The corn stalks stood high and thick-leafed, and the rows grew to the edge of the woods. That was how he happened to see Clovis the day she came away from a meeting with Leon. As she stepped into the open, the sun hit her. She stopped, opened her palm, and stared at a small object that sparkled in the sun. She looked at it with obvious pleasure and pride, and she was beyond the child stage of being pleased at the sight of pretty stones. Then, as if to hide, preserve, and enjoy it the more, she put the object into her mouth and walked away to the shade of the trees that grew by the outlying cabins.

Instinctively, he waited and watched the edge of the woods. April turned her head and gazed at him soberly, as if to ask why they paused. When the man made no move, she lipped a long leaf of corn and pawed the earth lightly. That failing to get a response, she shat hugely. The offal was hardly out of her before it was covered by huge, noisy flies. Still the man stood waiting.

Then Roscoe saw Leon. Looking more like a man than a boy, something in his way of walking being prideful and masculine, he came out of the woods and looked after the distant figure of Clovis. His eyes did not have to find her but knew exactly where to aim. He shrugged and smiled, as if enjoying a joke with himself, or reminding himself of something pleasurable that had recently happened. Then he opened the front of his breeches and pulled out his dick. He looked down at it shook it indulgently, stroked it two or three times, and put it back into his breeches.

Roscoe knew that Clovis and the master’s boy had done it. He waited until Leon had walked on out of sight, taking the same way Clovis had taken into the shade of the trees near the cabins. He thought—slut.

A day or two later Leon decided that diddling with Clovis was too dangerous to continue. That is why he had welcomed the Saturday and Sunday excursions into Highboro. And although the Sunday evening on the porch had found him in a mood to backslide, daylight renewed his resolution to have nothing more to do with the girl. Just as one action leads to another, so does inaction encourage itself.

A week later, if anyone had said her name to him suddenly, he would have been able to hear it without a start of guilt. He felt almost chaste again, and in his chastity lonely. He missed Floyd. Still a boy, he had a sudden piercing nostalgia for his own boyhood.