She told Clovis to come back that evening. When Clovis did, she cooled a stinking brew that had cooked all afternoon over her fire and gave it to the girl to drink. It tasted so vile Clovis felt the mere drinking of it should absolve her of the pregnancy. But all that happened was that she woke in the night and had to both vomit and shit.

But the mornings following that, she knew the other life was still within her. She also knew that when she began to show, her condition would be observed by Lovey and the mistress, who would ask her who the father was so that a marriage might be made. Deborah was firm about that: all babies born on the plantation should have a father who acknowledged them. When she was asked who begat her child, what could Clovis answer?

However, another event was to fill all minds and hearts before anyone knew or cared about the prospective motherhood of Clovis. It was an event that touched the lives of everyone on the plantation—indeed, of everyone in the county, an event that was to have infinite reverberations, like a sound that echoes and echoes, and can never be said to cease.

It began ordinarily enough. Felix and Nell had come out from Highboro for a few days’ visit after the late November hog-killing. For one who concerned herself so little with the pleasure of the flesh, Nell had a particular regard for blood pudding and fresh backbone.

With company in the house, Arnold grew bored by the small social demands on his attention and manners and rode over to Oaks one afternoon to engage Benjamin for hunting on the following day. There was no need for game as provender; the only notion was to have some sport.

Benjamin, with Rooster, who was becoming a good marksman and loved to go hunting with his father, saddled horses and trotted over to Beulah Land next morning. By five o’clock they and Arnold rode off to the bleak fields and woods, followed by three of Arnold’s best dogs. Finding no game in the fields, they dismounted, tied their horses, and went on foot into the woods.

As they walked, they separated, at first keeping in sight of each other, and then not. Rooster was drawing a bead on a bushy squirrel that thought he was hidden in a clump of mistletoe, when he heard the report of a gun. He recognized it as Mr. Kendrick’s. Silence followed, no outcry of pleasure, no curse of disappointment at a missed shot; nothing.

Rooster lowered his gun, forgetting the squirrel that had in any case raced fast as a lizard around the limb of the tree and down its trunk when the gun sounded. Rooster walked in the direction the shot had come from and encountered his father who looked at him as quizzically as the son looked at the father.