Another two or three minutes, and she knew he was on the bed, and that he continued to sleep. Her mind would not go back over the earlier part of the night, but it did register a fact or two. She was at Oaks. She had been— He was now asleep. She looked toward the sound of his snoring, her head nodding with fatigue that looked like a gesture of dumb assent.

If she remained very still for a while, perhaps she would be all right.

No, she would not be all right. She should go to the bed and kill him where he slept.

She let herself droop back upon the floor, her head resting on the rug, its dust touching her nostrils as its coarse weave touched her cheek.

A great effort was required for her to sit. A quarter of an hour later she stood with the help of a chair. She was too tired to stand. She let herself down carefully to the floor again, and then she crawled slowly to the door.

Reaching up she found the knob and turned it until the door swung open—silently, she thanked God. On all fours, she crawled into the hallway where she lay resting for half an hour before she thought she was capable of trying the stairs. The party was long over. She heard not a sound. Finding the stair railing, she pulled herself erect and, holding the railing with both hands, crept down the stairs and out of the door of the house, vowing that she would never enter it again.

11

As he’d grown older, and he was now sixty-eight, Ezra had become a light and restless sleeper, as a result of which his family had changed their sleeping arrangements. Lovey and Pauline shared the largest bed in the biggest room, which served as both bed and sitting room. Ezra slept on a cot in the kitchen, so that he could brew his medicines on the stove at any odd hours he chose and go in and out the back-door day or night without troubling anyone. Not many meals other than breakfast were cooked and eaten in the cabin. Lovey and Pauline ate from the kitchen of the main house and sent a basket of select victuals to Floyd in the blacksmith shed, where Ezra often joined him to eat. Floyd himself slept in a lean-to he had built onto the cabin, which was intended mostly for storage and to shelter the smaller sick animals Ezra wanted near him during the night. Only when the weather was coldest did Floyd spread a pallet on the kitchen floor near his father’s cot.