She’s grown used to his company, to hours spent before the fire, reading poetry and imagining grand futures for him, palaces of fame. Like so many boys of his generation, he’d read and reread the adventures of Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton. He wants to be a soldier, to be tested, to see himself fired like clay in the great kiln of battle. Instead here he is, only just sixteen, grimly torturing grain from barren ground.

Like Asia, Brother John has a great emotional range. He has a temper. He weeps for his losses. In fits of joy, he throws himself onto the dirt, smelling, tasting, inhaling the ecstatic world. Farmer John lives in a narrow box of miserable responsibility. Asia hardly sees him and hardly recognizes him when she does.

A new crew of men are hired to help with the harvest, the cheapest help available, Irish immigrants. These white men won’t take instruction from Joe Hall. John must manage them. This he’s unable to do.

It’s customary for white hands to share the noontime meal with their employer and his family. It’s customary for the ladies of the household to join them at table. But John feels a great distaste for these men, distaste they quickly reflect back. They dislike him for his British blood. They dislike him for the free and familiar way he deals with the local blacks. They’ve heard that he was bastard-born. Who is he to feel superior to them? Most of them are his elders, some by decades.

John refuses to let Mother, Rosalie, and Asia anywhere near these men. By noon, they’re often stripped down, dirty, smelly, and sweaty, not delightsome, Asia observes primly. Their accents are thick, their conversation uneducated. Dining with such would be an insult to the Booth women, John decides. He makes them keep to the upstairs during the noon meal.

Asia sees in this a beautiful, knightly chivalry. Her own Ivanhoe of the fields. Rosalie is more concerned. She loves and admires John as much as anyone. And she understands that if they ask of him the sacrifice of supporting them, then he must be left in charge, his judgment trusted. A meal with a tableful of male strangers would be a torment to her. Still she worries he’s made a mistake and would force herself to dine downstairs if the choice were hers.

The men gather at the kitchen table in the sweltering house. The women huddle in the even more sweltering bedroom upstairs, eating from plates held on their laps. The butter sweats in its bowl, the women sweat in their dresses. Eggs dry from the edges in as quickly as they can eat them. “Father would have made friends with these men,” Rosalie says in her whisper. “He would have shared a bottle and a story, played the pirate. And so they would have worked hard for him.” She’s not criticizing John. She’s only anxious that he make a success of this and for his own sake. Rosalie recently returned from town with a new saddle as a surprise for him. “When do you imagine I’ll have time to ride?” John had asked her listlessly.