“I don’t want you should talk that way,” she muttered. “He is now a soldier. Remember you that. He is gone to fight those same rebels you hid your cows from. Maybe you should be glad that there were men like him to make the rebels go away, and not steal things.”

“He ran away from them.” Henry laughed. “I guess I know what they told me in town. He ran away, and they say Mr. Fanning is like to lose a buggy and colt because he took! Oh, he is a fine soldier.” He clumped out to the back porch. Uncle Otto was coming up out of the root cellar … buttermilk, always buttermilk he was drinking. Quarts and quarts, which was just as good for the pigs. It would make the pigs fat, but Uncle Otto was already fat and that didn’t net a dime for anybody. Amelia was down at the chicken coops; she looked bleached and shrunken in her loose calico gown and blue sunbonnet, like a child dressed up in her mother’s clothes. Ach, that girl, he thought. She has got the looks; she ought to find a rich husband. But now she will be an old maid. I would like to beat some brains into her, if I could.

He ordered her, “I want you should come once with me. To get the cattle.”

“Henry,” cried his wife, behind him, “you should get you a man. Two men.”

“And costs maybe half a dollar?” he snarled.

Amelia said, “I’m coming.” She left her basket in the corn-crib, and walked toward the porch … He had never struck her since she was grown, but always she acted as if she expected a blow from him. Her mother spoiled her. She took money out of the teapot, and gave it to her to buy ribbons and truck, and like enough when Henry came in from the field of an evening, he would find that Amelia’s mother had let her go off to town with the Duffeys or somebody.

He grinned without humor. “So. You wear the good shoes to feed chickens.”

“These are old ones, Pa.”

“Your Aunt Gerta, she would never waste shoes while she was doing work. Nor Grandma wouldn’t—”

“Aunt Gerta’s got feet so bad now,” Amelia said sharply, “she can hardly walk on them at all.” Her face began to show the mottled pinkness it always showed when she was frightened and angry at the same time.

Henry told her, “Just the same, girl, Aunt Gerta got her a good husband. Was not an old maid when she was twenty—”

“Mealy,” came his wife’s shrill voice, “your Pa is going to bring back the stock. You come and get you a sunbonnet, because he wants you should help him drive them up.”