Almedy’s romance was almost as much fun as the corn school. Every day they walked with her down the lane to the mailbox to wait for the mailman. He came in a little white wagon and rang a dinner bell at every gate. The head of the Chapman lane was opposite the gate to Uncle Louie’s lane, and Almedy’s fellow was the second Chapman boy, named Elbert. He was almost a head shorter than Almedy, but he was her fellow anyway, she said. He rode on a plow horse barefooted to wait for the mail. Almedy tried to get to her gate first, then she’d wait for Elbert, even when the mail had already been left. She would always speak first.

“Hello, Elbert,” she’d say.

“Hiya, Almedy,” he’d say, and that was the only thing he said to her.

He pretended not to notice them at all but he stood up on the horse like a bareback circus rider and jumped up and down. The white horse stood still as if nothing was going on at all, though it switched the flies with its long tail and sometimes this whipped Elbert’s bare legs, so he said bad words. He sometimes hoisted himself off the horse to the branches of the great maple trees on either side of the gate and he swung from them by his knees, yelling, “Whoa, there, Moll! Plague on you, don’t you run away or I’ll whip the Jesus out of you.” Moll, far from being the wild, uncontrollable colt Elbert fancied her, was so fat and old she needed no bridle, and tranquilly grazed the weeds or gnawed the leaves of the bushes. During Elbert’s argument with his horse, Almedy and the two children stood attentively on the other side of the road. Marcia and Lena looked from Elbert to Almedy with grave absorption as a model for conduct in future courtships of their own. Almedy giggled every minute as if Elbert was a clown but evidently Elbert did not know anyone was watching, for he never looked at her, just yelled at the horse and did acrobatics. Finally, he would settle down on the horse, usually after a far-off admonitory shout from a distant field, reach down in the mailbox for the batch of farm papers, catalogs, samples, or what not. The clank of the tin mailbox shutting again was the signal for the horse to wheel around and thump back down the Chapman lane. Almedy would stop giggling at once, and keep her thin scarred brown hand over her eyes, watching him till he was lost in the trees. She would stand for two or three minutes just looking down the Chapman lane, her sharp, plain brown face suddenly desolate and drawn up as if she too was going to be homesick. Marcia and Lena watched her, puzzled that this everyday routine should mean so much to Almedy when nothing seemed to happen at all.

“How do you know when a boy is your fellow?” Lena inquired.