‘I’ll give you twenty dollars a month in cash money and the house rent-free to live in and I’ll furnish you-all with your lard and side meat and wheat for flour, all at a cost figure. I’ll keep your horses till you can sell to suit you. They can run on pasture for a spell, till the end of July, nohow. You can have all the wood you-all need to burn. Twenty dollars in cash money.’ Henry was being offered the tenant’s place on the farm.

‘You can have a garden patch here by the creek. Time enough to plant some truck, and I’ll give a day off from farm work to let you put it in. That-there gal can keep it hoed and keep the weeds out.’

Inside the cabin Ellen stood listening while her immediate future was being arranged, little darts of pain shooting out from the inner recesses of abdomen and chest, anger making a fever in her blood.

‘I’m not a-goen to stay here. I want to go with Tessie. I’m a-goen where Tessie is.’ She murmured it out of her catching breath, growing bolder as her fear grew. ‘I’m a-goen where Tessie goes. We can’t stay here.’ She caught her mother’s arm to insist. ‘We can’t stay. I have to go.’

‘You think you’re the boss of this-here place? The boss of your pappy? I’ll skin you alive if I hear e’er word more outen you.’ There was a dark quarrel and Ellen was shaken and slapped.

‘I want to go…’

‘I’ll skin the hide offen you…’

‘We can’t stay. We have to go. I have to be where Tessie…’

Nellie leaned over the fire, turning the frying meat, her broken hair hanging in oily strings around her forehead. Ellen wanted to plunge the knife she held in her hand into the bent head, and the recognition of her want tore her mind in two. She began to scream. The cries brought her father, who slapped her with his hands and sent her up the ladder to the loft room above. She had slept there the night before and her old quilt lay on the floor where she had left it.

In the morning she came down the ladder hungry and whipped, degraded, grateful for any companionship. She cried softly when her mother gave her food, a pone of bread and a piece of bacon, and these she ate sitting in the doorway near her mother, who was smoking tranquilly, words edging their way out from her mouth between the lips and the pipestem from time to time.

‘Your pappy went to work soon after sunup… It’ll be right good to settle down for a spell… You’ll like liven here right well after you get used to the ways of the place.’ Ellen knew that she could not stay. She had no thought of staying, no picture of herself as keeping there, in the doorstep, going the paths. But she dared make no answer. She ate her bread, her hunger eager for it, her head turned aside. ‘Your pappy and mammy don’t belong to that-there parcel of road trash, nohow,’ Nellie would say… ‘Your pappy is a farmen man… Don’t you recollect how we was a-moven to Nelson County when he caught up with Jock?… Travellen the road is one o’nary life. You’ll like right well after you get broke to the ways of the place, right well.’