A day for planting the garden was allowed Henry before the week was over, and he prepared the soil for beans and corn. Ellen stood by, subdued, obeying readily, even watching his hands to anticipate his want. She dropped the corn into the hills, three grains to the place, her mind full of pity for the corn, pity for her father.

‘Now get the hoe,’ Henry said.

She brought the hoe, handing it gently across the corn hill. She waited abjectly for her father’s next wish, her eyes on the clods or on her father’s feet where they sank into the cloddy soil.

‘If you water your garden and keep the weeds down you’ll have a right sharp parcel of truck here in no time,’ Henry said. ‘You’ll be right proud of your garden after a spell. Look at that-there toad-frog…’ He had brought some tomato plants down from the farmhouse garden and these he planted beyond the corn, watering their roots with the water Ellen carried from the creek in a large tin pail. ‘When these-here grow a spell you set a stake alongside. Now fetch more water.’ Ellen watched all his processes and obeyed his directions, thinking nothing, feeling nothing but the great out-reaching pity into which she was spread, pity for the water sinking into the dust, pity for the soil that turned unwillingly and sprawled abjectly apart, for Henry’s hands leaping with the hoe, for his voice, ‘Look at that-there old toad-frog…’

At the end of June Henry had gone to town to buy things for his family, driving his team hitched to the wagon. He came back with some iron cooking utensils, a kitchen table, and a cot bed for Ellen. The farmer had sold him an old wooden bed for himself and Nellie and this now stood in the cabin room opposite the fireplace. Ellen’s bed was placed in the loft room above, a sloping chamber of one window which was closed by a rough wooden shutter during storms but left open at all other times. Ellen went up the ladder to her bedroom on light arms and legs, first a hand up and then a foot, wheeling over and over. The new bed filled her with a pleasurable excitement whenever she thought of it, even in mid-morning when she chopped the wood for the dinner fire, even when she hoed lightly about the cornhills to cut the grass and weeds, but this pleasure but strengthened her pity for the farm and her renewed need to see Tessie and to tell her of the bed. The beans, the tomatoes, and the corn, these were all the vegetables planted. From the woodpile and the garden she could see the rolling lines of the surrounding farms, curve cutting curve, and sometimes she traced the lines in the air with her finger. Pictures of the old life grew sharper in her mind although they appeared less often, and the misty details faded out. For a little while she dreamed of the people of the road when she slept, but after a few weeks she was dreaming of the tobacco field, herself turning over the green leaves looking for tobacco worms, of the cabin room where the food was cooked over the open fire. She would remember the weary rumbling of the wagon bed, her sore body, tired from driving, from walking to relieve the load on the up-grade. There were the infected sores on her feet, great sores that would never quite heal and were always cut by the road dust, but were now fading. She would see the pageant of them going down the road, one of the Stikes youngones in front driving a lean filly hitched to a buckboard, either Haldeen or Irene it would be. Then the Stikes wagon with Eva driving and Joe Stikes asleep inside and Lige and Esther on the seat beside the mother. Then Screw and Connie, perhaps, or Tessie and Jock in their new wagon. Jock would be on the seat driving with Tessie beside him, her deep eyes burning in sunburnt skin, her quick mouth with little sharp corners. Then Henry’s wagon, a rough old thing mended everywhere, her mother inside on the bedding, herself driving the team, her father out bringing up the horses. Or maybe they would be cooking something beside a little bridge, then she would be by Tessie’s fire hearing Tessie talk about a house. Tessie was always wanting a house, a house with vines up on the chimney, a brick house with a gallery, a stone house with a fountain, a little brown house with white on the windows and doors, a house by a seaside, a house on a street. Tessie was always talking.