She was in the small meathouse behind the cabin cutting bacon for the breakfast while Nellie cleared away the supper. She was cutting with a butcher knife, the great blade making stabs through the meat, cutting quickly and deep. An awful strength came to her arm; she stabbed deeper, driving the knife to the handle. She would kill Jonas. She would stab him with her knife, thus and thus! She hated him. Deep in her body arose waves of hate, and a strength beyond any she had ever known drove the knife into the dried flesh. He was ugly. She remembered all his ugliness. His work clothes hung flat on his body, which was thin and tall. His work coat had a patch on the elbow and his shoulder blades stood out under his shirt. There were little white marks on his teeth. She hated him. There was a rough spot on his hand above the wrist. There were black hairs growing on his chin when he did not shave, growing away from his mouth, a white circle left around his lips. She could see his body through his clothes and she loathed it, despised it. When he was tired he limped a little on his left foot. ‘Slashed that-there foot wide open with a corn knife when I was a youngone, laid the raw meat back to the bone,’ he had said. She had seen his foot; once he had taken off his shoe to show it to her and she had trailed her finger over the long scar. She loathed him for his mutilations and she cringed away from the pain that had been his. She hated him for the pain and her hate drove the knife at each thrust.

‘I’d kick him out. I’d kick him with my foot,’ she said.

Another wave arose out of her more inner passion, Jonas coming to her door at dusk after his day in the field. He would be sitting on the step when she came back from the milking lot, and his cigarette would make a little light in the dusk while he waited for her to come. His hands would be gentle upon her. She would sit beside him in the half-light and his shoulders would be drooping with weariness and his shoulder frame showing a little through the line of his shirt. His lips would curve around his cigarette and there would be the circle of white about his mouth before the dark began. His voice, wanting comfort, ‘Gosh! I’m monstrous tired tonight. Ploughed and grubbed all day.’ And she, ‘If I could I’d like to cure all that-there outen you by just a-layen on of hands. I’d charm all the tiredness away in the twinkle of an eye if I could by just a-layen on of hands.’

His hands would be gentle upon her. ‘You already done that-there, Elleen.’ It was autumn. ‘You didn’t tell me to go outen your sight… I been in torment ever since I knowed, downright hell… but I knowed you’d tell me what’s right…’ She wept softly, hanging up the chain of the meathouse door and turning the key in the lock. She carried the meat into the house, going up the steep back steps. She threw the meat onto the kitchen table with the knife beside it and went up the stairs to her room, her feet striking hard blows upon the boards.