‘And I would have, if I could, a slated roof, red up there in the sun… steps a-goen down to a grass place where would be a sundial in the other end. Me a-comen down in the morning dew with a flower basket on my arm. Me a-cooken breakfast and a-setten out the pretties… I’d have a room in my house for Ellen…’

‘Or I would have’ – this would be another day – ‘a little house on a high bank above a river – let it be the Ohio or maybe the Tennessee – and me a-washen windows in a great hurry because company is a-comen.’ Or another day she would say, ‘I’d have a parlour to sit back in, cool and fine.’ ‘Me a-comen down marble stairs…’ ‘Me a-washen up things after dinner at a white sink like the one in the house where I worked for a spell in Bowling Green.’

The corn came through the soil in little green tubes, closely curled. Ellen had been carrying water past the hills when she saw the green pointing out of the clods, and she stopped in her act, surprised. In a few days the corn had slim grass-like leaves that bent in the sun and waved lightly, and she thought that she could see how much the plants grew from one day to the next. She ran to the garden eagerly each day to watch for the changes, and her pleasure in the growth of the corn was very real. The beans in their rows seemed to be a creature, one, brooding in stillness in all hours of the day and growing rank and full and lush in a few weeks. They said: ‘I’ll be you; you wait and see…’ The tomato vines with their strong sour odours coming from leaves and stem cut into her skin. She felt them before she came near them for they were strong and piercing. They laughed, big bold rank things, ugly and jeering and strong. She strutted and jeered when she came into the tomato patch, her head jerking to one side: ‘You sting my skin. You think I’m trash. You lied, you lied, you lied!’

She liked to sit in the corn after it grew waist-high or more. In the soft clods of the bright days or in the soft loam of the days after showers she would sit, looking about, feeling herself moving with the corn. A voice would come to her mind:

‘Or even suppose it was the poorest sort of shanty made outen boards set on end and only one room, or two; and suppose the people that lived there last used to be a dirty set and left their filth behind them when they went; and even suppose there’d be fleas under the house where the hogs had been a-sleepen… I’d set about maken it fitten to live in, you’d see. I’d scrub that-there floor…’ Or then:

‘They’d be a fair sight to see when the roses came in bloom next summer and when the grapes got up over that-there arbour – big bunches of grapes a-hangen down all summer and a-turnen purple in the fall and the bees a-comen to get sweet outen some. That would be a sight to see now.’