Ellen and Henry threw the stones into heaps on the hill field and Henry set the plough into the rough soil, making ready for corn. Later there would be a small tobacco crop in the lowest field where the farm tilted away from the stone pit. Henry’s two beasts of burden were a mule and an old mare, its mother. They pulled unevenly together, the mule lagging until the weight dragged on the mare’s tired old sinews. Ellen worked the garden without suggestion from Henry, selling eggs to the peddler and buying from him the garden seeds. The heifer bore a brown and tan calf in March and Ellen felt very calm and secure in her possessions, the two beasts her own. There were hens in the yard and two knotty sows walked about in the pen behind the hen coops to root the small stones out of the mud all day, but toward nightfall Ellen would pour them a mash of sour milk and meal. From the garden which lay beside the house and touched the road she could not see any neighbour’s house nor any neighbour’s field for the land was too poor to induce much clearing and there were many acres of scrubby woodland in which the hogs ran half wild. But up the road that lifted above the toll house and off a mile was the place of the Donahues, and as Ellen thumped at the clods she would think of the houses as they lay on the gentler rises, the Donahue yard pecked bare by geese, the Bannan house close along a road three miles away, a lonely house, always shut and still, or the Whelen cabin toward St Lucy. Out of the upland pastures that were grown with scrub timber would come the slow uncertain crying of cattle bells.

As she gathered stones from Henry’s ploughing in the high field she could see Regina Donahue at work with Pius in a far upland beyond a wasted ravine. Pius would be moving behind a plough, crawling worm-like along the lines of the corn, and Regina would be moving slowly after him, chopping weeds with a hoe perhaps, although she was too far away for her task to be discovered. Pius had very large round eyes that looked out staringly from behind long brown lashes. His cheeks were round and his lips were large and full and slow. He seemed never to understand what she said to him and he would look at her with still, questioning eyes, beseeching her. She hated his great foolish stare, but she was glad whenever he came to their house door on an errand, glad feeling her hate and contempt lightly flowing. At their house Regina would stump slowly and monotonously over the floor, cooking a supper, never changing her pace as she went up and down putting this or that on the stove to cook. Old Mrs Donahue walked to St Lucy every morning to pray in the church, striding up the road quickly, going to pray for the soul of her husband who was now in purgatory. When she returned from this duty she worked out all morning among the geese and hens. She would cry out: ‘Oh, Regina, come put this clucking hen under the barrel.’ Her words ticked and clucked as she hurried here and there, taking a living out of the hard earth. Once she had said to Ellen: ‘Ask your ma has she got a rooster to spare she wants to swap me. Sure my old rooster is the daddy to all them hens and that’s not good.’ A high flare of the cries of the geese came over her words, the cold raw March and the damp odours of the hen yard. ‘I seen a hard time since Joe Donahue he died on me.’