Every day or so a woman went by the house door, a thin woman whose skimp dress hung flat against her limbs. She would be carrying a small basket or a tin cup. Ellen, working in the garden or gathering greens along the roadside or sitting with Nellie in the stoop, would talk with the woman when she passed, although the interchange yielded little variety, for her look was vague out of fixed eyes, eyes stony as if they were made of bone. In her, life sank permanently back into the stones. She would lean against the garden fence and wait to be questioned if Ellen worked there among the seeds and the clods, and Ellen liked to give her whatever pleasure she might derive from these repeated dialogues.

‘What you got in your cup?’ Ellen would ask.

‘Two eggs, I got.’

‘Where you a-goen with two eggs?’

‘I’m a-goen to the store down at McGill.’

‘What all you think to buy with two eggs, now?’

‘Chewen wax, that’s what I aim. I taken two there again yester.’

‘Do you always buy chewen wax?’

‘Might’ near. Sometime I buy stick candy.’

‘What you do all day afore noon?’

‘I set and waited for the hens to lay. Hit taken the red one a long time.’

‘Bill, that’s my old man,’ she explained.

‘Got any youngones?’

‘Not e’er a one. I had one and hit died. Hit cried all time and then hit died. Bill said hit was a God’s mercy hit did.’ She spoke without regret, faintly smiling, shaking her cup dreamily.

The woman would walk slowly off toward the crossroads store which was called McGill. Later in the day she would return and pass up the rocky hill, three miles to go and three to come to get her bit of sweet. Ellen would think often of Fanny B. The spelling class was a game all the children played; two rows of words to learn and you had done enough. Walking home along the river road there would be men wading in the water to seine the fish, wading with their long white naked legs in sight, and Fanny B. would sing out a rhyme or a question. Fanny B. would know what her words meant but she knew in some young way; one could, being young, sing out words one minute and forget all about them the next, even forget whether the things the girls told were true, and forget things one had seen. Fanny B., going to the head of Miss Josie’s spelling class, would look very little and young with her thin arms and legs and her little dark dress, knowing the words Miss Josie asked, knowing only the words that were in the book. That was what it was to be ten years old, all the secret things and the half-known put snugly away in the forgetting parts of the mind, and a fleeting identity with Fanny B., whom she had not remembered for many years, would come to her when she took the key from its hiding place and unlocked her trunk in the white-washed room or when she saw the secret security of the inside of the trunk revealed.