One evening late in May Henry failed to come home from the field. Nellie fretted over the uneaten supper and Ellen worked among the stock. When he had not come at nightfall, Nellie and Ellen went across the farm, calling with uneasy voices, and after a search through the lower field they heard his groan coming weakly from the direction of the quarry. They found him in one of the stone pits, fallen among the stones, and when they lifted him one of his legs fell limp from the thigh. Ellen went to Mrs Donahue’s house for help and Pius was soon hurrying to St Lucy to telephone for a doctor. When Pius returned he brought the Carriers who remained all night. Bill and Pius helped the doctor set the bone and bind in the boards, and Bell sat near the bed for many hours, happy and kind, fervid because she knew someone who had broken a limb. Her blank face turned from the bed to Nellie and back again, but she was apart from the pain, feeling no twinge of it.

‘It just seemed like the ground rose up in the air and hit me,’ Henry said. ‘I worked out till nigh dark and I was on my way in when all of a sudden the ground just rose up outen the earth and hit me a terrible lick. That’s just how it seemed. The ground hit me one awful lick and then I found myself in the bottom of that-there hole and no idea how I got there. Like that, it was.’

The doctor went through the small house gathering up the things he needed, or he would ask Ellen, and his assurance and his speed filled the house. When he had set the bone in place and bound on the splints, the limb lay very large and white and wooden and still on the bed, and Henry came sickly out from the sleep of the chloroform. He would have to lie in bed many days, the doctor said, and Ellen brought water in a basin and bathed away the dust of the fields, a new kindness in her mind. To be bathing her father who lay white and still under her hands, yielding easily to her gentle demands, she passed with quietness and dignity through the room, the world grown simpler and less significant.

Henry lay in his bed for two weeks and after that he learned to sit in a chair with his injured leg stretched out heavily upon some support, hobbling back to bed on the crutches the doctor loaned him. Ellen finished setting the tobacco without help when the rainy season came, the land having been prepared many weeks before. She went slowly along the rows, carrying the plants from the bed at the foot of the hill. The season lay before her as a vast unweighed burden, and all the stooping and dragging and hauling, felt in anticipation, rested on her shoulders, on her arms, on her thighs, on her mind. She wondered who would plough the corn, the next labour after the tobacco setting, and after that would be the cutting of the hay, and there would be the garden to hoe and the little wheat crop to reap. Half of everything would go to the man who owned the land, ten hills for the man who owned the soil and then ten for them, ten shocks for Orkeys before their ten. She came in from the field too tired to care for the garden. She ate her food too weary to listen to Henry’s story of twingeing bones and Nellie’s report of the sow’s litter and the disasters among the hens. She would eat her supper silently when Nellie piled it onto her plate and nod in her chair while the dishes were being cleared. But after she had set the tobacco, just when the need of the ploughing grew actual, the man from Wingate’s farm came offering to plough. ‘I’ll put it in between my own and never miss the time,’ he said.