The next day Ellen saw a plough going up and down their rows and heard a voice speaking sharply to guide the horse. Jasper Kent had come to plough their fields. She could hear him gee and haw at the horse all morning, his voice speaking suddenly out of the hill, now and then hurling out an angry threat, oaths and threats and sharp commands a part of the business of getting the horse turned squarely in the furrow. She would stop her hoe in the garden to listen; she had long since ceased to heed Henry’s more feeble ploughing voice. In the late afternoon Kent stopped at the yard door to talk a little with Henry who sat there in a chair, to tell how the crops did and to offer help, and many afternoons later he would come. ‘I’ll try to see my way to plough that-there patch out for you-all this week,’ he would say. As she went up and down the yard to feed the stock Ellen would catch the meanings of their voices. Sometimes both men talked at once, each trying to convince the other, but Henry was grateful and he would concede in the end, bought by his gratitude.

‘Nohow I always taken notice if you plant potatoes in the dark moon of March you get a better crop,’ Kent said.

‘Light moon,’ Henry said. ‘I always thought light moon.’

‘No, dark. Dark moon. That’s science. Cabbage, now, in the light moon. Beans, corn, peas, all light. Beets, now, they go in in the dark of the moon. There’s a science to that-there. You ought to set a post in the dark of the moon, did you ever hear? If you don’t it’ll rot underground sure.’

Passing down the yard with the feed for the hogs Ellen would catch the wonder of their talk. ‘I taken a look at the almanac and I see Venus was the morning star and forthwith I …’ She would pass beyond the reach of their words. She never joined them at the kitchen door for Kent was felt to be Henry’s friend. The thought that there should be a morning star, given to the morning, would haunt her sense of the pigs as she poured out their mash, and the beauty of the words lingered with her as she said them over and over. The morning star; she had never said these words before. The thought that men knew the morning star and had it in mind, calling it by name, other names – this reared a new wonder. Once as she returned to the house Kent arose suddenly and stood before her.

‘Lock this-here away somewheres along with the other, will you, Ellen? I got no safe place to keep a trifle.’ He put some bills into her hand. ‘Sold the calves today and this-here is my share. Could you put it by for me for a spell?’

Albert Wingate came back from town any night, he said, and tormented his mother until she gave him whatever money she had by her. When he came there were dark ways in the house, he and his mother quarrelling all night and calling names. Sometimes he brought a band of revellers with him and there was a great noise with random pistol shots. When he was gone all the boxes and cupboards were turned out onto the floor, for he was never done searching the house for money and even robbed his mother if she slept.