She remembered Tessie pushing her book under the quilts to hide it out of the wet. A deep-set fact that was as one with her breath lay back of all her thought, a fact gathered into an unspoken phrase, ‘I couldn’t stay here, I’d have to go where she is.’ Tessie had four books now. She used to have five but the story book was gone. ‘Jock a-haulen around Tessie’s trash. I’d dump them books in the first ditch…’ A noise like a snarl out of another wagon.

Ellen carried water to the house from the spring that gathered in a scooped-out pool above the creek on the south side of the ravine. She would hold her left hand far out from her body to balance the load, her head bent toward the right. When she could slip away she explored the ravine to its head in the tree-grown hills lying beyond Bodine land. One day in July she saw three women walking on the dirt road that ran past the house, one of them leading a small child. She had caught glimpses of a woman on the yellow road before. These people, seen clearly, wore faded limp clothes, long and drab and weary from many washings. One wore a black sunbonnet but the other two had small hats. They carried no bundles and for this Ellen thought they must live near.

‘They’re our kind of people; they look like us. We might, maybe, get to know them. They live in a little house or a cabin or a shack, or maybe even a wagon.’

When she saw them returning in the late afternoon she went down near the fence and waited, looking at them. They passed without speaking but they did not cease to watch her, sending back diffused good humour and well-wishing. The next day one of the women passed again, and Ellen ran down to the fence when she saw her coming out of the curve of the road. The woman had been seen now a half-dozen times and had become a mass of characteristic motions and friendly staring eyes. Ellen longed to fix her into a thought, to know what she would say now that she knew how she would look saying it. She longed to find her out, to like her or to hate her. This day when she passed Ellen she spoke.

‘Howdy do!’

‘Good evening!’ Ellen said.

‘I allow you-all are the new people that moved in here.’

‘We moved in.’

‘Do you like?’

‘We like well enough.’

‘Hit’s a good place, Hep Bodine’s.’

‘You might stop to see us sometime when you happen to be a-goen down the road.’

‘I’d like to get acquainted right well. My name is Mrs Pinkston, Artie Pinkston.’

‘My name’s Ellen Chesser. Mammy’s in the house.’

‘How many you-all got in family?’

‘Just Mammy and Pappy and me.’

‘Well I do know. I got myself and Hez – I married Hez Pinkston – and three youngones.’

‘But we got six dead before I came, when we used to be a-liven in Taylor County and in Green. One was right puny and died three years old, and two taken fever and died. Then Mammy had Harp and Corie and they died. I don’t recollect what they died with, and Davie died when he was three months old.’