‘You must have that room,’ he said. ‘You just point-blank need it, I know quite well.’

Bill Shuck’s sister, Hester Shuck, came and went from time to time, a black-eyed girl with wide shoulders and deep hips, drowsy-eyed and quick to laugh. She was free to come and go, uncommitted. Sometimes she stayed with Bill and Marthy for many weeks, or then she would go and work for some farmer’s wife in hog-killing season or harvest time. She would ask Ellen questions of Jasper or of herself, questions that were their own answers, or she would have obscene stories to tell. Ellen kept her secret sewing locked in the trunk, safe from Hester’s shifting eyes that drowsed easily and were amused at anything, and she kept Jasper’s danger in secret likewise, setting her whole strength against it. She began to regather in mind bits of songs and stories, keeping them to sing and tell for the child, or when Nellie came or Henry she would ask about their mothers and fathers, as far back as they knew, which was only a little way. The farmer came again, knocking softly on the door. There would be a carpenter to begin building the room the following week, he said, and he lingered to ask her opinion of this plan or that. She could have a garden in the spring, he said; Jasper could fence off a little of the pasture, taking a day from the work of the farm any time he found convenient. Then Jasper borrowed a horse from him and rode away on the morning of the trial, going soon after daylight. In two hours or three he would be in the St Lucy country, stopping at Squire Stigall’s door, and she could see in her mind the Stigall gate, on the road beyond Wingate’s, far down the long stretch of road where the wagons died away slowly, but she could not divine what would pass inside the house. Men would come, hitching their horses to the gate, and Henry would come to testify. He would hold up his right hand and swear that his words would be the truth, and she pondered a little at how a thing could be true and untrue, both at once, but this eluded her and she was left searching for Squire Stigall until he became clear in a picture, his high shoulders, his slow steps, his carefully spoken words that laboured for exactness in any statement. ‘Did you or e’er one of yours see or hear a fifty pound shoat stray by today, shoat with a white band across its shoulder and a little white on its nose, fifty or fifty-five pound shoat?’ He had asked this once at the toll house.

She watched the path toward the barn far into the twilight and after the dusk had arisen, and then Jasper’s step across the pasture stumping wearily on the uneven turf, the click of the gate, his foot at the door. He drank a long draught of water at the bucket and dropped his hat on the floor, his hand inert, or he sat at the table and ate hungrily, asking for more bread, calling shortly for more meat, his hunger sullen. He breathed heavily over his plate, sitting with his chest hanging over the table, leaning on the board, or if he dropped a crust to the floor he did not trouble to pick it up; tired to the core. ‘I’ll take water,’ he said, and Ellen brought him the gourd full of the water and he drank deeply again. Squire Stigall had passed the matter on to the Grand Jury and that body would meet late in the spring. A dozen people had come to the trial to be questioned and they had remembered any little thing he had ever said and all that had happened was turned this way and that.