Her skirt was the one Tessie had given her, now plucked from briars and worn limp from many washings. Her waist had come out of a bundle of rags some people in Marion county had given her mother, the colour now gone, but traces of it lingered in the seams. The farmer’s wife had made her feel lice crawling, and she turned to the inner seams of her garments, searching for a moment. She counted the berries in the bottom of the pail, twenty-one, and then turned back to the inner surfaces of her clothes again, laying her fingers on the seams to pry them out.

‘I got no lice. She lied, that-there woman. I got no more lice ’n she’s got. Pappy can have twenty-one berries in his blackberry pie.’ Then she ate the berries.

Except when she helped her father sucker and worm the tobacco, Ellen never again went up the rise toward the farmhouse and she saw no more of the colt in the pasture. Her ways closed in around her and the hills drew nearer. She dragged home the brush which her father cut in the ravine, making her way slowly to the cabin with it or cutting it into fagots where it lay, and she carried this into the house when her mother called out, ‘I ain’t no firewood.’ She would run down the lane to the turnpike and watch up and down. When a passer went along the road in a buggy or wagon or on horseback, she experienced intense tremors of excitement at seeing a figure, a face or a conveyance, at seeing wheels or the stepping feet of horses. There would be fat ladies with pink plump daughters, or there would be thin ladies with little children in straw hats or starched bonnets. Little girls with curls filled her with happiness, as did gay coloured ribbons flying off from hat-brims or white flying veils blowing out from ladies’ hair. The people usually looked straight forward because there was a turn in the road ahead, but if they looked at her she suffered great shame. Then she would try to shrink under her skimp dress and she would feel her skin trying to shrink into her sinews, drawing inward toward her very marrow. But when the gazers were passed, as the carriage receded along the road and the noise of the wheels funnelled down into fainter clatters of sound, she would be her former self again, and she would keep afterward a renewed sense of people pointing with their fingers, of people carrying things in their hands, of voices rising and sinking away.

She would often chatter a little with Artie Pinkston in the lane. This woman was carrying a child and Ellen appraised her coldly, listening to her speech with the knowledge in her mind. The woman breathed shortly, suffocatedly, her lips parted.

‘It’s a hot spell of weather.’

‘July is a hot time.’

The great ugly figure stood up in the lane, the lips open to take breath, the face red and coarse. Why did she let herself be like that? Ellen would ask herself with an inner contempt, for she knew all the externals of child-getting. She had pitied her father and mother for their futile efforts toward secrecy; ‘Ellen is asleep,’ or ‘Is Ellen asleep?’ Life turned back upon itself and looked upon itself coldly. Night, dark, filth, sweat, great bodies, what for? She pitied them with a great pity, the pity of a child for adults.