There were other tenants living up and down the creek, some of the houses on the stony ridge where the creek bottom met the upland. Sometimes a woman would come up Ellen’s hill to sit awhile, or Ellen would go to the church in the maple grove, taking Hen. Then she sat among the tenant women who gathered near the rear of the church, and she would listen to their murmur or speak a little herself. The wives of the farmers would sit at the front talking through the waiting hour. Ellen knew the names of those in her group and where each one lived. They would talk quietly as if half afraid of their own voices. Later when the service began all would sing and then the preacher would exhort the world to greater goodness and truth. Ellen would walk back in the dry after-hour, Hen running beside her. Once walking home from the church with Hen at her side, her feet weary of the road and her dull dress lying down skimply under her eyes, she remembered two years back and recalled that Joe Phillips had looked at her in ways that showed that he liked her and that he liked the sound of her voice, and that he listened to her words, whatever they were. He had liked to come to her house and his face had lightened when he looked at her as if he thought her pretty to see, and once he had said to Hen, ‘He’s a pretty boy; he looks like his Mammy.’ Or, sitting waiting in the doorway, feeling a great weariness with her slow days, she would remember this again, and at the spring, before she dipped her bucket into the pool, she would lean over it to look at her face and search in the pool for any affirmation of her beauty.

When the cow was without milk Joe and Nannie became hollow-eyed and thin, their beings waiting upon the hazards of the seasons. The hazards of the seasons followed them into the cabin in long rainy periods, the leaking roof scarcely leaving them one dry corner for their play. ‘Nothing but a new roof will mend it,’ Jasper said, ‘There’s ne’er a thing there to mend to.’ Ellen thought, when Joe was sick, that he might die, and she tried to build an indifference about her helplessness. She could not help it, the matter; she could not then care.

If she stirred their food or washed their bodies she sank into each occupation, buried in its momentary demand. One day as she mixed the dough in the pan, stirring around and around, mixing the soda well into the wet mash, she was haunted with some forgotten thing. The yellow of the egg gave the batter a faint glow and made it fall and rise in a rich oily lava, thick and pliable, but now and then the grains of the meal became visible, taking their granular form on the surface above the stiff pliability of the mass. Around and around, stirring, the oval ridge of the batter rising beside the spoon and sinking away into a lap of flowing mass, ring on ring, until there was nothing but the faint shape left as the ripple approached the outer rim of the pan. Circles flowing outward through thick oily dough, flowing outward through heavy pliant matter, rising and falling, nearer and further, renewed and sinking back and renewed, over and over, in a perpetual orbit. She watched the flow as she stirred and stirred, looking at the motions and leaning a little nearer. Suddenly a soft whisper came to her lips as she looked, as she penetrated the moving mass, a whisper scarcely breathed and scarcely articulated, as would say, ‘Here… I am… Ellen… I’m here.’