‘I might sit down on this-here bank for a spell and rest myself,’ Artie said.

‘You might maybe like a cup of water to drink if I’d bring it out to you.’

‘I’d be right obliged.’

Ellen hated the woman for the pain she was going to have. The hills gathered closer in and Artie Pinkston helped to wind them tight and twist them close. ‘I had enough Mrs Pinkstons in my time. I’ll wait a spell,’ Nellie said, and she kept indoors when Artie stopped in the lane. After a while the hills would open up and send out great cries. Ellen knew. She would go a little way up the lane, past the first rise and around the curve and up again between two fields, until the top of a boarded cabin came in sight, but she dared no further, listening, ready to run back. The hills stood shoulder to shoulder. She would go to the garden in the early morning to gather the beans for dinner, thinking of soft sweet beans cooked in grease, or she would carry water down from the spring to drink, or water from the creek to wet the newly planted cabbage. She would sit under the tree by the woodpile and gaze at the chips, at the black earth, at her own brown legs and white thighs. A sudden voice would call out in her ear, Haldeen Stikes saying a lewd word. Haldeen had pursued her with his words, shaping words with his lips when he could not say them aloud, Haldeen with downy hair on his lip. Haldeen’s word would cry out at her and something in her laughed at it while something else stood back, meek and futile, and she laughed down upon her hard sun-darkened legs and her slim white loins.

Running up and down her ways she made beaten paths, down to the bank above the lane, down the laneside to the highroad, back to the bank, back to the house through low summer weeds, to the woodpile, through the garden along the side of the bean row, and out of the garden toward the creek, up the creek to the mouth of the ravine. Her paths grew hard and smooth. Ten times, twenty times a day she ran through her confines, pounding the ground with bare feet.

‘Jingle at the window, tidy-o,’ she sang. ‘Somebody a-jinglen on a thump-thump guitar, that is. If I had a guitar I’d be a-jinglen on it to a fare-you-well.’ She was coming in from the furthest part of the yard in the dusk, walking about in the warm languorous air. The stars were out, very low and very near, pushing down, falling of humid weight. The air scarcely moved at all, but now and then a warmer motion spread down from the higher places, pushing through skin and lying along the inner threads of nerves, fiddling on delicate quick with familiar searching hands. She walked into a tree before she was aware of it. Its great trunk spread against her breast like a broad chest upon her. A quick memory of Screw, of the time he caught her behind a wagon and hugged her close, came with the touch of the tree. She had been afraid of him for he was drunk. Whisky smells came out of him, and man smells, sweat and dirt, different from woman dirt. She had felt the buttons on his coat dig into her thin old dress and his great broad chest spread out before her slim body and his drunk arms trying to catch her closer. She had hated him and despised him, despised his whisky and dirt smells, but a slim thread like a thin silver serpent had rushed through her flesh, straight through her trunk, when Screw held her.