Through the weeks she would hear Joe Phillips calling to the men in the fields or hammering at the barn where he was mending a roof. The weeds grew fast after the midsummer rains, but Ellen cared less to work at the garden, grown listless and weary. Nannie was going to school now, and Ellen would see the two of them, Nannie and Hen, running along the path or along the road, far past two farms, Hen with the dinner bucket and Nannie carrying the book; as she sat in the house she would see them. She would hear Phillips as he hammered at the barn, and hear the two small children humming at their play, their words lost under the purr of their voices, and her listlessness would give her each picture as something remote and unrelated to her own being, as felt through a veil, until the little children would float in an unreality so entire that they seemed to be any children, belonging to some other woman in some remote house. Or suddenly, under this withdrawing mist in which each sense had sunk and each obligation had drowned, would appear, more vivid than lightning, Hester Shuck’s way, gathering into sound, into words, and she would know all that Hester did and all Hester’s slobbering talk. The fact of Hester, in her face and in her acts and in her body, gathered into an oblique thought, blighted and throttled, shrinking back of half-said words: ‘When it comes knock it in the head with a stick of stovewood and bury it in the ash pile out behind the henhouse’: this was Hester. ‘A little red stringy brat, looks like a rabbit new skinned, God knows! look at it’: this was Hester. Ellen’s hand would feel for the knife as she sat limply in her chair, and her left hand would catch at Hester’s throat to still her vile breath. Or she would sink again into a half sleep and remember some task undone, hearing Dick and Joe as they talked at their play, floating back again into the unreality of their voices and the remoteness of every obligation. If she heard Phillips in the yard she would not stir from her place, and when he had talked a little with the children or when he had ground his tool, he would go away again. The sounds of one day blurred against those of another. The quiet of the morning would enhance the quality of her drowsing being and thus she would sit, idle and weak, until, to penetrate the fog, she would gather the ashes of some spent thought, torn snarls of knowing, and she would sometimes moan softly under the confusion. Hester Shuck, her way of crawling about in the thicket, turning herself into a sow; her dark hair; her wide jaws and deep hips: ‘a little red stringy brat, look at it!’ this was Hester. She knew the whole of Hester’s way; she could gather her together; she knew her in her own mind, saw her in bestial postures in a swift picture, as sharp as a lightning flash on a dark sky: ‘a sharp crack on the head with a stick of stovewood and bury it along with the chicken guts and feathers out behind the ash hopper.’