‘After you-all went the blacksmith worked on our wagon tongue a long spell before he got it fixed. A farmer came up alongside the wagon and talked to Pappy about work in his patch. You could smell the iron when it went in the tub red hot and you could smell horse hoof. I saw you-all’s wagon go on down the road till it got round and a sight littler and seemed like anybody’s wagon a-goen anywheres. The country all around got little and narrow and I says to myself, “The world’s little and you just set still in it and that’s all there is. There ain’t e’er ocean,” I says, “nor e’er city nor e’er river nor e’er north pole. There’s just the little edge of a wheat field and a little edge of a blacksmith shop with nails on the ground, and there’s a road a-goen off a little piece with puddles of water a-standen, and there’s mud,” I says. When it rained Mammy pulled up the storm sheet. The farmer kept a-walken up and down and a-looken at the sky. “I need a hand tomorrow and I’m a-goen to pay well,” he says. He’d put his hands inside his pockets and say, “You can take it or leave it.” And then he climbed up on his big black critter and made like he was gone. “If that-there gal’s any good a-worken she can have twenty-five cents a hour, and the woman too.” Pappy said, “I don’t allow to work my old woman. The youngone can. She can do a sight in a day.” Then towards dark we went down the pike and off up a little dirt road to the house the farmer said we could have all night, and we dragged our bed in on the floor. It was a poor trash house. There was water a-runnen down the wall by the chimney flue and a puddle on the floor off on the yon side of the fireplace, but we kept dry. You could hear the rain all night a-fallen on the roof and a-drippen on the floor, and it was a fair sound. The house was a one-room house, an o’nary place, but before night I saw a cubbyhole against the chimney and a cubbyhole is good to put away in. The chimney was made outen rocks and it had soot smells a-comen outen it, and there was negro smells a-comen out from back in the corners. When it came on to rain Pappy went out and put the critters under a shed.’

The next morning a mist was spreading over the farm, but the rain was over. As soon as he had eaten from the supply of food in the wagon, Henry went off without a word. Ellen watched him cross the creek at the water gap and go up the fencerow toward the farmhouse. Her mother sat in the door of the cabin and waited.

‘If you’re a mind to drap you better be a-goen up there,’ she said. ‘You better leave your shoes behind you. Baccer setten is a muddy time.’