She knew the walls of the house in all their swaying lines and all their mossy softness. The roof pole bowed slightly, drooping into a curve. The roof was the colour of weather, white with the sun, grey with the rain, deep grey with the moon, rosed with the sunset. The wall leaned back from the rock doorsteps, and the shingles on the sunny slope of the roof were curled like autumn leaves fallen in wavering lines. In the ground around the house were embedded bits of trash, relics of former tenants, such as wisps of paper, cut hairs, iron nails, pipestems, coffee grounds, threads, and pulps of rags. Dull mouldy smells that were faintly sickening came out of the earth here when she scratched it with her finger. She knew the ground around the house intimately. Once she scratched up a bit of a broken mirror, once a human tooth, once a rotted glove with a bright metal fastener. The soil was black and stiff like felt.

Sitting on the bank above the lane she watched for Artie Pinkston’s coming for the reward of a few words exchanged. She drew her legs under her skirt and tucked the edges of the garment under her knees and her feet. She drew herself together, her slim body scarcely needing a foot of ground, shrinking from the ground, while Artie Pinkston stopped for her brief say – the heat, the price of eggs, the scarcity of wild berries. Ellen watched the woman until she passed out of sight and then she drew herself together even closer, shrinking and gathering in upon herself. Memory played up a monstrous picture in her mind although she shook back her head and tried to efface it. Eva Stikes in labour with Esther. Irene scared, running out of the shanty. The two of them, she and Irene, scared, standing about the door. Her mother calling to Tessie:

‘Eva Stikes is a-bawlen. Get the water hot whilst I see what’s to do.’

‘Oh, people are ugly and everything is ugly,’ Ellen muttered, remembering. ‘Brown ground ugly and yesterday ugly and all the things people do – eaten and a-walken and a-haven things to keep. Terrible, it is. Ugly. Hard to do. Everything ugly. Eva Stikes a-screamen and a-pullen on the bedpost and Mammy a-sayen do this and do that. Irene a-screamen and a-holden onto me and a-getten sick enough to throw up, Eva a-sayen, “Kill me, somebody, knock me in the head with the axe, oh, for the love of God somebody kill me!” and it goes on all day in the shanty. Yesterday ugly and everything ugly, all the way back to the first, as far as you can recollect, ground, sun, things to eat, cooken, things to keep, wanten things, backward as far as you can recollect. And then a little cryen, a thin cryen, and Tessie is a-washen a baby by the cookstove, and everybody is a-smilen, glad it’s all over and glad about the little new baby that’s so pink and clean, little hands and little feet.