‘But he looks old,’ Joe said, ‘like old men. What makes him look so funny, Mammy?’

‘How?’

‘He feels hard, but crumbly when you take him up. And he smells sour, or bitter. That’s it. He smells bitter and tastes bitter.’

Her work in the garden was a fervour of service to the child. Jasper would go out of the house softly in the morning so that Chick need not wake, but at noon, while he waited for the horses to rest and have their feed, he would play with the child and sing a great rousing song, and Chick would leap in his arms with the whole of his small strength and flush faintly pink under his blue-veined skin. Jasper and Chick had many understandings which hung about great raucous words that grew up, syllable by syllable, out of vast associations of past mirth and present wonder. Jasper would clap his hands, catch Chick’s eye and hold it for an instant, and then out would come the great nonsense word, thundered out of his stubby beard and poured over Chick’s small laughter. Ellen would watch them with a curious joy she could not bring into any relation with her pain.

Breaking the soil her mind would penetrate the crumbling clod with a question that searched each new-turned lump of earth and pushed always more and more inwardly upon the ground, a lasting question that gathered around some unspoken word such as ‘why’ or ‘how’. Thus until her act of breaking open the clay was itself a search, as if she were digging carefully to find some buried morsel, some reply. Working among the hens or the swine, in the broad light of day, a wind tearing at her garments would awaken in her some sense of another time and another wish, another longing now forgotten and unknown but keeping some faint being in a half-known phrase said at some time long past on some windblown hill where stones were piled in a mound. And her lasting inquiry, her questioning anguish, would gather about this remote image, this phrase, and ask it, and beg it for redress, for remission, for pity. Or once, looking quickly up into the sky where the sun shone brightly, she remembered with a sudden flash of bright, pictured light a hill grave where the sun had poured over a white marble shaft and where she had sung of life with a great shout, and she turned upon that picture the whole of her questioning pain and begged of it for life for her child, as if she would pray that hour to take from herself half, even all, she had and give it to him. Or, in the yard, cutting the wood for the dinner fire, she would remember Chick’s spasm of the night before, his muscles tight and stiff and his face blue, his eyes half closed, and then his writhing body and his wild cries, and she would hate the pain that held the child and hate his withered limbs and his bent spine, until hate and pain would distort her own face and numb her mind. How she hated, but not the sleepless nights for herself till her limbs were like wood and her throat rasped with dry grief, nor Jasper, never complaining and never weary in his compassion, walking the floor with the child half the night after he had driven the plough all day. It was not this she hated, but the pain in the child, bending his spine and twisting his limbs, until she could not separate the pain from the suffering infant and she would hate Chick himself as she slashed at the firewood. Then she would throw down the axe and hurry to the house to lean over his pillow and settle his comforter nearer, or if he were awake she would take him to her bosom and hold him in a fervour of tenderness and kiss his sad little face and hold his hands to warm them.