‘God knows, you’re beside yourself, Ellen, and you best let me take him now, to rest you…’

‘And now he looks like you. Like you some time hence.’

‘Oh, God Almighty!’

They wept a long while now, each in his place, Jasper calling aloud and Ellen bending over the still child. They wept thus until they were spent and quiet, and then for a while they were still.

‘You could take him now, Jasper,’ Ellen whispered at last. ‘You could take him and lay him out on the bed. Now you could.’

‘I’ll get Job Tucker to make a little box to be his coffin. Three miles will not be far to go,’ Jasper said while they stood beside the cot.

‘I’ll wrap him in a piece of fair cloth I got to make aprons for myself and Nannie. A fair piece, white it is, I bought from the store. Never a bit of ease outen the earth he had, in all his enduren life. Knowed you best and liked you first,’ she whispered.

CHAPTER TEN

The wind blew almost always on this hilltop. It shook the old boards of the house and ravelled the stones from the chimney; it swayed the bough of the poplar tree beside the door and it turned the shade of the locust tree before the gate to quivering powdered shadows. Little Melissy could not remember beyond the Powers country, for she had been born here. The hills undulated freely under the cultivated fields and reached in rough sheer bluffs up to the ridge that divided these farms from the north country. The house stood on the crest of an upland that dipped to rise again to a hill where open timber grew and where the unmilked cattle were pastured. It had, in the early days of the country, been the farmhouse, the centre of all its acres, and for this it was larger than tenant houses usually are, having four rooms and a loft. Hen was a tall boy now, becoming great in stature, like Jasper, his great gaunt arms strong to lift and haul. He had begun to chew tobacco. Some rumour of this had reached the fireside a year before, a hushed rumour, unconfirmed, but one day when Ellen sewed buttons on his garment a piece of the stuff rolled out onto the floor, spilled from his pocket.

‘For land’s sake, Hen,’ Ellen said, ‘a man grown already!’ After that no one questioned Hen’s coming and going. He worked for Jasper all day or he milked the cow for Ellen, a heifer from the first cow, which was gone now, a brown and tan beast that still bore the marks of the great Wakefield herd, and the last tie which bound Ellen to a past that was remembered perhaps infrequently, but held with constancy as a finished picture, complete and set apart, dimly shadowed but done, scarcely belonging to herself more than to another. The huckster came to her door to trade for butter, chickens, eggs, whatever she had. She hung the butter down in the well to keep it fresh and cool, the pail standing on a shelf halfway down the stone wall, to be drawn up with a rope. She went busily from day to day, eager with Nannie, making plans.