‘And apples, there’s the Hawkseye Greening, a big apple from a seedlen, or take the Secor and that’s a cross between Salome and Jonathan. It’s a medium red, very good it is, fine. Stores away better than old Jonathan, too. A cross between old Jonathan and Salome.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Jasper said.

‘But the JH Hale peach, it don’t bear fruit when it’s planted by itself. It has to be planted near a Banner or, say, a Elberta. And the reason for that-there, it’s simple. It has to get the pollen offen one or the other. And the Sharon, that’s a cross-bred apple. But the American Beauty, that’s my favourite to eat in hand. I’ll be back to set out along in late fall.’

‘October light moon be about right for that-there,’ Jasper said.

‘I wouldn’t set any great store by the moon to tell me when to plant. The moon has got some properties, that I’d say, but I never set out by the moon.’

Joe had been in a fight again with Lin Wallace and Ellen knew what the fight had been about. Lin had called out to Joe at playtime, called out before all the school, ‘Jasper Kent, he’s a barn burner. He burned up a man’s barn over around St Lucy and almost got in the pen. I’d be a feared to let old Jasper Kent come on my place. Joe Barn-Burner is that boy’s name.’

‘What did you do to Lin?’ Ellen asked. ‘In your turn what did you do?’ Her head was lifted and her bosom high.

‘I gouged his head but he pinned me down. He’s bigger. I fought back but he pinned me down and I couldn’t get my hand loose. He’s bigger.’

‘I’ll get him along the road a Monday,’ Hen said. ‘You just wait.’

‘He’s bigger’n you even,’ Joe said. ‘He’s got a knife to stab with, too.’

‘I saw that knife, Lin’s knife. It’s plumb five inches long, the blade is,’ Dick said. ‘I saw it today.’

‘For God’s sake,’ Ellen muttered to Jasper as they stood together beside the door. ‘A knife to cut my boy with. To let your boys get cut to pieces in a fight over what you done or didn’t do. Did you burn up that-there barn or not, Jasper Kent? A knife to stab with! For God’s sake!’

Jasper went out to the well and drew up a bucket of water, slow with the winch. Then he carried the bucket in at the door, a great man that filled up the doorway, and strode across the floor with it to the place where it always stood on the table. The lamp quivered in its own light and settled back to a nucleus of light on the shelf above the fireplace, and Ellen left the corner by the door and moved through the atmosphere that had suddenly grown real – half comprehended and half vague – as the menace of the knife was less keenly realised. Clearing away the food and the dishes while Nannie put Melissy to bed and Hen mended a tool under the light she heard them all, going, ordering, calling, hurrying in and out, quarrelling, snarling back, defending each other, laughing, making jokes she could never have thought to make, and it came to her that these were of her, these people, but that they owned her somehow more than she owned them. Luke Wimble had said before he went that words came out of his mouth sometimes so fast that he hardly knew himself that he had said them or how he came to think them at all. They were his own words, he said, but they somehow stood outside himself as if they talked to him and made him wonder.