Jasper went plodding over the fields, labouring without end, a great man, tall in a doorway, bent a little forward when he walked. He was always busy, making off to work as soon as he had eaten, falling asleep at night as soon as he became quiet, even while he sat in his chair. As he came from the autumn ploughing, stooped by the furrows, he would stalk over the stones that lay behind the kitchen door. He seemed old and weary, effaced, as if he withdrew and left no reckoning. Or inside the house one day she heard Nannie and Joe and Dick as they came from school, stopping to drink, each one, a deep draught from the bucket at the well, continuing a conversation they had been holding as they came, weary and dry after the long walk home in the heat of the day, contemplative and final:

‘Nohow, my pap, he’s an upright man. I heared a man say one time while I waited inside the shop, the time Collie Childs fixed the singletree, I heared a man say, a man I never knowed, “Jasper Kent, he’s a good upright man and you can lay your last copper on that.”’

‘My pap is honest,’ Nannie said. ‘Wouldn’t steal a pin, Pap wouldn’t. I heared a man talk once to Mr Enzer…’

‘I did too,’ Joe said. ‘“Jasper Kent you could trust to the end of the world,” he said. Said, “You could take Jasper Kent’s reckonen and never count the change.”’

Jasper and Hen were cutting the tobacco crop now, early autumn, all day long, working slowly and stooping again and again over the field. Jasper would split the stalk from the top downward and then sever it near the ground, handing it then to Hen who hung the inverted plant on the long lath that stood by, later loading these onto the wagon to haul them to the barn, and the field grew more and more ragged as the labour passed over it and its yield was taken away. Or, moonlight, and Cordie and Nannie and Hen and Joe and Lige Newton, – they romped under the locust tree, and played Lay Low Sheep and Wheel and Turn, or ran down to the persimmon tree to hunt for the ripened fruit. All the other tobacco fields were despoiled now, ragged, cut-over as they lay, in the valleys and onto the hill-slopes, and all the barns from farm to farm were filled with the limp plants, the shutters opened to the air, and an odour of burning hung in the winds, or hazes lay inert against the sky and against the sloping hills. Then Joe tracked an opossum home to his den in a hollow tree, and on the next night all the dogs were out and all the boys, over the pastures and hills to the bluffs along the river, whooping and barking, the boys and the dogs, until the beast took shelter in a tall tree that even Hen could not climb and crouched there looking down upon them, glistening white in the moonlight.