Luke pressed the earth close around the apple tree, treading it with his foot and smiling at the toe of his shoe, his head bent and his brows drawn, smiling in his perplexity.

‘You’re worth all the balance put alongside each other,’ he said. He pressed the soil firmly down and laid the sods in place, pressing them carefully. ‘You’re worth all the balance and to spare. You got the very honey of life in your heart. Today I says to myself while I dug the holes for the Sharons and the Elbertas in Arland Booker’s orchard, I says, “She’s got the honey of life in her heart.”’

Nellie went about habitual tasks, doing each one in the ways her hands had long ago learned, glad she no longer cared, eased from caring now, and forgetful whether there were six eggs in the basket or ten, but hoarding the basket under the bed from a long habit, even if there were none. It seemed that for her it was over, and no matter, whatever it had been, this passage, this life, this strange long curious thing without alternative. Ellen prepared clothing for Nellie and Henry and sent Hen to them often, for he could make the long journey on horseback in half a day and return a day or two later; or sometimes she went herself, driving with Hen or Joe. Henry became sick, lying in a stupor on his bed or fretting. He wanted to leave St Lucy, he said. He was afraid he would take root there and he was not of a mind to take root in that poor place. When he died he seemed alone in his dying. To Ellen, as she straightened Nellie’s house, preparing for it, he seemed to have taken an arbitrary course, bent upon it, while she and Nellie left him to his chosen way, abandoned him to it, though she could find no other mood or feeling within herself and no approach to him, no help. She set Nellie’s house to rights while he lay in his long stupor, distraught by the universal feeling which one has for the dying; pain, vexation, weariness, sorrow.

Ellen and Jasper took all the money they had, with Hen helping with his savings, to buy Henry a simple burial. Nellie went to live with Bell Carrier. She had feared emotion as a visitation from without herself, and Bell, having none, gave her ease. ‘I’m here now and I’ll stay,’ she said. Going about the small rough farm in the Rock Creek country, her home now, Ellen would remember Nellie, from first to last, a structure which she knew almost entirely in her senses, her deep inner knowledge which lay behind memory. She would gather Nellie to an entity, remembering her youth, her ways, her history, her look; Nellie had had yellow curls when she was a child, but her hair had turned to dun-brown before it had become streaked with grey; when she was a little child she had once climbed to the top of a tall gate to watch some people pass, and she had sung out, ‘Mr Man, your pipe made some smoke get in my eyes,’ and the passer had given her a dime, had folded the coin tight into her little fist. She screamed all night when she lost her first children, all then being dead, but when she lost all again she had gone about in a hard quiet or had sat still in her house.