As she sewed at some garment, rocking softly to and fro with the sway of her needle, she stopped, the seam stayed and the thread taut in her hand, stopped and remembered life. Life and herself, one, comprehensible and entire, without flaw, with beginning and end, and on the instant she herself was imaged in the lucid thought. A sense of happiness surged over her and engulfed her thinking until she floated in a tide of sense and could not divide herself from the flood and could not now restore the memory of the clear fine image, gone in its own accompanying joy. The joy exhausted, she sat lax in an apathy, unthinking and unfeeling, staring at the wall without sight, but her hands remembered their habit of the needle and the stitches fell again, over and over, her body swaying softly to and fro. It was early spring now, the lean time of the year, the cold spring. There was little to eat but bread and bacon. Some farm bell rang, far off over the hard hills, a faint sound beating thin against the air. It was after eleven o’clock, then, time to prepare the food. Jasper would come across the meadow, bent, stiff. She could feel the noon reaching over the entire country, valley and stony hills, the farm bell leaving faint echoes in the mind together with hunger, a feel of the approach of food, bacon and bread and grease.

She felt the noon on her skin, and she heard it in her ears and tasted it in her mouth. It lay on her seam like a load and dragged at her needle. It was imperative; it could not be set aside. She carried the slop to the pigs while the kitchen fire kindled. They were running in the lot behind the barn, and while they lapped at the greasy water and nosed out the choice morsels she looked after the hens. When the pigs had eaten she could feel their soft round noses on her ankles as they followed her down the lot grumbling, squealing, wanting more, the white-nosed one at her right heel, the runt at her left.

‘I couldn’t fill you-all if I tried,’ she said. ‘It’s a hog’s way to be empty.’ A sudden thought of them in November, wallowing in corn and mud, knocked in the head, their throats cut, hung up to bleed, scalded in the big pot. Then cut into sides and hams and shoulders. She herself would render the lard; she would trim the little pieces of gut fat off the chitterlings and stew it down in a kettle by the well. She would give some of the offal to the dogs and bury some of it in the garden, offal from the little white-footed runt now at her right ankle. This was his measure of life. ‘I’d like to know how you’d live in winter,’ she said to herself. ‘The only way is not to make any pet out of stock. How you’d live in winter without you had your sowbelly to eat and your lard to fry in and the hams to trade at the store for sugar and coffee?’