She wanted to sit beside Tessie and talk about a house. She wanted to talk about a desert where camels walk in long lines, or about glaciers where men explore for poles, or about men walking into mines with little lights on their hats – about the wonders of the world.

‘If only I had things to put in drawers and drawers to put things in. That’s all I’d ask for a time to come.’ She could feel herself stooping to pull out a drawer, taking out a garment, at first vague and soft and fine, lace and ribbon and sweet smells, but she let it turn to coarse cotton in her hands, for when it took shape and grew definite there was no other way. She remembered a place where she and Irene had begged. ‘Could you give us some old clothes, Lady?’ And then a tall dark lady before a chest, bending to open a drawer with a faint stooping gesture, bending a little forward, a woman like slow water, a slim fine lady with dark hair and flowing hands.

More wood was needed for the supper fire now, for the nights were chilly and Henry liked to sit a little while by the blaze before going to bed. Ellen was pecking at the sticks by the wood pile with the sharp new axe her father had bought for her, making burning pieces. Nellie was sitting beside the cabin door. The pipe had hung in her listless hand until it had fallen to the ground, spilling its dead ash, but now and then quick hands turned up a garment or opened a vent and searched along the inner seams, eyes bent close. The blackbirds were assembled in great flocks now. They were gathering in the high trees on the hill above the ravine and their cries made a continuous chattering broken into chimes and waved to the flutterings of winged bodies. The twilights were falling earlier day by day, and strange shadows, different from the summer-cast shadows, slanted under the locust trees. The cry of the axe struck out against the cabin wall and against the bare tree branches, spreading wide, and the light came into the yard in unaccustomed ways. The cabin showed itself more, out in the hard light. Winter would come soon now. Nellie stooped quickly and rummaged at her garments, annoyed by the fleas, searching with her nearsighted eyes. They, Nellie and herself, were out before the cabin and out before the hard light, the leaves almost all fallen from the locust, an early falling. She stacked the cut wood in her arms and felt the rough surfaces and the rounded limbs and smelt the odours of green sap. Stooping to gather the wood, with her face close to the vapour of the sap, a great motion of tenderness for her mother swept through her nerves. ‘Get Ellen the shoes. I can wait a spell. My old ones will do me,’ she heard the words again. Minnie and Edd and Lue and Harp and Corie and Davie, before she came. ‘Mammy, what made your teeth go snaggly and all come outen your head?’ she had asked once. ‘Do you reckon you could have seven brats inside twelve year and have e’er a tooth left to your name?’ Now her face was close to the vapours of the wood and her lips brushed against the bark.