Finally they were gone and she crawled out of her hiding place and went slowly on. She could hear the boys screaming higher up around the curve and she knew that they were screaming at the echoes. She remembered running sounds like singing, like tinkling water rippling over creek stones, like pretty bells ringing brightly in little towns on Sunday morning, and she walked faster, for she remembered Tessie. Up in the Bluegrass of the state all summer, she had been, but now she would be going back down again. Where had Tessie been? She pushed her mind hard into the shadows, into the dark of what she did not know. Where had Tessie been? Tessie! Where had she been the day the cabin floor caught fire? Now she sat on a stone to think of that. A carriage full of voices was approaching, men and women singing, the parts sweetly blended. When she heard them coming near she climbed a wire fence and hid among low weeds in a pasture.

‘It makes a fair sound,’ she said.

There was a smell of pigs about in the weeds where she lay. A little pig-house stood out sharply in the moonlight on the upper slope of the enclosure and from somewhere off in the weeds came the sound of a sow’s deep breath. Sweet voices, men and women, sang in the night, with the irregular bent of the horses’ hoofs walking through the rhythms:

Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming…

The sound went on up the hill, four voices blended, or five perhaps, the horses taking their time at the road. ‘Sycamores’ kept in her thought, tone at first, spreading out two ways and gathering back into unison. ‘Men and women have pretty singing,’ she thought. ‘I wish I could sing like that.’ She tried to sing a chord but only her own voice came, a weak voice after the chorus lately there. Far up the hill she heard the carriage stop and she knew that the voices were singing to the echo. The night brought sublimated tones across the interlying space, thin planes of sound spreading through trees and rocks. She stood beside a white stone, a large white stone lying blank in the moonlight, and tried again to make a chord with her throat, but only a dull small tone came. Why could she not sing a full wide singing, she thought as she tried the word ‘sycamores’ over and over.

After that the road swept upward and outward to the west, running unmarked and white between bald fields and then dipping down suddenly to a small runlet, now dry. The dip and the culvert at the bottom, and the upward curve beyond, lost their moonlight and lay dim in a white noon sun, hot beetles ticking in the weeds and the wilted July grass, down below the Knobs in the cave country. A buggy came by in the noon sunlight, a man and a woman in it, the woman’s white summer dress almost like a mirror in the sun. The woman was weeping when they passed. ‘Not once but ten times,’ the man said. ‘Not once but ten times,’ a man’s voice was saying, roughly, accusingly. ‘Not once but ten times’ – her feet marched to the uneven rhythm of the saying as she climbed the rough road in shadow.