Ellen hid her shoes in the wagon. She took off her outer skirt, a dark blue garment, and folded it neatly over the shoes, for Tessie had given her the skirt. The garment removed, she stood clothed in a drab-green waist and a short grey cotton petticoat. She went up the fencerow, the way her father had gone, shy at being between fences, at being penned in a field, a little uncomfortable for the beans and bacon she had eaten, uncertain as to which way to go and as to what was expected of her.

At the top of the field she found the labourers assembled. The farmer had drawn plants out of the bed earlier in the morning, and he gave a basket of these to Ellen, showing her how to drop them along the rows, how to space them by an accurate guess. The men who set the plants into the ground followed her. They made a hole in the soft earth with a round stick and pushed the plant into the hole, squeezing the mud about it with the left hand, bending along the rows, almost never straightening from row end to row end. Ellen walked ahead of the men, dropping a plant first to right and then to left, completing the farmer’s field and leading a procession over a rolling hill, her bare feet, red from the sun and the dew, sinking into the mud where the field lay lowest. Her father and a grown boy named Ezra were those who worked behind her. In the mid-morning her mother came slowly, aimlessly, up the fencerow. The farmer offered her twenty-five cents an hour to take his place at the plant bed. ‘You could sit here on this board and be right comfortable and be earnen a little pin money besides. There won’t be more’n a hour or two of it and then a rest.’

‘I might work for a spell,’ she said.

At noon they sat under a tree by a fence and waited until food was brought from the farmhouse. The farmer himself came with a basket, his wife following with a coffeepot and some cups. The farmer displayed his offering, bread and pieces of ham dripping hot. There was milk to go in the cups after the coffee and there were fried potatoes and stewed peas. The farmer’s wife stayed only a moment, mopping her face, and the farmer said, pointing to the basket, ‘Here’s a pie when you-all are ready for it, and if anybody wants any more helpens all he has to do is to ask. I always feed my hands well.’ Then he too went back up to the house.

Their fingers were brown on the white bread. They ate shyly, making at first as if they hardly cared to eat at all, picking meagrely at the bread, letting the peas stand untasted in the tin pail. Ezra said:

‘I allow you-all are foreigners.’

‘We are on our way a-travellen. We are a-looken for a good place to settle down,’ Henry said.