‘Is the place where you-all come from a far piece from here?’

‘A right far piece.’

‘I allow you-all been all the way maybe to Green County, or maybe to Hardin or Larue.’

‘Larue! I been all the way to Tennessee and then on to Georgia.’

An expression of wonder.

‘I been all the way to Tennessee and then on to Georgia and back once and on to Tennessee once again. Me and my old woman and that-there gal there, all three of us. Say, old woman, I’m plum a fool about peas. Let’s have some outen that bucket there.’

‘But before that I lived in Taylor County,’ Henry said after the peas had been eaten. After the hour spent by the tree the work went forward again. Ellen caught the rhythm of her task and rested upon it, gaining thus a chance to look about her a little. The farmhouse stood off among tall trees, a yellow shape with points here and there, two red chimneys budding out of the roof. In her mind the house touched something she almost knew. The treetops above the roof, the mist in the trees, the points of the roof, dull colour, all belonging to the farmer, the yellow wall, the distance lying off across a rolling cornfield that was mottled with the wet and traced with lines of low corn – all these touched something settled and comforting in her mind, something like a drink of water after an hour of thirst, like a little bridge over a stream that ran out of a thicket, like cool steps going up into a shaded doorway. That night she lay again on the quilts on the cabin floor beside her mother. Her shoulders ached from carrying the basket all day and her feet were sore from the sun and the mud. Until two weeks before, when her father had bought her shoes at a country store, she had gone barefoot for many months, and her feet were tough and hard, but the mud had eaten into the flesh. When she had returned from the field at sundown she had found that someone had stolen her shoes from the wagon. Her folded skirt had been thrown aside and the shoes were gone, but nothing else had been taken. Lying on the quilts she thought again of Tessie. Her closed eyes saw again the objects of the day in the field, the near mud over which she bent, her feet pulling in and out of it, little grains of soil swimming past her tired eyes. The farmer was there with his stiff legs and square butt, bending over the plant bed, urging everyone forward, trying to be both familiar and commanding. Across the mud and the swimming grains of soil ran his yellow house, off past trees, ran mist, roof-shapes, bobolinks over a meadow, blackbirds in locust trees, bumblebees dragging their bodies over red clover.

‘Nine hours I worked and made two dollars and a quarter, but shoes cost two dollars. I’ll have a heap to tell Tessie.’