Mr Al was large and gentle, moving slowly through his farm, speaking to his stock in a firm gentle voice, deep-sounding out of his broad back and full sides. He spoke gently to Ellen:

‘See’t you shut that-there gate always. Them calves mustn’t get out.’

Ellen could hear the deep echoes of his words flowing through the barns, flattened against the hay, hollowed-out in the corridors, and rolled out in a sheet before the high outer wall. Mr Dick had the same voice, gentle among the mules, firm and wide-flowing.

‘Stand up there Buck. Woah there! Get in there Ike!’

The two voices flowed around her as she crumbed the pepper bread for the little turkeys. The voices were full of deep, gentle, abrupt undercurrents; they went stepping down notes with long steps, as men’s voices go in singing, walking through a tune, walking down a tune to the very bottom of song. Ben’s voice came upon her too, an old voice, full of cracked words that were jointed in the middle, each fragment full of harmonies.

‘Take yo’ turn, now, you li’l’ devil, an’ suck yo’ mammy. Dis-here calf’s big ’nough to wean, I’m a-thinken. Get outen dat bucket, Ol’ Black! Always got yo’ nose in somewheres!’

Once in a while Miss Tod came to the lot. She was a large woman with plump hands that were often full of rings. Sometimes there were stains around the corners of her mouth from the snuff she had taken. ‘I’m right proud of my turkeys this year,’ she said. ‘If you take care the best you can I’ll give you one for a present for your Thanksgiving dinner, besides the pay.’

Ellen would milk the cow before sundown and carry the milk to the little porch before the cabin and strain it there. Then she would bathe her face in the wash pan and brush her hair smooth before the kitchen mirror, winding her long braid around her head. In the glass she would see her own clear eyes and brown lashes and she would look at the little pits in the corners of her eyes. If she strained her face upward she could see her neck where there were a few brown freckles, and she could see the little hollow in her throat between two white bones. Sometimes she looked long at her teeth and her lips, searching them out, trying to know all their ways, or she would search out her dimpled smile or stand back to see her smooth cheeks or draw down her dress at the throat to see her white breast and shoulder.

‘I’m a-goen now, Mammy,’ she would say. ‘Is it time?’

‘I expect it is. You better.’

She would take the turkey bread in her hand and go, bonnetless, up the gentle hill across the pasture in the light of sundown, calling the hens as she went. She was keenly aware of the ceremony and aware of her figure rising out of the fluttering birds, of all moving together about her. She would hear the mules crunching their fodder as she went past the first barn, and she would hear the swish of falling hay, the thud of a mule hoof on a board, a man’s voice ordering or whistling a tune. She would take the flocks in at the gate, careful not to let any of the calves out, and she would know that John Bradshaw knew that she was there although he said nothing and looked nothing. She would crumble down the bread for each brood near its coop and she would make the count and see to the drinking pans. Then she would go back through the gate, only a wire fence dividing her from the milking group, and walk down the pasture in the dusk. That was all; the office would be over.