The sun came down white on the gravestones and beat back upon the hot air. The wind blew down from the west field and bent the grass. Ellen’s eyes shone brighter when a new memory came to her mind. She lifted her head suddenly and her sunbonnet fell back, swept off by the breeze. She was calling aloud now, her shout growing into a song.

‘Up in town on court day, it is, and a mighty big crowd is a-comen in the roads and horses are a-rampen up the street, and such a gang you can’t stir withouten you watch where you go. And sheep a-bawlen and cows, and a man says loud and fast…

Fifteen fifteen who’ll make it twenty

Fifteen now come on with the twenty

Who’ll make it twenty

Who’ll make it twenty

Fifteen now come on with the eighteen

Fifteen fifteen

Come on with the eighteen…

‘And bells a-ringen and banners go by and people with things in pokes to sell and apples a-rollen out on the ground and butter in buckets and lard to sell and pumpkins in a wagon, and sheep a-cryen and the calves a-cryen for their mammies, and little mules a-cryen for their horse mammies, and a big man comes to the courthouse door and sings out the loudest of all:

O yes! O yes!

The honourable judge

James Bartholomew Gowan

(It must ’a’ been)

Is now a-sitten…

‘That’s just what he said, that man in the door of the courthouse that time.

O yes! O yes!

The honourable judge

James Bartholomew Gowan

Is now a-sitten…

Come all ye…

And you shall be heared.

‘Powerful big county court today, they said. But I’m better’n he is. I’m better’n you. I’m a-liven and you ain’t! I’m a-liven and you’re dead! I’m better! I’m a-liven! I’m a-liven!’

CHAPTER THREE

By autumn the turkeys had grown almost to maturity and they filled the lot with their dark, bronze-brown waves of motion. Ellen fattened them with corn which she and Ben shelled by hand, a labour which required half the afternoon. They worked sitting on a rough bench not far from the watering trough where the mules came to drink, a wire fence dividing them from the runway leading down to the trough. Inside the barn a great drove of mules stood all day before the high feeding platforms, and sitting outside on the bench Ellen could hear the grinding of teeth, for the mules could never have done with eating from the tables which were never empty. Mr Dick scattered more and more fodder before them, working all day, and they daily grew more sleek and round. Later he would take them away to the south and sell them to the sugar plantations. Ellen felt the mild sting of the dry autumn air on her face as she sat with Ben over the shelling of the corn. Not far off was a flaming sugar tree. In a little while the mules would go south to plough the cane lands. She remembered cotton fields where men and women and children were bending over white flowers that puffed out raggedly into down, in a great ragged field of white down. A white field went off a long way over a flat country, and the road went sandy and wet under wheels, all almost forgotten now.