The apparition was gone, forgotten in the warmth of the fire. She held her damp feet to the blaze and felt the drowsy heat on her face, watching the sycamore log that burned with a soft liquid light. She was hearing pleasantly the remembered tones of a voice she had heard many days back, a shout that had come to her from the pasture road. ‘No use to plant beans till you hear a whippoorwill!’ She had been digging potatoes in the garden, turning up the half-frozen soil to the deep warm inner part where they were buried safe from the frost. A voice had cried out to her from the pasture, ‘Not safe to plant beans. Have you heared e’er whippoorwill?’ A boy was teasing her across the winter pasture, calling out from the road. He had been riding a plough horse, a great sack of something across before the saddle. She would not even know him if she should see him again, for he had been too far away to be seen clearly. Now a smile straightened her lips and quivered in and out of her eyes as she looked at the sycamore flame.

‘A-teasen and a-foolen. Beans and whippoorwills in a winter time. “Have you heared e’er whippoorwill?” December it is, right at Christmas, and he says to me, “Not safe to plant beans till you hear a whippoorwill.”’

In January came a dry frozen time, hard and cold. Each cow made a long white breath in the morning air. Henry worked all day at fencing and Ellen was never done finding wood and bringing it to the cabin to keep the fire on the hearth. In the night sometimes lonely horsehoofs went galloping along the beaten mould of the pasture road, thumping on the frozen dirt. The sound would waken her with a thrill of pleasure, a joy at being awakened for any purpose, at feeling herself suddenly alive again. Into the joy would come a sadness at the lonely throb of the horse’s feet that were going, the unspeakable loneliness that settled down on the road and the yard, on the cabin, on her own body, as the pulse of the hoofs beat dimmer on her ears and faded further and further away. Her mother’s words would call out in the lonely stillness of her mind. ‘Where’s the fellows that ought to be a-comen?’ She had been brushing her hair before the kitchen mirror, looking into her own clear eyes. ‘What fellows?’ she had said, dreaming over her hair. ‘A big grown girl, nigh to eighteen and no fellows a-comen!’ She had been lifting a lock of her hair, making it lie in different ways, searching out the ways of hair. The taunt had come upon her unprepared and now the words would probe the still dark after the passer was gone. A hard cry snarled into the dark. ‘Where’s the fellows that ought to be a-comen?’