‘If only some o’nary trash hadn’t stole my shoes,’ she said when a thorn drove into her heel and sent cold quivers of pain to the very roots of her hair. She bit hard at her cheeks and lips and waited until the tremors passed out of her flesh. ‘It’s o’nary to steal,’ she said.

‘It’s right low down, now, right wrong. You dasn’t steal from your own set. That-there would be awful wrong, and I reckon it’s wrong nohow. It’s wrong to the folks that lose the stuff and that makes it come around wrong to the body that takes it. Only if a man’s got so much he never misses what you take, why then it seems like it might maybe not be wrong, only you can’t tell whe’r a man is a-goen to miss it or not and so it’s wrong, I reckon, no matter.’

A deeper whisper came in her mind suddenly, so sharp as to have the force of another speaker: ‘What about the times you took things yourself? Eggs sometimes, more’n often. What about the chicken? Wood, if you call that-there stealen?’

‘Pappy don’t steal, not a lick, nor Joe and Jock. If they did they’d get put in jail and it takes a sight of money to get outen jail. The Stikes youngones are always a-finden things. If they see a thing it’s lost for sure and they find it right off.’ She liked to dwell on this last idea to deny the hard voice any interval for speech.

‘Sometimes you been a-finden things,’ it rolled out, unbidden. Her brain felt very cold and hard. Cold spread back to the base of her head. She had found things. Tessie knew, or maybe Tessie knew. But sometimes it was so cold they must have a fire, her mind argued with its knowledge. Oh, bitter burning in fingers that were like sticks, shivering body and no underwear. Cold, even in Tennessee, but warm when one got under the covers, other bodies lying close. But the eggs and the chicken, that was more. You had to go out of your way to get them. That was just plain stealing any way you looked at it.

‘But you have to eat. Your belly makes you do it,’ her lips said.

The land lay rolling in large plates, some of them green with high wheat, some faintly crisscrossed with corn rows, some in pasture. She kept among the bushes as long as she could, going toward the house by indirect ways. She found some wild strawberries in an upper pasture on a hillside and many of these she ate as she passed. Higher up a fenceline she came to a wild apple tree with little knotty green apples hanging, and she ate two of these, wishing for salt. The yellow house allured her but she dared not approach it directly. She wondered if the farmer knew about the dull roof, now sharp in the sun, and if he knew how the yellow gables came out of the tree boughs, all set and still, fixed behind boughs, gables fitting into each other, snug and firm. Going up and down roads she had seen many houses, the angles turning with the turning of roads. Up the fence tangle, creeping and worming, she went now, to lie at last among tall weeds just beyond the vegetable garden. A horse, hitched to a two-seated buggy, was tied to a post beside the house. At the side doorstep a shepherd dog lay in the sun, but once he lifted his head and growled lazily. After a little the farmer and two women came from the house and climbed into the buggy, calling impatiently to someone.