Sebe would often stop as he passed going to the grist mill with the corn, or sometimes he would come in his buggy, stopping casually, warily keeping his seat in the vehicle, gathering up the lines from time to time as if he meant to be off at once. He had bought the buggy from a farmer beyond the river.

‘Hit’s a right pretty turnout,’ Ellen said, teasing the buggy with a willow switch, twiddling the spokes of the wheels, twiddling Sebe’s pronoun before his eyes. ‘Hit is now. You look like you was fatched up in town.’

‘You could ride along with me if you are of a mind to, maybe; if you happen to be a-goen my way.’

‘Which way you aim to go?’

‘I aim towards Fairhope Church and back around by Fox Creek. Or some other way if you’d rather.’

Sometimes Ellen would climb in beside him and ride down the pike. Then he would talk about his corn crop and his tobacco. In another year he expected to be able to rent a place. He knew a good strip of bottom over beyond the creek, fine corn land. A body could make the store bill off the ducks and geese alone. It was a prime place for ducks, right on the water before the door. He knew a man used to live there and his wife made the store bill every year off the ducks and chickens. He knew a fine breed of ducks, Indian Runners. He could get a setting of eggs for little or nothing and in a year, look how many you would have. A body could do a sight with ducks, a good thrifty woman could. And look what you could do with chickens. Take a good breed like the Rhode Island Reds and say you had twenty hens to start, you could raise two hundred or three hundred frying-sizes in no time, and even say corn kept to eighty cents you could make. He knew a man had a wife made enough to buy a disc plough, just off the egg money alone. And there would still be the geese to pay the store bill.

Ellen saw in her mind the little farm beyond the creek with ducks floating out in a stately procession on the water holes and the hens cackling their high barbed songs in the bright mornings, and a quick woman, herself perhaps, gathering in the eggs and selling them for coins, gathering in the coins and spending them for a disc plough or a binder or a horse rake, and the wind blew brightly, sprightly in clear mornings, cool bright mornings, and the little house would stand off in the bottom among cornfields, crisp cornfields. She thought of the woman as always gathering in eggs and trading them for coins and spending the coins for bright new machines that would go clickerty-click across the sparkling meadows.

‘How much is a setten of duck eggs worth now?’ she asked.