A pain lay in her chest, under her breath, tokening something impending. There was something to do, something to happen. She thought that if she only had some bread or an egg she would not go to the cabin at all during the day, for she knew what there was to eat, beans and fat bacon – old bread. If only she had an egg, cool and juicy. You could slip in your hand and take an egg. The creek came out of a steep valley that was grown with bushes and trees, making a ravine which wound back into the hills. She saw into the curves of the ravine and went slowly over the creek sand, thinking: your hand would slip into the straw and there would be the egg. Blackbirds were chiming in the trees at the edge of the tobacco field and the bobolinks of yesterday were still busy over the meadow. Up in the narrow ravine she sat with her feet in the water, as still as stone, waiting for the life which her coming had disturbed to return. Presently a snake came out from under a white rock, making a sigh in a tuft of water grass. It went off down-stream, flowing more quickly than the water. Your hand would glide in over the straw and you would hardly know when it happened, she thought, and then the egg would be running down your throat. She watched the grey water bugs walking in the sandy mud under the still pool. They floated more than they walked and they made faint trails in the slime. Where the water ran over a stone it had a low purring sound like children talking far off, little children saying,

I found one.

I found one too.

Look at mine!

Her mind lay back among the people she had left two days before; the people made a certainty which spread back of her strange new sensations that were derived from the fields. Scraps of talk, lodged in mind, loomed out now in unprecedented moments.

‘Eleven. They’ve got eleven youngones, eleven brats now.’

‘What they think they are? White rats? Belgium hares?’

This was Screw and Connie and their talk. Screw and Connie in a fight Tuesday, talking loud and throwing things. Screw whipped Connie and knocked her down often, and then she would hide her razor in her dress and swear she would kill him when he came back, but, next day, she would be washing his dirty shirt in the creek and singing a song:

And I fancied I could trace

Just a tear on her dear face…

She was thinking about Connie and Screw when she climbed over a water gap and went higher up the creek. A hunger pulled at her inner part in spite of the strawberries and the two green apples, and this hunger she could separate from the pain that lay under her breath, but she did not wish to go back to the cabin and see her father and mother, the one lying leg-weary in the shade, the other sitting listlessly in the door, smoking the pipe. When her father waked they would talk a little: