‘I know,’ she said.

‘Every time I went I taken a dollar.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Sometimes old Jones, he’d say, “Jule’s got company. I reckon you can’t go up tonight.”’

The sun slanted long rays through the air, rays which cut through the hard bare trees and printed dim shadows of boughs on the ground, the light lying widely dispersed over the spent bushes and debased grass, over the burnt chicory, frost-eaten and done. She had thought that Jonas was for her and that he was something to her, and Dorine had so thought, and Elmer and Rosie. She had been too bold within herself, she reflected. She was remembering slowly, the memory lying in a cumbersome, shapeless mass under her pain and under her abashed need. She was remembering Dorine’s first party. He had told her the names of all the people there and had told her that she would like them when she knew them. Her wish for Jonas was crowded back into a minute point and under this plodded or spread the matter of a vast shapeless memory which turned about in a movement to a summary but came to nothing, confused and blurred anew by the fact that he now wanted her to know, that he felt that his story concerned her.

‘Not but twice have I been there since I knowed you, Elleen, and them times I came out and sat alongside the creek all night and I says to myself, “Jonas Prather, you’re a stinken, o’nary fool, a low-down damned-to-the-devil white-trash.” I wouldn’t name all I called myself as I sit out alongside the creek all night.’

‘Was that a long spell ago, Jonas?’

‘’Twas last summer, the last time I see Jule. After ploughen time in the corn, I recollect now, after wheat harvest.’

Ellen pulled her coat around her and drew her thinly dressed knees under its folds. The chill was spreading up from the hollow with the approach of evening. The cows were waiting at the barn and after a little she would have to go to shell the corn for the fattening turkeys. He was speaking again, asking her if she would hear the rest, for there was more to tell. After they had walked up Dorsey’s hill, she reflected, and after he had kissed her in the wheat harvest. She stared at the ground beyond the steps, but his side, blue work clothes and crooked plough shoes, reached into the edge of her vision, one long broad hand laid out restlessly on his knee, a twitching hand that moved in and out of her sight. He wanted to tell her and the rest was harder to tell, harder to bear, and suddenly she wanted him to find relief and ease. She herself or what she felt about the wheat harvest did not matter if he found ease.