‘Wonder where Jock and Joe is by today?’

‘On the road down below Rushfield a piece. I could catch up in three hours or a little more if I was of a mind to.’

‘And Eva Stikes as like as not has got on her red head rag and is a-tellen fortunes to the Briartown niggers.’

‘And her hoop earbobs on, maybe.’

‘And Tessie is a-palaveren, wherever she is. I never see such a vigorous woman to palaver.’

Her mother and father whipped her for running off to Tessie’s wagon. Now she sat by the water of a pool, stirring the mud with a stick and thinking of Tessie. Tessie was always ready to take notice. ‘Hear that-there redbird!’ she’d say, and she would walk like a street parade when she told about a circus. Her eyes would round big when she would say, ‘Oh, Grannie, what makes your ears so big? To hear you the better, my child.’ She was all for tree-shaded avenues and stone gateposts and people walking down to sundials to tell the time of day, and even for horses they bought and sold every week. ‘I don’t know what you see in that-there old carcass,’ Jock would say, and Tessie would be rubbing the critter’s nose and looking into his eyes. She was married to Jock, Jock West; some said she was only taken-up with him, like Screw and Connie. The cathedral at Nashville, a great church, came into her mind. Once Tessie slipped her away and took her there to see – it was twittering candles and great music running down suddenly into little music and people swaying all together until there was a river running through the church, up and down, and her heart surged in her breast. She and Tessie sat on a back seat watching. Another time they had stood beyond a paling when a white-robed man called in a voice rich with music, ‘Oh, Brother Andrew, have you got a G string?’ Some nights sitting around the fire Tessie was so shiny you could hardly take your eyes off her… Hanging her clothes up on a wire fence to dry, stepping quick, no shoes and stockings on. ‘Tessie is our kind of folks,’ she said.

She stirred the mud with a forked stick, thinking of Tessie’s voice, hard and tight in a curse, pushing the curse down at all four corners and holding it steady, coming not often – Tessie was full of ways and plans and she did not have to curse much. But sometimes when a wagon stuck in the mud and they could never budge it for a whole day, then she did, and once when Connie said she was sweet on Screw. ‘God Almighty for God’s sake! A damn little I think of Screw. Thick neck! Always a-knocken down. Connie can have Screw. Damn Screw!’

Ellen went further up the creek, jumping from white stone to white stone, feeling safe in the narrow ravine hidden among the willow bushes. She heard quails calling over in the fields, and farm sounds came into the hollow, a calf or a mule crying out. After a little she knew that the farmer had come back from church; sounds heard less than felt told her this, echoes in the hillside, screen doors slamming in the right-hand bushes and rocks. She found a dead snake still bloody from his wounds and this made her think of the man Screw had killed – blood and the breath gone out. She turned the snake over and over to see it writhe, pity and wonder and cruelty in her mind. Screw had killed a man. Haldeen Stikes said he had killed two, but you never dared speak of it even if you called it one. Her father had whipped her once for asking, ‘Did Screw kill a man?’