‘But nohow if you don’t tell me to go outen your sight.’

‘I wouldn’t tell you to go outen my sight.’

‘But we wouldn’t be the same together as we used to be.’

‘Not everybit the same, Jonas, dances and parties and so much to laugh at.’

‘Seems as if I couldn’t dance any more. Seems like I’d turn to something hard like iron if I tried.’

‘Maybe we wouldn’t dance. Not for a spell nohow.’

‘I been in torment, downright hell. At night afore I could sleep. Then I says, “I’ll tell Eileen nohow. Maybe she’ll tell me to go off, but nohow I’ll tell her.”’

‘No matter how much I study it over I can’t see e’er thing to do.’

‘But if I could be beside you a little spell tomorrow and day after.

‘At sundown you could come.’

She arose from the step and went down to the path where she stood until he came to stand beside her. She asked him if he would like to go with her to feed the great white turkeys, for they were a sight to see, like great birds, all their feathers in a flutter. At the pens he kept beside her, even following her closely when she went into the barn on some errand. There was a moment when he leaned over the drinking pans to pour the water out, when she hated his pain and his shame, and her hate spread to his limbs and his back, his bent head and reaching hands. She talked about the white turkeys and about the price they would bring Miss Tod, or she had him lift one to guess its weight. Or standing at the bars beside the milking lot, when he came forward down the calf pen, when the turkeys were housed in the barn and the hush of their feathers was settling over the dusk, she gathered Jonas with her eyes and pitied him, and pitied herself and all men and women, and took his hand and walked back across the pasture.

There was nothing they could do, they decided, and they would wait. The winter would come. In the next day her thought of him was hushed and tender, muffled under her emotion, her ways were gentle and her voice low. Another day she was strong and cool; she would ask Jonas to give her a lasting promise, but when she spoke of it he was so full of lowly grief, saying that he would pledge her anything she asked with his right hand as forfeit, that she did not name any demands. He came every day until the cold fell. They would sit a little apart and they would talk of common things.