At one sinking of the fire Nellie withdrew and moved about in the back of the room or in the kitchen. Then she took off a little of her clothing and lay down in the bed, falling asleep as the pink light faded from her forehead. Ellen moved into Nellie’s chair and thus they sat, Henry reminiscent and outward-flowing, warming to his own past as he searched his mind for it.

‘And so you been plumb to Tennessee and back,’ Jonas said. ‘Well I vum!’

‘But my pap he never went out of sight or hearen of Luckett’s Branch, never in his whole lifetime.’

‘You was a rover, for a fact now.’

‘My pap, he said his pap was named Edd Chesser and said the name was by rights Cheshire away back, afore his time. My grandpap was a master hand for honey bees. I’ll tell you what he could do. He could walk right into a swarm and never get a sign of a sting. Twenty stands he had if he had one. I recollect once when I was a tad how I got stung. I recollect as well as if it was today. We used to take bread and honey to school to eat at big recess for our school dinner. I recollect once when I opened up my dinner bucket the whole place was lined with these-here little brown ants, all gaumed into the dinner.’

‘What did you do?’ Ellen asked. ‘How’d you get shed of them?’

‘I reckon I didn’t eat my dinner that-there day. I never could abide to have ants in my victuals. A man over by Coulter’s sawmill said once, “Law, ants is such clean little things, I never take notice to an ant.” A woman over at grandpap’s said once she never ate blackberry jam because it was made in flytime. Said if you ever took notice to it blackberry jam was about half flies cooked up and most people never knowed the difference. The taste was about the same, she said. She said she never ate jam on that account.’

‘What did she say peach jam was half? Wasps, I reckon, yellow jackets,’ Jonas said.

‘I recollect when I was a youngone,’ Henry resumed his memory. ‘We used to live in a house over against a knob and once the chimney smoked all one winter so bad we looked black as buzzards and Mammy was drove half outen her mind a-tryen to tidy things. That spring when Pap was ploughen he turned up a skull bone. Sure thing, he did, a small-like skull as if it was a woman or a child. Out in the middle of a field. He brought it to the house but Mammy she wouldn’t let it rest till she got it outen the house, but my brother Newt, he stood it agin the door to make a door prop. Then Pap threw it out to please Mammy, and it laid out behind the henhouse all summer upside down, and once when it rained I see the chickens drink water outen it. Then Mammy she told Pap he better bury it and Newt buried it when he went to dig a post hole one time. It was a small-like skull and might be a woman or a youngone half growed up, and then after a spell we heared that a man killed his boy in the house away back, man drunk and killed his own boy about twelve year old and they buried him out in the field. War time, it was. Said there was blood on the floor up in the loft room where the boy died, and sure enough there was, when you looked sharp, a brown spot on the floor but you couldn’t say on oath it was blood.’