‘Why don’t you go on to bed,’ Nellie said, waking out of her first sleep. ‘Nobody wants to listen to your long-winded blab all night. Can’t you-all get shed of him, Ellen?’

‘I recollect I was ten year old and next year they all put at Preacher Wilder to teach a school and he gave in. I recollect the first day. Preacher Wilder’s shoes hurt and he taught all day in his sock feet and I recollect the holes in the heels of his socks. No new sight to anybody but it made the big gals laugh to see Preacher Wilder’s naked hide shine outen his sock holes. Next year Preacher Wilder’s wife died and he married Farney O’Bryan and went off, but he was in nobody’s debt though. Then we didn’t have a school for a right smart while and when we did I never went. Stayed at home to help Pap. It was when I was sixteen that Tom Begley stabbed Shine Mather, stabbed him clean through the guts and laid him out as bloody as a hog. Then the mob came and hung Tom to a white oak down by the creek along past our house and me and Puppy and Joe Deats, we took Tom down and laid him out for the funeral. Quarrel over a shotgun, I recollect.’

‘Did Shine Mather think it was his shotgun?’ Ellen asked. Henry’s words burst loud on her ears, reverberating against her sense, but she attended to nothing he said and leaned dejectedly in her small stiff chair, her shoulders back. ‘Did Shine claim the shotgun?’

‘It was a trade between a shotgun and a filly, but I disremember how it was. Tom, he owned the shotgun, I reckon, and he traded for the filly. Seems like it was the filly that was lied about, but I disremember. Seems like the filly had a lame shoulder and seems like Shine knowed it but traded when the filly was all rested up and the lame didn’t show. That’s how it seems. Nohow Shine greened Tom outen a good shotgun.’

‘Why don’t you go to bed,’ Nellie said, waking again, ‘and quit your eternal blab? Nobody wants to listen to blabber all night.’