A little later when the touch-me-nots appeared, she imagined how her baby, when he grew older, would play with them.

He would be frightened, perhaps, at first to see what happened when he touched those blond flowers with the red-brown splotches on them: I called them “scatters,” for when a finger is put to them they explode, spewing their tiny seeds everywhere. I was sure when Thomas got over his fright he would wait every summer until the flowers became mature enough to do their little tricks.

“They’re not doing it yet. When will they do it, Mother? They’re not doing it.”

“Be patient,” I would say. “They’re not ready to do it.”

THINGS seemed more various and intricate than she had remembered. The whitish nubs of leaves which had begun to shoot from the catfoot stems in later summer were fragrant from the first. And when the catfoot itself appeared, she held it to her baby’s nose, being careful not to let any of its bristles touch him.

I thought then that it was because of Thomas that the earth was as if new.

WHEN the days were hot, she could smell animal dung on a path minutes before she saw it. In the warm nights her body was damp from its being so close to Sheninjee, and her hair, long as it was, curled into tendrils as if it were new fern foliage.

She welcomed the smell of apple skins and the texture of the black walnuts. As the days grew a little shorter and the evenings cooler, she felt the contrast to the skin of passing from out-of-doors to indoors where the smoky fire twisted and burned.

After a day of scraping corn kernels from cobs, she would wade into a shallow place of the Ohio with her son, her arm around his waist with him facing away from her. Then she would swirl him back and forth in arcs in the cool water, and he would kick his feet and rub his creased ankles together as she had seen blue flies do, as if he had something annoyingly sticky on them.

When the corn was dry, she pounded it in preparation for making samp. When she was new at pounding her arms burned with the effort, but then she grew used to it and welcomed its very difficulty; the repeated downstrokes that resulted in the sundering of kernels reminded her of how she used to split wood, of how much power she felt, of how she fell into a rhythm, of how spent yet peaceful she felt afterward.

She loved her block and pestle and her other utensils as well: two large clay kettles and a smaller one, of brass; two knives; two vessels of heavy bark; a deer-jaw scraper. She kept them together and free of dirt and of the droppings of mice.