“We ate the chicken,” said William Wallace, “and it was tender. Of course that wasn’t all they had. The night I was trying their table out, it sure had good things to eat from one end to the other. Her mama and papa sat at the head and foot and we was face to face with each other across it, with I remember a pat of butter between. They had real sweet butter, with a tree drawed down it, elegant-like. Her mama eats like a man. I had brought her a whole hat-ful of berries and she didn’t even pass them to her husband. Hazel, she would leap up and take a pitcher of new milk and fill up the glasses. I had heard how they couldn’t have a singing at the church without a fight over her.”

“Oh, she’s a pretty girl, all right,” said Virgil. “It’s a pity for the ones like her to grow old, and get like their mothers.”

“Another thing will be that her mother will get wind of this and come after me,” said William Wallace.

“Her mother will eat you alive,” said Virgil.

“She’s just been watching her chance,” said William Wallace. “Why did I think I could stay out all night.”

“Just something come over you.”

“First it was just a carnival at Carthage, and I had to let them guess my weight . . . and after that . . .”

“It was nice to be sitting on your neck in a ditch singing,” prompted Virgil, “in the moonlight. And playing on the harmonica like you can play.”

“Even if Hazel did sit home knowing I was drunk, that wouldn’t kill her,” said William Wallace. “What she knows ain’t ever killed her yet. . . . She’s smart, too, for a girl,” he said.

“She’s a lot smarter than her cousins in Beula,” said Virgil. “And especially Edna Earle, that never did get to be what you’d call a heavy thinker. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the ‘C’ got through the ‘L’ in a Coca-Cola sign.”

“Hazel is smart,” said William Wallace. They walked on. “You ought to see her pantry shelf, it looks like a hundred jars when you open the door. I don’t see how she could turn around and jump in the river.”

“It’s a woman’s trick.”

“I always behaved before. Till the one night—last night.”

“Yes, but the one night,” said Virgil. “And she was waiting to take advantage.”

“She jumped in the river because she was scared to death of the water and that was to make it worse,” he said. “She remembered how I used to have to pick her up and carry her over the oak-log bridge, how she’d shut her eyes and make a dead-weight and hold me round the neck, just for a little creek. I don’t see how she brought herself to jump.”