He stamped across the porch. Drenna dropped down on the top step, draping her gray percale skirt across her worn shoes. The widow hunched herself on the cowhide seat of her hickory rocker, drawing her shawl around her shoulders against the chill air from the northwest.

“Ain’t you sick o’ keepin’ Drenna hangin’ around where you kin look at her all the day? I ain’t done laughin’, the way you begun a-courtin’ her, like you was huntin’ a squirrel goin’ acrost a oak thicket an’ you tryin’ to keep sight of it. How many years ago was it? Two, three? Anyways, long enough to git you a couple o’ young uns. An’ you ain’t sick o’ lookin’ at her yit!”

Lige towered over her. He shook back the curly sun-bleached hair from his sweaty forehead like an infuriated bull. He plunged roaring into her trap.

“Dog take you! You ain’t fitten to fish the same creek ’long-side of her! Drenna, move offen the stoop away from her! You’d orter study on sayin’, is she sick o’ lookin’ at me! A pore sorry thing like me, to git a woman——”

The Widow Sellers rocked violently in sheer delight. Her little black chinquapin eyes danced. She scratched her white head excitedly with a piece of the okra she was cutting. She shrilled above him.

“Now you said it! Now you and me agrees for onct, Mister Gentry! A pore sorry thing like you! Now you’re talkin’!”

He stopped short.

“Oh, go to the devil,” he said good-naturedly.

Drenna smiled uneasily. The ribald quarrelling of this pair still disturbed her. It was scandalous for two people so dependent on each other to talk so. No other man, black or white, would work so hard for the old woman, at the low wages of six dollars a week. Certainly no other employer would allow Lige time off every afternoon to work his own few acres. They threw these facts at each other at every encounter.

The Widow Sellers was admitting now, “Shore you works hard. Bless Katy, all you know is to work. You don’t know nothin’ else. You got you no sense.”

“You wait ’til my beans gits top price next week. You’ll say I got sense.”

“You got Davis wax, eh? Them new-fangled ones. They’re pretty, but they ain’t got the good flavor. Sellers always planted Wardwell’s. You won’t never make you no crop,” she said comfortably. “Here,” she reached behind her rocker and pushed a pair of worn child’s shoes in his hands. “I had me a box from Janey, in Alabamy. Git along to your sorry bean-patch.”

He hurled the shoes past her head.

“Give your dogged shoes to a nigger young un.”

He spat over the edge of the porch and strode off fiercely.

“Fust crop o’ beans I make,” he called back over his shoulder, “you’ve seed the last o’ me, ol’ woman.”