“You’ll be white-headed as me,” she mocked after him, “an’ still proud to be takin’ my rations money!”

“No need to holler,” he soothed from the gate. “You got you a voice like a limpkin.”

“A limpkin?” she puzzled. “That brownified crane screeches like a wild-cat?”

“Now you said it!” he whooped.

His teeth flashed in his tanned face. He was off at a violent trot for his two acres of beans. The old woman grinned.

“Ain’t he the biggety thing!”

“Hain’t biggety,” the young woman said gently. “Jest turrible prideful. . . . He shot him a tillie-hawk a ways back, jest account o’ ol’ man Tainter was drivin’ up behind us. He figgers he’s as good as ary man to shoot his shells reckless.”

The old woman nodded and chuckled. She put down her pan of okra and picked up the child shoes, dusting them with her apron. Drenna put them under her arm.

“Thank you, ma’am. They’ll fit one o’ the chappies, shore.”

They walked together to the road. The widow shivered.

“That scamp knows as good as I do we’ll git heavy frost tonight. We cain’t skip it. The whole State o’ Texas is a-breathin’ cold in on us. Floridy don’t make none o’ her own troubles,” she grumbled. “They all comes in from some’eres else. Wind from the south an’ cold from Texas. He better say good bye to them beans today whilst they’re purty.”

She laid a hand on the girl’s arm.

“I was jest a-baitin’ Lige about you. Leave me tell you, when he got you, he got him a saint.”

The chinaberry cast a lacelike shadow across the translucence of the young sharp-chiselled face.

“There’s no harm to neither one of you,” the girl said quietly. “I don’t pay no mind when either one or t’other of you gits to rarin’.”

The three-room rough-pine dwelling a mile from the village was bare and shabby. Drenna’s father, prospering one year in hogs, had given her a small melodeon. It was the sole ornament of the main room. When Lige was not so tired that he tumbled, sometimes in his underwear, sometimes fully dressed, into their bed in the adjoining room, he coaxed her at night to play on it. She sat stiffly upright on the seat and picked out awkward, quavering hymns.

Tonight he sat teetering in his pine-slab chair, smoking his pipe, his blue eyes staring into space. His shaggy hair curled unnoticed into them. Drenna put the drowsy children, the baby and the boy of three, between clean unbleached muslin sheets over a corn-shucks mattress on the hand-made bed opposite the fireplace. When Lige did not make the usual sign, she went hesitantly to the melodeon. He relaxed a little as the notes of “Rock of Ages” wheezed sweetly from it.

“Dog take it, Drenna, that’s purty.”