The Ford stopped outside the gate. The chinaberry tree in the yard had grown higher than the house, and in the silence of the car’s halting, its gaunt branches scraped the bricks of the chimney. Adams passed through the gate and took a few steps up the path. The place seemed uninhabited; not his home, but merely a place he had remembered. He waited for Joe and Emma, lagging behind when the woman lifted the shoestring latch and pushed open the door.

At first the large kitchen appeared empty. He blinked. An oak fire glowed dull in the range. He searched the darkness. There was a stirring in the dusk in the far corner. The faces of two children took shape, their eyes wide and glinting.

Adams called across the room, “It ain’t Gracie and Lila, is it?”

Joe said, “Ain’t either of you girls big enough to get the lamp going without somebody should come home and light it for you?”

Emma said, “Hush up, Joe. I’ll light it. Go fetch me an armful of wood. You girls come speak to your father.”

The girls moved woodenly into the light of the swinging kerosene lamp. They, too, he thought, looked like rabbits, smallmouthed and frightened. They had grown tall and thin.

He questioned, “Gracie, that you with them longest legs? Let’s see—I been away seven years—you must be thirteen. Lila? You about ten——”

He held out one hand toward them. They did not move.

Emma called, “Start the bacon, Gracie. We’ll never be done.”

Adams stood in the middle of the floor. The bustle of supper-making stirred about him. Joe returned by the back door, dropping wood in the box with a clatter. He washed his hands in the basin on the water shelf and combed his thick hair with a comb he took from behind the mirror.

He called to Adams, “Set down, man.”

Emma said sharply, “Let him come wash first. He’s got that jail-house smell.”

Adams flushed.

“We all kept mighty clean up there,” he said. “We had running water. My clothes is all clean.”

Joe dilated his nostrils, testing the air with relish.

“It’s the disinfectant they use in them places,” he said.

Adams moved to the water shelf and washed his face and hands carefully. He dampened an end of the towel and rubbed it inside his collar. He smoothed his hair with his hands and edged into a chair at the long table against the wall. His wife leaned over him to place a plate of cold biscuits. He caught at a fold of her skirt as she moved away.

He said playfully, “Don’t make company of me in my own house, Emma.”

The thin girls gaped at him. He was uncomfortable, as though he had tried to make a joke in church. Emma brought hot dishes from the stove. She stood looking at the table, and pushed back a forelock of hair. The gesture made her in an instant his wife again. He remembered teasing her about it, telling her she would wear herself bald-headed. He had seen her lie in bed beside him, her hair braided neatly for the night, and lift her hand to brush back that very soft dark forelock. A sharp sweetness struck through him.