The kitchen became vitalized with the pardon. He drew it out slowly from his inside coat pocket and unrolled it. The large seal shone in the lamp-light. The parchment paper was thick and white, like a magnolia petal. Mrs. Mobbley trailed her fingers over its smoothness.

Mobbley asked, “Do the governor hisself sign them?”

Adams pointed to the scrawled name. “I’ll be blest.” Mobbley studied the signature. “He don’t write no better than no other man.”

Adams apologized, “I reckon he gets to writing careless, with all them state documents to sign.”

The four-year-old boy whimpered.

The girl Gracie whispered, “Lila, give him some gravy for his grits. You know he don’t like ’em dry.”

Mrs. Mobbley said, “I reckon home cooking tastes mighty good after jail-house rations.”

He brought himself back with a start from the pardon to the table. The food was inferior to the penitentiary fare.

He said reluctantly, “Well, we had mighty good rations. Not much change— If you got tired of beans, why, nobody felt bad about it—you had to eat beans, or go hungry, right on.”

Mobbley and Joe Porter laughed with him. His numbness dissolved. He was aware of the warmth of the room and the crackling of wood in the stove. He stretched his legs under the table, feeling the pine boards of the floor rough under his feet.

He said, “Dogged if the floor don’t feel peculiar. The floor up yonder was cement.”

The penitentiary loomed before his sight; immensely white; modern and bright and handsome. It was a cross between heaven and hell, he thought hazily, a fabulous place where doomed men moved in a silent torment in the midst of electric-lit, immaculate surroundings. The gray unpainted room about him, fire-lit and intimate in the November darkness, was the world, and he had come back to it. His toes and fingers tingled, as though life had begun to prick through a disembodied spirit.

The two girls and the small boy sat stiffly in the pain of young sleepiness, their eyelids fluttering. The Mobbleys took up the talk and chattered of county news, correcting each other. Emma said, “I’d ought to clear up the table,” but she sat still, moving only her hands, now along the edge of the oilcloth table-cover, now up and back across her hair. Joe Porter filled his pipe and teetered in his chair. The Mobbleys rose to take their leave. Mrs. Mobbley looked quickly from Emma to Adams, and then to Joe.

She asked with an excited sucking of breath, “Joe, you coming with us tonight?”

He teetered a moment. He moved slowly to the stove and knocked out his pipe against it.

“I reckon,” he said and joined the Mobbleys at the door.

Emma called after him, “You studying on digging the sweet potatoes tomorrow?”

He hesitated.

“I’ll let you know about it.”