Her own youth was passing. Young men from the section had courted her, but one after another she had dismissed them. Their attentions had, at first, been pleasant and flattering to her, but she would say to herself, and to them, ‘I must take care of papa; not everyone has a papa like mine.’ But the feeling grew in her — and more rapidly and firmly after the ill-advised marriage of her sister — that all the young men were beneath her. Or, more accurately, that not one was worthy to be brought to papa as his son-in-law. After her sister died, down in Mississippi, and some church ladies down there wrote and inquired if they should send the little child, she dismissed the last of the young men. She absorbed the child, May, into the life she had created about the easy-chair and the footstool of her father. The child was taught to tiptoe to the General and curtsy, and say in a small voice, ‘I hope you are feeling better, Grandfather,’ and, ‘I love you, Grandfather,’ and, ‘Here is a rose I plucked for you, Grandfather.’

  General Burnham was killed in an election-day quarrel on the streets of Bardsville. Although he had almost ceased to have any meaning for the community, the dramatic circumstances of his death revived for a moment his vanished importance. His funeral was a public occasion. The pallbearers were, like the deceased, veterans of the war, and a Confederate flag covered the coffin. A volley was fired over the grave. While the echoes yet rang in the frosty air, Lucy Burnham, in a frenzy of grief, tore herself from the supporting arms of her friends, and was scarcely prevented from flinging herself into the grave. Percy Munn, then a boy just entering adolescence, heard the wild, pure cry wrung from her heart and saw her drunken lurching toward the open grave. He was to remember the moment, and much later was to try, puzzledly, to correlate its passion with the cold, trivial, foolish, and futile woman whom he grew to know. That day he also saw a motionless, thin little girl, some six or seven years old, whose face appeared to be molded of a scarcely tinted wax, and who stood near the grave but seemed to be aware of nothing around her. That was his first sight of May.

  When Miss Burnham recovered from the stupefying effects of her grief, she turned herself, grudgingly and almost resentfully at first, to the care of her little niece. But the child was so gentle and tractable and affectionate that, more and more, she gave herself without reservations to her. One bright morning in early spring, a clear day that seemed in its softness of air and penetrating brilliance to promise, almost prematurely, the new season, she sat by an open window and brushed the child’s yellow hair. Even though a fire smouldered in the grate, the window was up, for the first time that year, and the fresh odor of the earth came into the room. Miss Burnham looked perturbedly out over the tumbled garden, where great brown spikes of weed stalk thrust up among the rosebushes and the knotted, leafless wistaria clutched and dragged down the rotted trellises, and out over the brown fields beyond, and then returned her attention to the child’s head, over which the sunlight spilled. Under that light the child’s long hair was a clear, luminous gold. Suddenly Miss Burnham dropped the brush, and plunged her fingers into the hair, as into a healing stream, and with tears on her cheeks, cried out: ‘Oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, I’ll be so good to you. Make me be good to you, always!’ Then she pressed the child to her bosom, and holding her with one arm, stroked again and again the golden hair, murmuring, ‘Your hair, it’s just the color of his, his own little granddaughter; it’s gold like his.’

  The child became her whole life. Gradually, she paid less and less attention to the operation of the place. The negro hands and croppers would come up to the house to get directions or to ask a question, but she would let them stand around an hour, or two hours, while she bathed the child, or pressed a ribbon for her, or put ribbons on her hair. The men would lounge on the back porch, looking off across the yard or talking in low voices. ‘Miss Lucy, she shore doan mind burnen the good Lawd’s daylight, she doan, now,’ they would say, laughing. After a while she would come out to them, with an artificial air of briskness and business, and with a temper that was ready, at the slightest provocation, to break into a flood of recriminations which they could not understand.

  She lost over half of the property. The house, a six-room, weatherboarded, one-story structure built around an original dog-run cabin, fell into serious disrepair. Some of the weatherboarding sagged loose to expose the old logs and chinking beneath; some of the boards of the front steps rotted out; in the front rooms, where the roof leaked worst, the plaster fell off in patches from the ceiling; the last vestiges of paint disappeared from the exterior. But Miss Burnham, even though each year left her more threadbare and rusty in her black dresses, always found, somehow, the money to buy new clothes and ribbons for the child. And, as her house decayed and her own clothes grew more shabby, she became more vain and overbearing in her relations with her neighbors. She began to invent achievements and honors for her father, but at first with such cunning, such casual references, and such diffident parryings of curiosity that they were accepted by all but the most wary. Then, as though emboldened by success, she enlarged the scope of her inventions and began to push back into an ever and ever more magnificent and fantastic history.

  Miss Burnham hated all the young men, whose sharp eyes, even as she talked, always seemed to fix upon a cracked pane or threadbare patch of carpet or, even, upon her red, chapped hands. She hated them and was contemptuous of them, but she hated Percy Munn most of all. With her he was more polite and attentive than any of the others were, but he was also the most silent and watchful; and, from the very first, she seemed to know that he was the one most to be feared, that he was the one who would take May from her.

  He married May after a courtship of two years. He could have married her earlier, but he wanted to establish his practice and to have a little money ahead. Almost as soon as he had returned from the honeymoon in Louisville, he sent men over to put a new roof on Miss Burnham’s house, and to paint it. He ordered them simply to go and begin work and to say, if questioned by her, that the matter had been entirely arranged. But while the men worked, she seemed oblivious to them; and she never mentioned the matter to Mr. Munn or, as far as he knew, to May. The roof and paint might, for all she showed, have come like a natural event, a rainstorm or the change of seasons.

  ‘It’s sweet of you, Perse,’ May said, ‘to be doing all that for Aunt Lucy.’

  ‘I hate to see property going to pieces,’ he answered. ‘And anyway, the place’ll be yours some day, I reckon.’

  ‘It’ll make her so happy, having it fixed up,’ she declared.

  He did not tell May, however, that he had mortgaged some of his own land to buy the mortgage on Miss Burnham’s place. Nor did he ever discuss the matter with Miss Burnham. He rarely saw her. May visited her often, but only occasionally could she be persuaded to come to the Munn place. Mr. Munn knew that she hated him, and that she would never forgive him, not for taking May, or painting her house, or saving her from eviction. And as he drove his buggy, that September morning, toward her place to talk to May and persuade her, if possible, to come back to him, he knew that Miss Burnham, no matter how the event turned out, would find in it a cause for new, and a fulfillment of old, hatred.

  He hitched his mare to a paling of the fence, tried the paling to discover that it had rotted loose, swore, and transferred the loop to another and more substantial paling. Then he walked toward the house between the lines of twisted, shaggy cedars. The negro woman who answered to his knock left him standing on the porch until she returned to announce, ‘Miz Lucy say you kin go in the parler.’

  He followed her into the hall and she pushed open a door to the left and stepped aside.

  ‘It was Miss May I wanted to speak to,’ he said.

  ‘Miz Lucy say she be here,’ the woman answered, and went away down the hall.

  He entered the parlor, which was almost dark. The air in the room was cold and still, with a dusty odor. Without thinking, he moved toward the nearest window and stretched out his hand to part the curtains; then he decided that it would be impertinent. He returned to the open space in the middle of the floor. The room was not very large. The two ponderous, glass-fronted bookcases, which rose to the ceiling, the chairs and the love-seats, the what-nots and the embroidered screens, the great cracked vases — these objects crowded around him in the gloom, weightily and oppressively. He stood in the midst of them, aware of the excited beating of his own heart, and breathed the odor of dust and horsehair.

  Miss Burnham was a long time in coming. She came at last, moving toward him with a skirring sound of her black-silk skirts and with her head bobbing nervously forward on her long neck as though in a scarcely restrained and irritable asseveration. He waited, holding his hat in his hands before him, and she moved directly at him, as though she did not see him, or as though he were not there at all, and then stopped in front of him with the air of one who is startled at an obstruction. She said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Munn.’ Her head continued to jerk slightly back and forth with a painful, mechanical motion, like a metronome asserting a rhythm that had nothing to do with the events about her.

  ‘Good morning,’ Mr. Munn responded.

  She did not ask him to sit down, and made no motion toward a chair. She continued to stand directly in front of him.

  ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you,’ he apologized, after waiting. ‘I reckon the girl didn’t understand me. I asked if I could see May.’

  ‘She did not misunderstand you,’ Miss Burnham said.

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Munn began, and hesitated. ‘I don’t want to trouble you. I just wanted to speak to May.’ Under the necessity of her gaze, and the small regular jerking of her head, he continued: ‘You know, we had a — a misunderstanding, and I wanted to talk to her. It’s not serious. That is, it shouldn’t be ——’

  That abstracted gaze and that movement of her head were unchanged. His voice trailed off.

  ‘You may not see my niece,’ she affirmed.

  ‘Isn’t she here? I thought ——’

  ‘She is here,’ Miss Burnham said.

  ‘She is here?’

  ‘But it is not possible for you to see her.’

  ‘It’s important,’ Mr. Munn asserted, his tone rising. ‘I have to see her.’

  ‘No,’ she answered.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ He took a step toward her, and she gave ground. ‘I’ve a right to see her. Every right.’

  ‘You have forfeited any right,’ she announced.

  ‘I’ve every right,’ he said. ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘I should think shame would forbid,’ she retorted, her high-pitched voice breaking a little. She brought her hands together in front of her and clenched them.

  ‘Shame ——’ he began.

  ‘Shame,’ she repeated. ‘After what you did. To come here, after what you did, whatever it was. She won’t tell me. Not a word. But she sat in a chair and cried, hour after hour, Mr. Percy Munn, that’s what she did, and that’s what you made her do, Mr. Percy Munn, and now you want to see her, you ——’

  ‘Is she sick?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not your affair, but she lies there in bed, with her beautiful golden hair out over the pillow, and the tears run down her cheeks. I’d think you would sink through the floor with shame, Mr. Percy Munn, or put a bullet through your head. If I were a man I’d do it for you. Like my father, the General.’

  ‘I want to see her,’ he said, somewhat abstractedly.

  ‘No,’ she rejoined.

  He advanced toward the door, but she blocked him, their bodies nearly touching.

  ‘No!’ she repeated, with a ring, almost of long-deferred joy, in her voice.

  ‘I’m going to see her,’ he insisted, and she put out her arms to bar the doorway.

  He seized her by the wrist. Even at the moment, he knew how ice-cold the flesh of her wrist was. Her whole body shook. ‘Remember!’ she exclaimed. ‘Remember you’re a gentleman — if you are one!’

  He did not release her.

  ‘Take your filthy hands off me,’ she said.

  Still, he did not release her. Instead, he looked into her face, almost with curiosity. He stared into her red-rimmed eyes and observed the feeble, frightening twitching of her head, and in a flash thought how easy it would be to knock that rotten old head in with one blow of his fist. One blow, like a rain-rotten melon. His grip tightened on her wrist.

  ‘All right,’ he replied, and dropped his hand from her wrist.

  ‘I’ll tell May,’ she said gaspingly, triumphantly, ‘everything.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Everything,’ she reiterated, ‘and you’ll never lay eyes on her again.’

  He stood stock-still, looking at her. ‘All right,’ he said.

  She stepped out into the hall, and pointed, quiveringly, toward the front door. ‘Now get out!’ she almost screamed.

  When he got home, he changed clothes, ate some cold food in the kitchen, went to the toolshed and got a cutting knife, and hurried down to the field. They were cutting the last field of tobacco now, not a field he had out on shares but part of his own crop. He approached the men, said, ‘Hello,’ and began to work down a row. The men, Mr. Grimes and two negroes, looked up to greet him soberly, then returned to their occupations.

  Mr. Munn felt the knife sink into the stalk, splitting it almost to the ground, almost as though by its own weight. Then he swung the blade and lopped off the heavy plant, just below. The blade of the knife was clean-looking and flashed in the sunlight. Now and then he paused to hold up a plant in both hands and feel its weight and look at it closely. It was going to be a fair crop, he thought again; good considering the season, anyway. Then he would lay the plant by, to wilt out before it could be racked on its stick.

  ‘Hit oughter weigh out pretty good,’ Mr. Grimes remarked, watching him inspect a plant.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Mr. Munn answered, almost grudgingly.

  ‘I’m a-gitten on,’ Mr. Grimes said, straightening up. He was a spare-made man, and the faded blue shirt hung loosely about his shoulders. His eyes were a pure, used-up blue, faded like the color of the shirt. He had long, ragged, reddish mustaches which wagged extravagantly when he spoke. ‘A-gitten on,’ he repeated, ‘nigh onto sixty, and I seen a lot of terbacker. Hit’s a-bout all I know, I reckin. And I seen a lot pore-er terbacker’n this-here in my time.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘This patch of ground here’ — and he moved his slow gaze up the slight rise, across the earth where nothing now showed but the blunt stobs — ‘I alluz say, if’n they ain’t but one hand of terbacker growed, hit’ll be growed here. I seen a lot of diff’rent places in my time, and I put a plow-point in a lot of diff’rent pieces of ground, but I say, let a man break ground along this-here crick. Give God’s will and weather, and hit’ll git him a little somethen fer his sweat.’

  ‘It’s good enough ground,’ Mr. Munn agreed. He looked down at it, at his feet, as though discovering it. He laid the plant he held on the ground, with the other plants that were wilting there. One of the negroes passed down the next row with an armful of tobacco sticks. With a clatter he dropped the staves there between the rows, and began to rack up the plants already cut there. Mr. Munn bent to his task. He felt the sun on his back, even through his shirt, and on the back of his neck. He thought of the season’s changing, how it would be not so long, and took a relish in this last heat on his flesh.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mr. Grimes said, ‘goen on thirty-six years ago, I set a stand of terbacker in this selfsame field. Fer yore pappy. And hit made out a good crop. But I moved on. But I come back here twicet afore this-here present time. Hit looks lak a young feller gits restless and moves on. No matter what kinder ground he’s got to work. Hit looks lak.’

  ‘I reckon so,’ Mr. Munn remarked, scarcely hearing, bending with the knife.

  ‘Good ground,’ Mr. Grimes said. ‘Hit gives a man fer his sweat.’

  Mr. Munn’s knife fell, and he seized the plant.

  ‘Fer his sweat,’ Mr. Grimes repeated, ‘if’n a man kin git a piece of money fer what hit makes.’

  Mr. Munn straightened slowly up, holding the plant. ‘By God,’ he declared deliberately, weighing the plant in his hands, ‘by God, and this year we’ll get something.’

  ‘I done heared hit said afore,’ Mr. Grimes said.

  They finished the field, except for a few plants at the low end. One of the negroes was there, still cutting and laying the plants to wilt. They stood for a moment, Mr. Munn and Mr. Grimes and the other negro, looking back over the bare earth. The earth was reddish in color, and the stobs stuck up out of it, row after row. They racked up the last plants that were ready, and the negro climbed onto the wagon. The wagon moved slowly off across the field toward the barn, which stood at the head of the rise, a tall, blank, gray, box-like form against the distant clarity of the horizon. Mr. Munn and Mr. Grimes began to walk after the wagon.

  ‘Hit’s nigh all in now,’ Mr. Grimes remarked, looking over the empty field.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn said, somewhat shortly.

  ‘A powerful sight of terbacker,’ Mr. Grimes went on, ‘done come off that-air ground, one time and anuther. I set terbacker on that-air ground afore you was born. Hit growed thar afore yore time, and afore mine.’