“Jones? No, about ninety-two that was. I’ll tell you for why I think so....”
“It was eighteen ninety-six,” Midi said. “Eighteen ninety-six it was and no mistakes made.”
“Before ninety-six, I’ll bet my last dollar on it. I’m under a doubt that it was as late as that, Midi.”
“It was ninety-six. I know. It was the same year Rowena was borned. I have a way of knowen. I recall. We all know what year Rowena was borned in. How old are you, Rowena? Just ask Rowena how old she is and you get the answer to how long it’s been.”
“I’m nineteen now.”
“Nineteen. That’s how long it’s been. Ninety-six, it was.”
She would not go to look at his cattle although Midi invited her, offered to take her there. The harvesters came to the wheat, and the cut field, laid up in orderly bundles, row after row, was increased in size, multiplied or enhanced by the elasticity of lines spreading two ways over a rolling land. The harvest hands were lusty feeders, sitting heartily to the food Midi and Rowena and Susan prepared, pouring great goblets of soured milk from the tall white pitcher or helping themselves again to the roasted meat that was piled high on the platter. Some voice at the cattle barns beyond the road and the pasture sang from mid-summer forward. Sallie found two saddles for as many old brood mares that were unemployed in the fields, and she and Theodosia rode back through the farm paths into remote land and explored a tangle of twiggy glades to find the spring that gave the first water to Spring Run, and they lay to rest all through the heat of the day in the cool woodland. The oat harvest followed the wheat, the voice at the distant barn singing now and then, Caleb Burns singing over the heads of his cattle, some phrase as “We’re marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion,” phrases that intoned well before the great barn and fitted well to the voice as it hollowed richly before the resonant walls, the lay of the hills lending assistance.
We’re marching upward to Zion,
The beautiful city of God....
In the dusk before the house door, he had looked at her once, his eyes pointed with some distress. “I saw you the day you came here, in the wagon with the peddler,” he said. His face had been in that moment pointed, like the face of a fox, drawn to a sharp focus by its troubled interval, “I saw you the day you came here.”