Susan, sitting on a box, with a treasure of dead branches at her feet, waited yet a space before setting them in the fire form. She was sunk in the apathy of the body surrendered to restoring processes. The men's voices entered the channels of her ears and got no farther. Her vision acknowledged the figure of Leff nearby sewing up a rent in his coat, but her brain refused to accept the impression. Her eye held him in a heavy vacuity, watched with a trancelike fixity his careful stitches and the armlong stretch of the drawn thread.
Had she shifted it a fraction, it would have encountered David squatting on the bank washing himself. His long back, the red shirt drawn taut across its bowed outline, showed the course of his spine in small regular excrescences. The water that he raised in his hands and rinsed over his face and neck made a pleasant, clean sound, that her ear noted with the other sounds. Somewhere behind her Daddy John and Courant made a noise with skillets and picket pins and spoke a little, a sentence mutteringly dropped and monosyllabically answered.
David turned a streaming face over his shoulder, blinking through the water. The group he looked at was as idyllically peaceful as wayfarers might be after the heat and burden of the day. Rest, fellowship, a healthy simplicity of food and housing were all in the picture either visibly or by implication.
"Throw me the soap, Leff," he called, "I forgot it."
The soap lay on the top of a meal sack, a yellow square, placed there by David on his way to the water. It shone between Susan and Leff, standing forth as a survival of a pampered past. Susan's eye shifted toward it, fastened on it, waiting for Leff's hand to come and bear it away. But the hand executed no such expected maneuver. It planted the needle deliberately, pushed it through, drew it out with its long tail of thread. Surprise began to dispel her lethargy. Her eye left the soap, traveled at a more sprightly speed back to Leff, lit on his face with a questioning intelligence.
David called again.
"Hurry up. I want to light the fire."
Leff took another considered stitch.
"I don't know where it is," he answered without looking up.
The questioning of Susan's glance became accusative.