“Good morning,” Temple said.
The woman held the child on her hip.
It was asleep.
“Hello, baby,” Temple said, stooping; “you wan s’eep all day?
Look at Temple.”
They entered the kitchen.
The woman poured coffee into a cup.
“It’s cold, I expect,” she said.
“Unless you want to make up the fire.”
From the oven she took a pan of bread.
“No,” Temple said, sipping the lukewarm coffee, feeling her insides move in small, trickling clots, like loose shot.
“I’m not hungry.
I haven’t eaten in two days, but I’m not hungry.
Isn’t that funny?
I haven’t eaten in.……” She looked at the woman’s back with a fixed placative grimace.
“You haven’t got a bathroom, have you?”
“What?” the woman said.
She looked at Temple across her shoulder while Temple stared at her with that grimace of cringing and placative assurance.
From a shelf the woman took a mail-order catalogue and tore out a few leaves and handed them to Temple.
“You’ll have to go to the barn, like we do.”
“Will I?” Temple said, holding the paper.
“The barn.”
“They’re all gone,” the woman said.
“They wont be back this morning.”
“Yes,” Temple said.
“The barn.”
“Yes; the barn,” the woman said.
“Unless you’re too pure to have to.”
“Yes,” Temple said.
She looked out the door, across the weed-choked clearing.
Between the sombre spacing of the cedars the orchard lay bright in the sunlight.
She donned the coat and hat and went toward the barn, the torn leaves in her hand, splotched over with small cuts of clothes-pins and patent wringers and washing-powder, and entered the hallway.
She stopped, folding and folding the sheets, then she went on, with swift, cringing glances at the empty stalls.
She walked right through the barn.
It was open at the back, upon a mass of jimson weed in savage white-and-lavender bloom.
She walked on into the sunlight again, into the weeds.
Then she began to run, snatching her feet up almost before they touched the earth, the weeds slashing at her with huge, moist, malodorous blossoms.
She stooped and twisted through a fence of sagging rusty wire and ran downhill among trees.
At the bottom of the hill a narrow scar of sand divided the two slopes of a small valley, winding in a series of dazzling splotches where the sun found it.
Temple stood in the sand, listening to the birds among the sunshot leaves, listening, looking about.
She followed the dry runlet to where a jutting shoulder formed a nook matted with briers.
Among the new green last year’s dead leaves from the branches overhead clung, not yet fallen to earth.
She stood here for a while, folding and folding the sheets in her fingers, in a kind of despair.
When she rose she saw, upon the glittering mass of leaves along the crest of the ditch, the squatting outline of a man.
For an instant she stood and watched herself run out of her body, out of one slipper.
She watched her legs twinkle against the sand, through the flecks of sunlight, for several yards, then whirl and run back and snatch up the slipper and whirl and run again.
When she caught a glimpse of the house she was opposite the front porch.
The blind man sat in a chair, his face lifted into the sun.
At the edge of the woods she stopped and put on the slipper.
She crossed the ruined lawn and sprang onto the porch and ran down the hall.