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hear you. What do you want?”
    She whirled again and without a break in her stride and still watching the old man, she ran right off the porch and fetched up on hands and knees in a litter of ashes and tin cans and bleached bones, and saw Popeye watching her from the corner of the house, his hands in his pockets and a slanted cigarette curling across his face. Still without stopping she scrambled onto the porch and sprang into the kitchen, where a woman sat at a table, a burning cigarette in her hand, watching the door.

6

    P opeye went on around the house. Gowan was leaning over the edge of the porch, dabbing gingerly at his bloody nose. The barefooted man squatted on his heels against the wall.
    “For Christ’s sake,” Popeye said, “why cant you take him out back and wash him off? Do you want him sitting around here all day looking like a damn hog with its throat cut?” He snapped the cigarette into the weeds and sat on the top step and began to scrape his muddy shoes with a platinum penknife on the end of his watch chain.
    The barefoot man rose.
    “You said something about——” Gowan said.
    “Pssst!” the other said. He began to wink and frown at Gowan, jerking his head at Popeye’s back.
    “And then you get on back down that road,” Popeye said. “You hear?”
    “I thought you was fixin to watch down ther,” the man said.
    “Dont think,” Popeye said, scraping at his trouser-cuffs. “You’ve got along forty years without it. You do what I told you.”
    When they reached the back porch the barefoot man said: “He jest caint stand fer nobody——Aint he a cur’ us feller, now? I be dawg ef he aint better’n a circus to——He wont stand fer nobody drinkin hyer cep Lee. Wont drink none hisself, and jest let me take one sup and I be dawg ef hit dont look like he’ll have a catfit.”
    “He said you were forty years old,” Gowan said.
    “ ’Taint that much,” the other said.
    “How old are you? Thirty?”
    “I dont know. ’Taint as much as he said, though.” The old man sat in the chair, in the sun. “Hit’s jest Pap,” the man said. The azure shadow of the cedars had reached the old man’s feet. It was almost up to his knees. His hand came out and fumbled about his knees, dabbling into the shadow, and became still, wrist-deep in shadow. Then he rose and grasped the chair and, tapping ahead with the stick, he bore directly down upon them in a shuffling rush, so that they had to step quickly aside. He dragged the chair into the full sunlight and sat down again, his face lifted into the sun, hishands crossed on the head of the stick. “That’s Pap,” the man said. “Blind and deef both. I be dawg ef I wouldn’t hate to be in a fix wher I couldn’t tell and wouldn’t even keer whut I was eatin.”
    On a plank fixed between two posts sat a galvanised pail, a tin basin, a cracked dish containing a lump of yellow soap. “To hell with water,” Gowan said. “How about that drink?”
    “Seems to me like you done already had too much. I be dawg ef you didn’t drive that ere car straight into that tree.”
    “Come on. Haven’t you got some hid out somewhere?”
    “Mought be a little in the barn. But dont let him hyear us, er he’ll find hit and po hit out.” He went back to the door and peered up the hall. Then they left the porch and went toward the barn, crossing what had once been a kitchen garden choked now with cedar and blackjack saplings. Twice the man looked back over his shoulder. The second time he said:
    “Yon’s yo wife wantin somethin.”
    Temple stood in the kitchen door. “Gowan,” she called.
    “Wave yo hand er somethin,” the man said. “Ef she dont hush, he’s goin to hyear us.” Gowan flapped his hand. They went on and entered the barn. Beside the entrance a crude ladder mounted. “Better wait twell I git up,” the man said. “Hit’s putty rotten; mought not hold us both.”
    “Why dont you fix it, then? Dont you use it everyday?”
    “Hit’s