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and her shadow filling the room. “Clean that chimney good,” she said.
    Joby carried the lantern with Granny behind him and then Loosh; I could see her bonnet and Loosh’s head and the two shovel blades over his shoulder. Ringo was breathing behind me. “Which un you reckon she drempt about?” he said.
    “Why dont you ask her?” I said. We were in the orchard now.
    “Hoo,” Ringo said. “Me ask her? I bet if she stayed here wouldn’t no Yankee nor nothing else bother that trunk nor Marse John neither if he knowed hit.”
    Then they stopped—Joby and Granny, and while Granny held the lantern at arm’s length, Joby and Loosh dug the trunk up from where they had buried it that night last summer while Father was at home, while Louvinia stood in the door of the bedroom without even lighting the lamp while Ringo and I went to bed and later I either looked out or dreamed I looked out the window and saw (or dreamed I saw) the lantern. Then, with Granny in front and still carrying the lantern and with Ringo and me both helping to carry it, we returned toward the house. Before we reached the house Joby began to bear away toward where the loaded wagon stood.
    “Take it into the house,” Granny said.
    “We’ll just load hit now and save having to handlehit again in the morning,” Joby said. “Come on here, nigger,” he said to Loosh.
    “Take it into the house,” Granny said. So after a while Joby moved on toward the house. We could hear him breathing now, saying “Hah!” every few steps. Inside the kitchen he let his end down, hard.
    “Hah!” he said. “That’s done, thank God.”
    “Take it upstairs,” Granny said.
    Joby turned and looked at her. He hadn’t straightened up yet, he turned half stooping and looked at her. “Which?” he said.
    “Take it upstairs,” Granny said. “I want it in my room.”
    “You mean you gonter tote this thing all the way upstairs and then tote it back down tomorrow?”
    “Somebody is,” Granny said. “Are you going to help or are me and Bayard going to do it alone?”
    Then Louvinia came in. She had already undressed. She looked tall as a ghost, in one dimension like a bolster case, taller than a bolster case in her nightgown; silent as a ghost on her bare feet which were the same color as the shadow in which she stood so that she seemed to have no feet, the twin rows of her toenails lying weightless and faint and still as two rows of faintly soiled feathers on the floor about a foot below the hem of her nightgown as if they were not connected with her. She came and shoved Joby aside and stooped to lift the trunk. “Git away, nigger,” she said. Joby groaned, then he shoved Louvinia aside.
    “Git away, woman,” he said. He lifted his end ofthe trunk, then he looked back at Loosh who had never let his end down. “If you gonter ride on hit, pick up your feet,” he said. We carried the trunk up to Granny’s room and Joby was setting it down again until Granny made him and Loosh pull the bed out from the wall and slide the trunk in behind it; Ringo and I helped again. I dont believe it lacked much of weighing a thousand pounds.
    “Now I want everybody to go right to bed so we can get an early start tomorrow,” Granny said.
    “That’s you,” Joby said. “Git everybody up at crack of day and it be noon fore we get started.”
    “Nummine about that,” Louvinia said. “You do like Miss Rosa tell you.” We went out; we left Granny there beside her bed now well away from the wall and in such an ungainly position that anyone would have known at once that something was concealed, even if the trunk which Ringo and I as well as Joby believed now to weigh at least a thousand pounds, could have been hidden. As it was, the bed merely underlined it. Then Granny shut the door behind us and then Ringo and I stopped dead in the hall and looked at one another. Since I could remember, there had never been a key to any door, inside or outside, about the house. Yet we had