He had not come for the stove. He had come, in fact, just to buy a few goods they needed to see them through until the next trip, sometime in March probably, when he would bring Mary and the girls along. Now they needed shoes for the girls, for they had outgrown the old ones that he had repaired and repaired, and thread and needles Mary had asked for. And then a little something for the girls for Christmas, some candy and maybe some store dolls. And so he had come, starting in the middle of the night, carrying two tow sacks with him, out of the Cove and down the mountain alongside Little River into town.

Now the stove sat at the edge of the plank porch in front of Gray’s store; and he sat beside it, dangling his feet over the edge of the porch and eating, slicing thick hunks of cheese from the block he’d bought from Gray and putting them onto crackers before sticking them into his mouth. He chewed each bite absently while staring at the dust piled against the porch below his feet. The flesh below his right eye rippled as he chewed and stared. At one point he completely ignored John Suttles, who twice called his name and then passed on with a grunt. He was thinking of how that morning he had come into Gray’s store and greeted the town loafers and the boys that had come down from Chestnut Flats to loaf. And Gray and Mrs. Gray. He had greeted them and told them the girls were stout as bears and Mary was much better now than she had been right after harvest when she’d felt so poorly that folks had sent food in.

Then he had bought the stove.

No.

Then he had seen the stove and remarked on it, and then Gray had sold it to him.

But, no, it was not Gray but something else that had led him to be the possessor of the stove.

And now he sat beside what was undeniably his possession on the porch in front of Gray’s store, his possession by some process that was still a mystery to him.

When he finished eating the cheese and crackers, he closed his knife and slid it into his pocket. Then he stood and brushed the crumbs out of the folds of his overalls and watched them fall into the thick dust that had gathered like dry, gray snow against the porch.

He stepped onto the porch and took a piece of rope from the stove’s top and began making the strap by which he planned to carry the stove. He tied one end of the rope to one of the stove’s legs and slipped the other end though the hole of one of the burners and out again through the fire door. He picked up one of the tow sacks he had carried into town and folded it several times. Then he tied it to the rope to make a pad for his shoulder. He planned to alternate between carrying the stove directly upon his back and carrying it by the rope, thinking that way he would be able to go farther before having to stop and rest. The possibility that he might reach the point at which he could go no farther by either method had occurred to him, but he had laid that by in his mind as he would lay a sack of corn in his bin until it was time to take it to the mill. When he had finished readying the rope, he backed up to the stove, removed his hat, and pulled the rope over his head. With his back and shoulders broad and flat against the stove, he put his hat back on and grasped the inside of the front burner with his fingers. Then leaning forward and pulling the stove, he tilted it until its weight was heavy on his back. Bracing himself carefully with his feet spread evenly, he lifted the stove off the porch. Even with the precaution, the stove’s weight almost threw him; and he had to take two quick steps and shift his shoulders rapidly under the stove to keep it upon his back. The shoes and thread, the candy and dolls—the things he had gone back into the store to buy after, in a separate transaction, he had purchased the stove—along with the lengths of stovepipe and the griddles, all slid around inside the stove where he had put them after placing them inside the other tow sack. He had just regained an uneasy balance when a woman spoke to him.

“Where you going with that ’er stove, Mr. Johnson?”

Joby, after some trouble, managed to crook his neck enough to see the woman, Sina Rose Adams, sitting beside her husband Fletcher on a wagon. Through the space below the wagon’s seat, he caught sight of the four, or maybe five, children in the wagon’s bed.

“I’m taking it home,” Joby said.

“You ain’t fixin’ to carry that thing home, are you?” Fletcher Adams said.

“Yeah,” Joby answered.

“Why, lan’,” said Sina Rose, “why didn’t you bring your wagon to town?”

Fletcher Adams cut his wife a look. Fletcher never grew a beard proper, but Joby could not attest to having seen him when he was within thirty-six hours of his last experience with a razor, and his dark eyes in his dark face gave him a generally menacing appearance. But he was one of the only men who ever married himself out of the moonshine and outlaw climate of Chestnut Flats into the respectable community of the Cove; and he was a good enough neighbor, though he sometimes recalled too avidly or too fondly certain exploits of some of the Flats folks he had lived among. He was immune to the disapproval himself, but it embarrassed his wife and her family, one of the oldest in the Cove.

Joby answered Sina Rose Adams as pleasantly as he could under the weight of the stove. “Well, now, ma’am,” he said, and then he grunted and shifted the stove, “if I’d brought my wagon I’d a had to push it. I ain’t got no mule right now. Yeller Kate up and died about two weeks ago. The cancer, according to Miles Thompson. And I’d done sold Half-a-Ear John. I been borrying a mule for this and that from Henry McCulloch since.”

“Joby, I don’t see why you didn’t borry to come into town,” said Fletcher. “Especially hauling something like that heavy step-stove. Why, that thang must weigh 200 pound.”

“Well, now,” Joby said, and his eyes brightened even as he grunted and panted under the shifting weight of the stove, “I didn’t know I’s going to be hauling this thing when I come. I figgered on giving McCulloch’s mules some rest. I was only figgering on taking two tow sacks back up the mountain when I went.”

“Well, why don’t you leave it ’til you get a wagon to haul it?” Fletcher asked. “Or wait a couple or three hours and we’ll take you back as fur as our place anyhow.”

“I reckon it’s mine to tote now,” Joby said. Then he stopped talking as if no more talk was needed or even possible, and with a nod, he turned, his feet seeming to screw down into the earth, and started walking along the road out of town toward the river.

Both Sina Rose and Fletcher knew, as everyone knew, of the inordinate and legendary strength of Joby Johnson, who had once lifted a man up and pinned him against the ceiling of a room and held him there sprawling until the man admitted he had drunk Joby’s whiskey without first being invited. Fletcher Adams had seen it. But that had been a long time ago.

Still sitting on the wagon seat, Sina Rose murmured, “It ain’t ever man could do it.”

Fletcher looked at her for a moment; then he looked back up the road at the step-stove that was walking off on Joby Johnson’s thick legs. “It ain’t ever man would do it, neither,” he said. “Asides, he ain’t done it yet.”



II


By the time he reached the river again, where he had planned to first ease the stove’s weight from his back to carry it by the rope, Joby had already made the change three times. He had not been careful enough the first time and the slipping weight had jerked him backward so hard he thought for a moment he had done some real damage to himself. When he realized he was all right, he began to imagine having to lie down there on the road and wait for someone to come along and see him beside the stove, broke-down and a confirmed fool. He thought about that picture for a long time, even after he was on his way again. He even imagined someone coming and bending over him and brushing his sweaty black hair out of his eyes. He imagined saying to this stranger, “I reckon I’m a confirmed fool.” The stranger did not say anything. He just kept doing things to help the poor man lying there poured out like water. “I always been real stout,” he imagined saying to the stranger, “especially for a reglar-sized man. And it ain’t just me says so.” Then he thought how if it really happened it would not be a stranger who stopped but someone he knew, because he knew everyone who might come along this road, at least by sight; and by blood or marriage he was some kin to a right smart of them.

So by the time he actually got to the river, he had concluded he would have to take his first rest there. He backed up to a sweet-gum tree and sat down slowly, letting the stove shave the bark off the tree all the way down to the root. When he had gotten himself out of his makeshift harness, he took from his overalls bib pocket some papers, matches, and a sack of tobacco he had bought from Gray—considerably crushed now by the pressure of the rope against his chest—and rolled a cigarette.

The river was quiet there where the road joined it. The ford was further upriver. In the summer townspeople came to this spot to swim, but it was deserted now. Joby still wouldn’t look under his collar to see the mark he knew the rope had made on his shoulder, despite the tow sack he used for padding. He looked steadily at the river instead and smoked. Then he raised his eyes and admired the good stand of trees growing up the rise on the opposite side of the river. There was a loose vine that hung from its entanglement in the high limbs that the town boys had cut for swinging out over the river. He picked out a good canoe tree, although he hadn’t made a dugout since he was thirteen years old. Then he remembered those woods belonged to Talbot, who was Gray’s kin.

Son of a bitch, he thought, but he immediately suffered a powerful inward tremor and felt humbled for having thought it. It was the kind of thing he would have thought about a man in the old days. Before he found Jesus…and Mary. Or really the other way around. It was the kind of thought he would have had in the days when he would come from the Cove and Gray would come from town and Fletcher Adams wouldn’t have to come from far at all since he was already planted in those parts, and they might all be sitting around the same table at that house in Chesnutt Flats talking big and drinking whiskey and smoking and chewing and sometimes fighting. It was funny how he and Gray and Fletcher Adams had all come out of that alive and now were something completely different from what they had been.

Then he remembered how that morning coming into town had been like it always was, how he had greeted the men and Mrs. Gray as he always did, how he had told them all that the girls were as stout as bears and that Mary was much better than she had been back just after the harvest when she’d gotten so sick and people sent the food. Then he had sat around and smoked and talked, his foot the whole time set upon the two tow sacks he had laid on the floor as though they might crawl off. One of the town men was a one-armed man that had fought for the Confederacy, but there were Union men there, too, and some whose families had tried to be neutral. They talked of the war as if they had fought it just a month ago, except for the absence of fear and the hard feeling. And when he saw his chance, Joby reminded them of how his father had seen his own brother murdered by North Carolina bushwhackers who were raiding the Cove for food and horses and anything else they saw and decided they wanted. And guerillas had sometimes taken the food directly from the families’ tables. Many of the stories were so bad that they had become a kind of standard to measure modern problems by. Joby, born twelve years after the war, sometimes looked at the survivors and thought they didn’t seem to measure up to the stories people told about it. They ought to look different, it looked like, but they didn’t.

That morning, the stove was sitting in a nook between two shelves behind the long counter Mrs. Gray used to measure material for the women. On top of the stove was a wooden crate overflowing with different-colored scraps of material. Joby was wondering what Mrs. Gray might ask for the crate of scraps when he’d discovered the stove under it.

“What you asking for that stove?” he wondered out loud.

Gray got up from the chair he occupied most of the time and walked over to the stove. “I’ll have to get eleven dollars for this thing,” he said as he took the crate of yard good scraps off the stove and set it down on Mrs. Gray’s counter. Joby got up and walked toward the stove, remembering to pick up his sacks.

He was then suddenly conscious of the fact that his interest in the stove, an accident of wandering thought, had centered the interest of the store. All the others now shifted their bodies and turned their heads, even changed their breathing, and looked at him and Gray and the stove. It all made Joby feel awkward, and he had nothing more to say.

“Eleven dollars, you say?” he said anyway.

“Yeah,” Gray said firmly, not frowning, but Gray had a way of insulting the Covites who came into his store without coming right out and doing it. And the one thing he would talk about until the day he died was his father’s having seen General Sherman near Knoxville while the older Gray was still driving a sutler’s wagon. Gray liked to recall his father’s impression, “You’d think the old cuss would look like George Washington or God a’mighty, but he looked like a shriveled up hillbilly rotting on his own corn.” Gray had been talking about Sherman since the days when he would come up from town and Joby would come down from the Cove to Chestnut Flats to sit in that house and drink. And he never failed to put a lot of emphasis on the word hillbilly.

Joby did not look at Gray. He stood at the end of the counter gripping the two tow sacks in one of his broad hands and staring directly at the stove’s front. There was an embossed name on the stove’s door: safehearth. And below the name, boston, mass.

“I reckon that’s a fair price,” Joby said.

Behind him someone chortled, signaling another general shifting of postures and chuckling that streamed up to Joby’s back and stopped.

Then he’d bought the stove.

No.

Then he’d said to himself, eighteen dollars and thirty-eight cents, the sum of money in his pockets, all that was left from the corn he had sold to Thompson for Thompson to sell again in Knoxville and from all the firewood he’d loaded and hauled into town to sell over the late summer and the early fall and from selling Half-a-Ear John.

Then he’d said to Gray, “I reckon I’ll take it off your hands.”

That had brought on another chortle, but no chuckling. He felt another collective shifting of bodies behind him, but he was more aware of Gray, whose forehead got smaller, as a man’s will when he’s calculating close.

Joby took his wallet from his overalls bib and removed some folded bills from it. He carefully separated the bills and laid them upon Mrs. Gray’s counter. Gray picked up the stack of money and folded it. Joby watched the bills go inside Gray’s pocket. Then he watched Gray’s hand come out of the pocket again, empty. Gray was grinning at him. “You must have robbed the bank on your way here this morning,” he said.

Joby fought down something that was rising up in him then and said, “Will you help me get it outside?”

“Sure,” Gray had said, still grinning. Gray was ten years older than Joby, a tall man, straight in his back, and with thinner arms than any other man in the room. They were thinner even than his wife’s arms. Mrs. Gray’s forearms and wrists were thick from years of milking before she became Old Becham’s wife, and the long sleeves she wore didn’t hide their thickness, the cuffs pinching the flesh. When Old Becham died, Gray married her and took over Old Becham’s store.

Now by the river Joby believed that what had been rising in him was a flame of hatred at Gray for being Gray, for being the uppity town man with a fat wife, for being all that in spite of the time they’d spent with Fletcher Adams and others like themselves down in Chestnut Flats. Hated him because he’d courted Mary before he left her to marry Old Becham’s wife and left Mary…. Well, no, he hadn’t left Mary ruined because things hadn’t gone that far. But along with Joby’s hatred had risen the knowledge that he was a fool and that he needed to separate out all this feeling from what he was doing and just say, “No, I reckon I better not take it this trip, after all.” But he wouldn’t say it.

So now he possessed the stove.

It sat there by the tree next to him. To buy it he’d spent the money they had held out for winter. They would have had enough, and he still had his tobacco crop to sell, but he had to buy at least one mule from Thompson before spring….

“Dang it,” he suddenly said to himself, “Mary needs a stove.” He felt better then, and he wished he’d looked at it that way sooner, but the gratification wore off quickly and he had to convict himself all over again because he couldn’t make himself believe that he would have bought the stove just for Mary if things hadn’t gotten the way they’d been. It was not simply that he couldn’t bear for the men in the store to think he was poor. They all knew he was what he was, just as they knew themselves to be no different. No one in those parts except Thompson and Gray had ever had much, though he personally had more than he’d had in his life since Mary’s father had deeded to him the land he had worked since he was seventeen years old. But Mary’s sickness and the dead mule made him uneasy. And he had sometimes sat outside in the evenings and just wondered if it was still possible for a man to lose everything, really to lose everything. Even more than the way his father had lost food off the table and shoats and apples to bushwhackers during the war. More like the way the Bible’s Job lost everything and the Egyptians got boils. Buying the stove was a way of stacking things up against the door against all that, but the effect had already worn off.

And he’d bought it because of Gray, because of the way Gray made a man feel. Handing over that money to Gray was like reaching across a table to pour whiskey out of a demijohn into his glass in that house in Chestnut Flats. Because pouring whiskey for a man, whiskey you had paid for, could be more than a friendly gesture. It could be a sign, practically a statement, that you held the other man to be no better than you. But it was wrong to look at a man that way, and he was ashamed of himself for doing it, both with the whiskey in the bygone times and with the money that very morning. Because if you really held the man to be no better than you, there would be no need to pour the whiskey or hand over the money.

But he still possessed the stove.



III



In the house there was a rich yellow light. Mary was sitting in her chair by the fireplace, a cavernous opening with dark walls. The heap of ashes told of an even larger fire earlier in the evening. She always made the fire too big when she built it herself because she was cold natured. The children lay soaked in sweat under thick covers on the bed in the corner behind their mother’s chair. But tonight the big fire had been more than the result of habit or her nature. It had been a kind of protection against the fear that rose in her as she sat waiting for Joby while the hour grew late.

When the door did at last open, Mary sat forward suddenly and then stopped at the edge of her chair, as if something had caught her. She looked up at the dark figure in the doorway, knowing it was her husband by its shape, but recognizing, too, that the figure was somehow misshapen. “Joby,” she said. “Joby, what…?”

Then she came to him and put her hand upon his shoulder and left it there as they walked together to the fire and he sat down. He walked bent over, and slowly. When he had eased himself into a chair, he told her in a few words what had happened, in a voice weak and raspy from his heavy struggle. The one thing he did not tell her was that he was sure someone had followed him back up the mountain, and he eyed—only once—the shotgun standing in its place in the corner. When he had finished, she brought him a plate of beans and salt pork and boiled potatoes. He ate a little of the food and finished the coffee.

“I reckon if a body waited ’til he thought he could afford a thing, some people might never get nothing,” Mary said.

Joby nodded, sat silently, not eating the food now. His legs trembled violently as if the muscles craved the labor they had grown used to. It occurred to him that it must be very late at night.

Either because he was too tired or because he had half expected it, he did not move immediately when the banging at the door began, even though it was insistent. Finally, Joby got up and moved toward the door, frowning at the stiffness and pain. His shoulders pressed upward against some phantom weight. He picked up the shotgun as automatically as he would his hat to go out into the fields in the daytime.

When he opened the door, he saw John Gray, who was just about to bang upon it again. Gray’s face was twisted and small, and in the dim light it sat impishly on the tall man’s body. Next to him, but a bit farther back in the dark, was Fletcher Adams.

“Come in, fellars,” said Joby, putting the gun back in its place. Except for the weariness that reached even to his throat, it might have been three o’clock in the afternoon the way he said it.

Gray hesitated for a second, but, casting a sidewise glance at Fletcher, he came on in. Fletcher came in, too, and moved past Gray, who had stopped just inside the door. Adams walked quickly across the room to the fire and began to warm himself.

“Nobody taken sick?” Mary asked as Joby closed the door. “Did youns come from my mother’s?”

“No, ma’am,” Fletcher said, “ain’t nothing like that.”

“Well, have you men had any supper?” she offered. “Or I guess it’s nigh time I was cooking some breakfast.”

“No, we won’t be staying for a meal,” Gray answered sharply. “Thank you,” he added, the way he might speak to a woman customer in his store.

He and Fletcher Adams exchanged a quick look. Gray turned to Joby, who was still standing by the door he had just closed. “I come about that business we transacted earlier today,” Gray said. “I can’t be party to a family doing without in the cold coming on. I brought you back your money.”

He pulled the bills from his coat pocket and laid them on the table. They were the same bills Joby had paid him for the stove, and they were folded in the same order. Gray put them down on the table and seemed to press them as if he would put them even farther down before he withdrew his hand.

Joby watched him, and as Gray’s hand was withdrawing, Joby’s eyes remained fixed on the money for a moment. Something was rising in him again, like swelling. He didn’t know what to say, or rather didn’t know that he really did know, but then he was saying it.

“I believe we made a concluded deal, John Gray. I’m obliged for your concern, but I reckon I’m responsible for my family’s keep.” Whatever was swelling inside Joby was breaking up as he spoke, as if the words, or some words, had the power to break up whatever might swell up in a man.

“Damn it, man,” Gray said, “I ain’t interested in your responsibilities.”

“I can’t allow such talk in my house,” Joby said.

Fletcher’s head rose a little higher out of his shoulders. Mary stood by her chair where she had stood since the men had come in. She didn’t seem to move at all. Not even to breathe.

Gray was hard all over and his face trembled. Joby instinctively dropped his right foot back to brace himself and shifted his taut, sore upper body forward. He blinked as Gray moved, but then he saw that Gray meant only to get out. Gray opened the door and passed quickly through, leaving it open behind him. Joby, after a moment, closed the door, and turning back toward the fireplace, he discovered that Mary was holding the iron poker in her hand, pointing it like a saber at Fletcher, who had not moved and who was not taking his eyes off Mary’s poker.

“I hain’t got nothing to do with this,” Fletcher said, holding up both his hands to shield himself.

“Mama,” said one of the little girls from her bed in the dark corner, but none of the adults looked that way.

“No, ma’am,” Fletcher went on, “I ain’t come for no trouble.”

“I ain’t understanding this,” Joby said, stepping toward Fletcher. Fletcher leaned slightly toward Joby, but he didn’t take his eyes off Mary and he didn’t lower his hands.

“Ain’t no call for that poker, Mary,” Joby said.

Mary lowered the poker, slowly, but she did not stop watching Fletcher, and she did not back away.

Fletcher lowered his hands and cautiously turned toward Joby.

“Joby, I ain’t got no quarrel,” he said.

Joby nodded.

“I just come as a witness.” Fletcher turned back toward Mary appealingly. The poker dropped a bit further, until its tip touched the floor.

“What he said ain’t the truth,” Fletcher began. “He made it up standing there. He couldn’t brang hisself to tell you the real truth. He come because he got hisself in a knot he had to come to get hisself out of. That’s why he come. When me and Sina Rose went in the store after we seen you, he was a standin’ up there talking to them fellers ’ats always in there seems like…. Well, he was sayin’ some things I wouldn’t want said again. And then he finally said, ‘If’n he,’ meaning you, ‘carries that thing all the way home, I’ll give it to him.’”

“Give it to me?” Joby said.

“That’s right. Everbody set up and took a new interest then, and Gray looked like ants had done crawled up his britches legs cause he knowed he’d said the wrong thing. Them Chestnut Flats boys don’t hold no notion of a man’s word at all unless it’s a makin’ some kind of a bet, but let a man wager something like that and they’re for bringing out the Bible and they’ll hold him to it or ruin him, and Gray knowed it.

“He started to trying to beg out by sayin’ they wasn’t no way to verify it now, but somebody said ‘Hell, he,’ meanin’ you, ‘could be gone after.’ Excuse me, but that’s what somebody said. And Gray grinned and said he couldn’t do that cause he had a store to mind. Then Mrs. Gray come through and said, ‘Mind what? A bunch of loafers?’ One or two of the boys got a mad look at that, but most of them just cackled like Mrs. Gray had done them a good turn, and you could tell they wasn’t going to lose interest nor let the thing drop ’spite Gray’s excuses.”

“God-almighty,” Joby said, almost whispering, “give it to me.”

“Yessir. And I don’t know what come over me. It was like we was all a gang of boys hanging a cat or something. I up and said I’ll go with you, and that sort of seemed to settle the whole thing. Sina Rose pinched me on the arm, but I’d done said I’d go, so I told her to finish her business and drive on back to our place. And they was a few more bets made fer and agin you and more being made when me and Gray set out after you.”

Hanging a cat, Joby thought. I was the cat.

“We follered you all the way here, hanging back and being quiet.”

But I made myself the cat, Joby thought.

“That was easy enough, least ’til it got dark. You know I’m a pretty good hand in the woods, and Gray wasn’t anxious fer you to know what we was doing. When we come up on you settin’ by the river, Gray figgered he had it made then. He said, ‘By Ned, he ain’t made it more’n this far,’ and I said, ‘You never said nothing about him not stoppin’ to rest.’ He looked at me like he was fixin’ to quarrel, but he knowed he was in the wrong and a store full of witnesses. So we set down and waited fer you to get going again. It sounds awful sneakin’ like now, don’t it? But it seemed all right then. Like it wasn’t really sneakin’, not mean sneakin’ anyhow.”

The word witnesses hung on in Joby’s mind, suspended from all the others Fletcher was saying. I knew they were there. I knew….

“But I’ll have to say I never figgered you’d make it either. You looked so tuckered out settin’ there. And when the grade steepened, you could hear old Gray’s breathing started sounding like he couldn’t keep the laughing out of it ’cause neither one of us considered you’d get that stove up again after you set it down another time.

“That was the doggedest thing I ever seen how you figgered a smart way to rest. You ought to of seen him, Mrs. Johnson, leaning that stove back against them trees so he could take some of the weight off’n him without a settin’ it down. And a standin’ there agin it, taking your rest. A man don’t stiffen up so bad that a way, does he? A man could do better by going on with some little chore while taking his breaks. That’s why I usually shell a little corn or something while we’re resting from putting up hay or something. Them boys will say, ‘Why don’t you light and rest a spell, Fletcher,’ and I’ll say, “’Cause I don’t aim to stiffen up,’ and they’ll shake their heads, but dreckly when they move they’ll moan and catch theirselves and I’ll laugh at ’em for not believing me. And that’s like what you was doing by resting agin them trees. He must of stopped four or five times, Mrs. Johnson.”

Joby moved to the table and sat down on the bench. By talking, Fletcher was bringing back to Joby’s mind what exhaustion had already put out of it, leaving only his muscle to remember the weight of the stove and the half ease of leaning back against the trees. But it had not been a smart thing.

Desperate was the word Joby thought. He ain’t telling it right. It wasn’t like he’s saying.

Fletcher now stood more relaxed before the fire. He even coupled his hands behind his back and spread his feet wider, as he naturally would any other time he happened to stop to warm himself before their fire and naturally take the chance to tell a yarn. Mary still stood with the poker in her hand, its tip on the floor.

“But that last time you stopped you looked done fer. We couldn’t see you much, though we could still tell where you was by sighting yours and the stove’s shadders. We could just hear your breathing mostly, which was sounding like you was choking, on blood we figgered, and we started to come, but then you hawked up and spit and your breathing got easier. Gray said that didn’t matter. He was going on to you anyway. He said he wasn’t going to stand by and let no man die. But I seen. I told him, no, he wasn’t going to go and rob you. And in a little while you was moving agin, and we knowed you was close enough to home that you’d make it now.

“When you went in the house, we argid a spell. Gray says he wasn’t going into no man’s home at this time of night, but I said we was here and knowed you wasn’t in the bed and they wasn’t no real good reason not to go on in and take care of his business. And he knowed, I could tell, that he couldn’t get out of it. They’d be more crow than he could ever swaller if’n he went back without coming on in. But, by dang, you seen him. He couldn’t brang hisself to tell the truth oncet he was here. You seen how he was, all eat up cause he had to lower hisself. Course Gray hates to let any money out of his hands, but it was the pure shame more.”

“You mean he’s shamed of having to bring it to us,” Mary said. She squatted now before the fire and used the poker to stir the embers under the only remaining log on the dog irons, not bothering to ask Fletcher to move aside. Simply assuming he would. And he did, and Joby thought, It is over for her now. She has put it away, in that way she has. Her face, sallow still from her illness, looked golden in the glow of the fire. She didn’t look up from the embers she stirred, and neither of the men said anything in answer to her. What is she really thinking about an old beau who did that? Who came to her house and put dirt in it? Joby wondered, but he would say nothing to her about that. He looked at the bills lying on the table where Gray had left them. They don’t mean anything. But she has put it away, just like the sickness.

Fletcher moved toward the door. “I’m a going to slip on home now. Sina Rose is probably got twenty or thirty of her male kin looking fer me by now.”

Before he opened the door, he turned to look at them. “Mrs. Johnson,” he said, “it ain’t ever man would carry home a stove like Joby done today.”

Mary did not look up from the fire. “I know it,” she said.

Joby rose from his bench to shut the door after Fletcher.

“Night to you,” Fletcher said to him. “I reckon you know folks will be talking about you. I can’t wait to hear Gray’s version.”

“Goodnight, Fletcher,” Joby said, and he watched Fletcher Adams stride off across the front porch and into the dark. Then he closed the door.

Mary had risen from stirring the fire and discovered the two girls sitting on the side of their bed together with their skinny white legs hanging over and their bare toes pointing down, those of the bigger girl almost touching the floor.

“Get to bed now,” Mary said, and the girls rolled over and scooted themselves under the blankets.

Joby moved slowly from the door to his usual chair by the fire. The log on the dog irons broke in the middle, sending ashes rolling forward over the hearth and sparks fluttering up the chimney. Mary put two logs on the fire and stirred and banked the embers beneath them.

“I knowed they was there,” Joby said.

“Well, of course you did,” said Mary.

“I was afraid for a while that it was some of them Chestnut Flats boys going to get them a stove.”

“You can find plenty of Chestnut Flats boys willing to knock you on the head,” Mary said, “but you won’t find many willing to tote nothing as heavy as that stove very fur.” She paused. “You might of killed yourself, Joby Johnson.”

“I know it. I knowed it at the time. But it seemed like I didn’t have good sense to know what I knowed.”

He stretched his thick legs before him and examined them. “I won’t be fit for much for days to come,” he said. “I’m a fool. If Gray had just told me to my face he’d give me the stove if I toted it home, it’d all be different.”

“But he didn’t,” Mary said. She stopped stirring the fire and stood up.

“Yeah, I know. That ’baccer will be in case in the morning. I’ll pack some of it down before I start.”

“I’ll help you oncet the girls get fed and off. Don’t want you to get too late a start.”

Joby Johnson stretched himself again and smiled at his wife. He was spent, and it was a pleasure to take his ease. He could feel himself drifting off into a warm sleep.

Mary smiled back at him, and then turned to the fire again.

Joby came awake again and sat up. “After that I’m going to slip across your daddy’s bottom over to the Adams place,” he said. “See about borrying Fletcher’s mules. I been borrying too much from Henry, but if I can I aim to make that thing a whole lot lighter going down than it was coming up.”

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