The men in the village road knew one another intimately, calling “John” or “Bill” or “Thad” back and forth, shouting orders or suggestions. Lee Cummings worked somewhere on a farm, but he came home with his team at nightfall, the empty wagon rattling through the roadway. Or beyond the vapors of her sleep she would hear a night-passer, the wheels of a buggy or a car on the road which lay but a few feet from the house. In the early morning the village cows were driven to common waste pasture which was indifferently owned, along the creek, and the boys who drove them would loiter to swap knives or to boast of some personal excellence. A man’s voice would call out a command or a threat and a boy would move after his cow, simulating hurry. Thad sold goods at the store. He would stand in the sun in the early morning waiting for trade to come to his door, shifting his feet, waiting to see what the weather would offer before he predicted the business of the day. Chickens ran in the road and plucked at the grain that dropped from passing wagons, but when feeding times came they gathered at old Oscar Turner’s door. Thad would call out a jest or a truism to passing friends. “Yes, the rich they have their ice in summer, but the poor they have their’n in winter, and everything hit’s all evened up all round,” he called after some leaving companion, closing some tale or argument. He took credit to himself as a philosopher. Or again, as a prophet: “Hit’ll rain all day, you may as well get ready for hit. See them-there hens out eaten grass in the rain? When you see hens out in the morning eaten grass in the rain, that’s a sure sign hit’ll rain all day.” She walked through the lane toward the creek or returned to sit on Bradley’s doorstep, or she walked along the highroad past the store and the grist-mill, knowing no surprise that she should be there rather than anywhere else, and no surprise at the replies of the people that fell the one against another, as they talked of their tasks, every man knowing the other’s needs or peculiar quality. One of old Oscar Turner’s hens laid her eggs in an overturned barrel beside Thad’s door. “I looked to see if she was on,” a man said, drawing back from the barrel. “Is she on?” “I wonder if old Oscar he’ll set her there.” “A right public place.” “That old domernik hen, she don’t mind, she’s got no shame.”