Lying on the upper porch, the small square upper stoop above the front doorway, she could look at the night sky between the trees, all the people now in their beds to rest. Outside the tree-grown garden the road ran past, and beyond the road lay the Burns pasture, the great barns in the middle vista, and often she could hear the cattle eat if they came near the roadway to crop the grass, for they ate at night when the moon shone. Lying thus, she would go out quietly across the powdered dark that was granulated with dull light, go with the incandescent insects and the firmaments of night-cries that set stars of sound into the mellow black. Midi, when her daughters were safely away, liked to talk about brothels and women selling for hire. She lay now on the porch to sleep, she, Theodosia, on the bed Midi had made for her; she had come house by house up the valley. Midi was kind, a little withering woman with a high voice and hard, nervous, knotty hands. She saw Midi acutely as she lay in the half-dark to rest, and she heard again her breathless, fearful stories and conjectures of what must pass in wicked places. She knew that the woman was thus because she was heightened by the going of her prolific age, by the passing of her fecund power. The fiddle was stilled that she might not awaken those asleep in the house, but her mind played at a crooked phrase, a distressed lack-melody that mounted with a perpetual question toward the constellations in the open sky above and in the grass below, Midi turned momentarily back upon herself in intense departure, and she reflected that a woman’s life is short and full of peril. Or she would remember Sallie’s song. Sallie gathered strawberries from the garden, bobbing among the straw-lined rows as if she were a giant hop-toad. Rowena was her chief admonisher, and if she were admonished enough she would scrape the new potatoes out of their thin pinkish skins and wash them in readiness for the cooking. She brought the peas to Theodosia’s porch and shelled them there, and often she would remember a song about the peas, a singsong tune, Who buttoned up the peasecod? Who buttoned up the bean? I’m sure I never buttoned any, Although I’ve unbuttoned a many. Caleb Burns had sung that song to her, she said, one day when he had come upon her as she shelled behind the house at the kitchen steps. She would laugh at the invisible buttons and drop the unbuttoned peas lazily into her pan. * * * * *