It was in the third year of Selina’s marriage that she first went into the fields to work. Pervus had protested miserably, though the vegetables were spoiling in the ground. “Let them rot,” he said. “Better the stuff rots in the ground. DeJong women folks they never worked in the fields. Not even in Holland. Not my mother or my grandmother. It isn’t for women.” Selina had regained health and vigour after two years of wretchedness. She felt steel-strong and even hopeful again, sure sign of physical well-being. Long before now she had realized that this time must inevitably come. So she answered briskly, “Nonsense, Pervus. Working in the field’s no harder than washing or ironing or scrubbing or standing over a hot stove in August. Women’s work! Housework’s the hardest work in the world. That’s why men won’t do it.” She would often take the boy Dirk with her into the fields, placing him on a heap of empty sacks in the shade. He invariably crawled off this lowly throne to dig and burrow in the warm black dirt. He even made as though to help his mother, pulling at the rooted things with futile fingers, and sitting back with a bump when a shallow root did unexpectedly yield to his tugging. “Look! He’s a farmer already,” Pervus would say. But within Selina something would cry, “No! No!” During May, June, and July Pervus worked not only from morning until night, but by moonlight as well, and Selina worked with him. Often their sleep was a matter of three hours only, or four. So two years went—three years—four. In the fourth year of Selina’s marriage she suffered the loss of her one woman friend in all High Prairie. Maartje Pool died in childbirth, as was so often the case in this region where a Gampish midwife acted as obstetrician. The child, too, had not lived. Death had not been kind to Maartje Pool. It had brought neither peace nor youth to her face, as it so often does. Selina, looking down at the strangely still figure that had been so active, so bustling, realized that for the first time in the years she had known her she was seeing Maartje Pool at rest. It seemed incredible that she could lie there, the infant in her arms, while the house was filled with people and there were chairs to be handed, space to be cleared, food to be cooked and served. Sitting there with the other High Prairie women Selina had a hideous feeling that Maartje would suddenly rise up and take things in charge; rub and scratch with capable fingers the spatters of dried mud on Klaas Pool’s black trousers (he had been in the yard to see to the horses); quiet the loud wailing of Geertje and Jozina; pass her gnarled hand over Roelf’s wide-staring tearless eyes; wipe the film of dust from the parlour table that had never known a speck during her régime. “You can’t run far enough,” Maartje had said. “Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.” Well, she had run far enough this time.