The girl was plain and angular. She wore a drab brown smock. Her coarse skirt was high above mannish boots. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbows and the muscles of her thin arms were eager and tense. She stopped and wiped the stray brown hair from her eyes, looking at her work. A twig snapped: instinctively she fended her arm over the clay figure: she turned. Tom Rennard was there. He sat on a rock. “God, that’s lovely, Cornelia!” She came beside her brother. They looked at her work. “The rain won’t spare this one, any more than the others.” “Even in that tree hole?” “You know, Tom, the squirrels will play heck with it there.” Tom smiled. “Why not bring it home and put it in the parlor, where the Reverend Curtin Rennard can worship and adore it?” This was a huge joke for they laughed: a serious matter for there were tears in the eyes of the girl. “What do you think he’d do, Cornelia, if he found this place?” “He mustn’t, Tom.” “What a brute he is!” “Bless him,” said the girl. “Don’t you think, sister,” Tom pondered, “don’t you think mother perhaps was like that?” “Of course she was, Tom. What other model have I got? I can’t really remember. Seeing I was three when you were born. Knowing father I bet mother didn’t nurse you except in a locked closet. But how else do I understand? And I do!” “I can’t remember her at all.” “I either. All one remembers home is father.” Tom got up. “Prayer time, I reckon.” They chose a close recess of little cedars, they hid the model and came away. The woods straggled down into elders and a last thick cordon of callow poplars. Here was a field. It was untilled and ragged with brown hillocks and hollows. They passed their cow, tossing her tail. The breeze of the end of day glided under their feet, scattered through the field, swung up above the margin of trees. Near the house was no tree. An unpainted barn: a well with hood awry on a flag of shale.... Cornelia and Tom joined their brother and sisters filling the dim room with their thoughts and their bodies. Up to the flecked, stained ceiling their presence filled it. The room made them one. The empty chair that faced them on which lay the Bible made them a body lacking a head. Their shoulders were sharp against each other. Their eyes did not meet, save in the empty chair. Fear was the mold of the room, making them one. Fear also corroded them, shredded them apart, turned them into what each was: Clarence and Ruth and Laura, Cornelia and Tom.