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went home. Sarah always said it was because she wanted a little fresh air after having been cooped up in the factory all day, and Becca every day agreed cheerfully, exclaiming, 'What a good idea! Let's do it!' - asifit were the first time that Sarah had asked such a thing of her. Becca was sure, in her own mind, that Sarah simply didn't want to have to return directly to the house where Josephine Howell was waiting for her.
    Josephine Howell's parents had lived in a small house halfway between the Weavers' farm and Moms Emmons' store, but that was long before either of those latter places existed. The house burned down, with Jo's parents in it, when Jo was eight years old. The child, already stout, which was remarkable in an area where children of farmers more commonly suffered from malnutrition, was out picking pecans off the ground in a neighbouring orchard at the time. Pecans sold for five cents a pound in Pine Cone, but they were proved much more valuable to little Josephine in that they preserved her life.
    The cause of the fire was never known, though it must be admitted that it was never really looked into either. After this accident little Josephine went to live with her only surviving relative, Bama, a second cousin (twice removed), who was old, infirm, and most people said, insane. Jo was sixteen when the old woman drowned in Burnt Corn Creek, in her eighty-seventh year. No one could ever determine what the old woman had been doing down there on the bank, since she had always maintained to anybody who would listen how much she hated and feared running water. No one howevermuch regretted her passing, and many were even relieved, for Josephine's cousin had been a spiteful woman who kept grudges against the third generation of a family that had wronged her. She was poor, physically almost helpless, and had possessed no real influence in the scattered community of farmsteads, yet it was thought very bad luck to be on the wrong side of her. This bad luck was a very corporeal thing, and would manifest itself in loathsome boils and ulcerations of the skin, at the best, and at the worst was evidenced in sudden violent death. But Alabama was a backward place then, where loathsome skin diseases and sudden violent deaths were not uncommon phenomena anyway.
    Before the meagre wooden headstone had been raised on the old woman's grave, Jo had married Jimmy Howell, a young dirt farmer, who didn't know what he wanted out of life, and wasn't smart enough to realise that what he most certainly didn't want was a wife like Josephine. Even when she was young, and she married when she was no more than seventeen, Josephine Howell was both large-boned and fat. It is a shape ill-suited for the hard life of the spouse of a dirt farmer. Jimmy Howell had raised cotton while a bachelor, but Josephine complained so much of the difficulty in stooping to work with the plants, that he had switched over to corn, though it was a less profitable concern.
    Josephine would have refused to workthe farm altogether had she not realised that her effort was absolutely necessary for their economic survival. She had not wanted children, had no wish for the bother of raising and caring for them; but after seventeen years of marriage, she gave her husband a son - not to please Jimmy Howell, but to provide a worker for the farm. Jo raised Dean with one object in mind: that he should take her place in the fields, and before five years had elapsed, Dean had proved himself already a better, more valuable worker than his mother. Jo retired in triumph to her kitchen, with her radio, until Jimmy Howell died. Then she took the insurance money and the scant proceeds from the sale of their forty-acre farm (it had increased from thirty acres in their thirty-five years of marriage), and purchased a small house in Pine Cone, one that was old but still in fair condition. It had been one of the first to be built south of Commercial Boulevard. Jo had wanted a new house, but