ndy if you told him how--and Maw would be showing
him just how to shape it all out. Each hammer blow struck deep on the
boy's heart.

Maw lined the home-made box herself with soft old quilts, and washed and
dressed her dead herself in his faded outlawed wedding clothes. And on a
morning soft and sweet, with a hint of rain in the air, they rode down
in the farm wagon to the south field together--Paw and Maw and
Luke--with big Tom walking beside the aged knobby horse's head.

Abel Gazzam, a neighbor, had seen to the grave; and in due course the
little cavalcade reached the appointed spot inside the snake fence--a
quiet place in a corner, under a graybeard elm. As Maw had said, it was
"a pleasant place for Paw to lay in."

There were some old neighbors out in their own rigs, and Uncle Clem had
brought his family up in his car, with a proper wreath; and Reverend
Kearns came up and--declining all lien on the broilers--read the burial
service, and spoke a little about poor Paw. But it wasn't a funeral, no
how. No supper; no condolence; no viewing "the remains"--not even a
handshake! Maw didn't even look at her old friends, riding back home
between Tom and Luke, with her head fiercely high in the air.

A dull depression settled on Luke's heart. It was all up with the
Hayneses now. They had saved Paw from charity with their home-made
burial; but what had it availed? They might as well have gone the whole
figure. Everybody knew! There wasn't any comeback for a thing like this.
They were just nobodies--the social pariahs of the district.

IV

Somehow, after the fashion of other years, they got their meager crops
in--turnips, potatoes and Hubbard squashes put up in the vegetable
cellar; oats cradled; corn husked; the buckwheat ready for the mill;
even Tom's crooked furrows for the spring sowings made. Somehow, Maw
helping like a man and Tom obeying like a docile child, they took toll
of their summer. And suddenly September was at their heels--and then the
equinox.

It seemed to Luke that it had never rained so much before. Brown vapor
rose eternally from the valley flats; the hilltops lay lost entirely in
clotted murk. By periods hard rains, like showers of steel darts, beat
on the soaking earth. Gypsy gales of wind went ricocheting among the
farm buildings, setting the shingles to snapping and singing; the
windows moaned and rattled. The sourest weather the boy could remember!

And on the worst day of all they got the