“Poor man,” Abagail said. “Poor, poor man. Flights of angels sing you to y’rest, Billy Richardson.”

She turned back to the cool, inviting house. It seemed miles away, although in reality it was only across the dooryard. She wasn’t sure she could make it that far; she was utterly exhausted.

“Lord’s will be done,” she said, and began to walk.

The sun was shining in the window of the guest bedroom, where she had lain down and fallen asleep as soon as her brogans were off. For along time she couldn’t understand why the light was so bright; it was much the feeling Larry Underwood had had upon awakening beside the rock wall in New Hampshire.

She sat up, every strained muscle and fragile bone in her body crying out. “God A’mighty, done slep the afternoon and the whole night through!”

If that was so, she must have been tired indeed. She was so lamed up now that it took her almost ten minutes to get out of bed and go down the hall to the bathroom; another ten to get her shoes on her feet. Walking was agony, but she knew she must walk. If she didn’t, that stiffness would settle in like iron.

Limping and hobbling, she crossed to the henhouse and went inside, wincing at the explosive hotness, the smell of fowls, and the inevitable smell of decomposition. The water supply was automatic, fed from the Richardsons’ artesian well by a gravity pump, but most of the feed had been used up and the heat itself had killed many of the birds. The weakest had long ago been starved or pecked to death, and they lay around the feed– and droppings-spotted floor like small drifts of sadly melting snow.

Most of the remaining chickens fled before her approach with a great flapping of wings, but those that were broody only sat and blinked at her slow, shuffling approach with their stupid eyes. There were so many diseases that killed chickens that she had been afraid that the flu might have carried them off, but these looked all right. The Lord had provided.

She took three of the plumpest and made them stick their heads under their wings. They went immediately to sleep. She bundled them into a sack and then found she was too stiff to actually lift it. She had to drag it along the floor.

The other chickens watched her cautiously from their high vantage points until the old woman was gone, then went back to their vicious squabbling over the diminishing feed.

It was now close to nine in the morning. She sat down on the bench that ran in a circle around the Richardsons’ dooryard oak to think. It seemed to her that her original idea, to go home in the cool of dusk, was still best. She had lost a day, but her company was still coming. She could use this day to take care of the chickens and rest.

Her muscles were already riding a little easier against her bones, and there was an unfamiliar but rather pleasant gnawing sensation below her breastbone. It took her several moments to realize what it was… she was hungry! This morning she was actually hungry, praise God, and how long had it been since she had eaten for any reason other than force of habit? She’d been like a locomotive fireman stoking coal, no more. But when she had parted these three chickens from their heads, she would see what Addie had left in her pantry, and by the blessed Lord, she would enjoy what she found. You see? she lectured herself. The Lord knows best. Blessed assurance, Abagail, blessed assurance.

Grunting and puffing, she dragged her towsack around to the chopping block that stood between the barn and the woodshed. Just inside the woodshed door she found Billy Richardson’s Son House hanging on a couple of pegs, its rubber glove snugged neatly down over the blade. She took it and went back out.

“Now Lord,” she said, standing over the towsack in her dusty yellow workshoes and looking up at the cloudless midsummer sky, “You have given me the strength to walk up here, and I’m believin You’ll give me the strength to walk back. Your prophet Isaiah says that if a man or woman believes in the Lord God of Hosts, he shall mount up with wings as eagles. I don’t know nothin much about eagles, my Lord, except they are mostly ugly-natured birds who can see a long ways, but I got three broilers in this bag and I should like to whack off their heads and not m’own hand. Thy will be done, amen.”

She picked up the towsack, opened it, and peered down. One of the hens still had her head under her wing, fast asleep. The other two had squashed against each other, not moving much. It was dark in the sack and the hens thought it was nighttime. The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.

Abagail plucked one out and laid it across the block before it knew what was happening. She brought the hatchet down hard, wincing as she always had at the final mortal thud of the blade biting through to wood. The head fell into the dust on one side of the chopping block. The headless chicken strutted off into the Richardsons’ dooryard, blood spouting, wings fluttering. After a bit it found out it was dead and lay down decently. Broody hens and New York Democrats, my Lord, my Lord.

Then the job was done and all her worrying that she might botch it or hurt herself doing it had been for nothing. God had heard her prayer. Three good chickens, and now all she had to do was get home with them.

She put the birds back into the towsack and then hung Billy Richardson’s Son House hatchet back up. Then she went into the farmhouse again to see what there might be to eat.

She napped during the early part of the afternoon and dreamed that her company was getting closer now; they were just south of York, coming along in an old pickup truck. There were six of them, one of them a boy who was deaf and dumb. But a powerful boy, all the same. He was one of the ones she would have to talk to.

She woke around three-thirty, a little stiff but otherwise feeling rested and refreshed. For the next two and a half hours she plucked the chickens, resting when the work put too much misery into her arthritic fingers, then going on. She sang hymns while she worked—“Seven Gates to the City (My Lord Hallelu’),” “Trust and Obey,” and her own favorite, “In the Garden.”

When she finished the last chicken, each of her fingers had a migraine headache and the daylight had begun to take on that still and golden hue that means twilight’s outrider has arrived. Late July now, and the days were shortening down again.

She went inside and had another bite. The bread was stale but not moldy—no mold would ever dare show its green face in Addie Richardson’s kitchen—and she found a half-used jar of smooth peanut butter. She ate a peanut butter sandwich and made up another, which she put in her dress pocket in case she got hungry later.

It was now twenty to seven. She went back out again, gathered up her towsack, and went carefully down the porch steps. She had plucked neatly into another sack, but a few feathers had escaped and now fluttered from the Richardsons’ hedge, which was drying for lack of water.

Abagail sighed heavily and said: “I’m off, Lord. Headed home. I’ll be going slow, don’t reckon to get there until midnight or so, but the Book says fear neither the terror of night nor that which flieth at noonday. I’m in the way of doing Your will as best I know it. Walk with me, please. Jesus’ sake, amen.”

By the time she reached the place where the tar stopped and the road went to dirt, it was full dark. Crickets sang and frogs croaked down in some wet place, probably Cal Goodell’s cowpond. There was going to be a moon, a big red one, the color of blood until it got up in the sky a ways.

She sat down to rest and eat half of her peanut butter sandwich (and what she would have done for some nice black-currant jelly to cut that sticky taste, but Addie kept her preserves down cellar and that was just too many stairs). The towsack was beside her. She ached again and her strength seemed just about gone with two and a half miles before her still to walk… but she felt strangely exhilarated. How long since she had been out after dark, under the canopy of the stars? They shone just as bright as ever, and if her luck was in she might see a falling star to wish on. A warm night like this, the stars, the summer moon just peeking his red lover’s face over the horizon, it made her remember her girlhood again with all its strange fits and starts, its heats, its gorgeous vulnerability as it stood on the edge of the Mystery. Oh, she had been a girl. There were those who would not believe it, just as they were unable to believe that the giant sequoia had ever been a green sprout. But she had been a girl, and in those times the childhood fears of the night had faded a little and the adult fears that came in the night when everything is silent and you can hear the voice of your eternal soul, those fears were yet down the road. In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever young and that—