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in the first place. I worked on that for a while, then felt better, heard nothing more, and fell asleep.

CHAPTER IV
    S O FOR A WHILE Val laid off of me, at least off my misspent life, and for a couple of months I was happy, with my freedom, my work, and her, though busier than that paperhanger, with mosquitoes as well as hives. I snatched the trees out quick, now that I knew how to do it, and was done with them later that week. Then I raced the calendar, to get stuff in the ground so it would start to grow. First I had to lime, or double-lime actually, as the land was fairly poor, and turn it in with a plow. Then I double-fertilized, and cut that in with a disk. Then I seeded, for lettuce, spinach, broccoli, corn, and all kinds of stuff. I did that all with the tractor, sometimes needing help, like someone to ride the planter putting tomato seedlings in, and was given a boy named Homer. He was a colored fellow who parked cars at the Ladyship, and came out every day in the truck to pick up stuff to take in, green stuff, that is, as soon as it was ready and I could cut it and pack it in crates.
    On top of all that were the hams, a big source of profit, now the Ladyship was open and made a sales outlet. Getting them ready in town, it seemed, was much too complicated, as they had to be smoked out here, and besides, it was a different kind of routine from what restaurant chefs are used to. From the carcasses he bought, he had them cut every day, and brought them out at night, usually four, two picnics and two big ones, but sometimes eight. She did the curing and cooking, squirting formula into a vein with a little pump she had, then later steaming them under pressure, baking them, and doing them up in plastic, with “ MR. VAL’S FINE HAMS ” printed on. Once a month, when enough had been formulated up and hung in the cold room, I did the smoking. I rolled the racks to the smokehouse, dumped sawdust out on the floor, tossed a lighted newspaper in, closed up, and watched the dampers. At the end of forty-eight hours, out they came, brown as hickory nuts. The racks, it turned out, were called “trees.” Until then I had thought the Ham Tree some kind of a comedian’s gag, like the Rock Candy Mountain. It turned out, though, to be real.
    The formula, she told me, was secret, but one day I called it skookum, and that started her laughing. Then we both laughed so hard we cried. Then she got ashamed, and said stop talking like that. So I did. So she did. So I didn’t. So she didn’t. So after that it was skookum, our own little private joke.
    The hams we always did early, as soon as he shoved off for town, but I’d see her again for lunch, and, for her, generally dressed up. Or at least I put on a coat, a new one I bought. It turned out, once I’d made restitution, I was on a salary, one hundred dollars a month and my keep, and the coat was my first outlay. But every little thing brought us closer, like the color the coat should be. I got brown, but she said it ought to be blue, to go with my hair, which is yellow, like molasses taffy, and my eyes, which she said are blue, though until then I hadn’t much noticed. I said brown was quiet, and then we’d argue it out, but it seemed sweet that anyone cared what I wore. In between we’d talk of the fat, but kind of around the edges, generally working in toward the good that needs to be done. She spoke of the church they went to, off Branch Avenue in the city, but more often of another one, in St. Mary’s, that she’d gone to when she was little.
    In between everything she’d eat and eat and eat, great big ham sandwiches, with pie, often a whole one, ice cream, pastry, and yogurt. Then at night she had her “one real meal of the day,” as she called it, and he did. We lived on beef, pork, ham, veal, and lamb, with occasional poultry; on potatoes, another vegetable, and gravy; on pie, ice cream, pastry, and pudding, but never fresh fruit or green salad. It was the best food