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The 1959 Ford Country Squire station wagon got them to Florida and it got them back to Pine Cone; it lasted through the first ten months of their marriage and would probably have seen Sarah through the three years that Dean was scheduled to be away from her had he not smashed it to junk the night before he was to leave for Fort Rucca. He was drunk, in the company of two young men who were not going into the army, and, driving without headlights, had ploughed into a fence post about eight miles outside of town, on property belonging to Jack Weaver, a not-very-prosperous pig farmer. Mr Weaver was understanding when he learned that Dean was to go into the army the next morning, and his wife Merle bound up the foreheads of Dean's two companions with much sympathy. Then all three men rode back into Pine Cone in the back of Mr Weaver's pickup truck, but the Country Squire was left in a drainage ditch, until it was taken away about two months later by someone who wanted the parts.

Dean left for Fort Rucca, before dawn, without telling Sarah about the accident. She was very surprised not to see the car in front of the house the next morning when she needed to get to work, but supposed that one of Dean's companions had had to drive her husband home the night before, and had kept the automobile overnight. She learned the truth when she talked to the wife of one of these men at the plant on morning coffee-break. If there had been any way of getting in touch with Dean right then, Sarah thought she would have yelled at him for not having told her. An accident was an accident, it was even excusable that he had been drunk, but there was no justification for his cowardice in keeping the news from her. But when she wrote to him that night she could only think how depressed Dean had been about going off to Fort Rucca, and of course there was the possibility that he might not come home alive from Vietnam. Sarah had not had the heart to bring the car up to him, except in passing, asking what she should do about the insurance.

No insurance money was forthcoming, for Dean had not carried collision coverage. All of Sarah's money went into the household expenses, and she had none to spare, especially not the kind of money that is needed for car payments. Dean's cheques from the army were meagre; he kept half for his incidental expenses, and the other half went directly to his mother. Sarah saw not a penny of these funds, and Jo explained to her daughter-in-law, 'I told Dean you didn't need the money, and you don't. You make a lot more than him. You got your mama and daddy's insurance money laid up somewhere, and if you really wanted a Cadillac Eldorado, I know you could take the bus down to Mobile, and walk right into the Cadillac showroom, and drive that thing right off the floor. There is not a reason in this world for Dean to send you money when you don't need it, and I can't work and I'm not going to be getting Social

Security for another eight years and four months, unless I go blind first, and then I'll get it sooner

Sarah had explained to her mother-in-law many times that her parents had left only enough money to pay for their funerals, and to discharge their debts. There had been nothing left over for Sarah herself. Jo had always told Sarah in return that she didn't believe a word of this. Sarah had stopped trying to convince her, and when Jo now demanded, every other day, that Sarah go out and buy them a Cadillac Eldorado, Sarah merely said, 'Jo, I couldn't afford a glove to put in the glove compartment...'

Sarah was again fortunate in living next door to Becca Blair, for Becca was always pleased to take Sarah wherever she needed to go, and if she wasn't available, Becca's daughter Margaret had strict instructions to make the purple Pontiac available to Sarah at any time. This was no great hardship on Becca, however, for the two women maintained schedules that were quite similar. They went to work and left it at the same time, needed to shop at the grocery store as often (and had just as soon do it together anyway), and whenever Jo bore down particularly hard on Sarah (usually every weekend when Jo and Sarah were in the house together for many uninterrupted hours) Becca was more than happy to drive Sarah around out in the country until she had recovered herself. Sarah grew to think of the front passenger seat as her own, and learned how to open the glove compartment of the car without all the little statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Christopher tumbling out on to the floorboards.

Most days, after work, Sarah would ask Becca to drive around Pine Cone once before they 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 could not afford it. The whole of her life, she grumbled, had been like that.

It was sometimes said, in the places where farmers gather, that Josephine Howell had driven her husband to an early grave with her sullen temper, her constant complaining, and her intractable laziness, just so that when he was dead she could sell the farm and move into Pine Cone, where she wouldn't have anything to do but grow fatter than she already was, if that was possible. The problem was, that she had had to wait until Dean was old enough to support her, so that she wouldn't have to do any work at all. The wives of these farmers whispered that her means of disposing of her husband had not been of the legal variety, but this has to be discounted as malicious gossip. It was well known that Jimmy Howell had died of a snakebite, though the doctor couldn't tell exactly what kind it had been, and no one had seen the reptile. Two fang marks were found on the dead man's leg just above the ankle, and it was very likely that he had been bitten in the field. Mai Homans was a farmer who owned acreage immediately adjoining that of Jimmy Howell, and whenever this story was repeated, Mai invariably said: 'I'd think it was Jo Howell put them marks on Jimmy's legs with her own teeth, and it was poison out of her own mouth that killed him, except that she's too fat to bend down that far...'

Jo Howell paid no attention to what people said; she and her teenaged son lived quietly together in the small house, and much the greatest portion of Dean's minuscule salary went to keep them in food. At this time, Dean was much oppressed by his mother and wanted desperately to leave her, though he knew that if he did, she would be forced to go on welfare.

Dean wed Sarah Bascom much against his mother's wishes, but this attempt to be free of Jo was a failure. Sarah was not fond of her mother-in-law, but she insisted that Dean not abandon the woman altogether. When he lost his job, and the trailer was seized by the bank, Dean with his bride reluctantly returned to the house that belonged to his mother.

To Jo's credit, she ignored the fact that he had treated her shabbily in the previous few months. On the other hand, she did not treat Sarah any more kindly though she knew that her daughter-in-law had stood up for her cause with Dean. Dean and Sarah had been living in the second bedroom of the house at the time that he was drafted, and now Jo was alone with Sarah.

It was common knowledge that Jo Howell did not get along with her daughter-in-law, and that the household was not a cheerful one. It was Sarah who was invariably pitied, and in fact admired for putting up with Jo Howell's harsh ways. Not only did Sarah work very hard to bring money into the household, had for a time supported both her husband and his mother, but she waited on Jo Howell as well, performed all sorts of little services for that fat, lazy woman, who sat around the house all day long, watching television and eating Ritz crackers.

Every afternoon at five-thirty, when Sarah Howell returned from the Pine Cone Munitions Factory, she found Jo Howell sitting in a rocking chair in their simply furnished, dusky living room. The sun was going down on the other side of the house, and the principal light in the room was fromthe television set. Jo usually pretended to be absorbed in the late afternoon movie, or whatever actress happened to be talking to Mike Douglas, so that she wouldn't have to speak to her daughter-in-law. But on one afternoon late in March Jo Howell, with the remote control, turned off the set as soon as Sarah came in the back door.

Sarah knew something was up, when she could not hear the television. She put the groceries down on the counter, and went directly in to Jo. The woman sat in her accustomed chair, grimly smiling. Sarah distrusted the woman, had never had any liking for her, and actually hated the way that she looked: oily and gross, with streaked, greasy hair pulled hard back from her face. Jo's eyes were small and black, and loose flesh almost closed over them, especially when she looked hard at you.

'Hey, Jo', said Sarah, and tried not to let show the apprehension that she felt. But there was no sense in antagonising Jo before she even knew what the matter was. Their argument would come soon enough, but sometimes, when Sarah put a cheerful face before it all, she was allowed to get through an entire evening easily enough - and these days, with Dean gone, she really didn't ask for much more than that.

Jo replied nothing at all, but stared hard at her daughter-in-law . Sarah sighed then, a small sigh, and fell into the very comer of the couch with a mixture of fatigue, curiosity, and impatience.

'Sarah.. .' began Jo, very slowly. Sarah was glad that she didn't own a dog, because Jo looked as if she were about to inform her that it had just been run down in the road.

'What, Jo?'

'Army called, Sarah ...' Jo was holding on to every word.

'What'd the army want with you?' said Sarah trying, but not able to match her mother-in-law's sullen deliberateness of tone.

'Wasn't me they wanted. They wanted to talk to you

'What'd they want, Jo? I got to go put up the groceries.' Sarah wanted Jo to get on with this; it wasn't that she was worried about anything that Jo might have to say, she just didn't want to give Jo the satisfaction of keeping her guessing, keeping her in suspense. It was one of Jo's favourite games, and one of the most exasperating.

'Dean's coming home...'

'Why', said Sarah, involuntarily, in her surprise. 'Why's he coming home now? He got leave three weeks ago, and I didn't think he could get it again so soon. He said—' Jo interrupted her. 'Dean's coming home for good.' Sarah moved her hand in a slight protest, and she gazed on Josephine Howell with annoyance and apprehension.