And I don't let anybody go hungry under my roof, and there's a bed in the loft room that's yours and a door that latches from the inside. He glanced at her. Then he asked, “What do they call you?” She studied him for a long, long moment, the way you'd study thin ice before trusting your weight to it. Delphia, she said at last, “They call me Delphia.” Something in the way she said it—“They call me”— as if the name belonged to other people's mouths and not to her, told Elias Warfield that whatever this woman had survived to grow so tall and so guarded, it had cost her more than he could yet imagine.
He nodded once, as if a bargain had been struck, and clucked to the mule, and the wagon carried them on down the red road toward a farm that neither of them yet knew was about to change the course of both their lives. The Warfield place, when it rose out of the pines at the end of a rutted lane, was a study in genteel ruin. The main house had been white once, and was now the color of an old tooth. The gallery sagged.
Two of the four chimneys had lost their caps. Behind the house stood a cluster of outbuildings, a smokehouse, a corn crib, a barn with a swaybacked roof, and beyond them the fields ran down to a creek lined with willows. An old man sat on an upturned bucket in the yard, mending harness, and he rose when the wagon came in, shading his eyes. This was Kato, who had been born on the place, and had worked it for 60 years, and had watched three generations of Warfields fail to make it pay.
He looked at the giant woman on the wagon seat, and his weathered face did not laugh. It did something more complicated. It went still, and then it went soft, and then it did a thing Elias would remember later and not understand until much, much too late. Kato took off his own hat the way Elias had, and he said very quietly in a voice that shook, “Well now.” That was all.
Well, now and he looked at Delphia as if he were looking at a ghost that had come walking up out of the past to sit in his yard in the killing summer heat. And Delphia looked back at him with no recognition at all, and the moment passed, and the work of the failing farm swallowed it whole. But it had happened, and nothing that happens on a small place stays buried forever. The first weeks were a slow, wary circling, two guarded people learning the shape of each other across the width of a hard day's labor.
Delphia worked in a way that stopped Elias's breath the first time he saw it. She put her shoulder to a pine stump that four men and a mule had failed to budge the season before, and she braced her bare feet in the red clay, and she heaved, and the earth gave up its grip with a groan and a tearing of roots. And the stump came over on its side, trailing dirt like a pulled tooth. She did it again with the next and the next.
By the end of the first day, she had cleared more of the north 40 than Elias and Kato together had managed in a month. She did not brag on it. She did not even seem to notice she had done anything remarkable. She simply moved to the next task, wiping the sweat from her brow with a forearm, and asked in that low, rough voice, “What's next?” But strength was not the thing about her that Elias came to notice most.
It was the watchfulness. She never sat with her back to a door. She ate fast, the way people eat who have learned that food can be taken from them. When Elias moved too quickly near her, reaching past her for a tool, coming around a corner unexpected, he saw her whole body go rigid, saw the flinch she fought down, and it made him slow himself, gentle himself, the way you would around a horse that had been beaten by its last owner.
He never asked her what had been done to her. He did not have to. It was written in the scars on her back that he glimpsed once when her collar shifted. silver white ridges laid crosswise, old and deep. It was written in the way she said thank you the first time he set aside the best of the cornbread for her, said it in a whisper, as if the words might be a trap.
There was an evening early on that Elias would remember. Delphia had worked past dark, bringing in the last of the corn, and when she came to the well to wash, she found Elias had left a plate for her on the step. Not scraps, not leavings, but the best of the supper, the piece of meat he might have kept for himself, set out on a clean cloth. She stood over it a long time.
Then she said, not looking at him, “Why?” Just the one word. Elias, who did not fully know the answer himself, said, “Because you worked hard, and a body that works hard ought to eat well. That’s all.” Delphia picked up the plate as if it might be snatched away.
She ate standing up fast, the way she always ate, and when she was done, she washed the plate and the cloth and set them by the door. Then she said so quietly he almost missed it, “Thank you.”
He understood, watching her, that she was thanking him not for the food, but for the plain fact of being treated, for one meal, as something better than a mule, and that even that small mercy she did not quite trust, was braced against, was waiting to be revealed as a trick with a price attached.
It broke his heart a little, and it settled something in him, too. Kato watched her differently, and Elias began to notice it. The old man had taken to lingering wherever Delphia worked. He brought her water without being asked.
He watched her hands when she gripped an axe or a hoe, watched her face in profile against the light. And once Elias caught him standing in the barn door, with tears standing in his eyes, watching her pitch hay into the loft as if it was straw. When Elias asked him what was the matter, Kato wiped his face and said it was just the dust, just an old man's weak eyes, and went back to his mending. But he had begun to hum in the evenings, a low tune that Elias had never heard him hum before, a slow, sad, rolling melody, with no words that Elias knew, and Delphia, hearing it from across the yard, would go very still, as if some deep and buried thing in her had been brushed by a hand she couldn't see.
The trouble, when it came, came from outside, the way trouble on a struggling farm so often does. Word had spread through Chesterfield District that Elias Warfield had bought the giant girl for $3, and the district found it endlessly amusing, and then it found it useful. A neighboring planter named Royce Pettigrew, whose lands adjoined the Warfield place on the creek side, was a man with a smooth face and a cold eye, and an appetite for other men's property. Pettigrew had wanted the Warfield bottomland for years.
The creek acreage was the only good soil left on the place, and it commanded the water, and he had watched Elias sink slowly toward ruin with the patience of a man who knows a fruit will fall into his hand if he simply waits beneath the tree. He held a note against Elias, bought up from a Charleston factor, and he had been content to let it ride and gather interest while the farm withered. But the arrival of Delphia changed his arithmetic. He rode over on a fine bay horse one evening in early autumn, sat his saddle in the Warfield yard without dismounting, and looked down at Elias with a smile that never reached his eyes.