Will Parker had learned well not to complain. The heat hadn’t affected him yet, and he had neither wife nor lunch pail. What he had were three stolen apples from somebody’s backyard tree-green, they were, so green he figured he’d suffer later-and a quart of buttermilk he’d found in an unguarded well.

The men sat in the shade of the mill yard, their backs against the scaly loblolly pines, palavering while they ate. But Will Parker sat apart from the others; he was no mingler, not anymore.

"Lord a-mighty, but it’s hot," a man named Elroy Moody complained, swabbing his wrinkled red neck with a wrinkled red hanky.

"And dusty," added the one called Blaylock. He hacked twice and spit into the pine needles. "Got enough sawdust in my lungs to stuff a mattress."

The foreman, Harley Overmire, performing his usual noon ritual stripped to the waist, dipped his head under the pump and came up roaring to draw attention to himself. Overmire was a sawed-off runt with a broad pug nose, tiny ears and a short neck. He had a head full of close-cropped dark hair that coiled like watchsprings and refused to stop growing at his neckline. Instead, it merely made the concession of thinning before continuing downward, giving him the hirsute appearance of an ape when he went shirtless. And Overmire loved to go shirtless. As if his excessive girth and body hair made up for his diminutive height, he exposed them whenever the opportunity arose.

Drying himself with his shirt, Overmire sauntered across the yard to join the men. He opened his lunch pail, folded back the top of his sandwich and muttered, "Sonofabitch, she forgot the mustard again." He slapped the sandwich together in disgust. "How many times I got to tell that woman it’s pork plain and mustard on beef!"

"You got to train ’er, Harley," Blaylock teased. "Slap ’er upside the head one time."