The cotton is waist high around him, ripe with brimming bolls, which seem in the dim light a single substance blanketing the field, like how Frank imagines snow. The dry bracts scrape against his trousers, a swishing sound with each step, and his feet sink into the loose-tilled soil, so that walking takes twice the effort it would need otherwise. Frank finds he has to pause every few minutes to catch his breath. He keeps his eyes fixed on the cabin in the distance, still just a small shape beneath the rising moon. Smoke drifts from the chimney. It doesn’t seem to be getting any bigger, as if Frank were making no progress toward it at all. But when he looks back in the direction from which he’s come, Bess is growing ever smaller, a tiny shape alone with the wagon and stone at the edge of the empty road. He feels as if he’s wading into nothingness, a purgatory of perpetual cotton.
It’s grown no cooler with evening, the heat now rising from the ground, enveloping, escapeless. He left his jacket in the wagon, but he’s still in long white shirtsleeves and brown wool pants, hardly summertime clothing, but his finest. In his estimation eighty-five dollars was too much to ask to borrow in a pair of coveralls. He stops to take his loosened tie from around his neck, remembering this morning, when Elma tied it on, and his heart seizes at the memory. He thinks how Elma could soon be all that he has left.
He continues on, trying not to think of the miles between where he is and where he needs to be, of the shrinking hours between now and midnight. Images flash through his mind: Elma’s gnarled hand around the rocker’s arm, the explosions and gunsmoke of war, the tombstone in the wagon bed, the banker’s mocking face, scattered hay and stockings in the shed. He stares at the white blur of cotton as he trudges through it, trying to see this instead, until finally he has come to the clearing where the cabin stands.
He looks up, breathless and sweating, the tie still clenched firmly in his hand. The cabin is even smaller than it appeared from afar, rickety and raised above the ground on cinder blocks. Laundry hangs from a line in the small yard: trousers, a blouse, white undershirts glowing in the moonlight. Three sagging steps lead up to a deep sunporch, where a rake leans against the rough-cut cypress boards of the wall. There are no outbuildings, like the one where he keeps Bess, and there is no sign of a mule.
A dog comes out through the open door. It walks to the edge of the porch, where it growls, a low, guttural sound. A child follows. Frank stands in the moonlight at the edge of the clearing, what hope he had for help now gone. A cacophony of locusts swells around him, jeering and shrill, and he feels suddenly exhausted, the weight of the day, of the year, of his life crashing into him from behind. It is all he can do to lift his hand. The child lifts her own, and, like that, it is dark.