In Amelia County, away from the city of Richmond, my mother was more relaxed. Our Aunt T didn't have a television. In Amelia, everyone colored and white knew everyone else colored and white. But there were still snakes, black widows, the kicking end of horses, and broomstraw to look out for. Broomstraw? Broomstraw,, my mother replied emphatically. A man who had been a neighbor, running across a field of it, had tripped and a stiff shaft of straw shot up his flared nostril, piercing the soft brain. He had been found on his face in the field. Aside from not being allowed in the barn without a grownup, once out of Aunt T's house in Amelia we were turned loose to see whatever was there to see.

When Edwin killed a chicken, taking off its head with a hatchet, there was remarkably little blood. My mother was farm-bred. Killing hens for Sunday dinner was an ordinary occurrence, and neither she nor anyone else thought to warn us. Later I would know the signs of Saturday and its ritual slaughter. Marie wore her most faded print dress into the kitchen. After getting breakfast, she put a huge black kettle of water for plucking on to boil, the temperature in the kitchen already near 90, at not even 10 o'clock.

Sometimes she wanted her extra pay for Sunday dinner, a quarter, ahead of time. Aunt T grumbled, but out came the quarter from her change purse and into Marie's grip. To keep it out of sight, out of mind, Marie put it on top of the can of pork and beans on the second shelf. "Miss T, she got Sunday dinner. I got Saturday night to think about."

We slipped away from the breakfast table and ran askelter through the kitchen. Marie was boiling water, paying us no mind. We banged out the back screen door, making as much noise as our bare feet could, slapping them down on the wood stairs. We were free until lunch. I wanted to go to the wooden house where Aunt T kept the new broods of baby chicks. I was shy of hens. When I was given corn to broadcast onto the dirt yard for them, I didn't cast it broadly enough. Or I forgot to be careful of my bare feet and wandered around in the feed area, fascinated by the lidless yellow eyes of the hens, the fierce and accurate bobbing of their necks after glints of corn, the flounce of burnished tail feathers, and the manner in which each yellow foot lifted itself, flexed its nibbled toes, spread them out, and set them carefully down in slow motion while the fury of the bobbing necks kept up their rapt staccato. The hens were as intent as I neglectful. Why then was I surprised, each time surprised, when the hard beak found its way to my bare toes, or fell between them in a near miss that teased me with delicious terror? I might have seen it coming.

To get to the house of the baby chicks, to be in that safe muddle of soft cheeping and down, puffs that could easily have been animated dandelions, we had to cross in front of the woodshed and continue on behind it. But on this one Saturday morning, I saw Edwin in front of the open shed, in baggy overalls, no shirt on. He was Marie's husband. A hen fluttered and squawked in one of his hands. He had her by the ankle part of her legs, and her yellow feet stuck out the back of a hand as big as a baseball mitt. Sun flashed off the head of the hatchet that hung in the ring of his overalls. I stopped still and watched him intently. What was he doing? He was whistling.

My sister, Betsy we called her then, was lingering at the old porcelain bathtub set out in the yard. Although we weren't supposed to, she was running water into it from the old hose, raising the water in it to give to the cows and horses we always hoped would one day materialize from the pages of our books or from the pastures of more affluent farms in Amelia. She liked to sprinkle water on her toes and on to her exposed tummy, soft and pale between the little ruffled halter and the elastic band of her shorts.

I turned back to Edwin. He didn't let on that he saw us, but then he never did. Why should he have to deal with Miss Doyle's city girls? I didn't know anything about his life, except that he was married to Marie, came to Aunt T's to chop wood, and he kept to himself. Years later, Marie would tell me he liked a beer on Saturday night. They had a boy named Junior who had been hurt in the war. He had one arm and pinned the empty sleeve of his shirt to the side of the shirt so it wouldn't flap. That's what Marie said he did when I asked her what about the empty shirt sleeve. I had never seen Junior. You could ask Marie questions, and she would answer in her sharp, high, amused voice. She gave me little jobs in the kitchen, swatting flies when they got too bad, and she let me pat the rolls into place on the tin sheets before she put them in the oven. Marie, my mother said, had a lot of white blood in her. That's why her skin was so nearly white. Edwin had darker skin, and he was quiet. It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask him a question, although I now wanted to. How burly the mitt of his hand was around the handle of the hatchet! How the sun lit the steel! And how curious that the hen, only moments before a flap and squawk of feathers, was now grown quiet, stilled perhaps by Edwin's gait, a lumbering that rolled as if he knew the earth were roundly curved beneath his feet, a stolid rocking along the ground that had taken him now to the stump of cut wood. Barely breathing, I let myself be drawn to the wood, coming near it with my body, going away from it with my mind, wondering if I could get close enough to see the annular rings and know how old the tree had been when it was cut down. I must have known what Edwin was about to do.

In a motion so swift it was seamless, like light, came down naked arm, steel edge, and the weight of Edwin's determination to give Aunt T what she'd asked for -- Sunday dinner. And these powerful forces met in the neck of the hen, which I knew from sucking one cooked in Brunswick stew was an intricately interlocked lace of bones, delicate. Through feather and bone the hatchet fell, lodging into the surface of the wood with its orbiting years. The hen's head went over soundlessly into the wood dust and pine chips at the base of the chopping block. The eye was yellow with a jet black center, the beak hard and bright.

Next to me, Betsy was an explosion of giggles, pointing -- for there in the dust, released from Edwin's grasp, the chicken, headless, ran its body in swooping arcs about the ground in front of the wood shed, looking for its head. Wasn't it looking? It was blindly, accurately looking. It did not bump into the stump or into Edwin's legs. He watched the swooping hen without expression. "It dancing," he said flatly. Dancing? The word astonished me. The body careened about the yard. Would it stop? Would it ever stop? Just then, it slumped to its side, near its lopped off head. I inched nearer the stump. On the rim of the blade, on the cutting edge, there was a faint blur I could call blood. Then I saw two bright drops on the wood rings.

"Do another one!" my sister demanded. She was delighted with the dancing dead hen. Appalled, I would never have asked, although I was glad she had. I wanted to know if the frantic searching Edwin called dancing was what any chicken, headless, dead without knowing it, alive from the neck down, did.

"Miss T want two more hens for company Sunday," Edwin said. He wouldn't let us think he was to kill another just because two white girls from the city, who didn't know what they were looking at, the difference between life and death, had asked him to.