Selling the ploughs and harness

An intercalary chapter on the selling-off. The tenant men haul out ploughs, harrows, harness and teams and take whatever the junk dealers will give — fifty cents for a good plough, ten dollars for a matched pair of bays. What is being sold is not the goods but the lives in them, and the seller warns the buyer that a packet of bitterness comes with the pile. Back at the houses the women sort what can be carried: pots, mattresses, canvas, the rifle, an axe worn down over forty years. What will not fit is looked at hard enough to be memorised — a father's Pilgrim's Progress, a china dog from the St Louis Fair, a brother's last letter — and then burned in the yard while the loaded cars pull away into the dust.