Author: Wendell Berry; editor
Date: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00
Description: Library of America inaugurates its edition of the complete fiction of one of America's most beloved living writers For more than fifty years, in eight novels and fortytwo short stories, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) has created an indelible portrait of rural America through the lens of Port William, Kentucky, one of the most fully imagined places in American literature. Taken together, these novels and stories form a masterwork of American prose: straightforward, spare, and lyrical. Now, for the first time, in an edition prepared in consultation with the author, Library of America is presenting the
Publisher: Library of America
Rights: ISBN 978-1-59853-570-9

WENDELL BERRY

PORT WILLIAM NOVELS & STORIES:
THE CIVIL WAR TO WORLD WAR II

Jack Shoemaker, editor

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

Volume compilation, notes, and chronology copyright © 2018 by

Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Published in the United States by Library of America.

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing. Each year the Library adds new volumes to its collection of essential works by America’s foremost novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and statesmen.

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All texts published by arrangement with Counterpoint Press.

The Library of America wishes to thank Mary Berry for her assistance in the publication of this volume of her father’s work, and Michele Guthrie of The Berry Center for her efforts in helping prepare the Chronology.

Endpaper map and family tree designed by Molly O’Halloran. Genealogy prepared by David S. McCowen.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939510
e-ISBN 978–1–59853–570–9

First Printing

The Library of America—302

Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories:

The Civil War to World War II
is kept in print in memory of

OWSLEY BROWN II
(1942–2011)

in recognition of his support of The Berry

Center in New Castle, Kentucky, advocating for
farmers, land-conserving communities, and
healthy regional economies

with a gift from

HIS LOVING FAMILY

to the Guardians of American Letters Fund,
established by the Library of America
to ensure that every volume in the series
will be permanently available.

Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories:

The Civil War to World War II
is published with support from

THE GOULD FAMILY FOUNDATION

ELEANOR BINGHAM MILLER

STEVEN NIGHTINGALE

AN ANONYMOUS FRIEND

Contents

The Girl in the Window (1864)

The Hurt Man (1888)

Fly Away, Breath (1907)

A Consent (1908)

Pray Without Ceasing (1912)

Watch With Me (1916)

A Half-Pint of Old Darling (1920)

The Lost Bet (1929)

Nathan Coulter (1929–1941)

Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows (1930)

Thicker than Liquor (1930)

Nearly to the Fair (1932)

Burley Coulter’s Fortunate Fall (1934)

The Solemn Boy (1934)

A Jonquil for Mary Penn (1940)

Turn Back the Bed (1941)

A Burden (1882, 1907, 1941)

A Desirable Woman (1938–1941)

Misery (1943)

Andy Catlett: Early Education (1943)

Andy Catlett: Early Travels (1943)

Drouth (1944)

Stand By Me (1921–1944)

A World Lost (1944)

A Place on Earth (1945)

Making It Home (1945)

Not a Tear (1945)

Chronology

Note on the Texts

Notes

PORT WILLIAM

The Girl in the Window (1864)

THEY MIGHT as well all have been the same bunch, although they weren’t. Sometimes there would be enough gray uniforms or uniform pieces among them to permit them to be identified (perhaps) as Rebels. Sometimes they would be more formally recognizable as Yankees because they would all be dressed in uniforms that would be blue. Sometimes, because of their unlikeness to one another and to any living thing ever before seen in Port William, you couldn’t tell who they were. Whoever they were, the town shut itself against them like a terrapin closing its shell. From the yards and porches and storefronts along the single street, people withdrew behind doors. People who had ridden into town in a wagon or on horseback got themselves and their animals out of sight, if they could. Otherwise, they were apt to have to get away on foot, their mules or horses “requisitioned,” and if the younger men could get away at all before being arrested or “recruited.”

The Yankees would be looking for persons disloyal to the Union, a category not clearly defined, or for revenge against perpetrators of disloyal acts, which also were not well-defined or perhaps even definable. The Rebels would be on the lookout for recruits. The others, the self-described irregulars or guerillas, would be actuated, as like as not, by some local grudge going back a long time before the war. All of them, always, were looking for any livestock that could be ridden, worked, or eaten, anything that could be eaten, anything usable as a weapon, anything portable that was worth carrying away, any opportunity for amusing themselves by any of the cruelties available to those who had abjured, seemingly forever, the laws of kinship and friendship and neighborhood.

And Port William was isolated, beyond the reach of official help, too small and divided even to consider defending itself, both too Southern and too near the Ohio River.

Doing freely, beyond constraint or compunction, the things that it seemed men would do if they got the chance, they all were trouble, trouble when they were present, trouble when they were gone, no end of trouble. She feared them all, and therefore she hated them all.

She was Rebecca Dawe, daughter of Maxie and James John Dawe, sister of Galen Dawe who had been killed by a neighbor as he was leaving to join the Confederate army at the start of the war. Her two older sisters were at home on the river bottom farm down by Dawe’s Landing where their father had a store, and where the family and their handful of slaves provided more help in fact than was needed. She could be spared. And so she had come up to Port William to help her aunt Dicey, her mother’s sister, with her young children, to help with the work of the household, for her greater safety as her parents saw it, and as she herself saw it for relief from isolation in the great space of the river valley and from her parents’ grieving.

And Dicey needed her. Until Rebecca came, walking barefoot up from the river, carrying her shoes and extra clothing bundled in a shawl, Dicey had been alone with her three children, the oldest almost still a baby, and what she called her little dab of livestock: a milk cow, two shoats, and by now a bare dozen hens. Like some of the other houses in Port William, the Needlys’ fronted a small farm, theirs going narrowly all the way back to the woods on the river bluff. Dicey’s husband, Thomas Needly, the town’s only blacksmith, was in the federal military prison in Louisville for an “act of disloyalty.” One evening past dark, working mainly by feel, he had reset a shoe on a stranger’s horse. He had charged nothing. The stranger, who was in a hurry, had not asked what he owed, and Thomas, in the circumstances and from experience, was afraid to name the price. But the stranger had been the wrong one to help out with such a favor. He was a wanted man. He was caught, and on his testimony Thomas Needly was charged with aiding him in his attempt to escape.

A small band of federal soldiers came in the night, arrested Thomas, and carried him away. Dicey did not know why they had taken him or where, or if he was alive, until she received a long-delayed letter somehow smuggled out of the prison. It was a letter much beyond Thomas’s powers of writing, written for him in a determinedly beautiful flowing script by a fellow prisoner:

Mrs. Needley
dr. Madam:

Thos. Needley your houseband was put in here the fed. mil. jail at Louisvle on yesterday charged with aiding a Rebble. He says say he is well & alrite & fully abled of body & mind & send cloths, &c if poss.

a Friend

Dicey did send a packet of his clothes and a few other things that, not knowing, she thought might be of use. This he never received, nor did she hear from him again. Until the war ended nearly a year later, for all she knew, he had fallen off the edge of the world.

And it had been, she would think, a kind of world’s edge that he had been to, for he had come back from the helplessness and powerlessness of the dead. When he stood again at his anvil in his strength, in the fierce heat and exactitude of his old work, he had, it seemed to her, the aspect of one who had returned from the grave.

In Thomas’s absence, lacking his offering to the community of his needed work and its return of money, the household had become oversimplified and poor. Dicey, who had married late, was thirty, Rebecca just sixteen. They watched over the children. They kept house sparely and neatly. They gardened and foraged and traded for food, and accepted gratefully the food sent up to them from the Dawe household down in the river valley, always in small amounts as a precaution against theft and because, even at the Dawes’ place, food was hardly abundant.

The dab of livestock pertained to the two women and their household only conditionally. The two shoats, their ears notched, had been turned loose in the woods, and they were Dicey’s own still if they were not caught or shot by some band of soldiers or bushwhackers, and if ever she could get them penned and slaughtered when the time came. The chickens, too easily stolen from the henhouse, had been allowed to go half wild, roosting in trees and hiding their nests in the weeds or the barn, at the mercy of predators. The cow they had saved from theft or slaughter, so far, by confining her in the farthest pasture. Thomas had built in a corner next to the woods a pen of split rails and a small shed where some hay could be stored. To this pen Rebecca carried the milk bucket every morning and every evening, the children following along. And then she carried home again enough milk to drink fresh and to keep them in cream and butter and clabber. “The cow,” said Dicey, who liked to say things well, “is our luck and our luxury.”

This was late in the summer of 1864, and their luxuries were in fact lucky, and rare. But they were living in what Rebecca was learning fast to recognize as the human condition, in which things are most clearly known by their opposites. She and the others were most touchingly and dearly living because Galen Dawe and so many others were dead, because so many boys even as young as Rebecca had been killed in battle, cut down like weeds. They were most movingly, most consciously and thoughtfully free, because Thomas and so many others were in prison. They ate with relish their frugal meals because of the lively possibility that even they, before the coming winter would be over, could be hungry. They were gathering in and preserving and putting away, even hiding, every surplus scrap of food. There would be stuff yet from the garden. In the fall they would gather walnuts and hickory nuts from the woods. They might, with help, catch and slaughter the two hogs. But the prospect was neither bounteous nor certain.

There were times when their thoughts were carried round and round by hope and fear, courage and resignation. Dicey said, “Lord, I reckon the pore human race has come to a many a fall such as this one. We’ll make it, maybe, if those creatures don’t steal the food right out of our mouths.”

At the start of the war she had been openly in sympathy with the Confederacy, like the rest of her family. By now all the violent ones in their bunches she called, without distinction, “creatures.” It was a vital, reverberant word when she said it, for as she acknowledged with frank reluctance the belonging of all creatures to God she pointedly refused to these the classification of “human.” Even at the height of her resentment and indignation she did not curse them. But she made no distinction between them and the other creatures—“supposedly,” as she would say, “lower”—who conducted themselves in bunches. The state was occupied officially by the Union army. She did not indulge herself by supposing that official occupation by the Confederate army would have been better or, for that matter, different. Power—and for how long?—was the power of the bunch.

The bunches had been with them from the beginning. In the summer of 1861 a company of recruits of each side had drilled in Port William on the same day, and by their taunting back and forth had come close to a shooting scrape right there in the road. “It was almost history,” Dicey said. “It would have been known as the Battle of Port William.” If it had happened, it would have been as intimate an engagement almost as a family quarrel. No strangers would have been involved. Everybody in each company knew everybody in the other one. It would have been Port William’s own. The town and the countryside were divided most cruelly, for the division was not among strangers but among neighbors and kinfolk. That was why in the Port William neighborhood the violence peripheral to the official war was never entirely at rest. In addition to the almost routine recruiting or kidnapping, arresting and stealing, there were barn-burnings and other acts of vandalism. Threats were shouted from the darkness, or delivered openly to housewives standing in their doorways. And there were rumors, groundless as often as not, but grounded firmly nonetheless on experience.

The effort of the day was all but over, though the sun was still well up in the sky. Rebecca and the children had walked back to attend to the cow and walked home again with the milk, giving Dicey time to set the house to rights and have a little quiet. Rebecca then had come upstairs to her bedroom, for she loved the stillness of the ordered house at the day’s end, and she too needed her quiet. The house, especially the upstairs rooms, was warm beyond comfort, but she sat still by the open front window for the touch of a breeze that was there, and looked out as she liked to do. In a while they would have a supper of milk and cold biscuits and other leftovers from dinner, and then she and Dicey would sit on the front porch in the gathering dusk while the children played in the yard. By full dark all of them would be in bed—“to save light,” Dicey would say, meaning candles and lamp oil.

The shadows of the house and the trees beside it had reached all the way across the road to the Feltner house shut and quiet on the other side. And then the murmur of voices from down along the few storefronts of the town became briefly louder and then ceased altogether. She heard the hoofbeats of one horse galloping away along one of the paths that led out from the town into the fields. A shiver passed over her as shivers do when somebody has stepped on the place that will be your grave. She leaned in her chair to look, and saw coming down the hill from the schoolhouse, toward the stores and the bank and the church in the town’s middle, a little band of riders. They rode at a walk, looking around. When they came among the business places, now evidently shut and deserted, they stopped, bunching together, and then began riding erratically back and forth, leaning now and again from their saddles to test a latch or to pound a fist on a locked door. One of them fired a pistol into the air. They were well-armed, with holstered pistols and long guns scabbarded or lying across the saddle bows. One of them had a sheathed saber dangling at his side.

That the one had so reasonlessly fired his pistol suggested to Rebecca that they were there without a purpose, looking merely for whatever they might find. But watching them was in fact like watching creatures of another species, a flock of blackbirds or a school of shad. Everything they had done seemed to her familiar and unsurprising, but she could not in the least anticipate what they would do next. It was this sense of their oddity, their utter strangeness, that made her afraid of them. Her fear was a palpable tremor inside her, but even though she was alone she did not allow any visible sign that she was afraid. She stayed as she was, quietly watching. The breeze bore up to her window the warm smells of horse sweat and dust, and now and again the voices of the riders.

She had no idea who they were. They clearly were not Yankees of the force of occupation. But there were several other possibilities. They could have been strayed Rebels or members of the so-called Home Guard or irregulars or bushwhackers, who could have been anybody with any cause or intention. In Port William the war had a lot of sides; it was hard to tell how many or which was which. Worse, it was sometimes hard to tell who in Port William was on which side. This had made the town cautious, and as a result far less talkative than it had been before the war and would come to be again years after it ended. During the war Port William found it hard to keep to its old way of talking to itself about itself. As nearly everybody seemed to know, there were great men at the top of the contending governments and armies who foresaw and even desired that eventually the war would have an official end, but at the bottom were men who did not care if it never ended.

She would remember all her life the threatful or wanton or heartless things she saw during the years of the war, and in fact during many years following—unofficial acts of violence as surely permitted by the war as if they had been determined by policy. The war also had given her two visions of such acts which she had not seen, but which she saw in her mind in such detail that she might as well have seen them with her eyes.

She could see, she would see all her life, her brother Galen on the bay gelding known as Rex, starting to a place near Smallwood where a company of Confederate volunteers was known to be gathering. He was senior to Rebecca by eleven years and therefore, to her, a mature man. But in her vision of him, as she grew older, he became younger, until the day when, in her never-finished sorrow, the realization would come: “He was just a boy!”

He sat well on his horse. He rode alone and—as she saw, as in her vision she increasingly understood—his face had a certain solemnity as if, the hesitance and effort of his decision now behind him, he felt himself a man fated to war—though not, surely, a man fated to be killed in that moment, before he could breathe again.

The family knew who did it, though there was no witness, no avowal, no evidence that was indisputable. And so the story she knew was not the story only of her brother, but in her vision he was alone, and when she heard the shot it surprised her. Every time the vision returned to her in the night or in the daytime when she sat alone the shot surprised her—for she saw each time that Galen anticipated nothing, was aware perhaps of nothing but himself and his horse passing on their way. It seemed to her that Galen did not hear the shot. He fell at once and cleanly from the saddle, delivered out of time without even a suspicion of the cause. The ones who happened upon his body found the horse nearby, grazing along the roadside.

The second vision was from the fall of 1863, more than two years after the first. Several slaves, five or six of them, both men and women, were cutting and shocking corn by moonlight out on the Bird’s Branch Road, not far from the church. In her vision she saw them plainly, working steadily along to the rhythm that their corn knives hacked into the rustling of the dry corn. They were singing. They were singing, “Freedom! Oh, freedom!” That was all the song, but they sang it back and forth among themselves. Sometimes they would fall silent, and then the song continued unsung to the beat of the knives. And then a solitary voice would lift into the moonlight, “Oh, freedom!” and then they would all sing, “Freedom! Oh, freedom!” a cry that was old and creaturely and human. Later she would imagine that there had rarely been a time, and in Port William after slavery perhaps never again a time, when the word “freedom” had been so understandingly sounded. As the singers sang, they worked. As they worked, the rows of standing corn slowly became fewer and the rows of shocks increased. Over the striking of the knives and the steady rustling of the corn and the singing, the moonlight fell as if a greater silence were thus made visible.

And Rebecca saw too, following the narrow road up the rise from the church, another of the little bands of hostile men that in those years crisscrossed the neighborhood, leaving it each time, it seemed to her, worse than it had been before, just as they crisscrossed also her own mind, leaving it each time sadder and yet stronger and less to be fooled.

There was no question who these were, for the people of Port William had come by various ways to know for certain. These were Confederate cavalry, six men and an officer. Their presence was perhaps accountable by some minor event or accident of the war, and yet, to her own mind, it was factual without being explainable. They simply were there, alien and unbelonging, as they had been wherever they had come from, as they would be wherever they would go, like all the others who had been displaced by the unaiming destiny of the bunch.

As they came up along the corn rows and into the sound of the Negroes’ singing and understood it, that word rising as if by nature out of bondage, the officer abruptly spurred his horse, put him to the rock fence beside the road, and neatly cleared it. He rode in among the crew of workers—they were scattering, running like quail into the standing corn. Drawing his pistol, he shot the eldest of them, a slave man named Tucker, point-blank in the side of the head.

It was no wonder that her time to marry came late for a young woman of Port William. It came when she was twenty-four, seven years after the formal, the “historical,” ending of the war. The nighttime reprisals of vengeful men—the unofficial violence set loose and still nominally justified by official violence—were still terrorizing the country. Her own repugnance and disdain persisted in those years of official peace. She would not be wedded, she could hardly bear to be looked at, by the young men of her own place, every one of whom seemed to her to bear the taint of what she called ever after “that awfulness.” She married instead an Irish immigrant who, to escape the bunch-violence that ruled his own land, had come to America and, hearing that a “shoe cobbler” was needed, finally to Port William.

Though she was old enough in that summer of 1864 for a Port William girl to be married, the awfulness already had driven any thought of courtship or marriage from her mind. She had instead taken a defensive stand on the side merely of the helpless and the threatened. On their behalf she distrusted all the creatures of the bunches and the weapons. That was why she sat still in her fear and watched as the alien riders, in the absence or invisibility of the entire membership of the town, occupied and ruled over the empty road.

And then, seeing nothing easily to be taken or enjoyed, they began to give the place up. They gathered again in the road and formed raggedly a line, resuming the direction that would carry them on through the town and finally into the river valley.

Looking away then in the direction they were going to go, she saw hanging over the river a single small white cloud just touched by the gold of the weakening sun. And then she saw, as if wonder must now be added to the new normality of outrage, the figure of a walking man emerge into the open concavity of the road as it came up out of the valley and turned toward the town. She knew immediately who it was, as she might have recognized at a distance too far for reading the character of her own script. It was Eli, her mother’s slave, with a split basket on his arm, bringing to her and Dicey, she supposed, some gift of food. Alone, old and ambling, visible against the bare horizon as the chimney of a burned house, he would be at the mercy of the riders, who had not yet seen him, though they would see him as soon as they looked. They would surround him on their horses. They would point their guns at him for the pleasure of seeing him frightened. They would demand the basket. Or worse. They could do worse. They could do as they pleased.

In her mind a thought like a prayer cried out: “Eli! Get out of sight!”

She looked quickly at the line of riders now coming up even with her window, and then quickly back at Eli. For another wonder, he had seen them first. Exactly as if he had heard her unspoken warning, he had vanished.

Relieved, she now looked only at the line of riders as one by one they straggled by. Their horses were fairly fit and of fairly good stock. The men in general rode them well enough, with an evident sense of their power, even maybe of pomp, and yet still she felt their strangeness, the strangeness of their ability now, in their bunch, to do as they pleased. They were like biting dogs. Emboldened by the fear they had caused, they longed for pursuit, but they had found as yet nobody to pursue.

They had almost gone by. She had almost relaxed her strict vigilance over her fear—her courage, though she had not called it so, that had kept her sitting and watching. She was ready to stand up, shake herself, and go to find Dicey and the children, when the last of the line of riders glanced up and saw her.

He stopped his horse, turned him to face the house, and sat looking up at her. Having recovered her stillness, pressing firmly downward within herself the physical tremor of her fright, she looked back at him. He was a young man with a curly, sand-colored beard. To somebody else, or in different circumstances, he might have seemed even, in his fashion, a handsome young man. But she feared him and she hated him, and without flinching she looked back at him.

She thought, and the thought was familiar to her, how easy it would have been, if she had had a gun, if she had placed herself a few feet back in the shadowy room, to have shot him dead. And then she thought immediately, for this thought also was familiar, of the endlessness of such an act, or of its many ends multiplying unforeseeably forever. Maybe it was that thought that kept most people out of the way of such acts, when they could keep out of the way of them.

She knew she was daring him. She meant her facing him, her looking back, to be merely a refusal to be cowed by him. But she knew, she felt, the boldness even of so quiet a refusal. The deliberate impassivity of her face he would see as impudent. He would be challenged by it. He could, if he wished, shoot her and get clean away, unwitnessed, his shot not necessarily causing his companions even to look back.

His reprisal, though not violent, though it did not cause her to move or change expression, was nonetheless shocking to her, for it was just as unexpected as she expected it to be. He said without raising his voice, in perfect contempt, “Get your ugly face out of that window.”

Though for some time she continued to watch him, defying him, for she trembled now with the knowledge that she gladly would have killed him, he went on and did not look back.

Finally she allowed herself to look away. She willed herself free of her anger and her fear. She allowed the familiar room and all the house, quiet and warm and shadowy, to come round her again. Old Eli, wherever he was out there in the dimming country, was safe. The household and the town still were silent. Chances were there would be no human sound again until morning.

She got up from her chair. She would go now to find the others. They would fix supper and eat. They would let another evening come upon them. They would sleep.

As she went by the mirror on her dresser, she paused a moment and looked in. Unlike her mother, but as her daughter Margaret would be in her turn, she was a young woman of principled modesty. She would not have liked to catch herself thinking of herself as beautiful, though she was. But she did think, articulating the words deliberately as if saying them aloud: “That is not an ugly face.”

The Hurt Man (1888)

WHEN HE was five Mat Feltner, like every other five-year-old who had lived in Port William until then, was still wearing dresses. In his own thoughts he was not yet sure whether he would turn out to be a girl or a boy, though instinct by then had prompted him to take his place near the tail end of the procession of Port William boys. His nearest predecessors in that so far immortal straggle had already taught him the small art of smoking cigars, along with the corollary small art of chewing coffee beans to take the smoke smell off his breath. And so in a rudimentary way he was an outlaw, though he did not know it, for none of his grown-ups had yet thought to forbid him to smoke.

His outgrown dresses he saw worn daily by a pretty neighbor named Margaret Finley, who to him might as well have been another boy too little to be of interest, or maybe even a girl, though it hardly mattered—and though, because of a different instinct, she would begin to matter to him a great deal in a dozen years, and after that she would matter to him all his life.

The town of Port William consisted of two rows of casually maintained dwellings and other buildings scattered along a thoroughfare that nobody had ever dignified by calling it a street; in wet times it hardly deserved to be called a road. Between the town’s two ends the road was unevenly rocked, but otherwise had not much distinguished itself from the buffalo trace it once had been. At one end of the town was the school, at the other the graveyard. In the center there were several stores, two saloons, a church, a bank, a hotel, and a blacksmith shop. The town was the product of its own becoming, which, if not accidental exactly, had also been unplanned. It had no formal government or formal history. It was without pretense or ambition, for it was the sort of place that pretentious or ambitious people were inclined to leave. It had never declared an aspiration to become anything it was not. It did not thrive so much as it merely lived, doing the things it needed to do to stay alive. This tracked and rubbed little settlement had been built in a place of great natural abundance and beauty, which it had never valued highly enough or used well enough, had damaged, and yet had not destroyed. The town’s several buildings, shaped less by art than by need and use, had suffered tellingly and even becomingly a hundred years of wear.

Though Port William sat on a ridge of the upland, still it was a river town; its economy and its thoughts turned toward the river. Distance impinged on it from the river, whose waters flowed from the eastward mountains ultimately, as the town always was more or less aware, to the sea, to the world. Its horizon, narrow enough though it reached across the valley to the ridgeland fields and farmsteads on the other side, was pierced by the river, which for the next forty years would still be its main thoroughfare. Commercial people, medicine showmen, evangelists, and other river travelers came up the hill from Dawes Landing to stay at the hotel in Port William, which in its way cherished these transients, learned all it could about them, and talked of what it learned.

Mat would remember the town’s then-oldest man, Uncle Bishop Bower, who would confront any stranger, rap on the ground with his long staff, and demand, “Sir! What might your name be?”

And Herman Goslin, no genius, made his scant living by meeting the steamboats and transporting the disembarking passengers, if any, up to the hotel in a gimpy buckboard. One evening as he approached the hotel with a small trunk on his shoulder, followed by a large woman with a parasol, one of the boys playing marbles in the road said, “Here comes Herman Goslin with a fat lady’s trunk.”

“You boys can kiss that fat lady’s ass,” said Herman Goslin. “Ain’t that tellin ’em, fat lady?”

The town was not built nearer the river perhaps because there was no room for it at the foot of the hill, or perhaps because, as the town loved to reply to the inevitable question from travelers resting on the hotel porch, nobody knew where the river was going to run when they built Port William.

And Port William did look as though it had been itself forever. To Mat at the age of five, as he later would suppose, remembering himself, it must have seemed eternal, like the sky.

However eternal it might have been, the town was also as temporal, lively, and mortal as it possibly could be. It stirred and hummed from early to late with its own life and with the life it drew into itself from the countryside. It was a center, and especially on Saturdays and election days its stores and saloons and the road itself would be crowded with people standing, sitting, talking, whittling, trading, and milling about. This crowd was entirely familiar to itself; it remembered all its history of allegiances, offenses, and resentments, going back from the previous Saturday to the Civil War and long before that. Like every place, it had its angers, and its angers as always, as everywhere, found justifications. And in Port William, a dozen miles by river from the court house and the rule of law, anger had a license that it might not have had in another place. Sometimes violence would break out in one of the saloons or in the road. Then proof of mortality would be given in blood.

And the mortality lived and suffered daily in the town was attested with hopes of immortality by the headstones up in the graveyard, which was even then more populous than the town. Mat knew—at the age of five he had already forgotten when he had found out—that he had a brother and two sisters up there, with carved lambs resting on the tops of their small monuments, their brief lives dated beneath. In all the time he had known her, his mother had worn black.

But to him, when he was five, those deaths were stories told. Nothing in Port William seemed to him to be in passage from any beginning to any end. The living had always been alive, the dead always dead. The world, as he knew it then, simply existed, familiar even in its changes: the town, the farms, the slopes and ridges, the woods, the river, and the sky over it all. He had not yet gone farther from Port William than to Dawes Landing on the river and to his Uncle Jack Beecham’s place out on the Bird’s Branch Road, the place his mother spoke of as “out home.” He had seen the steamboats on the river and had looked out from the higher ridgetops, and so he understood that the world went on into the distance, but he did not know how much more of it there might be.

Mat had come late into the lives of Nancy and Ben Feltner, after the deaths of their other children, and he had come unexpectedly, “a blessing.” They prized him accordingly. For the first four or so years of his life he was closely watched, by his parents and also by Cass and Smoke, Cass’s husband, who had been slaves. But now he was five, and it was a household always busy with the work of the place, and often full of company. There had come to be times, because his grown-ups were occupied and he was curious and active, when he would be out of their sight. He would stray off to where something was happening, to the farm buildings behind the house, to the blacksmith shop, to one of the saloons, to wherever the other boys were. He was beginning his long study of the town and its place in the world, gathering up the stories that in years still far off he would hand on to his grandson Andy Catlett, who in his turn would be trying to master the thought of time: that there were times before his time, and would be times after. At the age of five Mat was beginning to prepare himself to help in educating his grandson, though he did not know it.

His grown-ups, more or less willingly, were letting him go. The town had its dangers. There were always horses in the road, and sometimes droves of cattle or sheep or hogs or mules. There were in fact uncountable ways for a boy to get hurt, or worse. But in spite of her losses, Nancy Beechum Feltner was not a frightened woman, as her son would learn. He would learn also that, though she maintained her sorrows with a certain loyalty, wearing her black, she was a woman of practical good sense and strong cheerfulness. She knew that the world was risky and that she must risk her surviving child to it as she had risked the others, and when the time came she straightforwardly did so.

But she knew also that the town had its ways of looking after its own. Where its worst dangers were, grown-ups were apt to be. When Mat was out of the sight of her or his father or Cass or Smoke, he was most likely in the sight of somebody else who would watch him. He would thus be corrected, consciously ignored, snatched out of danger, cursed, teased, hugged, instructed, spanked, or sent home by any grown-up into whose sight he may have strayed. Within that watchfulness he was free—and almost totally free when, later, he had learned to escape it and thus had earned his freedom. “This was a free country when I was a boy,” he would sometimes say to Andy, his grandson.

When he was five and for some while afterward, his mother drew the line unalterably only between him and the crowds that filled the town on Saturday afternoons and election days when there would be too much drinking, with consequences that were too probable. She would not leave him alone then. She would not let him go into the town, and she would not trust him to go anywhere else, for fear that he would escape into the town from wherever else she let him go. She kept him in sight.

That was why they were sitting together on the front porch for the sake of the breeze there on a hot Saturday afternoon in the late summer of 1888. Mat was sitting close to his mother on the wicker settee, watching her work. She had brought out her sewing basket and was darning socks, stretching the worn-through heels or toes over her darning egg and weaving them whole again with her needle and thread. At such work her fingers moved with a quickness and assurance that fascinated Mat, and he loved to watch her. She would have been telling him a story. She was full of stories. Aside from the small movements of her hands and the sound of her voice, they were quiet with a quietness that seemed to have increased as it had grown upon them. Cass had gone home after the dinner dishes were done. The afternoon had half gone by.

From where they sat they could see down into the town where the Saturday crowd was, and they could hear it. Doors slammed, now and then a horse nickered, the talking of the people was a sustained murmur from which now and then a few intelligible words escaped: a greeting, some bit of raillery, a reprimand to a horse, an oath. It was a large crowd in a small place, a situation in which a small disagreement could become dangerous in a hurry. Such things had happened often enough. That was why Mat was under watch.

And so when a part of the crowd intensified into a knot, voices were raised, and there was a scuffle, Mat and his mother were not surprised. They were not surprised even when a bloodied man broke out of the crowd and began running fast up the street toward them, followed by other running men whose boot heels pounded on the road.

The hurt man ran toward them where they were sitting on the porch. He was hatless. His hair, face, and shirt were bloody, and his blood dripped on the road. Mat felt no intimation of threat or danger. He simply watched, transfixed. He did not see his mother stand and put down her work. When she caught him by the back of his dress and fairly poked him through the front door—“Here! Get inside!”—he still was only alert, unsurprised.

He expected her to come into the house with him. What finally surprised him was that she did not do so. Leaving him alone in the wide hall, she remained outside the door, holding it open for the hurt man. Mat ran halfway up the stairs then and turned and sat down on a step. He was surprised now but not afraid.

When the hurt man ran in through the door, instead of following him in, Nancy Feltner shut the door and stood in front of it. Mat could see her through the door glass, standing with her hand on the knob as the clutch of booted and hatted pursuers came up the porch steps. They bunched at the top of the steps, utterly stopped by the slender woman dressed in mourning, holding the door shut.

And then one of them, snatching off his hat, said, “It’s all right, Mrs. Feltner. We’re his friends.”

She hesitated a moment, studying them, and then she opened the door to them also and turned and came in ahead of them.

The hurt man had run the length of the hall and through the door at the end of it and out onto the back porch. Nancy, with the bunch of men behind her, followed where he had gone, the men almost with delicacy, as it seemed to Mat, avoiding the line of blood drops along the hall floor. And Mat hurried back down the stairs and came along in his usual place at the tail end, trying to see, among the booted legs and carried hats, what had become of the hurt man.

Mat’s memory of that day would always be partly incomplete. He never knew who the hurt man was. He knew some of the others. The hurt man had sat down or dropped onto a slatted green bench on the porch. He might have remained nameless to Mat because of the entire strangeness of the look of him. He had shed the look of a man and assumed somehow the look of all things badly hurt. Now that he had stopped running, he looked used up. He was pallid beneath the streaked bright blood, breathing in gasps, his eyes too widely open. He looked as though he had just come up from almost too deep a dive.

Nancy went straight to him, the men, the friends, clustered behind her, deferring, no longer to her authority as the woman of the house, as when she had stopped them at the front door, but now to her unhesitating, unthinking acceptance of that authority.

Looking at the hurt man, whose blood was dripping onto the bench and the porch floor, she said quietly, perhaps only to herself, “Oh my!” It was as though she knew him without ever having known him before.

She leaned and picked up one of his hands. “Listen!” she said, and the man brought his gaze it seemed from nowhere and looked up at her. “You’re at Ben Feltner’s house,” she said. “Your friends are here. You’re going to be all right.”

She looked around at the rest of them who were standing back, watching her. “Jessie, you and Tom go see if you can find the doctor, if he’s findable.” She glanced at the water bucket on the shelf over the wash table by the kitchen door, remembering that it was nearly empty. “Les, go bring a fresh bucket of water.” To the remaining two she said, “Get his shirt off. Cut it off. Don’t try to drag it over his head. So we can see where he’s hurt.”

She stepped through the kitchen door, and they could hear her going about inside. Presently she came back with a kettle of water still warm from the noon fire and a bundle of clean rags.

“Look up here,” she said to the hurt man, and he looked up.

She began gently to wash his face. Wherever he was bleeding, she washed away the blood: first his face, and then his arms, and then his chest and sides. As she washed, exposing the man’s wounds, she said softly only to herself, “Oh!” or “Oh my!” She folded the white rags into pads and instructed the hurt man and his friends to press them onto his cuts to stop the bleeding. She said, “It’s the Lord’s own mercy we’ve got so many hands,” for the man had many wounds. He had begun to tremble. She kept saying to him, as she would have spoken to a child, “You’re going to be all right.”

Mat had been surprised when she did not follow him into the house, when she waited on the porch and opened the door to the hurt man and then to his friends. But she had not surprised him after that. He saw her as he had known her: a woman who did what the world put before her to do.

At first he stayed well back, for he did not want to be told to get out of the way. But as his mother made order, he grew bolder and drew gradually closer until he was almost at her side. And then he was again surprised, for then he saw her face.

What he saw in her face would remain with him forever. It was pity, but it was more than that. It was a hurt love that seemed to include entirely the hurt man. It included him and disregarded everything else. It disregarded the aura of whiskey that ordinarily she would have resented; it disregarded the blood puddled on the porch floor and the trail of blood through the hall.

Mat was familiar with her tenderness and had thought nothing of it. But now he recognized it in her face and in her hands as they went out to the hurt man’s wounds. To him, then, it was as though she leaned in the black of her mourning over the whole hurt world itself, touching its wounds with her tenderness, in her sorrow.

Loss came into his mind then, and he knew what he was years away from telling, even from thinking: that his mother’s grief was real; that her children in their graves once had been alive; that everybody lying under the grass up in the graveyard once had been alive and had walked in daylight in Port William. And this was a part, and belonged to the deliverance, of the town’s hard history of love.

The hurt man, Mat thought, was not going to die, but he knew from his mother’s face that the man could die and someday would. She leaned over him, touching his bleeding wounds that she bathed and stanched and bound, and her touch had in it the promise of healing, some profound encouragement.

It was the knowledge of that encouragement, of what it had cost her, of what it would cost her and would cost him, that then finally came to Mat, and he fled away and wept.

What did he learn from his mother that day? He learned it all his life. There are few words for it, perhaps none. After that, her losses would be his. The losses would come. They would come to him and his mother. They would come to him and Margaret, his wife, who as a child had worn his cast-off dresses. They would come, even as Mat watched, growing old, to his grandson, Andy, who would remember his stories and write them down.

But from that day, whatever happened, there was a knowledge in Mat that was unsurprised and at last comforted, until he was old, until he was gone.

Fly Away, Breath (1907)

ANDY CATLETT keeps in his mind a map of the country around Port William as he has known it all his life and as he has been told about it all his life from times and lives before his. There are moments, now that he is getting old, when he seems to reside in that country in his mind even as his mind still resides in the country.

This is the country of his own life and history, fragmentary as they necessarily have been. It is his known country. And perhaps it differs also from the actual, momentary country insofar as time is one of its dimensions, as reckonable in thought as length and breadth, as air and light. His thought can travel like a breeze over water back and forth upon the face of it, and also back and forth in time along its streams and roads.

As in thought he passes backward into time, the country becomes quieter, and it seems to grow larger. The sounds of engines become less frequent and farther apart until finally they cease altogether. As the roads get poorer or disappear, the distances between places seem to grow longer. Distances that he can now travel in minutes in an automobile once would have taken hours and much effort.

But it is possible, even so, to look back with a certain fondness to a time when the sounds of engines were not almost constant in the sky, on the roads, and in the fields. Our descendants may know such a time again when the petroleum all is burnt. How they will fare then will depend on the neighborly wisdom, the love for the place and its genius, and the skills that they may manage to revive between now and then.

The country in Andy Catlett’s mind has assuredly a past, which exists in relics and scraps of memory more or less subject to proof. It has presumably a future that will verify itself only by becoming the past. Its present is somewhat conjectural, for old Andy Catlett, like everybody else, cannot be conscious of the present while he is thinking of the past. And most of us, most of the time, think mostly of the past. Even when we say, “We are living now,” we can mean only that we were living a moment ago.

Nevertheless, in this sometimes horrifying, sometimes satisfying, never-sufficiently-noticed present, between a past mostly forgotten and a future that we deserve to fear but cannot predict, some few things can be recalled.

In all the country from Port William to the river, one light shines. It is from a flame on the wick of an oil lamp, turned low, on a little stand table at the bedside of Maximilla Dawe in a large unpainted house facing the river in Glenn’s Bottom between Catlett’s Fork and Bird’s Branch. The old lady lies somewhat formally upon the bed, seemingly asleep, in a long-sleeved flannel nightgown, clean but not new, the covers laid neatly over her. Her arms lie at her sides, the veined and gnarled old hands at rest. She is propped, in the appearance at least of comfort, on several pillows, for she is so bent by age and work that she could not lie flat.

She has been old a long time. Though “Maximilla” was inscribed in her father’s will, by which he left her the farm in the river bottom, the family of “the slave woman known as Cat,” and his stopped gold watch, and though it was signed in her own hand at the end of two or three legal documents, she was never well known even to herself by that name. Once upon a time she was “Maxie”—“Miss Maxie” to the Negroes and some whites. For at least as long, to herself as to all the neighborhood of Port William, she has been “Aunt Maxie.” To her granddaughter, who was Andy Catlett’s grandmother, she had always been “Granny Dawe,” as to Andy she still is known.

Andy’s grandmother, born Margaret Finley, now Margaret Feltner, sits by the bedside of Granny Dawe in that room in the dim lamplight in the broad darkness of the river valley in the fall of 1907, a hundred years ago. Margaret Feltner is a pretty woman—or girl, as the older women still would have called her—with a peculiar air of modesty, for she knows she is pretty but would prefer not to be caught knowing it. She is slenderly formed and neatly dressed, even prettily dressed, for her modesty must contend also with her knowledge that her looks are pleasing to Mat Feltner, her young husband.

With her are three other young women, also granddaughters of the old woman on the bed. They are Bernice Gibbs, and Oma and Callie Knole. Kinswomen who know one another well, they sit close together, leaving a sort of aisle between their chairs and the bed.

Their voices are low, and their conversation has become more and more intermittent as the night has gone on. The ancient woman on the bed breathes audibly, but slowly too and tentatively, so that they who listen even as they talk are aware that at any moment there may be one more breath, and then no more.

But she is dying in no haste, this Aunt Maxie, this Granny Dawe, who lived and worked so long before she began to die that she was the only one alive who still knew what she had known. She was born in 1814 in the log house that long ago was replaced by the one in which she now is dying. At the time of her birth, the Port William neighborhood was still in its dream of itself as a frontier, “the West,” a new land. The chief artery of trade and transportation for that part of the country then was the river, as it would be for the next hundred years. When the time came, she bestowed her land, her slaves, and herself upon a man named James John Dawe, whose worldly fortune consisted of a singular knack for trade and the store and landing, the port of Port William, known as Dawe’s Landing. He left the care of the farm to her. With the strength and the will and the determined good sense that have kept the farm and household in her own hands until now, she ruled and she served through times that were mostly hard.

The Civil War had its official realization in movements of armies and great battles in certain places, but in places such as Port William it released and licensed an unofficial violence also terrible, and more lasting. At its outset, Galen Dawe, on his way to join the Confederate army, was shot from his horse and left dead in the road, no farther on his way than Port William, by a neighbor, a Union sympathizer, with whom he had quarreled. And Maxie Dawe, with the help of a slave man named Punkin, loaded the dead boy onto a sled drawn by a team of mules. Looking neither right nor left at those who watched, she brought home the mortal body of her one son, which she washed and dressed herself, and herself read the great psalm over him as he lay in his grave.

The rest of her children were daughters, four of them. Her grief and her bearing in her grief gave her a sort of headship over daughters and husband that they granted without her ever requiring it. When a certain superiority to suffering, a certain indomitability, was required, she was the one who had it. Later, when a band of self-denominated “Rebel” cavalry hung about the neighborhood, she saved her husband, the capable merchant James John, from forcible recruitment or murder, they never knew which, by hiding him three weeks in a succession of corn shocks, carrying food and water to him after dark. By her cunning and sometimes her desperate bravery, she brought her surviving family, her slaves, and even a few head of livestock through the official and the unofficial wars, only to bury her husband, dead of a fever, at the end of the official one.

When the slaves were freed in Kentucky, when at last she had heard, she gathered those who had been her own into the kitchen. She told them: “Slavery is no more, and you are free. If you wish to stay and share our fate, you are free to stay, and I will divide with you as I can. If you wish to go, you are free to go.”

There were six of them, the remaining family of the woman known as Cat, and they left the next morning, taking, each of them, what could be carried bundled in one hand, all of them invested with an official permission that had made them strange to everything that had gone before. They left, perhaps, from no antipathy to staying, for they arrived in Hargrave and lived there under the name of Dawe—but how could they have known they were free to go if they had not gone? Or so, later, Maxie Dawe would explain it, and she would add, “And so would I have, had it been me.”

She and her place never recovered from the war. Unable to manage it herself, and needing money, she sold the landing. She hired what help she could afford. She rented her croplands on the shares. After her daughters married and went away, she stayed on alone. To her young granddaughters, and probably to herself as well, the world of the first half of her life was another world.

No more would she be “Maxie” to anybody. Increasingly she would be “Aunt Maxie.” She was respected. By those who lacked the sense to respect her she was feared. She held herself strictly answerable to her necessities. She worked in the fields as in the house. Strange and doubtful stories were told about her, all of them perhaps true. She was said to have shot off a man’s ear, only his ear, so he would live to tell it.

And now her long life, so strongly determined or so determinedly accepted by her, has at last submitted. It is declining gently, perhaps willingly, toward its end. It has been nearly a day and now most of a night since she uttered a word or opened her eyes. A younger person so suddenly moribund as she would have been dead long ago. But she seems only asleep, her aspect that of a dreamer enthralled. The two vertical creases between her brows suggest that she is raptly attentive to her dream.

That she is dying, she herself knows, or knew, for early in the morning of the previous day, not long before she fell into her present sleep, her voice, to those who bent to listen, seeming to float above the absolute stillness of her body, and with the tone perhaps of a small exasperation, she said, “Well, if this is dying, I’ve seen living that was worse.”

The night began cloudy, and the clouds have deepened over the valley and the old house with its one light. The first frosts have come, hushing the crickets and the katydids. The country seems to be waiting. At about dawn a season-changing rain will begin so quietly that at first nobody will notice, and it will fall without letup for two days.

When midnight passes through the room, nobody knows, neither the old woman on the bed nor the young ones who watch beside it. The room would seem poor, so meager and worn are its furnishings, except that its high ceiling and fine proportions give it a dignity that in the circumstances is austere. Though the night is not quite chilly, the sternness of the room and the presence of death in it seemed to call for additional warmth, and the young wives have kindled a little fire. From time to time, one or another has risen to take from the stone hearth a stick of wood and lay it on the coals. From time to time, one or another has risen to smooth the bedclothes that need no smoothing, or to lay a hand upon the old woman’s forehead, or to touch lightly the pulse fluttering at her wrist.

After midnight, stillness grows upon them all. The talk has stopped, the fire subsided to a glow, when Bernice Gibbs raises her hand and the others look at her. Bernice is the oldest of the four. The others have granted her an authority which, like their grandmother perhaps, she has accepted merely because she has it and the others don’t. She looks at each of them and looks away, listening.

They listen, and they hear not a sound. They hear instead a silence that reaches into every room and into the expectant night beyond. They rise from their chairs, first Bernice, and then, hesitantly, the others. They tiptoe to the bed, two to a side, and lean, listening, at that edge which they and all their children too have now passed beyond. The silence grows palpable around them, a weight.

Now, as Andy Catlett imagines his way into this memory that is his own only because he has imagined it, he is never quite prepared for what he knows to have happened next. Always it comes to him somewhat by surprise, as it came to those who remembered it from the actual room and the actual night.

In silence that seems to them utterly conclusive, the young women lean above the body of the old woman, the mold in which their own flesh was cast, and they listen. And then, just when one of them might have been ready to say, “She’s gone,” the old woman releases with a sigh her held breath: “Hooo!”

They startle backward from the bedside, each seeing in the wide-opened mouths and eyes of the others her own fright. Oma Knole, who is clumsy, strikes the lamp and it totters until Bernice catches and steadies it.

They stand now and look at one another. The silence has changed. The dying woman’s utterance, brief as it was, spoke of a great weariness. It was the sigh of one who has been kept waiting. The sound hangs in the air as if visible, as if the lamp flame had flown upward from the wick. It stays, nothing moves, until some lattice of the air lets pass the single distant cry of an owl—“Hoo!”—as if in answer.

Callie Knole turns away, bends forward, and emits what, so hard suppressed, might have been a sob, but it is a laugh.

And then they all laugh, at themselves, at one another, and they cannot stop. Their sense of the impropriety of their laughter renews their laughter. Looking at each other, flushed and wet-eyed with laughter, makes them laugh. They laugh because they are young and they are alive, and life has revealed itself to them, as it often had and often would, by surprise.

Margaret Feltner, when she had become an old woman, “Granny” in her turn, told Andy of this a long time ago. “Oh, it was awful!” she said, again laughing. “But the harder we tried to stop, the funnier it was.”

And Andy, a hundred years later, can hear their laughter. He hears also the silence in which they laugh: the ancient silence filling the dark river valley on that night, uninterrupted in his imagination still by the noise of engines, the great quiet into which they all have gone.

The laughter, which threatened to be endless, finally ends and is gathered into the darkness, into the past. The night resumes its solemn immensity, and again in the silence the old woman audibly breathes. But now her breaths come at longer intervals, until the definitive quiet settles upon her at last. They who have watched all night then fold her hands. Her mouth has fallen open, and Bernice thinks to bind it shut. They draw the counterpane over her face. Day whitens again over the old house and its clutch of old buildings. As they sit on in determined noiselessness, it comes to the young women that for some time they have been hearing the rain.

A Consent (1908)

For my friends at Monterey, Kentucky

PTOLEMY PROUDFOOT was nothing if not a farmer. His work was farming, his study and passion were farming, his pleasures and his social life occurred in the intervals between farm jobs and in the jobs themselves. He was not an ambitious farmer—he did not propose to own a large acreage or to become rich—but merely a good and a gifted one. By the time he was twenty-five, he had managed, in spite of the hard times of the 1890s, to make a down payment on the little farm that he husbanded and improved all his life. It was a farm of ninety-eight acres, and Tol never longed even for the two more that would have made it a hundred.

Of pleasures and social life, he had a plenty. The Proudfoots were a large, exuberant clan of large people, though by my time Tol was the last one of them in the Port William neighborhood, and Tol was childless. The Proudfoots were not, if they could help it, solitary workers. They swapped work among themselves and with their neighbors, and their workdays involved a mighty dinner at noontime, much talk and laughter, and much incidental sport.

As an after-dinner amusement and aid to digestion, the Proudfoot big boys and young men would often outline a square or a circle on the ground, and get into it and wrestle. Everybody wrestled with everybody, for the object was to see who would be the last one in the ring. The manpower involved might better have been rated as horsepower, and great feats of strength were accomplished. Now and again great physical damage was accomplished, as when, for example, one Proudfoot would endeavor to throw another Proudfoot out of the ring through the trunk of a large tree. Sometimes, after failing to make headway through a tree trunk or barn door, a Proudfoot would lie very still on the ground for several minutes before he could get up. Sometimes, one Proudfoot or another would be unable to go back to work in the afternoon. These contests would be accompanied by much grunting, and by more laughter, as the Proudfoots were hard to anger. For a Proudfoot boy to become big enough and brave enough finally to set foot in that ring was a rite of passage. For a Proudfoot to stand alone in that ring—as Tol did finally, and then often did—was to know a kind of triumph and a kind of glory. Tol was big even for a Proudfoot, and the others could seldom take him off his feet. He tumbled them out, ass over elbows, one by one, in a manner more workmanly than violent, laughing all the time.

Tol was overabundant in both size and strength. And perhaps because animate creatures tended to get out of his way, he paid not much attention to himself. He damaged his clothes just by being in them, as though surprising them by an assortment of stresses and strains for which they had not been adequately prepared. The people around Port William respected Tol as a farmer; they loved to tell and retell and hear and hear again the tales of his great strength; they were amused by the looks of him, by his good humor, and by his outsized fumblings and foibles. But never, for a long time, would any of them have suspected that his great bulk might embody tender feelings.

But Tol did embody tender feelings, and very powerful tender feelings they were. For Tol, through many years, had maintained somewhere about the center of himself a most noble and humble and never-mentioned admiration for Miss Minnie Quinch. Miss Minnie was as small and quick as Tol was big and lumbering. Like him, she was a Port Williamite. She had taught for many years at Goforth School, grades one through eight, which served the neighborhood of Katy’s Branch and Cotman Ridge in which Tol’s farm lay. When she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to a teacher’s college and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used. For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other. When she had trouble with one of the rougher big boys, she went straight to that boy’s father and required that measures be taken. And measures usually were taken, so surprisingly direct and demanding was that lady’s gaze.

For as many years as Miss Minnie had taught at Goforth School, Tol had admired her from a distance, and without ever looking directly at her when she might have been about to look directly at him. He thought she was the finest, prettiest, nicest little woman he had ever seen. He praised her to himself by saying, “She’s just a pocket-size pretty little thing.” But he was sure that she would never want to be around a big, rough, unschooled fellow like himself.

Miss Minnie did, from time to time, look directly at Tol, but not ever when he might have been about to look directly at her. More than once she thought rather wistfully that so large and strong a man as Tol ought to be some woman’s knight and protector. She was, in fact, somewhat concerned about him, for he was thirty-six, well past the age when men usually got married. That she herself was thirty-four and unmarried was something she also thought from time to time, but always in a different thought. She kept her concern about Tol limited very strictly to concern, for she was conscious of being a small person unable even to hope to arrest the gaze of so splendid a man.

For years, because of mutual avoidance of each other’s direct gaze, their paths did not cross. Although they met and passed, they did not do so in a way that required more than a polite nod, which they both accomplished with a seriousness amounting almost to solemnity. And then one morning in Port William, Tol came out of Beater Chatham’s store directly face-to-face with Miss Minnie who was coming in, and who smiled at him before she could think and said, “Well, good morning, Mr. Proudfoot!”

Tol’s mouth opened, but nothing came out of it. Nothing at all. This was unusual, for Tol, when he felt like it, was a talkative man. He kept walking because he was already walking, but for several yards he got along without any assistance from his faculties. Sight and sense did not return to him until he had walked with some force into the tailgate of his wagon.

All the rest of that day he went about his work in a somewhat visionary state, saying to himself, and to the surprise of his horses and his dog, “Good morning, mam!” and “How do you do, Miss Minnie?” Once he even brought himself to say, bowing slightly and removing his hat, “And a good morning to you, little lady.”

And soon, as if they had at last come into each other’s orbit, they met face-to-face again. It was a fine fall afternoon, and Tol happened to be driving down past Goforth School, slowing his team, of course, so as not to disturb the concentration of the scholars inside. Miss Minnie was standing by the pump in front of the schoolhouse, her figure making a neat blue silhouette against the dingy weatherboarding.

Again she smiled at him. She said, “How do you do, Mr. Proudfoot?”

And Tol startled at the sound of her voice as if he had not seen her there at all. He could not remember one of the pleasantries he had invented to say to her. He looked intently into the sky ahead of him and said quickly as if he had received a threat, “Why, howdy!”

The conversation thus established was a poor thing, Tol knew, so far as his own participation in it went, but it was something to go on. It gave him hope. And now I want to tell you how this courtship, conducted for so long in secret in Tol’s mind alone, became public. This is the story of Miss Minnie’s first consent, the beginning of their story together, which is one of the dear possessions of the history of Port William.

That fall, Miss Minnie and her students had worked hard in preparation for the annual Harvest Festival at the school. The Harvest Festival was Miss Minnie’s occasion; she had thought it up herself. It might have been a Halloween party, except that Halloween in that vicinity got enough out of hand as it was without some public function to bring all the boys together in one place. And so she had thought of the Harvest Festival, which always took place two weeks before Halloween. It was a popular social event, consisting of much visiting, a display of the students’ work, recitations by the students, an auction of pies and cakes to raise money for books and supplies, and abundant refreshments provided by the mothers of the students.

Ptolemy Proudfoot had never been to the Harvest Festival. He had no children, he told himself, and so did not belong there. But in fact he had always longed to go, had always been afraid to intrude himself without excuse into Miss Minnie’s world, and had always, as a result, spent an unhappy night at home. But this year, now that he and Miss Minnie were in a manner of becoming friends, he determined that he would go.

Tol had got along as bachelors must. He had even become a fair cook. From the outside, his house was one of the prettiest and best kept in the neighborhood. It was a small house with steep, gingerbreaded gables, and it stood under two white oaks in the bend of the road, just where the road branched off to go down into the Katy’s Branch valley where Goforth and its school were. Tol kept the house painted and the yard neat, and he liked to turn in off the road and say to himself, “Well, now, I wonder who lives in such a nice place!” But what he had thought up to do to the inside of the house was not a great deal above what he had thought up to do to the inside of his barn. Like the barn, the house was clean and orderly, but when he went into it, it did not seem to be expecting him, as it did after Miss Minnie came there to live.

On the day of the festival, Tol cut and shocked corn all day, but he thought all day of the festival, too, and he quit early. He did his chores, fixed his supper and ate it, and then, just as he had planned in great detail to do, he began to get ready. He brought his Sunday clothes to the kitchen and laid them out on a chair. He hunted up his Sunday shoes and polished them. He set a large washtub on the floor in front of the stove, dipped hot water into it from the water well at the end of the stove, cooled the hot water with water from the water bucket on the shelf by the door, put soap and washrag and towel on the floor beside the tub. And then he undressed and sat in the tub with his feet outside it on the floor, and scrubbed himself thoroughly from top to toe. He dried himself and put on his pants. Gazing into the mirror over the little wash table by the back door, he shaved so carefully that he cut himself in several places. He put on his shirt, and after several tries buttoned the collar. He put on his tie, tying a knot in it that would have broken the neck of a lesser man and that left even him so nearly strangled that he supposed he must look extremely handsome. He wet his hair and combed it so that when it dried it stuck up stiffly in the air as Proudfoot hair was inclined to do. He put on his suspenders, his gleaming shoes, and his Sunday hat. And then he sat in a chair and sweated and rubbed his hands together until it was time to hitch old Ike to the buggy and drive down to the school.

Before he got to the schoolhouse, he could hear voices, an uninterrupted babble like the sound of Katy’s Branch in the spring, and then he could see a glow. When he got to the bottom of the hill and saw, among the trunks of the big walnuts and water maples and sycamores that stood there, the schoolhouse windows gleaming and the school yard strung with paper lanterns, lighting the bare-worn ground and throwing the shadows of the trees out in all directions like the spokes of a wheel, he said, “Whoa, Ike.” The light around the old schoolhouse and within it seemed to him a radiance that emanated from the person of Miss Minnie herself. And Tol’s big heart quaked within him. He had to sit there in the road behind his stopped horse and think a good while before he could decide not to go on by, pretending to have an errand elsewhere.

Now that he had stopped, it became quiet where he was; he could hear the crickets singing, and he was aware of Willow Hole on Katy’s Branch, a little beyond the school, carrying on its accustomed business in the dark. As he sat and thought—thought hard about nothing that he could fix in a thought—Tol slid his fingers up beneath his hat from time to time and scratched, and then jerked the hat down firmly onto his head again, and each time he did this he rotated the front of his hat a little further toward his right ear. Presently the sound of another buggy coming down the hill behind him recalled him to himself; he clucked to Ike and drove on, and found a hitching place among the other buggies and the wagons and the saddled horses at the edge of the school yard.

There was a perimeter of voices out on the very edge of the light, where the boys had started a game of tag, unwilling to come nearer the schoolhouse than they had to. Near the building the men were gathered in groups, smoking or chewing, talking, as they always talked, of crops, livestock, weather, work, prices, hunting, and fishing, in that year and the years before.

Tol, usually a sociable man, had nothing to say. He did not dare to say anything. He went past the men, merely nodding in response to their greetings, and since he did not want to talk and so could not stop, and was headed in that direction, he went on into the schoolhouse, and immediately he realized his mistake. For there were only women and girls in there, and not one man, not a single one. Beyond the boys’ voices out on the edge of the dark and the men’s voices in the school yard was this bright, warm nucleus of women’s voices, and of women themselves and of women’s eyes turned to see who had burst through the door with so much force.

Those women would always remember the way Tol looked when he came in that night. After all his waiting and anxiety, his clothes were damp and wrinkled, his shirttail was out, there was horse manure on one of his shoes. His hat sat athwart his head as though left there by somebody else. When, recognizing the multiflorous female presence he was in, he snatched his hat off, his hair stuck up and out and every which way. He came in wide-eyed, purposeful, and alarmed. He looked as if only his suspenders were holding him back—as if, had it not been for that restraint upon his shoulders, he might have charged straight across the room and out through the back wall.

He had made, he thought, a serious mistake, and he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed, too, to show that he knew he had made a mistake. He did not want to stay, and he could not go. Struck dumb, his head as empty of anything sayable as a clapperless bell, he stood in one place and then another, smiling and blushing, an anxious, unhappy look in his eyes.

Finally, a voice began to speak in his mind. It was his own voice. It said, “I would give forty dollars to get out of here. I would give forty-five dollars to get out of here.” It consoled him somewhat to rate his misery at so high a price. But he could see nobody to whom he could pay the forty dollars, or the forty-five either. The women had gone back to talking, and the girls to whispering.

But Tol’s difficulty and his discomfort had not altogether failed of a compassionate witness. His unexpected presence had not failed to cause a small flutter in the bosom of Miss Minnie and a small change in the color of her face. As soon as she decently could, Miss Minnie excused herself from the circle of women with whom she had been talking. She took the bell from her desk and went to the door and rang it.

Presently the men and boys began to come inside. Tol, though he did not become inconspicuous, began at least to feel inconspicuous, and as his pain decreased, he was able to take intelligent notice of his whereabouts. He saw how prettily the room was done up with streamers and many candles and pictures drawn by the students and bouquets of autumn leaves. And at the head of the room on a large table were the cakes and pies that were to be auctioned off at the end of the evening. In the very center of the table, on a tall stand, was a cake that Tol knew, even before he heard, was the work of Miss Minnie. It was an angel food cake with an icing as white and light and swirly as a summer cloud. It was as white as a bride. The sight of it fairly took his breath—it was the most delicate and wondrous thing that he had ever seen. It looked so beautiful and vulnerable there all alone among the others that he wanted to defend it with his life. It was lucky, he thought, that nobody said anything bad about it—and he just wished somebody would. He took a position in a corner in the front of the room as near the cake as he dared to be, and watched over it defensively, angry at the thought of the possibility that somebody might say something bad about it.

“Children, please take your seats!” Miss Minnie said.

The students all dutifully sat down at their desks, leaving the grown-ups to sit or stand around the walls. There was some confusion and much shuffling of feet as everybody found a place. And then a silence, variously expectant and nervous, fell upon the room. Miss Minnie stepped to the side of her desk. She stood, her posture very correct, regarding her students and her guests in silence a moment, and then she welcomed them one and all to the annual Harvest Festival of Goforth School. She told the grown-ups how pleased she was to see them there so cherishingly gathered around their children. She gave them her heartfelt thanks for their support. She asked Brother Overhold if he would pronounce the invocation.

Brother Overhold called down the blessings of Heaven upon each and every one there assembled, and upon every family there represented; upon Goforth School and Miss Minnie, its beloved teacher; upon the neighborhood of Katy’s Branch and Cotman Ridge; upon the town of Port William and all the countryside around it; upon the county, the state, the nation, the world, and the great universe, at the very center of which they were met together that night at Goforth School.

And then Miss Minnie introduced the pupils of the first grade, who were to read a story in unison. The first grade pupils thereupon sat up straight, giving their brains the full support of their erect spinal columns, held their primers upright in front of them, and intoned loudly together:

“Once—there—were—three—bears. The—big—bear—was—the—poppa—bear. The—middle—bear—was—the—mom ma bear. The—little—bear—was—the—baby bear”—and so on to the discovery of Goldilocks and the conclusion, which produced much applause.

And then, one by one, the older children came forward to stand at the side of the desk, as Miss Minnie had stood, to recite poems or Bible verses or bits of famous oratory.

A small boy, Billy Braymer, recited from Sir Walter Scott:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said:

“This is my own, my native land”?

—and on for thirteen more lines, and said “Whew!” and sat down to enthusiastic applause. Thelma Settle of the sixth grade, one of the stars of the school, made her way through “Thanatopsis” without fault to the very end. The audience listened to “A Psalm of Life,” the First, the Twenty-third, and the Hundredth Psalms, “The Fool’s Prayer,” “To a Waterfowl,” “To Daffodils,” “Concord Hymn,” “The Choir Invisible,” “Wolsey’s Farewell to His Greatness,” Hamlet’s Soliloquy, “The Epitaph” from Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” and other pieces. Hibernia Hopple of the eighth grade declared with a steadily deepening blush and in furious haste that she loved to the depth and breadth and height her soul could reach. Walter Crow said in a squeaky voice and with bold gestures that he was the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. Buster Niblett implored that he be given liberty or death.

And then Miss Minnie called the name of Burley Coulter, and a large boy stood up in the back of the room and, blushing, made his way to the desk as he would have walked, perhaps, to the gallows. He turned and faced the audience. He shut his eyes tightly, opened them only to find the audience still present, and swallowed. Miss Minnie watched him with her fingers laced at her throat and her eyes moist. He was such a good-looking boy, and—she had no doubt—was smart. Against overpowering evidence she had imagined a triumph for him. She had chosen a poem for him that was masculine, robust, locally applicable, seasonally appropriate, high spirited, and amusing. If he recited it well, she would be so pleased! She had the poem in front of her, just in case.

He stood in silence, as if studying to be as little present as possible, and then announced in an almost inaudible voice, “‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin’ by James Whitcomb Riley.”

He hung his hands at his sides, and then clasped them behind him, and then clasped them in front of him, and then put them into his pockets. He swallowed a dry-mouthed swallow that in the silence was clearly audible, and began:

“When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,

And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,

And the clackin’ of the—of the, uh—the clackin’ of the—”

“Guineys!” Miss Minnie whispered.

“Aw, yeah, guineys,” he said:

And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens,

And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence

—uh, let’s see—”

“Oh, it’s then’s . . .”

“Oh, it’s then’s the time’s a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,

With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,

When he—uh—”

“As he leaves . . .”

“As he leaves the house, bare-headed, and goes out to feed the stock,

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.”

He looked at his feet, he scratched his head, his lips moved soundlessly.

“They’s something . . .”

“Aw, yeah.

“They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere

When the heat of summer’s over—uh—kindo’ lonesome- like, but still—uh—

“Well, let’s see. Uh—

“Then your apples—Then your apples all—”

Miss Minnie was reading desperately, trying to piece the poem together as he dismembered it, but he had left her behind and now he was stalled. She looked up to see an expression on his face that she knew too well. The blush was gone; he was grinning; the light of inspiration was in his eyes.

“Well, drot it, folks,” he said, “I forgot her. But I’ll tell you one I heard.”

Miss Minnie rose, smiling, and said in a tone of utter gratification, “Thank you, Burley! Now you may be seated.”

She then called upon Kate Helen Branch, who came to the front and sang “In the Gloaming” in a voice that was not strong but was clear and true.

That brought the recitations to an appropriate conclusion. There was prolonged applause, after which Miss Minnie again arose. “Mr. Willis Bagby,” she said, “will now conduct our auction of pies and cakes.”

Mr. Bagby took his place behind the table of pies and cakes.

“Folks,” he said, “this here is for the good of the school, and to help out this little teacher here that’s doing such a good job a-teaching our children. For what would tomorrow be without the young people of today? And what would our young people be without a fine teacher to teach them to figger and read and write, and to make them do all the fine things we seen them do here on this fine occasion this evening? So now, folks, open up your hearts and let out your pocketbooks. What am I bid for this fine cherry pie?” And he tilted the pie toward the crowd so that all could see the lovely crisscrossing of the top crust.

Tol had stood and watched and listened in a state of anxiety that prevented him from benefiting at all from the program. He had never seen in his life, he thought, such a woman as Miss Minnie—she was so smart and pretty, and so knowing in how to stand and speak. And when she stopped that Burley Coulter and set him down, Tol felt his heart swerve like a flying swift. She was as quick on her feet, he thought, as a good hind-catcher. And yet the more he looked upon her, the higher above him she shone, and the farther he felt beneath her notice.

Now there was old Willis Bagby auctioning off the pies and cakes, which were bringing more or less than fifty cents, depending on what they looked like and who had made them. And Tol was sweating and quaking like a man afraid. For what if her cake brought less than fifty cents? What if—and he felt his heart swerve again—nobody bid on it? He would bid on it himself—but how could he dare to? People would think he was trying to show off. Maybe she would think he was trying to show off.

Tol backed into his corner as far as he could, trying to be small, wishing he had not come. But now Willis Bagby put his hands under the beautiful white cake and lifted it gleaming on its stand.

“Now look a-here, folks,” he said. “For last, we got this fine cake made by this mighty nice lady, our schoolteacher. What am I bid for it?”

“One dollar,” said Gilead Hopple, who with his wife, Ag, was standing not far in front of Tol Proudfoot. Gil Hopple was the local magistrate, who now proposed for himself the political gallantry of offering the highest bid for the teacher’s cake. After his bid, he uttered a small cough.

“Dollar bid! I’ve got a dollar bid,” said Willis Bagby. “Now, anywhere a half?”

Nobody said anything. Nobody said anything for a time that got longer and longer, while Gil Hopple stood there with his ears sticking out and his white bald head sticking up through its official fringe of red hair.

And Tol Proudfoot was astonished to hear himself say right out and in a voice far too loud, “Two dollars!”

Gil Hopple coughed his small cough again and said, his voice slightly higher in pitch than before, “Two and a quarter.”

It seemed to Tol that Gil Hopple had defiled that priceless cake with his quarter bid. Gil Hopple happened to be Tol’s neighbor, and they had always got along and been friends. But at that moment Tol hated Gil Hopple with a clear, joyful hatred. He said, “Three dollars!”

Gil Hopple did not wish to turn all the way around, but he looked first to the right and then to the left. His ears stuck out farther, and the top of his head had turned pink. It had been a dry year. He looked as if the room smelled of an insufficient respect for hard cash. “Three and a quarter,” he said in a tone of great weariness.

Willis Bagby was looking uncomfortable himself now. Things obviously were getting out of hand, but it was not up to him to stop it.

Tol said, “Four!”

At that point a revelation came to Miss Minnie. It seemed to her beyond a doubt that Tol Proudfoot, that large, strong man whom she had thought ought to be some woman’s knight and protector, was bidding to be her knight and protector. It made her dizzy. She managed to keep her composure: she did not blush much, the tears hardly showed in her eyes, by great effort she did not breathe much too fast. But her heart was staggering within her like a drunk person, and she was saying over and over to herself, “Oh, you magnificent man!”

“Four and a quarter,” said Gil Hopple.

“Five!” said Tol Proudfoot.

“Five and a quarter,” said Gil Hopple.

“Ten!” shouted Tol Proudfoot.

And at that moment another voice—Ag Hopple’s—was raised above the murmuring of the crowd: “Good lord, Gil! I’ll make you a cake!”

Willis Bagby, gratefully seeing his duty, said, “Sold! To Tol Proudfoot yonder in the corner.”

Tol could no more move than if he had been turned by his audacity into a statue. He stood in his corner with sweat running down his face, unable to lift his hand to wipe it off, frightened to think how he had showed off right there in front of everybody for her to see.

And then he saw that Miss Minnie was coming to where he was, and his knees shook. She was coming through the crowd, looking straight at him, and smiling. She reached out with her little hand and put it into one of his great ones, which rose of its own accord to receive it. “Mr. Proudfoot,” she said, “that was more than kind.”

Tol was standing there full in public view, in the midst of a story that Port William would never forget, and as far as he now knew not a soul was present but Miss Minnie and himself.

“Yes, mam—uh, mam—uh, miss—uh, little lady,” he said. “Excuse me, mam, but I believe it was worth every cent of it, if you don’t mind. And I ain’t trying to act smart or anything, and if I do, excuse me, but might I see you home?”

“Oh, Mr. Proudfoot!” Miss Minnie said. “Certainly you may!”

Pray Without Ceasing (1912)

MAT FELTNER was my grandfather on my mother’s side. Saying it thus, I force myself to reckon again with the strangeness of that verb was. The man of whom I once was pleased to say, “He is my grandfather,” has become the dead man who was my grandfather. He was, and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time.

But the past is present also. And this, I think, is a part of the greater mystery we call eternity. Though Mat Feltner has been dead for twenty-five years, and I am now older than he was when I was born and have grandchildren of my own, I know his hands, their way of holding a hammer or a hoe or a set of checklines, as well as I know my own. I know his way of talking, his way of cocking his head when he began a story, the smoking pipe stem held an inch from his lips. I have in my mind, not just as a memory but as a consolation, his welcome to me when I returned home from the university and, later, from jobs in distant cities. When I sat down beside him, his hand would clap lightly onto my leg above the knee; my absence might have lasted many months, but he would say as though we had been together the day before, “Hello, Andy.” The shape of his hand is printed on the flesh of my thigh as vividly as a birthmark. This man who was my grandfather is present in me, as I felt always his father to be present in him. His father was Ben. My own live knowledge of the Feltners in Port William begins with Ben, whom I know from my grandparents’ stories. That is the known history. The names go back to Ben’s father and grandfather.

But even the unknown past is present in us, its silence as persistent as a ringing in the ears. When I stand in the road that passes through Port William, I am standing on the strata of my history that go down through the known past into the unknown: the blacktop rests on state gravel, which rests on county gravel, which rests on the creek rock and cinders laid down by the town when it was still mostly beyond the reach of the county; and under the creek rock and cinders is the dirt track of the town’s beginning, the buffalo trace that was the way we came. You work your way into the interior of the present, until finally you come to that beginning in which all things, the world and the light itself, at a Word welled up into being out of their absence. And nothing is here that we are beyond the reach of merely because we do not know about it. It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with reminders of Itself.

When my grandfather was dying, I was not thinking about the past. My grandfather was still a man I knew, but as he subsided day by day he was ceasing to be the man I had known. I was experiencing consciously for the first time that transformation in which the living, by dying, pass into the living, and I was full of grief and love and wonder.

And so when I came out of the house one morning after breakfast and found Braymer Hardy sitting in his pickup truck in front of my barn, I wasn’t expecting any news. Braymer was an old friend of my father’s; he was curious to see what Flora and I would do with the long-abandoned Harford Place that we had bought and were fixing up, and sometimes he visited. His way was not to go to the door and knock. He just drove in and stopped his old truck at the barn and sat looking around until somebody showed up.

“Well, you ain’t much of a Catlett,” he said, in perfect good humor. “Marce Catlett would have been out and gone two hours ago.”

“I do my chores before breakfast,” I said, embarrassed by the lack of evidence. My grandfather Catlett would, in fact, have been out and gone two hours ago.

“But,” Braymer said in an explanatory tone, as if talking to himself, “I reckon your daddy is a late sleeper, being as he’s an office man. But that Wheeler was always a shotgun once he got out,” he went on, clearly implying, and still in excellent humor, that the family line had reached its nadir in me. “But maybe you’re a right smart occupied of a night, I don’t know.” He raked a large cud of tobacco out of his cheek with his forefinger and spat.

He looked around with the air of a man completing an inspection, which is exactly what he was doing. “Well, it looks like you’re making a little headway. You got it looking some better. Here,” he said, pawing among a litter of paper, tools, and other odds and ends on top of the dashboard and then on the seat beside him, “I brought you something.” He eventually forceped forth an old newspaper page folded into a tight rectangle the size of a wallet and handed it through the truck window. “You ought to have it. It ain’t no good to me. The madam, you know, is hell for an antique. She bought an old desk at a sale, and that was in one of the drawers.”

I unfolded the paper and read the headline: BEN FELTNER, FRIEND TO ALL, SHOT DEAD IN PORT WILLIAM.

“Ben Feltner was your great-granddaddy.”

“Yes. I know.”

“I remember him. They never made ’em no finer. The last man on earth you’d a thought would get shot.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Thad Coulter was a good kind of feller, too, far as that goes. I don’t reckon he was the kind you’d a thought would shoot somebody, either.”

He pushed his hat back and scratched his forehead. “One of them things,” he said. “They happen.”

He scratched his head some more and propped his wrist on top of the steering wheel, letting the hand dangle. “Tell you,” he said, “there ain’t a way in this world to know what a human creature is going to do next. I loaned a feller five hundred dollars once. He was a good feller, too, wasn’t a thing wrong with him far as I knew, I liked him. And dogged if he didn’t kill himself fore it was a week.”

“Killed himself?” I said.

“Killed himself,” Braymer said. He meditated a moment, looking off at his memory of the fellow and wiggling two of the fingers that hung over the steering wheel. “Don’t you know,” he said, “not wishing him no bad luck, but I wished he’d a done it a week or two sooner.”

I laughed.

“Well,” he said, “I know you want to be at work. I’ll get out of your way.”

I said, “Don’t be in a hurry,” but he was starting the truck and didn’t hear me. I called, “Thanks!” as he backed around. He raised his hand, not looking at me, and drove away, steering with both hands, with large deliberate motions, as if the truck were the size of a towboat.

There was an upturned feed bucket just inside the barn door. I sat down on it and unfolded the paper again. It was the front page of the Hargrave Weekly Express, flimsy and yellow, nearly illegible in some of the creases. It told how, on a Saturday morning in the July of 1912, Ben Feltner, who so far as was known had had no enemies, had been killed by a single shot to the head from a .22 caliber revolver. His assailant, Thad Coulter, had said, upon turning himself in to the sheriff at Hargrave soon after the incident, “I’ve killed the best friend I ever had.” It was not a long article. It told about the interment of Ben Feltner and named his survivors. It told nothing that I did not know, and I knew little more than it told. I knew that Thad Coulter had killed himself in jail, shortly after the murder. And I knew that he was my grandfather Catlett’s first cousin.

I had learned that much, not from anyone’s attempt, ever, to tell me the story, but from bits and pieces dropped out of conversations among my elders, in and out of the family. Once, for instance, I heard my mother say to my father that she had always been troubled by the thought of Thad Coulter’s lonely anguish as he prepared to kill himself in the Hargrave jail. I had learned what I knew, the bare outline of the event, without asking questions, both fearing the pain that I knew surrounded the story and honoring the silence that surrounded the pain.

But sitting in the barn that morning, looking at the old page opened on my knees, I saw how incomplete the story was as the article told it and as I knew it. And seeing it so, I felt incomplete myself. I suddenly wanted to go and see my grandfather. I did not intend to question him. I had never heard him speak so much as a word about his father’s death, and I could not have imagined breaking his silence. I only wanted to be in his presence, as if in his presence I could somehow enter into the presence of an agony that I knew had shaped us all.

With the paper folded again in my shirt pocket, I drove to Port William and turned in under the old maples beside the house. When I let myself in, the house was quiet, and I went as quietly as I could to my grandfather’s room, thinking he might be asleep. But he was awake, his fingers laced together on top of the bedclothes. He had seen me drive in and was watching the door when I entered the room.

“Morning,” I said.

He said, “Morning, son,” and lifted one of his hands.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Still feeling.”

I sat down in the rocker by the bed and told him, in Braymer’s words, the story of the too-late suicide.

My grandfather laughed. “I expect that grieved Braymer.”

“Is Braymer pretty tight?” I asked, knowing he was.

“I wouldn’t say ‘tight,’ but he’d know the history of every dollar he ever made. Braymer’s done a lot of hard work.”

My grandmother had heard us talking, and now she called me. “Oh, Andy!”

“I’ll be back,” I said, and went to see what she wanted.

She was sitting in the small bedroom by the kitchen where she had always done her sewing and where she slept now that my grandfather was ill. She was sitting by the window in the small cane-bottomed rocking chair that was her favorite. Her hands were lying on her lap and she was not rocking. I knew that her arthritis was hurting her; otherwise, at that time of day, she would have been busy at something. She had medicine for the arthritis, but it made her feel unlike herself; up to a certain point of endurability, she preferred the pain. She sat still and let the pain go its way and occupied her mind with thoughts. Or that is what she said she did. I believed, and I was as sure as if she had told me, that when she sat alone that way, hurting or not, she was praying. Though I never heard her pray aloud in my life, it seems to me now that I can reproduce in my mind the very voice of her prayers.

She had called me in to find out things, which was her way. I sat down on the stool in front of her and submitted to examination. She wanted to know what Flora was doing, and what the children were doing, and when I had seen my mother, and what she had been doing. She asked exacting questions that called for much detail in the answers, watching me intently to see that I withheld nothing. She did not tolerate secrets, even the most considerate ones. She had learned that we sometimes omitted or rearranged facts to keep her from worrying, but her objection to that was both principled and passionate. If we were worried, she wanted to worry with us; it was her place, she said.

After a while, she quit asking questions but continued to look at me. And then she said, “You’re thinking about something you’re not saying. What is it? Tell Granny.”

She had said that to me many times in the thirty years I had known her. By then, I thought it was funny. But if I was no longer intimidated, I was still compelled. In thirty years I had never been able to deceive her when she was looking straight at me. I could have lied, but she would have known it and then would have supposed that somebody was sick. I laughed and handed her the paper out of my pocket.

“Braymer Hardy brought that to me this morning.”

She unfolded it, read a little of the article but not all, and folded it back up. Her hands lay quiet in her lap again, and she looked out the window, though obviously not seeing what was out there that morning. Another morning had come to her, and she was seeing it again through the interval of fifty-three years.

“It’s a wonder,” she said, “that Mat didn’t kill Thad Coulter that morning.”

I said, “Granddad?”

And then she told me the story. She told it quietly, looking through the window into that July morning in 1912. Her hands lay in her lap and never moved. The only effect her telling had on her was a glistening that appeared from time to time in her eyes. She told the story well, giving many details. She had a good memory, and she had lived many years with her mother-in-law, who also had a good one. I have the impression that they, but not my grandfather, had pondered together over the event many times. She spoke as if she were seeing it all happen, even the parts of it that she had in fact not seen.

“If it hadn’t been for Jack Beechum, Mat would have killed him,” my grandmother said.

That was the point. Or it was one of the points—the one, perhaps, that she most wanted me to see. But it was not the beginning of the story. Adam and Eve and then Cain and Abel began it, as my grandmother depended on me to know. Even in Thad Coulter’s part of the story, the beginning was some years earlier than the July of 1912.

Abner Coulter, Thad’s only son, had hired himself out to a grocer in Hargrave. After a few years, when he had (in his own estimation) learned the trade, he undertook to go into business for himself in competition with his former employer. He rented a building right on the courthouse square. He was enabled to do this by a sizable sum of money borrowed from the Hargrave bank on a note secured by a mortgage on his father’s farm.

And here Thad’s character enters into the story. For Thad not only secured his son’s note with the farm that was all he had in the world and that he had only recently finished paying for, but he further committed himself by bragging in Port William of his son’s new status as a merchant in the county seat.

“Thad Coulter was not a bad man,” my grandmother said. “I believed then, and I believe now, that he was not a bad man. But we are all as little children. Some know it and some don’t.”

She looked at me to see if I was one who knew it, and I nodded, but I was thirty then and did not know it yet.

“He was as a little child,” she said, “and he was in serious trouble.”

He had in effect given his life and its entire effort as hostage to the possibility that Abner, his only son, could be made a merchant in a better place than Port William.

Before two years were out, Abner repaid his father’s confidence by converting many small private fritterings and derelictions into an undisguisable public failure and thereupon by riding off to somewhere unknown on the back of a bay gelding borrowed ostensibly for an overnight trip to Port William. And so Thad’s fate was passed from the reckless care of his son to the small mercy of the law. Without more help than he could confidently expect, he was going to lose his farm. Even with help, he was going to have to pay for it again, and he was close to sixty years old.

As he rode home from his interview with the Hargrave banker, in which the writing on the wall had been made plain to him, he was gouging his heel urgently into his mule’s flank. Since he had got up out of the chair in the banker’s office, he had been full of a desire as compelling as thirst to get home, to get low to the ground, as if to prevent himself from falling off the world. For the country that he had known all his life and had depended on, at least in dry weather, to be solid and steady underfoot had suddenly risen under him like a wave.

Needing help as he did, he could not at first bring himself to ask for it. Instead, he spent most of two days propped against a post in his barn, drinking heavily and talking aloud to himself about betrayal, ruin, the cold-heartedness of the Hargrave bankers, and the poor doings of damned fools, meaning both Abner and himself. And he recalled, with shocks of bitterness that only the whiskey could assuage, his confident words in Port William about Abner and his prospects.

“I worked for it, and I come to own it,” he said over and over again. “Now them will own it that never worked for it. And him that stood on it to mount up into the world done run to perdition without a patch, damn him, to cover his ass or a rag to hide his face.”

When his wife and daughter begged him to come into the house, he said that a man without the sense to keep a house did not deserve to be in one. He said he would shelter with the dogs and hogs, where he belonged.

The logical source of help was Ben Feltner. Ben had helped Thad to buy his farm—had signed his note and stood behind him. Ben was his friend, and friendship mattered to Ben; it may have mattered to him above all. But Thad did not go to Ben until after his second night in the barn. He walked to Ben’s house in Port William early in the morning, drunk and unsteady, his mind tattered and raw from repeated plunges through the thorns and thistles of his ruin.

Ben was astonished by the look of him. Thad had always been a man who used himself hard, and he had grown gaunt and stooped, his mouth slowly caving in as he lost his teeth. But that morning he was also soiled, sagging, unshaved and uncombed, his eyes bloodshot and glary. But Ben said, “Come in, Thad. Come in and sit down.” And he took him by the arm, led him in to a chair, and sat down facing him.

“They got me, Ben,” Thad said, the flesh twitching around his eyes. “They done got me to where I can’t get loose.” His eyes glazed by tears that never fell, he made as much sense of his calamity as he was able to make: “A poor man don’t stand no show.” And then, his mind lurching on, unable to stop, he fell to cursing, first Abner, and then the Hargrave bank, and then the ways of the world that afforded no show to a poor man.

Ben listened to it all, sitting with his elbow on the chair arm and his forefinger pointed against his cheek. Thad’s language and his ranting in that place would not have been excusable had he been sober. But insofar as Thad was drunk, Ben was patient. He listened attentively, his eyes on Thad’s face, except that from time to time he looked down at his beard as if to give Thad an opportunity to see that he should stop.

Finally Ben stopped him. “Thad, I’ll tell you what. I don’t believe I can talk with you anymore this morning. Go home, now, and get sober and come back. And then we’ll see.”

Thad did not have to take Ben’s words as an insult. But in his circumstances and condition, it was perhaps inevitable that he would. That Ben was his friend made the offense worse—far worse. In refusing to talk to him as he was, Ben, it seemed to Thad, had exiled him from friendship and so withdrawn the last vestige of a possibility that he might find anywhere a redemption for himself, much less for his forfeited land. For Thad was not able then to distinguish between himself as he was and himself as he might be sober. He saw himself already as a proven fool, fit only for the company of dogs and hogs. If he could have accepted this judgment of himself, then his story would at least have been different and would perhaps have been better. But while he felt the force and truth of his own judgment, he raged against it. He had fled to Ben, hoping that somehow, by some means that he could not imagine, Ben could release him from the solitary cage of his self-condemnation. And now Ben had shut the door.

Thad’s whole face began to twitch and his hands to move aimlessly, as if his body were being manipulated from the inside by some intention that he could not control. Patches of white appeared under his whiskers. He said, “I cuss you to your damned face, Ben Feltner, for I have come to you with my hat in my hand and you have spit in it. You have throwed in your lot with them sons of bitches against me.”

At that Ben reached his limit. Yet even then he did not become angry. He was a large, unfearful man, and his self-defense had something of merriment in it. He stood up. “Now, Thad, my friend,” he said, “you must go.” And he helped him to the door. He did not do so violently or with an excess of force. But though he was seventy-two years old, Ben was still in hearty strength, and he helped Thad to the door in such a way that Thad had no choice but to go.

But Thad did not go home. He stayed, hovering about the front of the house, for an hour or more.

“It seemed like hours and hours that he stayed out there,” my grandmother said. She and my great-grandmother, Nancy, and old Aunt Cass, the cook, had overheard the conversation between Ben and Thad, or had overheard at least Thad’s part of it, and afterward they watched him from the windows, for his fury had left an influence. The house was filled with a quiet that seemed to remember with sorrow the quiet that had been in it before Thad had come.

The morning was bright and still, and it was getting hot, but Thad seemed unable to distinguish between sun and shade. There had got to be something fluttery or mothlike about him now, so erratic and unsteady and unceasing were his movements. He was talking to himself, nodding or shaking his head, his hands making sudden strange motions without apparent reference to whatever he might have been saying. Now and again he started resolutely toward the house and then swerved away.

All the while the women watched. To my grandmother, remembering, it seemed that they were surrounded by signs that had not yet revealed their significance. Aunt Cass told her afterward, “I dreamed of the dark, Miss Margaret, all full of the sound of crying, and I knowed it was something bad.” And it seemed to my grandmother, as she remembered, that she too had felt the house and town and the bright day itself all enclosed in that dreamed darkness full of the sounds of crying.

Finally, looking out to where the road from upriver came over the rise into town, they saw a team and wagon coming. Presently they recognized Thad Coulter’s team, a pair of mare mules, one black and the other once gray and now faded to white. They were driven by Thad’s daughter, wearing a sunbonnet, a sun-bleached blue cotton dress, and an apron.

“It’s Martha Elizabeth,” Nancy said.

And Aunt Cass said, “Poor child.”

“Well,” Nancy said, relieved, “she’ll take him home.”

When Martha Elizabeth came to where Thad was, she stopped the mules and got down. So far as they could see from the house, she did not plead with him. She did not say anything at all. She took hold of him, turned him toward the wagon, and led him to it. She held onto him as he climbed unsteadily up into the wagon and sat down on the spring seat, and then, gathering her skirts in one hand, she climbed up and sat beside him. And all the while she was gentle with him. Afterward and always, my grandmother remembered how gentle Martha Elizabeth had been with him.

Martha Elizabeth turned the team around, and the Feltner women watched the wagon with its troubled burden go slowly away.

Ben, who had meant to go to the field where his hands were at work, did not leave the house as long as Thad was waiting about outside. He saw no point in antagonizing Thad when he did not have to, and so he sat down with a newspaper.

When he knew that Thad was gone and had had time to be out of sight, Ben got up and put on his hat and went out. He was worried about the state both of Thad’s economy and of his mind. He thought he might find some of the other Coulters in town. He didn’t know that he would, but it was Saturday, and he probably would.

The Feltner house stood, as it still does, in the overlap of the northeast corner of the town and the southwest corner of Ben’s farm, which spread away from the house and farmstead over the ridges and hollows and down the side of the valley to the river. There was a farmstead at each of the town’s four corners. There was, as there still is, only the one road, which climbed out of the river valley, crossed a mile of ridge, passed through the town, and, after staying on the ridge another half mile or so, went back down into the valley again. For most of its extent, at that time, it was little more than a wagon track. Most of the goods that reached the Port William merchants still came to Dawes Landing by steamboat and then up the hill by team and wagon. The town itself consisted of perhaps two dozen houses, a church, a blacksmith shop, a bank, a barber shop, a doctor’s office, a hotel, two saloons, and four stores that sold a variety of merchandise from groceries to dry goods to hardware to harness. The road that passed through town was there only as a casual and hardly foreseen result of the comings and goings of the inhabitants. An extemporaneous town government had from time to time caused a few loads of creek rock to be hauled and knapped and spread over it, and the townspeople had flung their ashes into it, but that was all.

Though the houses and shops had been connected for some time by telephone lines carried overhead on peeled and whitewashed locust poles, there was as yet not an automobile in the town. There were times in any year still when Port William could not have been reached by an automobile that was not accompanied by a team of mules to pull it across the creeks and out of the mud holes.

Except for the telephone lines, the town, as it looked to Ben Feltner on that July morning seventy-eight years ago, might have been unchanged for many more years than it had existed. It looked older than its history. And yet in Port William, as everywhere else, it was already the second decade of the twentieth century. And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else. This disease had entered into Thad Coulter and into Abner. In Thad it was fast coming to crisis. If Port William could not save him, then surely there was another place that could. But Thad could not just leave, as Abner had; Port William had been too much his life for that. And he was held also by his friendship for Ben Feltner, and for himself as a man whom Ben Feltner had befriended—a friendship that Ben Feltner seemed now to have repudiated and made hateful. Port William was a stumbling block to Thad, and he must rid himself of it somehow.

Ben, innocent of the disease that afflicted his friend yet mortally implicated in it and not knowing it, made his way down into the town, looking about in order to gauge its mood, for Port William had its moods, and they needed watching. More energy was generated in the community than the work of the community could consume, and the surplus energy often went into fighting. There had been cuttings and shootings enough. But usually the fighting was more primitive, and the combatants simply threw whatever projectiles came to hand: corncobs, snowballs, green walnuts, or rocks. In the previous winter, a young Coulter by the name of Burley had claimed that he had had an eye blackened by a frozen horse turd thrown, so far as he could determine, by a Power of the Air. But the place that morning was quiet. Most of the crops had been laid by and many of the farmers were already in town, feeling at ease and inclined to rest now that their annual battle with the weeds had ended. They were sitting on benches and kegs or squatting on their heels under the shade trees in front of the stores, or standing in pairs or small groups among the hitched horses along the sides of the road. Ben passed among them, greeting them and pausing to talk, enjoying himself, and all the while on the lookout for one or another of the Coulters.

Martha Elizabeth was Thad’s youngest, the last at home. She had, he thought, the levelest head of any of his children and was the best. Assuming the authority that his partiality granted her, she had at fifteen taken charge of the household, supplanting her mother, who was sickly, and her three older sisters, who had married and gone. At seventeen, she was responsible beyond her years. She was a tall, raw-boned girl, with large hands and feet, a red complexion, and hair so red that, in the sun, it appeared to be on fire.

“Everybody loved Martha Elizabeth,” my grandmother said. “She was as good as gold.”

To Thad it was a relief to obey her, to climb into the wagon under the pressure of her hand on his arm and to sit beside her as she drove the team homeward through the rising heat of the morning. Her concern for him gave him shelter. Holding to the back of the seat, he kept himself upright and, for the moment, rested in being with her.

But when they turned off the ridge onto the narrower road that led down into the little valley called Cattle Pen and came in sight of their place, she could no longer shelter him. It had long been, to Thad’s eye, a pretty farm—a hundred or so acres of slope and ridge on the west side of the valley, the lower, gentler slopes divided from the ridge land by a ledgy bluff that was wooded, the log house and other buildings occupying a shelf above the creek bottom. Through all his years of paying for it, he had aspired toward it as toward a Promised Land. To have it, he had worked hard and long and deprived himself, and Rachel, his wife, had deprived herself. He had worked alone more often than not. Abner, as he grew able, had helped, as the girls had, also. But Abner had been reserved for something better. Abner was smart—too smart, as Thad and Rachel agreed, without ever much talking about it, to spend his life farming a hillside. Something would have to be done to start him on his way to something better, a Promised Land yet more distant.

Although he had thought the farm not good enough for Abner, Thad was divided in his mind; for himself he loved it. It was what he had transformed his life into. And now, even in the morning light, it lay under the shadow of his failure, and he could not bear to look at it. It was his life, and he was no longer in it. Somebody else, some other thing that did not even know it, stood ready to take possession of it. He was ashamed in its presence. To look directly at it would be like looking Martha Elizabeth full in the eyes, which he could not do either. And his shame raged in him.

When she stopped in the lot in front of the barn and helped him down, he started unhitching the team. But she took hold of his arm and drew him away gently toward the house.

“Come on, now,” she said. “You’ve got to have you something to eat and some rest.”

But he jerked away from her. “Go see to your mammy!”

“No,” she said. “Come on.” And she attempted again to move him toward the house.

He pushed her away, and she fell. He could have cut off his hand for so misusing her, and yet his rage at himself included her. He reached into the wagon box and took out a short hickory stock with a braid of rawhide knotted to it. He shook it at her.

“Get up,” he said. “Get yonder to that house ’fore I wear you out.”

He had never spoken to her in such a way, had never imagined himself doing so. He hated what he had done, and he could not undo it.

The heat of the day had established itself now. There was not a breeze anywhere, not a breath. A still haze filled the valley and redoubled the light. Within that blinding glare he occupied a darkness that was loud with accusing cries.

Martha Elizabeth stood at the kitchen door a moment, looking back at him, and then she went inside. Thad turned back to the team then, unhitched them, did up the lines, and led the mules to their stalls in the barn. He moved as if dreaming through these familiar motions that had now estranged themselves from him. The closer he had come to home, the more the force of his failure had gathered there to exclude him.

And it was Ben Feltner who had barred the door and left him without a friend. Ben Feltner, who owed nothing, had turned his back on his friend, who now owed everything.

He said aloud, “Yes, I’ll come back sober, God damn you to Hell!”

He lifted the jug out of the white mule’s manger, pulled the cob from its mouth, and drank. When he lowered it, it was empty. It had lasted him three days, and now it was empty. He cocked his wrist and broke the jug against an upright.

“Well, that does for you, old holler-head.”

He stood, letting the whiskey seek its level in him, and felt himself slowly come into purpose; now he had his anger full and clear. Now he was summoned by an almost visible joy.

He went to the house, drank from the water bucket on the back porch, and stepped through the kitchen door. Rachel and Martha Elizabeth were standing together by the cookstove, facing him.

“Thad, honey, I done fixed dinner,” Rachel said. “Set down and eat.”

He opened the stairway door, stepped up, and took down his pistol from the little shelf over the door frame.

“No, now,” Martha Elizabeth said. “Put that away. You ain’t got a use in this world for that.”

“Don’t contrary me,” Thad said. “Don’t you say another damned word.”

He put the pistol in his hip pocket with the barrel sticking up and turned to the door.

“Wait, Thad,” Rachel said. “Eat a little before you go.” But she was already so far behind him that he hardly heard her.

He walked to the barn, steadying himself by every upright thing he came to, so that he proceeded by a series of handholds on doorjamb and porch post and gatepost and tree. He could no longer see the place but walked in a shifting aisle of blinding light through a cloud of darkness. Behind him now was almost nothing. And ahead of him was the singular joy to which his heart now beat in answer.

He went into the white mule’s stall, unbuckled hame strap and bellyband, and shoved the harness off her back, letting it fall. He unbuckled the collar and let it fall. Again his rage swelled within him, seeming to tighten the skin of his throat, as though his body might fail to contain it, for he had never before in his life allowed a mule’s harness to touch the ground if he could help it. But he was not in his life now, and his rage pleased him.

He hooked his finger in the bit ring and led the mule to the drinking trough by the well in front of the barn. The trough was half an oak barrel, nearly full of water. The mule wanted to drink, but he jerked her head up and drew her forward until she stood beside the trough. The shorn stubble of her mane under his hand, he stepped up onto the rim. Springing, he cast himself across the mule’s back, straddled her, and sat upright as darkness swung around him. He jerked hard at the left rein.

“Get up, Beck,” he said.

The mule was as principled as a martyr. She would have died before she would have trotted a step, and yet he urged her forward with his heel. Even as the hind feet of the mule lifted from their tracks, the thought of Martha Elizabeth formed itself within the world’s ruin. She seemed to rise up out of its shambles, like a ghost or an influence. She would follow him. He needed to hurry.

On the fringe of the Saturday bustle in front of the business houses, Ben met Early Rowanberry and his little boy, Arthur. Early was carrying a big sack, and Art a small one. They had started out not long after breakfast; from the log house on the ridgetop where the Rowanberrys had settled before Kentucky was a state, they had gone down the hill, forded the creek known as Sand Ripple, and then walked up the Shade Branch hollow through the Feltner Place and on to town. Early had done his buying and a little talking, had bought a penny’s worth of candy for Art, and now they were starting the long walk back. Ben knew that they had made the trip on foot to spare their mules, though the sacks would weigh sorely on their shoulders before they made it home.

“Well, Early,” Ben said, “you’ve got a good hand with you today, I see.”

“He’s tol’ble good company, Ben, and he packs a little load,” Early said.

Ben liked all the Rowanberrys, who had been good neighbors to him all his life, and Early was a better-than-average Rowanberry—a quiet man with a steady gaze and a sort of local fame for his endurance at hard work.

Ben then offered his hand to Art, who shyly held out his own. Ben said, “My boy, are you going to grow up to be a wheelhorse like your pap?” and Art answered without hesitation, “Yes, sir.”

“Ah, that’s right,” Ben said. And he placed his hand on the boy’s unladen shoulder.

The two Rowanberrys then resumed their homeward journey, and Ben walked on down the edge of the dusty road into town.

Ben was in no hurry. He had his mission in mind and was somewhat anxious about it, but he gave it its due place in the order of things. Thad’s difficulty was not simple; whatever it was possible to do for him could not be done in a hurry. Ben passed slowly through the talk of the place and time, partaking of it. He liked the way the neighborhood gathered into itself on such days. Now and then, in the midst of the more casual conversation, a little trade talk would rouse up over a milk cow or a pocketknife or a saddle or a horse or mule. Or there would be a joke or a story or a bit of news, uprisings of the town’s interest in itself that would pass through it and die away like scurries of wind. It was close to noon. It was hot even in the shade now, and the smells of horse sweat and horse manure had grown strong. On the benches and kegs along the storefronts, pocketknives were busy. Profound meditations were coming to bear upon long scrolls of cedar or poplar curling backward over thumbs and wrists and piling over shoetops.

Somebody said, “Well, I can see the heat waves a-rising.”

Somebody else said, “Ain’t nobody but a lazy man can see them heat waves.”

And then Ben saw Thad’s cousin, Dave Coulter, and Dave’s son, Burley, coming out of one of the stores, Dave with a sack of flour on his shoulder and Burley with a sack of meal on his. Except for his boyish face and grin, Burley was a grown man. He was seventeen, a square-handed, muscular fellow already known for the funny things he said, though his elders knew of them only by hearsay. He and his father turned down the street toward their wagon, and Ben followed them.

When they had hunched the sacks off their shoulders into the wagon, Ben said, “Dave?”

Dave turned to him and stuck out his hand. “Why, howdy, Ben.”

“How are you, Dave?”

“’Bout all right, I reckon.”

“And how are you, Burley?”

Dave turned to his boy to see that he would answer properly; Burley, grinning, said, “Doing about all right, thank you, sir,” and Dave turned back to Ben.

“Had to lay in a little belly timber,” he said, “’gainst we run plumb out. And the boy here, he wanted to come see the sights.”

“Well, my boy,” Ben said, “have you learned anything worthwhile?”

Burley grinned again, gave a quick nod, and said, “Yessir.”

“Oh, hit’s an educational place,” Dave said. “We hung into one of them educational conversations yonder in the store. That’s why we ain’t hardly going to make it home by dinnertime.”

“Well, I won’t hold you up for long,” Ben said. And he told Dave as much as he had understood of Thad’s trouble. They were leaning against the wagon box, facing away from the road. Burley, who had gone to untie the mules, was still standing at their heads.

“Well,” Dave said, “hit’s been norated around that Abner weren’t doing just the way he ought to. Tell you the truth, I been juberous about that loan proposition ever since Thad put his name to it. Put his whole foothold in that damned boy’s pocket is what he done. And now you say it’s all gone up the spout.”

“He’s in a serious fix, no question about it.”

“Well, is there anything a feller can do for him?”

“Well, there’s one thing for certain. He was drunk when he came to see me. He was cussing and raring. If you, or some of you, could get him sober, it would help. And then we could see if we can help him out of his scrape.”

“Talking rough, was he?”

“Rough enough.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. Thad don’t often drink, but when he does he drinks like the Lord appointed him to get rid of it all.”

Somebody cried, “Look out!”

They turned to see Thad and the white mule almost abreast of them. Thad was holding the pistol.

“They said he just looked awful,” my grandmother said. “He looked like death warmed over.”

Ben said, without raising his voice, in the same reasonable tone in which he had been speaking to Dave, “Hold on, Thad.”

And Thad fired.

Dave saw a small round red spot appear in the center of Ben’s forehead. A perplexed look came to his face, as if he had been intending to say something more and had forgot what it was. For a moment, he remained standing just as he had been, one hand on the rim of the wagon box. And then he fell. As he went down, his shoulder struck the hub of the wagon wheel so that he fell onto his side, his hat rolling underneath the wagon.

Thad put the pistol back into his pocket. The mule had stood as still after he had halted her as if she were not there at all but at home under a tree in the pasture. When Thad kicked her, she went on again.

Ben Feltner never had believed in working on Sunday, and he did not believe in not working on workdays. Those two principles had shaped all his weeks. He liked to make his hay cuttings and begin other large, urgent jobs as early in the week as possible in order to have them finished before Sunday. On Saturdays, he and Mat and the hands worked in the crops if necessary; otherwise, that day was given to the small jobs of maintenance that the farm constantly required and to preparations for Sunday, when they would do nothing except milk and feed. When the work was caught up and the farm in order, Ben liked to have everybody quit early on Saturday afternoon. He liked the quiet that descended over the place then, with the day of rest ahead.

On that Saturday morning he had sent Old Smoke, Aunt Cass’s husband, and their son, Samp, and Samp’s boy, Joe, to mend a fence back on the river bluff. Mat he sent to the blacksmith shop to have the shoes reset on Governor, his buggy horse. They would not need Governor to go to church; they walked to church. But when they had no company on Sunday afternoon and the day was fair, Ben and Nancy liked to drive around the neighborhood, looking at the crops and stopping at various households to visit. They liked especially to visit Nancy’s brother, Jack Beechum, and his wife, Ruth, who lived on the Beechum place, the place that Nancy always spoke of as “out home.”

And so Mat that morning, after his chores were done, had slipped a halter on Governor and led him down through town to the blacksmith’s. He had to wait—there were several horses and mules already in line—and so he tied Governor to the rail in front of the shop and went in among the others who were waiting and talking, figuring that he would be late for dinner.

It was a good place. The shop stood well back from the street, leaving in front of it a tree-shaded, cinder-covered yard, which made room for the hitch rail and for the wagons, sleds, and other implements waiting to be repaired. The shop itself was a single large, dirt-floored room, meticulously clean—every surface swept and every tool in place. Workbenches went around three walls. Near the large open doorway were the forge and anvil.

The blacksmith—a low, broad, grizzled man by the name of Elder Johnson—was the best within many miles, a fact well known to himself, which sometimes made him difficult. He also remembered precisely every horse or mule he had ever nailed a shoe on, and so he was one of the keepers of the town’s memory.

Elder was shoeing a colt that was nervous and was giving him trouble. He was working fast so as to cause the colt as little discomfort as he could. He picked up the left hind hoof, caught it between his aproned knees, and laid the shoe on it. The shoe was too wide at the heel, and he let the colt’s foot go back to the floor. A small sharp-faced man smoking a cob pipe was waiting, holding out a broken singletree for Elder’s inspection as he passed on his way back to the forge.

Elder looked as if the broken tree were not the sort of thing that could concern him.

“Could I get this done by this evening?” the man asked. His name was Skeets Willard, and his work was always in some state of emergency. “I can’t turn a wheel,” he said, “till I get that fixed.”

Elder let fall the merest glance at the two pieces of the singletree, and then looked point-blank at the man himself as if surprised not only by his presence but by his existence. “What the hell do you think I am? A hammer with a brain? Do you see all them horses and mules tied up out there? If you want that fixed, I’ll fix it when I can. If you don’t, take it home.”

Skeets Willard elected to lay the pieces down in a conspicuous place by the forge. And Elder, whose outburst had not interrupted the flow of talk among the bystanders, caught the shoe in his tongs and shoved it in among the coals of the forge. He cranked the bellows and made small flames spike up out of the coals. As he turned the handle, he stared in a kind of trance at the light of the open doorway, and the light shone in his eyes, and his face and his arms were shining with sweat. Presently he drew the shoe, glowing, out of the coals and, laying it on the horn of the anvil, turned in the heel. He then plunged the shoe into the slack tub from which it raised a brief shriek of steam.

Somebody turned out of the conversation and said, “Say, Elder, do you remember that little red mule come in here with a bunch of yearlings Marce Catlett bought up around Lexington? Ned, I think they called him.”

“Newt,” Elder said in so even a voice that Skeets Willard might never have been there. “You bet I remember him.”

He took the cooled shoe from the slack tub and, picking up the colt’s foot and straddling it again, quickly nailed one nail in each side, raking the points over with the claws of his hammer. He let the colt stand on his foot again to see how the shoe set. “You bet I remember him,” he said. “That mule could kick the lard out of a biscuit.”

And then they heard the single voice raised in warning out in the road, followed immediately by the shot and by a rising murmur of excited, indistinguishable voices as the whole Saturday crowd turned its attention to the one thing.

Mat hurried out with the others and saw the crowd wedged in between the storefronts and Dave Coulter’s wagon. He only began to realize that the occasion concerned him when the crowd began to make way for him as he approached.

“Let him through! Let him through!” the crowd said.

The crowd opened to let him through, turning its faces to him, falling silent as it saw who he was. And then he saw what was left of the man who had been his father lying against the wagon wheel. Those nearest him heard him say, “Oh!” and it did not sound like him at all. He stepped forward and knelt and took his father’s wrist in his hand to feel for the pulse that he did not expect, having seen the wound and the fixed unsighted eyes. The crowd now was as quiet around him as the still treetops along the road. For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father’s dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones. When he looked up again, he did not look like the man they had known at all.

“Who did this?” he said.

And the crowd answered, “Thad Coulter, he done it.”

“Where’d he go?”

“He taken down the road yonder towards Hargrave. He was on that old white mule, old May.”

When Mat stood up again from his father’s side, he was a man new-created by rage. All that he had been and thought and done gave way to his one desire to kill the man who had killed his father. He ached, mind and body, with the elation of that one thought. He was not armed, but he never thought of that. He would go for the horse he had left tied at the blacksmith’s. He would ride Thad Coulter down. He would come up beside him and club him off the mule. He would beat him down out of the air. And in that thought, which lived more in his right arm than in his head, both he and his enemy were as clear of history as if newborn.

By the time Mat was free of the crowd, he was running.

Jack Beechum had sold a team of mules the day before, and so he had a check to carry to the bank. He also had a list of things that Ruth wanted from town, and now that he had money ahead he wanted to settle his account at Chatham’s store. His plan was to do his errands in town and get back home by dinner; that afternoon, he wanted to mow a field of hay, hoping it would cure by Monday. He rode to town on a good black gelding, called Socks for his four white pasterns.

He tied the horse some distance from the center of town in a place of better shade and fewer flies. He went to the bank first and then went about gathering the things that Ruth needed, ending up at Chatham’s. He was sitting by Beater Chatham’s desk in the back, watching Beater total up his account, when they heard the shot out in the street.

“Sounds like they’re getting Saturday started out there,” Jack said.

“I reckon,” Beater said, checking his figures.

“They’re going to keep on until they shoot somebody who don’t deserve it.”

Beater looked at him then over the tops of his glasses. “Well, I reckon they’ll have to look hard to find him.” He filled out a check for the amount of the bill and handed the check to Jack for him to sign.

And then somebody who had just stepped out of the store stepped back in again and said, “Jack, you’d better come. They’ve shot Ben Feltner.”

Jack never signed the check that day or for several days. He ran to the door. When he was outside, he saw first the crowd and then Mat running toward him out of it. Without breaking his own stride, he caught Mat and held him.

They were both moving at some speed, and the crowd heard the shock of the impact as the two men came together. Jack could hardly have known what he was doing. He had had no time to think. He may have been moved by an impulse simply to stop things until he could think. At any rate, as soon as Jack had taken hold of Mat, he understood that he had to hold him. And he knew that he had never taken hold of any such thing before. He had caught Mat in a sideways hug that clamped his arms to his sides. Jack’s sole task was to keep Mat from freeing his arms. But Mat was little more than half Jack’s age; he was in the prime of his strength. And now he twisted and strained with the concentration of fury, uttering cries that could have been either grunts or sobs, forcing Jack both to hold him and to hold him up. They strove there a long time, heaving and staggering, and the dust rose up around them. Jack felt that his arms would pull apart at the joints. He ached afterward. Something went out of him that day, and he was not the same again.

And what went out of Jack came into Mat. Or so it seemed, for in that desperate embrace he became a stronger man than he had been. A strength came into him that held his grief and his anger as Jack had held him. And Jack knew of the coming of this strength, not because it enabled Mat to break free but because it enabled Jack to turn him loose. He stepped away, allowing himself to be recognized, and Mat stood still. To Jack, it was as though he had caught one man and let another go.

But he put his eye on Mat, not willing yet to trust him entirely to himself, and waited.

They both were winded, wet with sweat, and for a moment they only breathed, watched by the crowd, Jack watching Mat, Mat looking at nothing.

As they stood so, the girl, Martha Elizabeth, walked by in the road. She did not look at them or at the wagon or at the body crumpled on the ground. She walked past it all, looking ahead, as if she already saw what she was walking toward.

Coming aware that Jack was waiting on him, Mat looked up; he met Jack’s gaze. He said, “Pa’s dead. Thad Coulter has shot him.”

They waited, looking at each other still, while the earth shook under them.

Mat said, “I’ll go tell Ma. You bring Pa, but give me a little time.”

Dinner was ready, and the men were late.

“It wasn’t usual for them to be late,” my grandmother said, “but we didn’t think yet that anything was wrong. Your mother was just a little girl then, and she was telling us a story about a girl and a dog and a horse.”

Aunt Cass stood by the stove, keeping an eye on the griddle. Nancy was sweeping the floor under the firebox of the stove; she was a woman who was always doing. Margaret, having set the table, had turned one of the chairs out into the floor and sat down. All three were listening to Bess, who presently stopped her story, rolled her eyes, and said, “I hear my innards a-growling. I reckon I must be hungry.”

They laughed.

“I spect so, I spect so,” Aunt Cass said. “Well, you’ll eat fore long.”

When she heard Mat at the kitchen door, Aunt Cass said, “Miss Nancy, you want to take the hoecake up?” And then seeing the change in Mat’s face, which was new to it but old to the world, she hushed and stood still. Nancy, seeing the expression on Cass’s face, turned to look at Mat.

Bess said, “Goody! Now we can eat!”

Mat looked at his mother and then down at Bess and smiled. “You can eat directly,” he said.

And then he said, “Margaret, take Bess and go upstairs. I think she’s got a book up there she wants you to read to her.”

“I knew what it was then,” my grandmother said. “Oh, I felt it go all over me before I knew it in my mind. I just wanted to crawl away. But I had your mother to think about. You always have somebody to think about, and it’s a blessing.”

She said, “Come on, Bess, let’s go read a story. We’ll eat in a little bit.”

As soon as he heard their footsteps going up the stairs, Mat looked at his mother again. As the silence gathered against him, he said, “Ma, I’m sorry. Pa’s dead.”

She was already wearing black. She had borne four children and raised one. Two of her children she had buried in the same week of a diphtheria epidemic, of which she had nearly died herself. After the third child had died, she never wore colors again. It was not that she chose to be ostentatiously bereaved. She could not have chosen to be ostentatious about anything. She was, in fact, a woman possessed of a strong native cheerfulness. And yet she had accepted a certain darkness that she had lived in too intimately to deny.

She stood, looking at Mat, while she steadied herself and steadied the room around her, in the quiet that, having suddenly begun there, would not end for a long time. And then she said to Mat, “Sit down.”

She said, “Cass, sit down.”

They turned chairs away from the table and sat down, and then she did.

“Now,” she said, “I want to know what happened.”

In the quiet Mat told as much, as little, as he knew.

As if to exert herself against the silence that too quickly filled the room, Nancy stood again. She laid her hand on the shoulder of Mat’s wet shirt and patted it once.

“Cass,” she said, “we mustn’t cry,” though there were tears on her own face.

“Mat,” she said, “go get Smoke and Samp and Joe. Tell them, and tell them to come here.”

To Aunt Cass again, she said, “We must fix the bed. They’ll need a place to lay him.”

And then they heard the burdened footsteps at the door.

In his cresting anger in the minutes before he stopped the mule in the road in Port William and fired the one shot that he ever fired in anger in his life, Thad Coulter knew a fierce, fulfilling joy. He saw the shot home to the mark, saw Ben Feltner stand a moment and go down, and then he kicked the mule hard in the side and rode on. He went on because all behind him that he might once have turned back to was gone from his mind, and perhaps even in his joy he knew that from that time there was to be no going back.

Even before the town was out of sight behind him, his anger and his joy began to leave him. It was as if his life’s blood were running out of him, and he tried to stanch the flow by muttering aloud the curses of his rage. But they had no force, and his depletion continued.

His first thought beyond his anger was of the mule. She was thirsty, he knew, and he had denied her a drink.

“When we get to the creek,” he said.

The mule followed the windings of the road down off the upland. Below the cleared ridges, they passed through woods. On the gentler open slopes below, they came into the blank sunlight again, and he could see the river winding between its wooded banks toward its meeting with the Ohio at Hargrave.

At the foot of the hill, the road dipped under trees again and forded a creek. Thad rode the mule into the pool above the ford, loosened the rein, and let her drink. It was a quiet, deeply shaded place, the water unrippled until the mule stepped into it. For the first time in three days Thad could hear the quiet, and a bottomless sorrow opened in him, causing him suddenly to clutch his belly and groan aloud.

When the mule had finished drinking, he rode her out of the pool, dismounted, and, unbuckling one end of the rein from the bit, led her into a clump of bushes and tall weeds and tied her there. For now the thought of pursuit had come to him, and he knew he would have to go the rest of the way on foot. The mule could not be hurried, and she would be difficult to hide.

He went back to the pool and knelt at the edge of it and drank, and then he washed his hands and in his cupped hands lifted the clear water to his face.

Presently, he became still, listening. He had heard, he thought, nothing but the cicadas in the surrounding trees. And then he heard, coming fast, the sound of loud talking and the rapid hooftread of horses. He stepped into a patch of weeds and watched several riders go by on the road. They were boys and young men from the town who, having waited through the aftermath of the shooting, had now been carried by their excitement into pursuit of him. “Boys,” he thought. He felt in no danger from them—he did not think of the pistol—and yet he feared them. He imagined himself hurrying on foot along the road, while the young riders picked and pecked at him.

The quiet returned, and he could feel, as if in the hair roots and pores of his skin, that Martha Elizabeth was coming near. He went back to the road again.

The walking and the water drying on his face cleared his mind, and now he knew himself as he had been and as he was and knew that he was changed beyond unchanging into something he did not love. Now that his anger had drained away, his body seemed to him not only to be a burden almost too heavy to carry but to be on the verge of caving in. He walked with one hand pressed to his belly where the collapse seemed already to have begun.

The best way between Port William and Hargrave was still the river. The road found its way as if by guess, bent this way and that by the whims of topography and the convenience of landowners. At intervals, it was interrupted by farm gates.

After a while, hearing several more horses coming behind him, he stepped out of the road and lay down in a small canebrake. When they had passed, he returned to the road and went on. Always he was watchful of the houses he passed, but he stayed in the road. If he was to protect the one choice of which he was still master, he had to hurry.

And now, as he had not been able to do when he left it, he could see his farm. It shone in his mind as if inwardly lighted in the darkness that now surrounded both him and it. He could see it with the morning sun dew-bright on the woods and the sloping pastures, on the little croplands on the ridge and in the bottoms along the creek. He could see its cool shadows stretching out in the evening and the milk cows coming down the path to the barn. It was irrevocably behind him now, as if a great sword had fallen between him and it.

He was slow and small on the long road. The sun was slow overhead. The air was heavy and unmoving. He watched the steady stepping of his feet, the road going backward beneath them. He had to get out of the road only twice again: once for a family in a spring wagon coming up from Hargrave and once for another horse and rider coming down from Port William. Except for those, nothing moved in the still heat but himself. Except for the cicadas, the only sounds he heard were his own steady footfalls on the dry dust.

He seemed to see always not only the changing road beneath his feet but also that other world in which he had lived, now lighted in the dark behind him, and it came to him that on that day two lives had ended for a possibility that never had existed: for Abner Coulter’s mounting up to a better place. And he felt the emptiness open wider in him and again heard himself groan. He wondered, so great was the pain of that emptiness, that he did not weep, but it exceeded weeping as it exceeded words. Beyond the scope of one man’s grief, it cried out in the air around him, as if in that day’s hot light the trees and the fields and the dust of the road all grieved. An inward pressure that had given his body its shape seemed to have been withdrawn, and he walked, holding himself, resisting step by step the urge to bend around the emptiness opening in his middle and let himself fall.

Where the valley began to widen toward the river’s mouth, the road passed a large bottom planted in corn. Thad looked back, expecting that he would see Martha Elizabeth, and he did see her. She was maybe three-quarters of a mile behind him, small in the distance, and the heat rising off the field shimmered and shook between them, but he knew her. He walked faster, and he did not look back again. It seemed to him that she knew everything he knew, and loved him anyhow. She loved him, minute by minute, not only as he had been but as he had become. It was a wonderful and a fearful thing to him that he had caused such a love for himself to come into the world and then had failed it. He could not have bowed low enough before it and remained above ground. He could not bear to think of it. But he knew that she walked behind him—balanced across the distance, in the same hot light, the same darkness, the same crying air—ever at the same speed that he walked.

Finally he came to the cluster of houses at Ellville, at the end of the bridge, and went across into Hargrave. From the bridge to the courthouse, he went ever deeper into the Saturday crowd, but he did not alter his gait or look at anybody. If anybody looked at him, he did not know it. At the cross streets, he could see on the river a towboat pushing a line of barges slowly upstream, black smoke gushing from its stacks. The walks were full of people, and the streets were full of buggies and wagons. He crossed the courthouse yard where people sat on benches or stood talking in little groups under the shade trees. It seemed to him that he walked in a world from which he had departed.

When he went through the front door of the courthouse into the sudden cool darkness of the hallway, he could not see. Lights swam in his eyes in the dark, and he had to prop himself against the wall. The place smelled of old paper and tobacco and of human beings, washed and unwashed. When he could see again, he walked to a door under a sign that said “Sheriff ” and went in. It was a tall room lighted by two tall windows. There was a row of chairs for people to wait in, and several spittoons, placed at the presumed convenience of spitters, that had been as much missed as hit. No one was there but a large man in a broad-brimmed straw hat and a suit somewhat too small, who was standing behind a high desk, writing something. At first he did not look up. When he finally did look up, he stared at Thad for some time, as if not sufficiently convinced of what he saw.

“In a minute,” he said, and looked down again and finished what he was writing. There was a badge pinned lopsidedly to the pocket of his shirt, and he held an unlit cigar like another pen in his left hand. He said as he wrote, “You look like most of you has been wore off.”

“Yes,” Thad said. “I have killed a man.”

The sheriff laid the pen on the blotter and looked up. “Who?”

Thad said, “Ben Feltner, the best friend I ever had.” His eyes suddenly brimmed with tears, but they did not fall. He made no sound and he did not move.

“You’re a Coulter, ain’t you? From up about Port William?”

“Thad,” Thad said.

The sheriff would have preferred that Thad had remained a fugitive. He did not want a self-confessed murderer on his hands—especially not one fresh from a Saturday killing in Port William. He knew Ben Feltner, knew he was liked, and feared there would be a commotion. Port William, as far as he was concerned, was nothing but trouble, almost beyond the law’s reach and certainly beyond its convenience—a source, as far as he was concerned, of never foreseeable bad news. He did not know what would come next, but he thought that something would, and he did not approve of it.

“I wish to hell,” he said, “that everybody up there who is going to kill each other would just by God go ahead and do it.” He looked at Thad for some time in silence, as if giving him an opportunity to disappear.

“Well,” he said, finally, “I reckon you just as well give me that pistol.”

He gestured toward Thad’s sagging hip pocket, and Thad took out the pistol and gave it to him.

“Come on,” the sheriff said.

Thad followed him out a rear door into the small paved yard of the jail, where the sheriff rang for the jailer.

The sheriff had hardly got back into the office and taken up his work again when a new motion in the doorway alerted him. He looked up and saw a big red-faced girl standing just outside the door as if uncertain whether or not it was lawful to enter. She wore a sunbonnet, a faded blue dress that reached to her ankles, and an apron. Though she was obviously timid and unused to public places, she returned his look with perfect candor.

“Come in,” he said.

She crossed the threshold and again stopped.

“What can I do for you, miss?”

“I’m a-looking for Mr. Thad Coulter from up to Port William, please, sir.”

“You his daughter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, he’s here. I got him locked up. He claims he killed a fellow.”

“He did,” the girl said. “Is it allowed to see him?”

“Not now,” the sheriff said. “You come back in the morning, miss. You can see him then.”

She stood looking at him another moment, as if to make sure that he had said what he meant, and then she said, “Well, I thank you,” and went out.

An hour or so later, when he shut the office and started home to supper, she was sitting on the end of one of the benches under the shade trees, looking down at her hands in her lap.

“You see,” my grandmother said, “there are two deaths in this—Mr. Feltner’s and Thad Coulter’s. We know Mr. Feltner’s because we had to know it. It was ours. That we know Thad’s is because of Martha Elizabeth. The Martha Elizabeth you know.”

I knew her, but it came strange to me now to think of her—to be asked to see her—as a girl. She was what I considered an old woman when I first remember her; she was perhaps eight or ten years younger than my grandmother, the red long gone from her hair. She was a woman always near to smiling, sometimes to laughter. Her face, it seemed, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever and whomever she looked at. She had gone with her father to the world’s edge and had come back with this smile on her face. Miss Martha Elizabeth, we younger ones called her. Everybody loved her.

When the sheriff came back from supper, she was still there on the bench, the Saturday night shoppers and talkers, standers and passers leaving a kind of island around her, as if unwilling to acknowledge the absolute submission they sensed in her. The sheriff knew as soon as he laid eyes on her this time that she was not going to go away. Perhaps he understood that she had no place to go that she could get to before it would be time to come back.

“Come on with me,” he said, and he did not sound like a sheriff now but only a man.

She got up and followed him through the hallway of the courthouse, past the locked doors of the offices, out again, and across the little iron-fenced courtyard in front of the jail. The sheriff unlocked a heavy sheet-iron door, opened it, and closed it behind them, and they were in a large room of stone, steel, and concrete, containing several cages, barred from floor to ceiling, the whole interior lighted by one kerosene lamp hanging in the corridor.

Among the bars gleaming dimly and the shadows of bars thrown back against concrete and stone, she saw her father sitting on the edge of a bunk that was only an iron shelf let down on chains from the wall, with a thin mattress laid on it. He had paid no attention when they entered. He sat still, staring at the wall, one hand pressed against his belly, the other holding to one of the chains that supported the bunk.

The sheriff opened the cell door and stood aside to let her in. “I’ll come back after while,” he said.

The door closed and was locked behind her, and she stood still until Thad felt her presence and looked up. When he recognized her, he covered his face with both hands.

“He put his hands over his face like a man ashamed,” my grandmother said. “But he was like a man, too, who had seen what he couldn’t bear.”

She sat without speaking a moment, looking at me, for she had much to ask of me.

“Maybe Thad saw his guilt full and clear then. But what he saw that he couldn’t bear was something else.”

And again she paused, looking at me. We sat facing each other on either side of the window; my grandfather lay in one of his lengthening sleeps nearby. The old house in that moment seemed filled with a quiet that extended not only out into the whole broad morning but endlessly both ways in time.

“People sometimes talk of God’s love as if it’s a pleasant thing. But it is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes. It included Thad Coulter, drunk and mean and foolish, before he killed Mr. Feltner, and it included him afterwards.”

She reached out then and touched the back of my right hand with her fingers; my hand still bears that touch, invisible and yet indelible as a tattoo.

“That’s what Thad saw. He saw his guilt. He had killed his friend. He had done what he couldn’t undo; he had destroyed what he couldn’t make. But in the same moment he saw his guilt included in love that stood as near him as Martha Elizabeth and at that moment wore her flesh. It was surely weak and wrong of him to kill himself—to sit in judgment that way over himself. But surely God’s love includes people who can’t bear it.”

The sheriff took Martha Elizabeth home with him that night; his wife fed her and turned back the bed for her in the spare room. The next day she sat with her father in his cell.

“All that day,” my grandmother said, “he would hardly take his hands from his face. Martha Elizabeth fed him what little he would eat and raised the cup to his lips for what little he would drink. And he ate and drank only because she asked him to, almost not at all. I don’t know what they said. Maybe nothing.”

At bedtime again that night Martha Elizabeth went home with the sheriff. When they returned to the courthouse on Monday morning, Thad Coulter was dead by his own hand.

“It’s a hard story to have to know,” my grandmother said. “The mercy of it was Martha Elizabeth.”

She still had more to tell, but she paused again, and again she looked at me and touched my hand.

“If God loves the ones we can’t,” she said, “then finally maybe we can. All these years I’ve thought of him sitting in those shadows, with Martha Elizabeth standing beside him, and his work-sore old hands over his face.”

Once the body of Ben Feltner was laid on his bed, the men who had helped Jack to carry him home went quietly out through the kitchen and the back door, as they had come in, muttering or nodding their commiseration in response to Nancy’s “Thank you.” And Jack stayed. He stayed to be within sight or call of his sister when she needed him, and he stayed to keep his eye on Mat. Their struggle in front of Chatham’s store, Jack knew, had changed them both. Because he did not yet know how or how much or if it was complete, it was not yet a change that he was willing, or that he dared, to turn his back on.

Someone was sent to take word to Rebecca Finley, Margaret’s mother, and to ask her to come for Bess.

When Rebecca came, Margaret brought Bess down the stairs into the quiet that the women now did their best to disguise. But Bess, who did not know what was wrong and who tactfully allowed the pretense that nothing was, knew nevertheless that the habits of the house were now broken, and she had heard the quiet that she would never forget.

“Grandma Finley is here to take you home with her,” Margaret said, giving her voice the lilt of cheerfulness. “You’ve been talking about going to stay with her, haven’t you?”

And Bess said, dutifully supplying the smile she felt her mother wanted, “Yes, mam.”

“We’re going to bake some cookies just as soon as we get home,” Rebecca said. “Do you want to bake a gingerbread boy?”

“Yes, mam,” Bess said.

She removed her hand from her mother’s hand and placed it in her grandmother’s. They went out the door.

The quiet returned. From then on, though there was much that had to be done and the house stayed full of kin and neighbors coming and going or staying to help, and though by midafternoon women were already bringing food, the house preserved a quiet against all sound. No voice was raised. No door was slammed. Everybody moved as if in consideration, not of each other, but of the quiet itself—as if the quiet denoted some fragile peacefulness in Ben’s new sleep that must not be intruded upon.

Jack Beechum was party to that quiet. He made no sound. He said nothing, for his own silence had become wonderful to him and he could not bear to break it. Though Nancy, after the death of their mother, had given Jack much of his upbringing and had been perhaps more his mother than his sister, Ben had never presumed to be a father to him. From the time Jack was eight years old, Ben had been simply his friend—had encouraged, instructed, corrected, helped, and stood by him; had placed a kindly, humorous, forbearing expectation upon him that he could not shed or shirk and had at last lived up to. They had been companions. And yet, through the rest of that day, Jack had his mind more on Mat than on Ben.

Jack watched Mat as he would have watched a newborn colt weak on its legs that he had helped to stand, that might continue to stand or might not. All afternoon Jack did not sit down because Mat did not. Sometimes there were things to do, and they were busy. Space for the coffin had to be made in the living room. Furniture had to be moved. When the time came, the laden coffin had to be moved into place. But, busy or not, Mat was almost constantly moving, as if seeking his place in a world newly made that day, a world still shaking and doubtful underfoot. And Jack both moved with him and stayed apart from him, watching. When they spoke again, they would speak on different terms. In its quiet, the house seemed to be straining to accommodate Ben’s absence, made undeniable by the presence of his body lying still under his folded hands.

Jack would come later to his own reckoning with that loss, the horror and the pity of it, and the grief, the awe and gratitude and love and sorrow and regret, when Ben, newly dead and renewing sorrow for others dead before, would wholly occupy his mind in the night, and could give no comfort, and would not leave. But now Jack stayed by Mat and helped as he could.

In the latter part of the afternoon came Della Budge, Miss Della, bearing an iced cake on a stand like a lighted lamp. As she left the kitchen and started for the front door, she laid her eyes on Jack, who was standing in the door between the living room and the hall. She was a large woman, far gone in years. It was a labor for her to walk. She advanced each foot ahead of the other with care, panting, her hand on her hip, rocking from side to side. She wore many clothes, for her blood was thin and she was easily chilled, and she carried a fan, for sometimes she got too warm. Her little dustcap struggled to stay on top of her head. A tiny pair of spectacles perched awry on her nose. She had a face like a shriveled apple, and the creases at the corners of her mouth were stained with snuff. Once, she had been Jack’s teacher. For years they had waged a contest in which she had endeavored to teach him the begats from Abraham to Jesus and he had refused to learn them. He was one of her failures, but she maintained a proprietary interest in him nonetheless. She was the only one left alive who called him “Jackie.”

As she came up to him he said, “Hello, Miss Della.”

“Well, Jackie,” she said, lifting and canting her nose to bring her spectacles to bear upon him, “poor Ben has met his time.”

“Yes, mam,” Jack said. “One of them things.”

“When your time comes you must go, by the hand of man or the stroke of God.”

“Yes, mam,” Jack said. He was standing with his hands behind him, leaning back against the doorjamb.

“It’ll come by surprise,” she said. “It’s a time appointed, but we’ll not be notified.”

Jack said he knew it. He did know it.

“So we must always be ready,” she said. “Pray without ceasing.”

“Yes, mam.”

“Well, God bless Ben Feltner. He was a good man. God rest his soul.”

Jack stepped ahead of her to help her out the door and down the porch steps.

“Why, thank you, Jackie,” she said as she set foot at last on the walk.

He stood and watched her going away, walking, it seemed to him, a tottering edge between eternity and time.

Toward evening Margaret laid the table, and the family and several of the neighbor women gathered in the kitchen. Only two or three men had come, and they were sitting in the living room by the coffin. The table was spread with the abundance of food that had been brought in. They were just preparing to sit down when the murmur of voices they had been hearing from the road down in front of the stores seemed to converge and to move in their direction. Those in the kitchen stood and listened a moment, and then Mat started for the front of the house. The others followed him through the hall and out onto the porch.

The sun was down, the light cool and directionless, so that the colors of the foliage and of the houses and storefronts of the town seemed to glow. Chattering swifts circled and swerved above the chimneys. Nothing else moved except the crowd that made its way at an almost formal pace into the yard. The people standing on the porch were as still as everything else, except for Jack Beechum who quietly made his way forward until he stood behind and a little to the left of Mat, who was standing at the top of the steps.

The crowd moved up near the porch and stopped. There was a moment of hesitation while it murmured and jostled inside itself.

“Be quiet, boys,” somebody said. “Let Doc do the talking.”

They became still, and then Doctor Starns, who stood in the front rank, took a step forward.

“Mat,” he said, “we’re here as your daddy’s friends. We’ve got word that Thad Coulter’s locked up in the jail at Hargrave. We want you to know that we won’t stand for the thing he did.”

Several voices said, “No!” and “Nosir!”

“We don’t think we can stand for it, or that we ought to, or that we ought to wait on somebody else’s opinion about it.”

Somebody said, “That’s right!”

“We think it’s our business, and we propose to make it so.”

“That’s right!” said several voices.

“It’s only up to you to say the word, and we’ll put justice beyond question.”

And in the now-silent crowd someone held up a coil of rope, a noose already tied.

The doctor gave a slight bow of his head to Mat and then to Nancy who now stood behind Mat and to his right. And again the crowd murmured and slightly stirred within itself.

For what seemed to Jack a long time, Mat did not speak or move. The crowd grew quiet again, and again they could hear the swifts chattering in the air. Jack’s right hand ached to reach out to Mat. It seemed to him again that he felt the earth shaking under his feet, as Mat felt it. But though it shook and though they felt it, Mat now stood resolved and calm upon it. Looking at the back of his head, Jack could still see the boy in him, but the head was up. The voice, when it came, was steady:

“No, gentlemen. I appreciate it. We all do. But I ask you not to do that.”

And Jack, who had not sat down since morning, stepped back and sat down.

Nancy, under whose feet the earth was not shaking, if it ever had, stepped up beside her son and took his arm.

She said to the crowd, “I know you are my husband’s friends. I thank you. I, too, must ask you not to do as you propose. Mat has asked you; I have asked you; if Ben could, he would ask you. Let us make what peace is left for us to make.”

Mat said, “Come and be with us. We have food, and you all are welcome.”

He had said, in all, six brief sentences. He was not a forward man. This, I think, was the only public speech of his life.

“I can see him yet,” my grandmother said, her eyes, full of sudden moisture, again turned to the window. “I wish you could have seen him.”

And now, after so many years, perhaps I have. I have sought that moment out, or it has sought me, and I see him standing without prop in the deepening twilight, asking his father’s friends to renounce the vengeance that a few hours before he himself had been furious to exact.

This is the man who will be my grandfather—the man who will be the man who was my grandfather. The tenses slur and slide under the pressure of collapsed time. For that moment on the porch is not a now that was but a now that is and will be, inhabiting all the history of Port William that followed and will follow. I know that in the days after his father’s death—and after Thad Coulter, concurring in the verdict of his would-be jurors in Port William, hanged himself in the Hargrave jail and so released Martha Elizabeth from her watch—my grandfather renewed and carried on his friendship with the Coulters: with Thad’s widow and daughters, with Dave Coulter and his family, and with another first cousin of Thad’s, Marce Catlett, my grandfather on my father’s side. And when my father asked leave of the Feltners to marry their daughter Bess, my mother, he was made welcome.

Mat Feltner dealt with Ben’s murder by not talking about it and thus keeping it in the past. In his last years, I liked to get him to tell me about the violent old times of the town, the hard drinking and the fighting. And he would oblige me up to a point, enjoying the outrageous stories himself, I think. But always there would come a time in the midst of the telling when he would become silent, shake his head, lift one hand and let it fall; and I would know—I know better now than I did then—that he had remembered his father’s death.

No Feltner or Coulter of the name is left now in Port William. But the Feltner line continues, joined to the Coulter line, in me, and I am here. I am blood kin to both sides of that moment when Ben Feltner turned to face Thad Coulter in the road and Thad pulled the trigger. The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in marriage. My grandfather made a peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.

After Mat spoke the second time, inviting them in, the crowd loosened and came apart. Some straggled back down into the town; others, as Mat had asked, came into the house, where their wives already were.

But Jack did not stay with them. As soon as he knew he was free, his thoughts went to other things. His horse had stood a long time, saddled, without water or feed. The evening chores were not yet done. Ruth would be wondering what had happened. In the morning they would come back together, to be of use if they could. And there would be, for Jack as for the others, the long wearing of grief. But now he could stay no longer.

As soon as the porch was cleared, he retrieved his hat from the hall tree and walked quietly out across the yard under the maples and the descending night. So as not to be waylaid by talk, he walked rapidly in the middle of the road to where he had tied his horse. Lamps had now been lighted in the stores and the houses. As he approached, his horse nickered to him.

“I know it,” Jack said.

As soon as the horse felt his rider’s weight in the stirrup, he started. Soon the lights and noises of the town were behind them, and there were only a few stars, a low red streak in the west, and the horse’s eager footfalls on the road.

Watch With Me (1916)

ONE OF the vital organs of Ptolemy Proudfoot’s farm was a small square building called simply “the shop.” Here Tol worked, according to necessity, as a blacksmith, farrier, carpenter, and mender of harness and shoes. The shop contained a forge with a cranking bellows and an anvil resting on an oak block. A workbench, with a stout vise attached, ran along one wall under three small windows. Tools and spare parts and usable scraps lay on the bench or stood propped in corners or hung from nails. On good days when they could be left open, large double doors at the front end admitted a fine flow of light.

On days when the weather prevented work outdoors, Tol would go to the shop and putter, or he would go there and sit and think. But he puttered and thought to advantage, for he earned more than he spent and sold more than he bought. He would be in the shop in the fall and winter more than in the spring and summer. In the spring and summer it was a good place to set a hen, and a couple of boxes for that purpose were fastened to the wall at the end of the workbench nearest the front doors.

Tol and his wife, Miss Minnie, and their neighbors killed hogs as soon as the nights became dependably cold in the fall. They wintered on backbone and spareribs and sausage and souse, with a shoulder or ham now and then. By spring they would begin to be a little tired of pork; fried chicken began to be easy to imagine. That was when Miss Minnie would begin to save eggs and watch for her hens to start setting. She liked to put several hens on eggs, in the henhouse and in the shop, just as soon as the weather began to warm up.

On the morning when this story begins, the chickens of that year were nearly all hatched. There was only one red hen still hovering sixteen eggs in one of the boxes in the shop. It was a fine morning early in August, dewy and bright; the Katy’s Branch valley was still covered with a shining cloud of fog. It was 1916 and a new kind of world was in the making on the battlefields of France, but you could not have told it, standing on Cotman Ridge with that dazzling cloud lying over Goforth in the valley, and the woods and the ridgetops looking as clear and clean as Resurrection Morning. Birds were singing. And Tol could hear roosters crowing, it seemed to him, all the way to Port William.

He had just stepped out after breakfast. It was later than usual, because the day had begun crosswise. When he had called his milk cows, they had not come. He had walked in the weak dawn-light down into the woods along the branch, where he found a water gap torn out by a recent freshet. From there he tracked the three cows down the wooded slopes halfway to Goforth before he found them and started them home. He drove them through the rent in the fence, wired it back with his hands well enough to hold until he could return with proper tools and more wire, and went on up the hill to chain them in their places in the barn.

And then when he was milking the third cow—a light-colored Jersey by the name of Blanche of whom he was particularly fond—she solemnly raised her right hind foot, plastered with manure, and set it down again in the half-filled bucket of milk.

Though he was a large, physically exuberant man who had been a wrestler famous all the way to Hargrave in his younger days, Tol was not a man of violence. But once he got Blanche’s foot out of the bucket, he had to sit there on his stool a good while before he could rid himself of the thought of joyful revenge. On the one hand, he sympathized with the cow. He thought he knew how she felt. It would be exasperating, after finding a hole in the fence and escaping into the wide world, to be driven home again, chained to a stanchion, and required to yield one’s milk into a bucket. On the other hand, Tol’s sense of justice was outraged. He had raised the cow lovingly from a calf; he had sheltered and fed and doctored her; he had loved and petted and pampered her—and now just look how she had treated him! He leaned his head back into her flank and began to milk again.

“Blanche,” he said, “I ought to knock you in the head.” He milked on in silence, his anger ebbing away. “But I don’t reckon I will.”

He stripped her dry, poured the bucket of ruined milk into the hog trough, turned the cows back into the pasture, and went to the house for breakfast, carrying one empty milk bucket and one full one.

“Did you have trouble with the cows?” Miss Minnie asked. She set Tol’s breakfast before him and started straining the milk.

Tol told her.

“Why, the old hussy!” Miss Minnie said. “I’ll bet you wanted to knock her in the head. Did you?”

“Not this time,” Tol said. And that made him laugh, for he thought he was at the end of the story, but he was not at the end of it yet.

The day had begun so contrarily that when Tol went by the shop to see about the setting hen on his way to the barn, he was not much surprised to hear her squawking in extreme dismay before he opened the door. When he opened the door he saw what the fuss was about. A big snake had climbed the locust tree next to the shop, crawled out along a limb and under the eave of the building, and was now descending along a crossbrace toward the hen’s nest. The snake was the kind known as a cowsucker, and it was big enough to swallow every egg in the nest. Tol was not particularly afraid of snakes, though he preferred not to walk up on one by surprise, nor did he hate them. He rather liked to have them around to catch mice, and now and then he would capture one to put in his corncrib. All the same, he did not welcome them into his hens’ nests.

“You got to change your mind, boy,” he said to the snake, who was now looking at him with its head erect, flickering its tongue. “You going to have to take your business elsewhere.”

Tol thought at first that he would just catch the snake by the end of the tail and buy its goodwill by letting it catch mice a while in the corncrib. But a cowsucker is a grouchy kind of snake, much inclined to stand on its rights, and when Tol reached out for its tail, the snake contracted into loops and threatened to bite Tol’s hand. There is no danger of being poisoned by a cowsucker’s bite, but when one threatens to bite you, you are very much inclined to draw back in a hurry whatever you have stuck out, and you are inclined to take the gesture as an insult.

Tol was a man slow to anger, but when the snake made as if to strike his hand, his mental state reverted to the moment, by no means long enough ago, when the cow had put her foot in the bucket.

“Well,” he said to the snake, “if you don’t need killing, then Hell ain’t hot.”

Tol was thoroughly mad by then, and also anxious for the hen and her nest of eggs. On her account, he wanted to get rid of the snake with the least possible commotion and in the biggest possible hurry.

So he ran back to the house and put a shell into the chamber of the old ten-gauge shotgun that he had inherited from his father. It was a hard-shooting, single-barreled weapon that Tol’s father had called Old Fetcher, “for it was a sure way to send for fresh meat.”

When he got back to the shop, Tol flung the door open for light, stood back so as to minimize disturbance to the hen, leveled the long, rusty barrel point-blank at the snake’s head, and fired—only to see the snake, with maddening dignity and aplomb, slowly depart by way of the hole that Old Fetcher had blasted through the wall.

Tol fully appreciated how funny that was, but he had no trouble in postponing his laughter. The hen, for one thing, was off the nest now and raising Cain, as if Tol and not the snake were the chief threat to her peace of mind.

“Get back on that nest and shut up,” Tol said.

He picked up a stick and ran around to the side of the building, but the snake, after the manner of its kind, was nowhere to be seen. And so Tol patched the hole he had made in the wall, and chinked up the place under the eave where he thought the snake had come in. He shooed the offended hen back into the shop and shut the door.

“Be quiet, now,” he said. “You’re going to live.”

He went back to the house, got another shell for the gun, reloaded it, and propped it against the shop door.

Tol went to the garden then, unhooked his hoe from the fence, sharpened it, and began cleaning out a row of late cabbages.

Steady work quiets the mind. Tol began to feel that he had got the day off to a straight start at last. He had nearly finished the cabbage row when he saw Sam Hanks’s truck come in and stop in front of the barn.

Sam got out and came strolling into the garden. He wanted to borrow Tol’s posthole-digging tools so he could set a clothesline post for his mother.

Sam was Miss Minnie’s favorite nephew, the only son of her only sister and Warren Hanks, a hardworking but somehow luckless tenant farmer. Sam had not followed in his father’s footsteps. “He loves a damned wheel,” his father had said, and Sam earned a modest living for himself and his now-widowed mother by hauling livestock and other things in his truck. He owned plenty of mechanic’s tools, but when he needed something to dig with, he came to Tol.

For that matter, Sam was apt to show up at Tol’s and Miss Minnie’s pretty often, even when he didn’t want to borrow something. He returned his aunt’s affection, and he liked Tol. Moreover, he enjoyed Tol. When Sam came walking into the garden that morning, Tol looked completely in character. He stood amid the rows of his garden, which he kept with an almost perfect attention to detail. And in the midst of that neatness and order, Tol could have been a scarecrow, albeit an unusually big one. He wore an utterly shapeless old straw hat. And he had now been long enough beyond the reach and influence of Miss Minnie that part of his shirttail was out, one of his cuffs was unbuttoned, and his left shoe was untied. Tol’s clothes always looked as if they were making a strenuous and perhaps hopeless effort just to stay somewhere in his vicinity.

“Well,” Sam Hanks said to him, “looks like I been elected to put up a clothesline. Don’t reckon I could borrow your diggers and all.”

“Why, sure,” Tol said. “They’re yonder in the shop. Watch, now, when you go in and don’t get snakebit.”

Tol then told Sam what had happened. But he just said he had let the snake get away from him; he didn’t tell about shooting the hole in the wall. He wanted to save that for when he could laugh about it. He was a man who had been mistreated by a cow and a snake all in the same morning, and he felt sore and aggrieved.

But while he was still commenting to Sam on the cowsucker’s extreme ill humor, he saw his neighbor, Thacker Hample, coming over the ridge, and then another trouble returned to his mind.

Thacker Hample belonged to a large family locally noted for the fact that from one generation to another not a one of them had worked quite right. Their commonest flaw was poor vision. When he could find them or somebody found them for him, Thacker wore glasses with lenses as thick as shoe soles. Walter Cotman said that if Nightlife’s nose had been a quarter of an inch longer, he would have been illiterate—but that was Walter Cotman. They called Thacker Nightlife on the theory that he could not tell daylight from dark, and therefore was liable to conduct his nightlife in the daytime. The name had a certain sexual glamour that appealed to Thacker Hample himself. When he had occasion to call himself by name, he usually called himself Nightlife—though he didn’t ordinarily say much of anything to anybody.

But Nightlife was incomplete, too, in some other way. There were times when spells came on him, when he would be sad and angry and confused and maybe dangerous, and nobody could help him. And sometimes he would have to be sent away to the asylum where, Uncle Othy Dagget said, they would file him down and reset his teeth.

When he was quiet, he was quieter than anybody, and Nightlife had been quiet for a long time. But then the week came for the annual revival at Goforth Church, and unbeknownst to anybody but himself, Nightlife decided that on the third night he himself would be the preacher, and he spent most of the preceding night getting ready. He made up a sermon and a prayer or two, and picked out some appropriate hymns. And on the night before Tol’s trouble with the cow and the snake, Nightlife presented himself to the regular preacher and the visiting preacher and told them that he was going to preach the evening’s sermon. In his sermon, as Tol and the others would understand later, Nightlife wanted to tell what it was like to be himself. It had to come out because at that time anyhow, it was all he had in him.

It would have been better if the two preachers had just said all right. But they, who well knew that they knew neither the day nor the hour of the coming of the Son of Man, were in fact not prepared for anything unscheduled. They told Nightlife that the evening’s service would have to proceed as planned. And that was when Nightlife’s time of quietness came to an end and, as the eyewitnesses all agreed, he throwed a reg’lar fit.

He flung his Bible down at the feet of the horrified young preachers. He threw his arms wide apart, laughed a loud contemptuous laugh, and asked them whose church they thought it was. They thought it was their church, he said, but he reckoned they just might be a little bit mistaken: it was Jesus’s church. And when Jesus came back, He would fork the likes of them into Hell as quick as look at them, and he, Nightlife, would at that time enjoy hearing them sing a different tune. He laughed again and bestowed upon them several epithets not normally used in church.

And so that evening’s service did not, after all, proceed as planned. By a sort of general and unspoken deference, Tol Proudfoot, who was certainly the biggest of them and was probably the kindest, was elected to deal with Nightlife Hample. While the others stood around and listened and then, tiring, began to drift away, Tol talked to Nightlife, whose anger had begun to subside into confusions of sorrow, regret, and self-pity. No clever persuasion was involved. With his big hand resting on Nightlife’s shoulder or his knee, Tol told him that everybody liked him and didn’t hold anything against him and thought he was a good fellow and wanted him to go home now and get a good night’s sleep. Tol told him all that over and over again, and finally Nightlife allowed his old mother to lead him home.

But nobody, least of all Tol, thought it would end there. Tol figured that having dealt with Nightlife once, he would have to deal with him again. And so when he saw Nightlife flinging himself over the ridgetop and down toward the barn, he wasn’t surprised, though he certainly was sorry.

“Trouble comes in bunches,” he said to Sam.

From where Nightlife came over the ridge, he could look right into Tol’s garden, and he had on his glasses. That he saw Tol and Sam was obvious enough to them; he even seemed to have the idea of coming directly to where they were. But then when he crossed the road and entered Tol’s driveway, Nightlife appeared to lose his intention; perhaps he had wanted to talk with Tol alone, and Sam’s presence put him off. He wandered past the house into the barn lot. Now he was pretending, perhaps, that he did not know they were there and that he was just looking around to see if Tol was at home.

“You looking for me?” Tol called. “Here I am.”

Nightlife then started toward the garden gate, went past the shop, saw Tol’s old shotgun leaning there, and picked it up. He opened the breech to see if it was loaded. When he closed the breech again they could hear the snap of the lock all the way up there in the garden. Nightlife balanced the gun in his hands for a moment as if he were thinking of buying it. And then he laid it over his shoulder and turned away.

“Uh-oh,” Tol said. He started toward the gate with Sam Hanks stepping between the same pair of rows behind him.

“Don’t take my gun, Nightlife!” Tol called, trying to sound not too much concerned, and yet unable to keep the tone of pleading entirely out of his voice. “I’m liable to need it!”

Tol had started to hurry. He hung his hoe on the fence by the gate and went on toward the shop.

Nightlife was hesitating. He turned back toward the door of the shop, as though he might actually put the gun back where he got it.

But then he turned away again. He said, not to Tol and Sam, rather to himself, but in too loud a voice, as if he did not quite expect himself to be able to hear, “Why, a damned fellow just as well shoot hisself, I reckon.”

“Wait, Nightlife!” Tol said. And then he added an endearment, as he usually did, to soften what might have seemed a reprimand: “Hold on, sweetheart.”

But Nightlife was already starting down through the pasture toward the woods with the gun on his shoulder.

“I expect I’ll just ease along with him a ways,” Tol said to Sam. “You go tell Miss Minnie, and then drive over and tell Walter Cotman and Tom and Braymer. Or send word to them if they’re out at work. And then you come with us.”

Tol was watching Nightlife while he talked to Sam. “Mind that old gun, now. If he’s crazy enough to shoot hisself, he might be crazy enough to shoot you.”

“Or you,” Sam said.

“Or me,” Tol said. He stepped off down the slope, following the dark path Nightlife had made in the dewy grass.

When he heard the screen door slam as Sam stepped into the kitchen, a kind of wonder came over Tol, for almost in the twinkling of an eye he had crossed the boundary between two worlds. In spite of the several small troubles of that morning, he had been in a world that was more or less the world he thought it was, and where at least some things happened more or less as he intended. But now he was walking down through the wet grass of his cow pasture toward the edge of his woods, a place as familiar to him as the palm of his own hand, in a world and a day in which he intended only to follow Nightlife and foresaw nothing.

He hurried a little, not to catch up with Nightlife, but to keep him in sight, which would be harder to do once they were in the woods. And it was into the woods that Nightlife was going. He was not going in a hurry, but he was not loitering either. He walked like a man with a destination—though where, in that direction, he could be going was a mystery to Tol.

And then Nightlife took the gun from his shoulder, placed it in the crook of his right arm, and went in among the young cedars that bordered the woods’ edge at that place. He disappeared as completely as if he had suddenly dived into water, but with less commotion. Not a bush trembled after he disappeared, and Tol feared that he would lose him. He went in himself at the same place, and for a while, among the cedars and other young low-branching trees, he could not see six feet ahead. And then, not far from the edge, the woods became taller and more open, and Tol could see Nightlife again.

He was no longer going so directly down the slope, but was slanting to his right as though he intended to go toward the river along that side of the Katy’s Branch valley, and soon, when he was well into the woods, he again altered his course so that he was not going downhill at all, but was going along the level contour of the slope. He was not walking fast, nor did he appear to be looking at anything. He seemed totally preoccupied, as though all his attention were demanded by whatever was in his mind.

Tol had thought of calling out to Nightlife, but had rejected the thought. The presence of Old Fetcher made it hard to know what to say. Tol had known Nightlife as long as Nightlife had been in this world to be known, but when one of his spells was on him, Nightlife was a stranger to everybody. There was no telling, then, what he might or might not do. Tol didn’t want to cause him to shoot himself in order to win an argument about whether or not he was going to shoot himself. Nor was Tol on his own account at all eager to face the business end of Old Fetcher.

He decided just to follow along, keeping Nightlife in sight as best he could. He would not try to catch up; he would try not to fall too far behind; he would say nothing. And Tol’s decision then established what he and the others would do the rest of that day and into the next. They would let whatever it was run its course, if it would. They would stop Nightlife from using the gun, if they had to and if they were able. At every considerable change of direction, Tol broke a branch end and left it dangling as a mark for Sam. Otherwise, the passage of two men over the dead leaves of the woods’ floor ought to be legible enough.

Nightlife and his widowed mother lived on a farm of maybe fifty acres that lay back in one of the several hollows that drained into Katy’s Branch. The farm was mostly hillside. It contained no ridgeland at all, and no bottomland except for a narrow shelf along the branch where the Hamples had their garden and where they had built a small log barn with a corncrib beside it. The house, built of logs like the barn, stood on the slope above the scrap of bottom, with privy and henhouse and smokehouse behind it. So far as the neighborhood remembered, nobody but Hamples had ever lived there. The farm was a remnant of land that had been overlooked or left out of the surveys of the larger boundaries that once surrounded it, or it had been sold off one of the larger boundaries at some time during the frenzy of settlement and speculation that accompanied the white people’s first taking of the land.

There had been a time—way back when the trees of the original forest were yet growing on it—when the place was fertile. But the first-comers, having no other land to farm, cut the trees from the slopes, patch by patch, growing little crops of tobacco and corn until fertility declined by the combined action of plow and rain, and then abandoning the land again to bushes and then trees, only to repeat the whole process in forty or fifty years. In the early days, perhaps, the Hamples lived up to the standard of most of their neighbors. They had the produce of what was still a productive little farm. They had what they could kill or pick or dig up in the stands of virgin forest that still stood all around.

But as the forests were cut down and the wild bounty of the country diminished and the soil of the slopes fled away beneath the axes and jumper plows of generation after generation of Hamples, the family’s life became ever more marginal. They kept a milk cow or two, a team of mules, meat hogs, and poultry. They raised a patch of corn and a little shirttail crop of tobacco. They kept the garden. They hunted and fished and trapped, dug roots and stripped bark, gathered the wild potherbs and fruit. From the corn that they and their animals did not eat, they distilled a palatable and potent whiskey, of which they sold as much as they did not drink. And yet their life declined until they were reduced to dependence on daywork for their neighbors, who did not need much help. And yet the Hamples persevered, and even provided a sort of hearty and bitter amusement to themselves. Delbert, Nightlife’s father, as an old man became famous for his boast, often repeated in the store at Goforth or in the bank at Port William: “I started out with damn near nothing, and I have multiplied it by hard work until I am going to end up with damn near what I started out with.”

But the Hamples were known, too, for their handiness. The neighborhood liked to boast of them that they could “make anything or fix anything.” They seemed to be born, virtually every one of them, with an uncanny mastery of tools and materials. When weak vision got bred into the line—which it did fairly early—it apparently made little difference, for Hample hands were so adept that they seemed to possess a second sight in their very fingertips. As industrial farm machinery entered the country and became more complicated, the Hamples in a way came into their own. None of them ever had the enterprise to open a proper shop, but their neighbors were forever bringing them something to fix.

Large families of Hamples had been raised in their snug hollow with its two slopes facing one another across the rocky notch of the branch, for the Hample men, whatever the condition of their fields, were fertile, and they married fertile women. As soon as they got big enough to leave or to marry, the Hample generations scattered like seeds from an opened pod. Always, until now, somebody would be left to start the cycle again. But after his father died, Nightlife stayed at home with his mother; he did not marry, and nobody thought he ever would. Even as a Hample, Nightlife was an oddity, and nobody could quite account for him. He had inherited the mechanical gifts of the Hamples; people said that he could do anything with his hands. And yet he seemed also to have been endowed with an ineptitude that was all his own. For instance, when he was about ten years old he contrived a jew’s harp out of an old clock spring and a piece of walnut; it was a marvel of cunning artistry, as everybody affirmed, but when he attempted to play it, it very nearly cut off his tongue. He was a Hample, plain enough, but it was as though when he was a baby his mechanically minded siblings had taken him apart and lost some of the pieces, which they then replaced with just whatever they found lying around. Nightlife lacked almost entirely the rough sense of humor that had accompanied other Hamples into and out of this world. And in addition to the capability of becoming drunk, which all Hample men before him had had in varying degrees, Nightlife had the capability of becoming crazy. His mind, which contained the lighted countryside of Katy’s Branch and Cotman Ridge, had a leak in it somewhere, some little hole through which now and again would pour the whole darkness of the darkest night—so that instead of walking in the country he knew and among his kinfolks and neighbors, he would be afoot in a limitless and undivided universe, completely dark, inhabited only by himself. From there he would want to call out for rescue, and that was when nobody could tell what he was going to do next, and perhaps he could not tell either.

Or that was what it looked like to Tol, who had thought much about it. And that was what Nightlife himself looked like that morning when Tol followed him down into the woods—he looked like somebody who didn’t know where in all the world he was, who didn’t know anybody else was there to see him, much less follow along after him.

Tol followed him nevertheless, and yet he did so with a sense of foregone conclusion. He had too much courtesy, if he had not had too much sense, to believe for sure that Nightlife would die by his own hand that day, or even soon, if ever. But he believed that he would die somehow sometime, and that when he did die, the name and the prospects of the Hamples would depart forever from what until then would be known as the Hample Place.

In assuming that the history and the future of the Hamples in their native hollow would end with Nightlife, Tol was right. Fifty years later, on a Sunday ramble with Elton Penn and the Rowanberry brothers and Burley Coulter, I walked up the branch through what once had been the Hample Place. It was early April. The spring work had started. When Elton and I drove down to the Rowanberry Place after dinner that day, the Rowanberrys said they were stiff and sore and needed to walk. So we climbed up through the woods onto the Coulter Ridge where we ran into Burley, who had nothing better to do, he said, than to go with us. There were five of us then, not hurrying or going anyplace in particular; we were just walking along and looking at the season and the weather, talking of whatever the places we came to reminded us of.

We walked down the hollow the Coulters call Stepstone, past the old barn that stands there, and on down to the Katy’s Branch road. We followed the road up Katy’s Branch a little beyond Goforth, and then we crossed the branch and went up into the woods along the hollow that divided the Hample Place. By then the Hample Place, the Tol Proudfoot Place, the Cotman Place, and others had all been dissolved into one large property that belonged to a Louisville doctor, who had bought it for a weekend retreat and then lost interest in it. Now, except for the best of the ridges, which were rented and farmed badly, the land was neither farmed nor lived on. Every building on it was ruining or already ruined, and the good hillside pastures were covered with young trees—which Burley Coulter said was all right with him.

“It’s a damned shame, anyhow,” said Elton, who did not want to forgive the neglect.

“Well, a fellow looking for something better, he don’t want to stay in a place like this,” Art Rowanberry said.

“Was that doctor looking for something better when he bought it?” Mart said.

“I reckon he thought he already had something better.”

“Well,” Mart said, laughing a little to refuse the argument with his brother, “anyhow, I reckon the more trees, the more coons.”

They were all hunters. All the country around us was thickly crisscrossed with the nighttime passages of their hunts. They had worked over it, too, and as boys had played over it. They knew it by day and by night, and knew something about every scrap of it. As we came up by Goforth Church, the long-abandoned store building, and the site of the vanished schoolhouse, and then passed the Goforth Hill road that went up alongside the Proudfoot Place, they began to tell stories about Tol Proudfoot, quoting the things he had said that nobody who had known him ever forgot. And then when we started up along the Hample branch, they told about the time Nightlife threw his fit, and about Tol and the others following him through the woods.

“What kind of farmers were the Hamples?” I asked.

And Art Rowanberry said, “Oh, they growed a very good winter crop.”

The Hample Place, when we got to it, no longer looked like anybody’s place. The woods, which had started to return after Delbert Hample’s death, had now completely overgrown it. The young trees had grown big enough to have begun to shade out the undergrowth. The barn and other outbuildings were gone without a trace. The house had slowly weathered away beneath its tin roof, which with its gables intact had sunk down onto the collapsed walls. Only the rock chimney stood, its corners still as straight as on the day they were laid. We peered under one of the fallen gables and looked straight into a buzzard’s nest containing one fuzzy white chick and one unhatched egg.

We had come as far as we wanted to go, and we rested there a while before we started back. It was a pleasant place, sheltered, opening to the west, so that the sun would have warmed it on winter afternoons. The north slope above the house would have been good land once, and now with the woods thriving on it again, you could imagine how it once might have evoked a vision of home in whatever landless, wandering Hample had first come—though his and his descendants’ attempt to farm there could only have proved it no place to farm. Their way of farming, in fact, had destroyed maybe forever the possibility of farming there. And so you felt that the trees had returned as a kind of justice. They had only drawn back and paused a moment while a futile human experiment had been tried and suffered in that place, and had failed at last as it was bound to do.

As we were leaving, we wandered past the fallen house and across the old garden spot to the branch. And then we saw that the chimney was not the only thing left standing, for there in the middle of the streambed stood a cylinder of laid rock that once had lined the Hamples’ well, and now it stood free like another chimney, turned wrong side out, where the stream had cut the earth from around it.

And so the Hamples had come and gone and left their ruin. And now the trees had returned. The trees on the little shelf where the garden had been were tall young tulip poplars that lifted their opening buds into the still light and air of that evening with such an unassuming calm that you could almost believe they had been there always.

Art Rowanberry, I remember, stood looking at them a long time. And then, turning to go, he said, “Well, old Nightlife didn’t have to leave this world for want of wood, I don’t reckon.”

And so Tol was right. The Hamples did die out on the Hample Place. But they did not die out of the community. There are still plenty of Hamples, on Cotman Ridge and elsewhere, to this day.

Tol had just begun to wonder when Sam was going to show up when Sam showed up. Tol raised his hand to him, and Sam nodded. In silence then they picked their way along together, Sam walking behind Tol. Between themselves and Nightlife, they kept a sort of room of visibility, the size of which varied according to the density of the foliage. They meant to stay separate from Nightlife by the full breadth of that room. When the foliage thickened, they drew closer to Nightlife to keep him in sight. Where the trees were old and there was not much undergrowth, they slowed down and let him get farther ahead.

After a while Nightlife came to a pile of rocks that had been carried from some long-abandoned corn or tobacco patch, and he sat down, laying the gun across his lap. He appeared now to be carrying the gun as if it were some mere hand tool, not recognizing what it was, just as he appeared to grant no recognition to himself or to where he was. When he stopped and sat down, Tol and Sam stood still. When he got up and started on again, they followed.

After a while Braymer Hardy was there behind Sam. And not long after that, when Tol again looked back, Walter Cotman and Tom Hardy were there. Tol stopped them then, and beckoned them close. He was older than the oldest of them by twenty years; he could have been father to them all, and they came obediently into whispering distance.

“Boys,” he said, “ain’t no use in us walking lined up so that old gun could hit us all with one shot. Kind of fan out. We’ll keep him in sight better that way.”

They fanned out as he said. And now the room of sight that had been defined only by a diameter was given a circumference as well. As they moved along, they continued to draw closer together or move farther apart, according to visibility. In that moving room that at once divided and held them together the only clarity was their intent not to let Nightlife be further divided from them.

They moved along with him wherever he moved. He went, still, pretty much level along the face of the slope, into the draws and out around the points, through old woods and through thicket, across pastures and tobacco patches, but mostly in the woods. Sometimes he would stop or sit down, and then they would wait, and when he went ahead they would go with him. That Nightlife was not himself, that he had become merely the vehicle of something he suffered that they had not suffered, they could tell by the way he moved and carried himself, the way he looked always straight ahead and always at the ground. He moved like a man in the concentration of urgent bodily pain, though they knew his pain was not of the body. Maybe he was not going to kill himself, they thought. Maybe he just needed something he did not have, had never had, did not know how to ask for, and maybe did not know the name of. But they knew also that Old Fetcher was an influential weapon. It was not a squirrel rifle—not a gun with which you could confidently undertake to shoot yourself just a little. If you picked up Old Fetcher, declaring that you might as well shoot yourself, then they knew as surely as if they held it in their own hands, you couldn’t put that gun down again without deciding not to shoot yourself.

It was a long time since morning now, and the day was getting hot. In the woods it was still and close. All five of them had sweated through their shirts. And still they moved along with Nightlife, and still they formed their rough and ever-shifting semicircle at the limit of sight. They were squirrel hunters and they knew how to move unobtrusively and quietly in the woods. In the spell of Nightlife’s silence and their own, strangeness came over them, as if they had died and come back in another time. Everything familiar had become strange. What they saw around them now seemed no longer to be what they knew and had always known, but seemed only to remind them of a time when they had known those things. They were following a man whom it had never occurred to them to follow before, who now had become central to their lives, and who perhaps was trying to find his way out of this world.

By noon they had come all the way down the Katy’s Branch valley and turned into the valley of the river, still keeping along the mostly wooded face of the bluff, high up. Now they were conscious of the bigger space and larger light; down through openings among the treetops they could see the river itself bending across the valley floor between its two parallel rows of trees, leaving the wide bottomlands first on one side and then the other. They could see the cornfields and houses and farm buildings in the bottoms on down into the blue distance halfway to Hargrave. Off somewhere on the far side of the river they heard a dinner bell.

And now they were aware also of the world going on, unaware of them and their extraordinary worry and purpose. It seemed unaccountable to them that they should know so well where they were when nobody else in all the world had any idea.

Presently they came to a deep crease in the face of the slope, worn there over the millennia by a steep wet-weather stream known as Squire’s Branch. And here instead of turning into the hollow in order to keep on the level as he had been doing, Nightlife slanted down into the dry bed of the branch and then turned straight down toward the river, stair-stepping down the tumbled rocks of the streambed. The others followed in their half-circle, with Tol in the center and the others fanned out on either side.

They stayed in the wooded hollow, but as the slopes gentled they could see open pasture off through the trees first on the left and then also on the right. And then they could see a little tobacco patch on the left. From time to time, the foliage opening, they could see the little store at Squire’s Landing and the house on the slope above it where Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie Dagget lived and farmed a little and fished a little and kept the store and the landing and kept an eye on the comings and goings of the neighborhood.

When Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie’s house came full into sight, Nightlife climbed out of the streambed onto the open slope. And then he walked down across Uncle Othy’s cow pasture, through the yard gate, across the yard, up onto the back porch, and through the kitchen door without so much as a knock.

Tol stopped at the edge of the woods and the others came up beside him.

“What now?” Walter Cotman said.

Tol uttered a sound that was partly a laugh and partly a grunt. What he should have done was all too clear to him now, and to the rest of them, too. He should have sent Sam Hanks and Tom Hardy, who were on that side of the branch, to Uncle Othy’s ahead of Nightlife. But it had not occurred to him that Nightlife, who earlier had avoided him and Sam and who had spent the whole morning skulking along in the woods by himself, would think of going right into somebody’s house. Tol had his lower lip between his teeth.

“Well, what are we going to do?” Braymer Hardy said.

“Boy, there ain’t nothing to do. We can’t go barging into Aunt Cordie’s kitchen ourselves. He’s the only one that’s got a gun. And if we had guns they wouldn’t do us any good, unless we wanted to shoot somebody or get shot, which I reckon we don’t.”

“So I reckon we’re going to wait,” Walter Cotman said. And he sat down.

The others seemed to consider sitting down also for they would not have minded a rest, but nobody but Walter did so. Nor could they stay where they were. Watching the house always, they eased gradually down into the yard. They did not go closer to the house than the yard gate for fear of inciting Nightlife to some damage they feared without naming. The worst they could imagine now had as good a license to happen as the best, and there was nothing at the moment that they could do. They did not go to the shade for the same reason that they did not sit down: it would not have been right. All the morning, it seemed to them, they had been walking the rim of the world, a narrow, shadowy, steeply sloping margin between life and death, and this imposed a strict propriety on them all. But from where they stood even with the kitchen windows open, they could not tell what was happening inside.

They weren’t going to know what was happening inside until after the story was over and Uncle Othy told Sam Hanks and Sam told Tol and Tol told the others at church on Sunday morning.

Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie were eating dinner. It was fried catfish. The others knew that much; they could smell it out in the yard. It smelled better than they wanted it to, for they were hungry.

“Do you want some cornbread, Othy?” Aunt Cordie said.

And then the screen door opened and here came Nightlife right into the kitchen with that old gun cradled in the crook of his left arm and looking like he was trying hard to remember something that he only barely remembered forgetting. They had not heard him until he put hand to the door and the spring sang.

He got clear into the middle of the kitchen before he seemed to realize that he was among people.

When he saw Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie sitting at the table, looking at him, their laden forks suspended between their plates and their mouths, he said, “Let us earnestly compose our hearts for prayer.”

“Son,” Uncle Othy said later to Sam Hanks, “I did earnestly compose my heart for prayer. I was afraid if I looked up I’d find my head in my plate.”

When Uncle Othy and Aunt Cordie bowed their heads, Nightlife prayed. What he said Uncle Othy was unable to report to Sam, for he said his mind had been occupied with a few words in his own behalf.

It was, anyhow, a long prayer that Nightlife prayed; Uncle Othy ran out of anything to say in his own behalf before it was over, and under the circumstances he was unable to think of anything to say in anybody else’s behalf. He and Aunt Cordie sat there with their heads down while that good fish got cold on the platter and Nightlife prayed, but not for them or at them; he prayed as if he were off somewhere by himself, and out loud but not too loud, Uncle Othy said, as if he suspected Old Marster was present but too deaf to overhear a thought or a whisper.

Aunt Cordie kept her head bowed to the end, for she would honor even a crazy man’s prayer. But when Nightlife said, “Amen,” she looked straight at him. “Thacker Hample, now what is all this foolishness? Sit down, child, and let me fix you a plate.”

But Nightlife just stared at her and at Uncle Othy, too, as if they, who had known him all his life, were strangers. His face was covered by a sort of blur of incomprehension, as if he not only did not recognize them but had no idea where he was.

“Son,” Uncle Othy said, “put down that dad-damned old gun, now, and get yourself something to eat.”

“I can’t eat of that river,” Nightlife said, “for it’s of the passing of the flesh. I don’t know where it has come from nor where it’s a-going.”

“Son, that river has come from up and it’s a-going down. Take a chair, and let the woman fix you a bite of fish.”

Aunt Cordie, who had got up, said, “Yes!” and reached out toward Nightlife as if to take hold of his arm.

Nightlife shrank away from her hand like a wild horse, and went back out the kitchen door.

“I went to the kitchen door and watched him go,” Uncle Othy told Sam, “and then I seen you all was following along after him. So I sat down again and told the woman to pass the cornbread, for I had to eat and I didn’t have all day.”

When they had come out of the shadowy woods, the whole hillside, buildings and trees and all, quaked in the still sunlight. Under the strong light, the maples in Uncle Othy’s yard seemed bent in profound meditation on their shadows now drawn in at their feet. Standing together just inside the yard gate, Tol and the other three quaked, too, and sweated in the fierce, bright fall of the noon heat. Not a leaf stirred anywhere. They heard what they would later know was Nightlife’s prayer—not the words, but just the rising and falling sound of it. And then, more briefly, they heard the voices of Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy.

And then the screen door was flung open and Nightlife came out, letting the door clap to behind him. When he stepped off the porch, he looked straight at the little band of men standing inside the yard gate with no more sign of recognition than if they had been posts or trees or not there at all. He followed the path around the house and down past the little store that would be closed until Uncle Othy finished his dinner. He turned upriver along the road; beyond the wooden bridge over Squire’s Branch, he crossed the narrow bottom to the river and turned upstream again at the top of the bank.

They were following him again, easing along behind him as before, keeping him in sight. If he knew he was thus accompanied, he gave no sign, and he did not look back. They walked nonetheless in fear that he would look back, would see and recognize them, and that the sight of them would cause him to do they did not know what. They were too busy, picking their way along and keeping him and each other in sight, to have time to think much about anything else, but they never ceased to be conscious of the gun, and of the immense difference it made. It was the wand that transformed them all. Without it, they would have been men merely walking on the world. Having it there before them in the hands of a man who might do with it they did not know what, they were men walking between this present world and the larger one that lies beyond it and contains it.

When they had passed the store they had seen Put Woolfork sitting in the shade under the porch roof, waiting for Uncle Othy to come down and open up for the afternoon. Put, as they knew, had a misery that wouldn’t let him work much in hot weather, and so he would walk down to the landing in the afternoon to fill himself up with Uncle Othy’s gossip and free advice. They had not passed near enough to him to speak, though Tol had raised his hand. Put did not raise his hand in reply, for he was too absorbed in watching them. They knew that they would be the first subject of conversation in the store that afternoon. They expected that as soon as Put was fully informed of the dinnertime events in the Daggets’ kitchen, he would be along.

They were right. Now that Nightlife was walking along the river, he began to stop more often. The river seemed to have attracted his notice as nothing had since he had spied Old Fetcher leaning against Tol’s shop door. As he went along now, he would pause to stand and look at the shady water beneath the overleaning trees. Or if he came to a stump or a drift log, he would sit down and look. And so it was no trouble for Put, once he had been informed, to catch up with them. Tol was soon aware that somebody was coming along behind them, and before he looked he knew who it was. Glancing back, he would see Put watching them from a weed patch or from behind a tree, his face sticking out, curious—in truth, fascinated—and yet afraid. He had come to observe and report.

Put was a man of about Tol’s age, somewhere past his mid-forties, though his face showed not a wrinkle. He was round of eye and face and form, as tight-skinned and smooth as an apple. “Put” was a foreshortening of Pussel Gut, a name that had been conferred upon him on his first day in school. Put lived on a tiny farm where the Cotman Ridge road came down into the river bottom. He kept three or four cows, which his wife milked, and with the help of his wife and his neighbors, he grew a little crop. The misery that kept him from working much in hot weather also did not allow him to work much in cold weather or in wet weather, or ever to do any work for very long if it was very hard. Put walked with his knees bent and his posterior slightly lowered as if at any moment he might be called upon to squat, so that even walking on level ground, he gave the impression that he was going down a steep hill. It was not a good idea to ask him how he was, for he would tell you. Tol nevertheless always asked him how he was. Tol was as good a friend as Put had.

Still, it made him uneasy to have Put tagging along. Though he did not like to know it, and would never have said so, he knew that Put, beyond being useless, could be a burden. He knew also that unlike most of the neighborhood, who either tolerated Put or ignored him, Walter Cotman despised him. It had not been but a few days since Tol had heard Walter say in Put’s presence—as if Put were not there or as if it did not matter if he was—that he was “as no-account as a shit-for-a-living damned old housecat.” Walter was a good farmer and a good dependable young man, and yet Tol knew that Walter had an edge to him as hard, sharp, and forthright as a good saw. Walter was a fastidious, demanding man, who did good work himself, who had no patience with bad work, and who said exactly and without hesitation whatever he thought. Walter’s tongue, as Tol often said to Miss Minnie, was connected directly to his mind.

Tol knew furthermore that when Walter laid one of those opinions of his in front of all the world, the Hardy brothers would laugh at it. The Hardys were stout, good-natured, smiling fellows, enough alike almost to be twins, except that Tom pitched and Braymer caught, and Braymer never owned anything he wouldn’t trade and Tom never owned anything he would. They were half Proudfoot, the sons of Tol’s sister, and Tol took much pleasure and pride in them. But they were young yet, too willing to laugh at somebody’s failings. So far as he could, Tol would go along with Put just as he would go along with Nightlife; he would do what he had to do, or what he could do. If, after it was over, it made a good story, then he would tell it; if it was funny, he would laugh. But now was no time for laughter.

Nightlife had stopped again. He had come to one of the rare places where the bank slanted down gently almost to the water’s edge. He sat down on the exposed roots of a big water maple that leaned out over the water; the gun lay across his lap and his hands rested on the gun. All the trees were big there, the riverbank was clear of brush, and Tol and the others had fallen a long way back. From his distance behind them, Put could no longer see Nightlife at all. Presently Tol saw Put break cover and start forward. Put was curious; he wanted to be where he could look at Nightlife. But Tol knew that he also had got lonesome and was longing for company and approval. Wanting no more commotion than necessary, Tol eased quietly back to forestall him.

“How’re you, Put?” Tol said.

“Aw, Tol, I ain’t no good,” Put said. “I’ve had my misery a right smart lately. You know how this weather does me. How you, Tol?” he asked sympathetically, as if Tol suffered from the same misery.

“Fine,” Tol said.

“Well, Uncle Othy was telling me about Nightlife and all. What do you reckon is going to happen? You reckon he’s going to shoot hisself ?”

They were talking under the white limbs of a large sycamore, well out of sight of Nightlife, but Put was peering ahead, trying to see him; he had hardly looked at Tol. “Where’s he at?”

“He’s yonder,” Tol said.

Now, having seen Tol move back, the others were coming, too.

Walter Cotman came up beside Tol just as Put said, “Well, I just thought you might need some help.”

And Tol imagined Walter saying to Put—or to one of the others, for he would say it in front of Put but not to him, “If somebody’s going to get shot, he’d like to be on hand to see it, long as it ain’t much trouble.” Tol could hear it as plainly as if Walter had said it, though so far Walter had said nothing.

“Honey,” Tol said to Walter, “I expect one of us ought to keep an eye on Nightlife. We don’t want him to go off without us.”

Walter nodded and went back.

“Why, sure,” Tol said to Put. “A fellow never knows when he’ll need help.”

After Nightlife got up from the roots of the maple and started on, it was a long time before he stopped again. He stayed near the river, avoiding the farmsteads, using farm roads or cow paths when he came to them and they were going in his direction; where there was no beaten way, he kept to his course anyhow. Briar patches he went around; other obstacles he climbed or went through apparently without granting them notice of their existence. He went through patches of nettles up to his waist. He went through brakes of horseweed that were over his head. He was not hurrying, but neither did he alter his pace or stop. And Tol followed just as steadily behind him, with the young men spread out on either side of him as before and Put Woolfork coming along behind. The crops having been laid by, the six of them walked in a deserted country even there among the fields, and as they walked, the hot bright afternoon stood tall and still above them. Around them, in the heat, the low fields shimmered and swayed.

Tol was hungry. He had not forgotten the smell of fried fish wafting out from Aunt Cordie Dagget’s kitchen. He was sorry he had not thought to leave Walter or Sam to wait for Uncle Othy to open the store and bring along maybe some cheese and some crackers, or maybe a few cans of sardines. He did not wish to indulge such thoughts, but they came to him uninvited, for he was a big man and he was used to three big meals a day.

But he was troubled also because he knew—he had known ever since that moment at the Daggets’ when he had watched Nightlife walk unchecked and preceded by no warning through Aunt Cordie’s kitchen door—that the day was beyond their control. The only man who had control was Nightlife, who did not know he had it. Their proven helplessness at the Daggets’ forced Tol to acknowledge that he could not foretell any of the bad outcomes that might lie ahead—or any outcome at all, for that matter. Maybe, he thought, you could keep a crazy man with a gun from shooting you or somebody else, if you could guess correctly what he was going to do and watch closely enough and keep far enough away. But how in the world you could keep him from shooting himself if he wanted to, unless you had a gun yourself and shot him first, Tol could not imagine.

And so along with heat and hunger and the beginning of weariness, Tol’s mind began to be afflicted by a sense of the futility, even the foolishness, of what he and the others were doing. For a while his thoughts lurched here and there as if unable to accept that there was not something better to do, or a better way to do what they were doing, some reasonability or sense that could be invited in. But he gave that up, as he gave up with the same motion of his mind the hope of food or rest or comfort.

It was not going to make sense, not yet, and maybe not for a long time, if ever. And for a while, maybe a longish while, there would not be food or rest or comfort either. When they got to the end of the story, he reckoned, they would at least eat. He said to himself, “I reckon it would be better not to have got involved.” But he knew even so that, helpless or not, hopeless or not, he would go along with Nightlife until whatever happened that would allow him to cease to go along had happened. And he knew that Walter and Sam and the Hardys would keep going as long as he did, just as he knew that Put would not. He thought, “I reckon I am involved.”

They had had a quick drink where a spring fed into Squire’s Branch just above Uncle Othy’s tobacco patch, and none since. Nightlife had not stopped to drink at all. Now they saw Nightlife veer away from the river toward an isolated barn where they knew there was a cistern. The cistern was in a small lot now in the shade at one of the barn’s eastward corners. Keeping their distance, they watched Nightlife enter the lot, unhook a tin can from the barn wall, and pump himself a drink. He leaned the gun against the barn when he took down the can, and now he sat down on the cistern top with his back to the gun and with the full can of water in his hand.

“Lordy Lord,” Tol thought, “if only one of these boys was close enough to snatch that old gun and run with it!”

But they were not close enough. They were standing in the sun at the edge of a cornfield, scattered out as before. Except for Put who had kept his distance from them as they from Nightlife, they were well within sight of one another, watching Nightlife who was sitting and resting in the shade with that can of cool water in his hand. With the cistern in sight, they suffered from their thirst. Nightlife took his time. The shade held him, and he sat there, sipping water from the can, while the barn swallows dipped and circled around him and overhead. And still he kept the same straight-ahead fixation on whatever was on his mind; he did not turn his head this way or that; he did not appear to be looking at anything.

After a while—an almost insufferable while for those who watched, thirsty, at the weedy edge of the cornfield, furnishing dinner to the sweatbees and the deerflies—he got up, hung the can back on its nail, picked up the gun, and went on in the same direction as before.

When Nightlife went out of sight into a wooded hollow, well beyond gun range of the barn, Tol’s little company headed for the cistern—the Hardy brothers first, running, Sam Hanks not far behind them, and then Walter Cotman, who disdained to concede by any haste that he was as thirsty as the others, and then Tol. When Tol got almost to the little cistern lot, Put Woolfork emerged from the cornfield.

Now that they were close enough to one another, the Hardy brothers were almost as eager to talk as to drink.

“Whew!” Tom was saying as Tol came up. “When I seen him go in at Uncle Othy’s, I didn’t know what.”

He had pumped for Sam, and now he pumped again while Braymer held the can under the spout.

“I sure didn’t want to hear that old gun go off,” Braymer said. He grinned, shook his head, and wiped his mouth. “Uncle Tol,” he said, “I don’t reckon you was worried.”

Tol laid his hat on the cistern top and wiped his face on his sleeve. “No,” he said, “I wasn’t worried. A man has a fit one night in church, and the next day picks up a loaded gun and goes off into the woods by hisself, and then walks in on an old couple at dinnertime without a knock or a ‘come in,’ that ain’t no kind of a worry.”

“What I want to know,” Braymer said, having drunk and handed the can to his brother, “is how long can he keep up this traveling. Don’t you reckon he’ll get hungry before long? He ain’t had no dinner.”

“We ain’t either,” Sam said, “that I noticed.”

“I reckon a man going to shoot hisself don’t need to worry much about dinner,” Tom said.

“How do you know he’s going to shoot hisself?”

“Well, he said he was, didn’t he?”

“He said he might as well. Maybe he ain’t going to.”

“Maybe he ain’t.”

Walter filled the can and offered it to Tol.

“Drink,” Tol said.

Walter drank, refilled the can, and handed it to Tol.

“Well,” Walter said, gazing off where Nightlife had disappeared, “if the damned fool is going to shoot hisself, why don’t he go on and do it, and let the rest of us get back to work?”

That was Walter exactly, Tol thought. He would not leave a thought unsaid. And he could not ignore a difference.

But Walter did not leave, as Tol—and Walter himself—knew he would not. He said no more. He simply snorted, seeing that Put had now come up and seated himself on the cistern top.

Having emptied the can once fast and once more slowly, Tol handed it to Tom Hardy who was still at the pump, and stepped off toward the woods’ edge, begrudging himself the three or four minutes he had stopped to drink.

Tol had not gone many steps from the barn before Sam Hanks put his hat back on and started after him. If there was danger in Nightlife, then Tol walked at risk now as he approached the woods; though Tol could not see Nightlife, Nightlife, if he wished, could see Tol. Once again it was possible for Sam to imagine the single abrupt syllable that was Old Fetcher’s entire vocabulary. Sometimes during that day it had been possible to forget the old gun’s plain and sudden eloquence; sometimes it had not been. Sam remembered it now with an exact presentiment of the difference it could make. He was glad to see that Tol circled out well wide of the place where Nightlife had entered the woods.

In his battered and frazzled old straw hat that no longer by its shape distinguished front from back, and his increasingly disheveled clothes now soaked with sweat, Tol reminded Sam of a tree. He was like a tree walking. Over the difficult terrain of that day he had taken the footing as it came, uphill or down, sidling or flat, brushy or open, as concentrated in his way as Nightlife in his.

The others also were coming now, hurrying to catch up, Walter Cotman and the Hardys positioning themselves in relation to Tol as before, Put Woolfork falling back into his accustomed place at the rear.

Their little delay at the cistern had cost them; now, for the first time since the beginning, they did not have Nightlife in sight and did not know in which direction he had gone. Once they were in the woods, they circled about in order to cross his track.

In a little while Walter Cotman said quietly, “Here he went.”

And now they arranged themselves according to the known reference of Nightlife’s track, which curved around a slue and then on out of the woods into another grass field where, at last, they had him in sight again.

From the barn where they drank, Nightlife had not gone back to the river, but slanted across the bottom generally in the direction of the mouth of Willow Run. He went on as before, straying around impassable obstacles, avoiding places where there might be people. For Tol and the others, following him had ceased to seem unusual. In the heat and the difficulty of their constant effort to keep just within sight of their strange neighbor, who had become at once their fear, their quarry, and their leader, they had ceased even to wonder what end they were moving toward. This wild pursuit that at first had seemed an interruption of their work had become their work. Now they could hardly imagine what they would be doing if they were home.

At the edge of a tobacco patch, they came upon two rows of tomatoes. Going by, they each picked two or three ripe ones. Tom Hardy picked a half-rotten one and aimed a perfect throw at the back of his brother’s head. If the tomato had been anything harder, it would have knocked Braymer down. Braymer returned the fire with two tomatoes, one of which, aimed at Tom’s head, caused him to duck, the second knocking off his hat. This exchange occurred in perfect good humor and in absolute silence.

Tol, who had a large tomato in each hand, whispered, “Boys! Boys! Boys!” and kept walking.

Tom made as if to throw a tomato at Tol’s back, grinned at his brother, and followed Tol, eating the tomato.

Nightlife reached the river again just a little downstream from the mouth of Willow Run. He kicked aside a few little pieces of driftwood and made himself a place to sit down and then he sat down, leaning his back against a large sycamore. There were several big trees there, water maples and sycamores and cottonwoods, making the shade deep.

A good breeze, the first they had felt all day, was coming up the river. They would have been comfortable, waiting there, except that they were thirsty again, and even if they had wanted to drink out of the river in dog days, they could not have gone down the bank now without putting themselves too much into view.

And so they just stopped when Nightlife stopped, and stood still, only taking their hats off to let the breeze cool their heads. After they had been there, unmoving, a little while, the stillness of the place sealed itself over them. Even the little wind ripples on the water seemed to grow attentive and still.

And that was when they heard Put Woolfork squall.

It was really not much of a squall, just the single abrupt syllable, “Wa!”—a statement that Put would not be allowed to forget for the rest of his life. It might have been merely the startled, despairing outcry of some unfortunate animal.

But Tol knew what it was, and he thought, “Boys!”

If Nightlife had heard, he gave no sign. He did not move. Tol looked then to see which of his young companions was missing, and found that no one was. They were all looking at him.

He started back toward the place the squall had come from. Seeing that all four of the others had started back with him, he stopped; he motioned to Sam to stay and keep an eye on Nightlife, and then went on, Walter and the Hardys moving quietly along with him.

Presently they saw, standing at the foot of a tall cottonwood, Burley Coulter with three days’ whiskers, holding an unlit lantern, grinning at Put Woolfork, who was fussing at him in a whisper.

“It ain’t a damn bit funny,” Put was saying. “You just done it because it was me. I’d like to see you try it on Walter Cotman.”

Burley simply continued to grin. And then when he saw Tol and Walter and the Hardys coming up, he shifted his grin to them.

For a few seconds nobody said anything, and then Tol said, “I knowed it was a boy. I just didn’t know which boy it was.”

Burley was twenty-one that year, old enough to take the word boy either as a judgment or as a pleasantry. Tol offered it as both, and Burley received it with his grin unaltered.

“Howdy, Burley,” Walter Cotman said. “Has Put treed a squirrel?”

Burley told what there was to tell. He had been in a patch of elderberries at the edge of the riverbank trees, just ready to step into the shade to cool off and maybe take a swim in the river, when he saw Nightlife coming along with the gun; Burley recognized it as Tol’s Old Fetcher. From Nightlife’s possession of the gun and from the look of him, Burley knew that something was out of fix. He kept still. Presently he saw Tol and Sam and Walter and the Hardy brothers, who obviously were following Nightlife. And then, coming way behind, he saw Put. When Tol and the others stopped, Put, who could not see Nightlife, stepped behind the big cottonwood and began to peep around it. He was so given over to his curiosity that Burley could not resist the temptation to creep up behind him and poke him in the back with a stick. Thereupon, expecting to die, Put had uttered the aforementioned famous exclamation.

The circumstances did not permit laughter, but even Tol smiled.

And Put said, “Slip up on a fellow that way! It’s about what you’d expect.”

“If you expected it, what did you holler for?” Burley said.

Burley was a wild young man. As the others knew, Put was an eager carrier of tales about Burley; they knew that Burley knew it, and knew that Put knew that Burley knew it.

“Well, what are you doing here?” Walter asked Burley.

“I’ve got a young dog disappeared over in here somewhere. Running a fox, I reckon.”

“How come you’re hunting this time of year?”

“I ain’t hunting. He’s hunting. I’m hunting him. You all got anything to eat? I had a few biscuits but they’re long gone.”

“No. We ain’t got a crumb. How long you been gone?”

Burley grinned, not much wanting to say, but finally saying, “Since night before last. What you boys doing?”

They told him.

Put, whose sense of grievance had been growing, said, “It’s done already chore time. I got to go home.”

“Don’t go, Put,” Tol said. He knew that was what Put wanted him to say, but he said it anyhow. “It ain’t no use in going.”

“Well,” Put said sadly, “I ain’t got no business here.”

Having thus expressed his dissatisfaction with them all, Put headed home.

And so, while following Nightlife to keep from losing him somewhere ahead of them, they had lost Put Woolfork behind them. And Tol was sorry, for he had not meant to lose anybody. He knew Put exactly for what he was. And yet in some way that Tol could not have explained, now that Put had gone off offended, they needed him. Or anyhow Tol did.

“He ain’t going home yet,” Walter said. “Not till his women have had time to get the milking done.”

“Well,” Tol said, “he don’t mean no harm.”

“Nor no good neither.”

“Well, but no harm.”

Tol was not sure there was no harm in Put—he was at least a gossip and probably a troublemaker—but he did not want to say so, and he did not want Walter to say so. It was a time of day when you could be sorrowful if you were not at home. Tol felt himself pressed out again onto that verge that Nightlife was walking. The conviction welled up in him that Put was better with them than he was alone—even allowing for the trouble that attended him, or that he brought, when he was with them.

“How about you boys?” he asked. “You all have got chores, too.”

“Well, how about you?” Braymer Hardy said.

“I ain’t got much. Miss Minnie can do what I’ve got.”

“Well, our wives can do ours,” Braymer said.

“How about Josie?” Tol said to Tom Hardy, who was the one most recently married. “Can she milk?”

“Why, I reckon!” Braymer said. “She’s a better hand than Tom.”

“Walter,” Tom said, “can you do like Put and leave your chores for your wife?”

“Why, sure,” Walter said.

Tol—who had not ceased to watch Sam Hanks, who had not ceased to watch Nightlife—now saw Sam motion to them to come on.

“Come on, boys,” Tol said.

“Burley,” Walter Cotman said, “you just as well come along.”

“I reckon I just as well,” Burley said.

And so he came along.

From the mouth of Willow Run, where the river curved in close to the hill again, Nightlife led them back up along the wooded bluffs. Now they left the river valley and walked upstream along the westward slope of the valley of Willow Run. Once he was well up into the woods, Nightlife followed the level contour of the slope out around the points and in and out of the hollows, as he had done before, and they followed him.

In one hollow a tiny stream of water flowed, and Nightlife followed it straight up the slope to where a spring issued from a cleft in the rock. They watched him kneel and drink, and waited while he sat down to rest.

Waiting, they looked at one another and grinned. They were again suffering from thirst, and again Nightlife took his time.

When finally he rose and went on and disappeared in the foliage, Tol motioned to Burley to go and drink. There was room for only one to drink at a time, and Tol did not want as much commotion and delay as there had been at the barn.

They watched as Burley knelt and drank and went on, and then one by one Tol waved the others forward: Walter, and then the two Hardys, and then Sam.

When Sam had finished, Tol drank and followed after the others, leaving the woods quiet again around the spring.

They would be in the woods now for a long time, for the west slope of the valley was poor land, most of which had been cut over at one time or another but not plowed. They were passing through some stands of large trees, mostly hickory and oak, and it was pretty walking, though too steep to be comfortable. Going along behind the others, Tol thought that if he were not hungry and did not have Nightlife to worry about, he would be having a pretty good time. And then he thought that he was having a pretty good time anyhow.

The evening shade had come to that side of the valley by the time Tol caught up with the others. It was cooling off a little. They would have been grateful for some supper—they were all thinking of things they would like to eat—but they were enjoying the cool. A little breeze had begun drifting down the slope, drying the sweat from their faces.

The light now lost its strength and heat as if detached from its source. Stray glows and luminescences floated among the trees. Sometimes they would hear a wood thrush sing, a flute suddenly trilled and then fading, somewhere beyond or behind. And before all the daylight was gone, there was a moon.

While Tol still had enough light to see them all, he gathered them to him. “We can’t all stay close enough to see him after dark,” he said. “So let Burley follow Nightlife, and we’ll follow Burley. With that moon, we ought to be able to stay together pretty good.”

And that was what they did.

After it got dark, Nightlife wandered a little more than he had earlier; he went a little slower and stopped more often. But he went on and on, Burley followed him, and they followed Burley. They kept always alert, for if Burley lost sight of Nightlife or they lost sight of Burley, anything could happen. Or so they felt. They felt that they could not afford to risk confusion. They certainly did not want to become disoriented and blunder into Nightlife and Old Fetcher in the dark. Enough moonlight filtered down through the foliage to give vigilance an edge over confusion, but barely enough. The light filled the woods with shadows, and at times the very effort of sight seemed to call forth phantoms and apparitions, motions where nothing moved. They lost all sense of where they were except in relation to one another. They forgot their tiredness and their hunger. They would have been thirsty again if they had remembered thirst, but they had forgotten it. They seemed to have become enlarged out of their bodies into sight itself and the effort of sight, and they walked owl-eyed among the confusions of things and the shadows of things.

They knew only what they saw, and they saw only shadows within a shadow. Nightlife led them through a maze that did not exist before he led them through it. They went in silence, for the dew had softened the dry leaves underfoot, and still they walked with care. Now and again, when they passed above a house, dogs would bark. Now and again, way off, they would hear an owl. Once, coming suddenly to the edge of an open field, they seemed to plunge headlong out of the dark into the moon-flooded sky.

The moon shone way into the night. And then, unexpectedly, for they had not seen the sky in a while, clouds covered the moon, and it was suddenly so dark that they could not see to the ends of their own arms; when they held their hands up before their faces and wiggled their fingers, they could not see them. It was, Walter Cotman told Elton Penn, who told me, “as black as a coker’s ass, and all at once.”

They stopped and waited, for that was all they could do. They knew that somewhere in the dark ahead of them Burley was trying out the problem of following Nightlife by sound, of getting close enough to him to know where he was without touching him. And so they waited.

They waited a long time, and saw nothing at all. They heard anonymous, inexplicable stirrings here and there. They heard a dog bark, way off—not at them this time. They heard a small owl trill sweetly and another answer from farther away. And that was all.

They were beginning to think of sitting down when they saw a dim yellow light suddenly bloom out of a hollow not far behind them. They turned and eased back toward it. When they got close enough, they recognized Burley. He had lit his lantern. They gathered around him.

“He never stopped,” Burley said. “He kept right on going.”

“Course he went on!” Walter said. “A man that can’t see in the daytime, what does it matter to him if he can’t see in the dark?”

“I stayed with him for a while,” Burley said. “I was close enough to him that I could hear him walking, I thought. And then I got to where I couldn’t tell what I was hearing. I was starting to hear things, and I couldn’t tell if they was actually things or not. I got scared I’d walk smack into him, so I held back. And then I lost him. He either stopped or went on, I didn’t know which. And so I eased away.”

“Well, we don’t want that light, do we?” Tol said.

“He’s too far to see it where he is,” Burley said, “I think, unless he followed me back.” He grinned at Walter Cotman.

The lantern, turned low, sat on the ground at their feet. It showed them their faces, and cast their shadows out around them like spokes.

They fell silent now, for the knowledge of their failure had suddenly come over them. The potency of Tol’s old shotgun entered their thoughts again. They knew that at any time, from somewhere out in the dark, they might hear its one short and final exclamation. And only then would they know where to go.

“Well,” Tol Proudfoot said, after a time that seemed longer than it was, “I reckon we’ve lost him.”

“I reckon if he’s lost, he ain’t by hisself,” Tom Hardy said. “Do you know where we are?”

“I know within three or four miles, I reckon,” Tol said.

“Do you know, Burley?”

“Right here,” Burley said.

They were speaking almost in whispers.

“What’re we going to do, then?” Walter Cotman said. “Stand here till sunup, with that lantern lighting us up for him to shoot at?”

“That lantern ain’t going to burn till sunup,” Burley said, “unless one of you all brought some coal oil.”

“We could build us a little fire, I reckon,” Braymer said.

Tol knew then that they were going to build a fire. He already objected to the lantern—or the caution in him objected to it. But after the darkness, it was a comfort and a pleasure. That they would build a fire he knew because he knew he could not bring himself to stop them from building it.

He was nonetheless relieved to hear Walter Cotman say, “We’re too close to him here to build any fire.”

“Well,” Burley said, “we could drop down this hollow till we’re out of the woods. He’ll stay in the woods, won’t he? That’s his pattern.”

They made their way slowly down the rocky bed of the stream. They came to a water gap in a rock fence, and crossed into what they knew to be a pasture, for now they saw cattle tracks and smelled cattle, and the foliage had been browsed nearly to the height of a man. There were trees still along the hollow, but here there would be grass fields out on the slopes on either side.

Burley led them up out of the streambed onto a little bench. By the light of the lantern or by feel they gathered up kindling and bigger wood for a fire. They helped the kindling with a tiny splatter of oil from the lantern, and soon they had a small fire going. Burley raised the globe and blew out the lantern flame. The fire cheered them; it forced back the dark and the damp of the night a little, and they were glad to sit down beside it. They were tired, and the fire made them a resting place.

And yet sitting there in the room of light it made was a fearfully simple, almost a brutal, act of faith. It made them visible to all the distances around them, and made those distances invisible to them. All they could hope was that if Nightlife saw the light of their fire, he would come into it and not shoot into it. They did not think he would see it, but the chance that he might shaped that odd little hope in them, and it kept them silent for a while, glowing, all of them, in the firelight.

Finally Walter Cotman said quietly, “It’ll rain tomorrow.”

“I’d say so,” Tol said.

“Well, we need a rain.”

“Yes, we do. If it don’t come too hard.”

“It could come hard. It’s been mighty hot.”

“We need one of them good old dizz-dozzlers,” Braymer Hardy said. “This time of year, it would be money in the bank.”

“A good rain now surely would ruin them little cabbages of mine,” Tol said.

“Why?”

“It would make big ones out of ’em.”

What they had said had not made so welcome an effect on the silence around them as their fire had made on the darkness. They let the silence come back. The fire eased them, and they thought of their tobacco. Walter and Burley made cigarettes; Sam and Tol filled and lit cob pipes; the others took chews.

After a while Walter said in the same quiet voice as before, “Tom, you reckon Josie’ll still be at your house when you get home?”

“It ain’t every newly married man that you find wandering about the woods of a night,” Tol said.

“Pore thing,” Braymer said, “it’s just a blessing she don’t care nothing about him, or this sort of doings would break her heart.”

Except for Tom’s, every face around the fire remained solemn. Tom grinned.

Tol said, “You take a young fellow like that, now, ugly and mean and nothing to offer but beans and hard work, and he fools a nice, smart, pretty girl into marrying him—you’d think he wouldn’t leave home, day nor night.”

“It’s a shame,” Walter said. “The women are all talking about it.”

“I growed my crop close to the house, the first year I got married,” Braymer said, “didn’t you, Uncle Tol?”

“Yessir, I did,” Tol said.

“Tom,” Walter said, “when you get up of a morning and you see these little specks floating on top of your coffee and you try to blow them off and they don’t blow off, that’s because they ain’t there.”

And then, way off, on their side of the valley but in a place they had not yet come to, a hound’s voice opened the darkness like a flare.

They hushed to listen.

The hound puzzled for several minutes over the scent he had announced, as if he were cold-trailing, perhaps, or going in the wrong direction. And then his cries rose full and confident.

“Is that your dog, Burley?” Sam Hanks asked.

“It’s him,” Burley said.

“Well, that ain’t no fox he’s running now.”

“No. He’s running a coon now.”

Tol said, “He’s a sweet-mouthed dog, ain’t he?”

They listened. Presently the cries became more urgent. The coon had treed.

“That was quick,” Sam said.

“Probably a sow with young ones,” Burley said.

The hound’s voice now seemed to fill the world with longing. The voice seemed to speak for the world. It spoke for Nightlife. It spoke for them all.

It seemed to them also to be an outlandish breach of propriety—so close and, in the face of their difficulty, so insistent on the normal order of things. The hound was Burley’s, and the others kept quiet for fear that Burley was going to say, in spite of Nightlife’s despair somewhere nearby in the dark, “Well, I reckon we ought to go see if a coon is what it is.” Burley himself kept quiet for fear that one of the others might say it in courtesy to him. And so for a long time nobody but the hound said anything.

Without warning, a hectoring, humorous voice came out of the nearby dark: “Well, by God, if you fellows is hunting, why don’t you go to your dog?”

The voice lifted them to varying heights above their resting places before they recognized it and let themselves back down again. Lester Proudfoot stepped into the firelight, holding his lantern up as if he had found what he was looking for.

“We ain’t hunting,” Burley said. “We’re just setting here improving.”

“I don’t reckon you brought anything to eat,” Tom Hardy said. “Or drink.”

“Naw, nor nothing to sleep with neither. What in the hell are you doing, running around in the woods of a night? Something got wrong with young women since my day? Tol, how you making it?”

Lester bore all the distinguishing marks of a Proudfoot. He was Tol’s first cousin, and he looked like Tol, though he was not as big. He possessed to the full the Proudfoot gregariousness, always ready to do anything that could be done in company. Lester would talk to anybody anywhere, under any circumstances, at any time, at any length. A hunter himself, he had been awakened by the hound and then, looking out his kitchen window, had seen the fire up on the hillside.

Tol told him why they were there.

“And Nightlife’s up yonder in the woods somewhere with a gun?” Lester said.

“I reckon. Sit down, Les.”

Lester sat down. He extinguished his lantern. “And you boys is waiting here either for him to see this fire and come to it, or take a shot at one of you all?”

“Or shoot hisself,” Walter Cotman said. “Or wander on from hell to breakfast, the way he’s been doing.”

“He’s done already wandered around equal to Moses,” Tom Hardy said.

“He’s wandered around equal to old Daniel Boone hisself,” Braymer said.

“Well, I hope he discovers Kentucky pretty soon and settles down,” Walter said.

“What the matter with him is he’s a Hample,” Lester said. “Ain’t that his chief difficulty? He don’t fit the hole that was bored for him.”

“Les,” Tol said, “tell about that time Nightlife’s granddaddy swore off drinking.”

“Uncle Norey,” Lester said. “Uncle Norey got to where he would always get drunk and down before the crop was made, and leave the hardest part for Aunt Nancy and the children. Aunt Nancy told him he’d have to stop that, and he did, he swore off. And then when they finally got the crop made and ready for the market, Uncle Norey said, ‘Here I’ve put in a whole crop year from Genesis to Revelation, and nare a drop of liquor has defiled my lips. Hand me that jug!’ ”

After Lester’s noisy entrance among them, their conversation had been quiet. Now they laughed as quietly as they had spoken. And then, except for the hound still clamoring at the tree, the quiet restored itself.

For some time, where they were, it was silent altogether.

And then Tom Hardy said, “A man would think of killing hisself, he ain’t at hisself, surely.”

“He’s at hisself, all right,” Tol said. “He ain’t nowhere but at hisself. Look at old Nightlife just rambling on, not looking right nor left, going like he knows where, and he don’t know.”

“The way he is now,” Walter said, “he just as well stayed home or stayed asleep. Or never been born. He don’t know where he is.”

“Don’t matter where he is,” Tol said. “He’s just wandering around inside hisself, looking for the way out. In there where he is, it’s dark sure enough.”

“Well, here we are. Or there we were. Right there with him.”

“And what did we do? Or what could we? For he ain’t just wandering around inside hisself; he’s wandering around out of reach—by about the range of that old gun.”

“You got to live whether you want to or not,” Tom Hardy said.

Tol said, “Boy, I think you’ve got to want to.” He said nothing for a long time then, and then he said, “You’ve got to like to live in this world. You can’t just mortal it out from one day to the next for three score years and ten.”

They were quiet again for a while, and then Lester stood up and relit his lantern. He said, “I reckon being as that keen-eyed fellow’s up there with Tol’s gun, I won’t bother about your dog now, Burley. I’ll slip up there after daylight and bring him down to the house. You get him when you can.”

“I’d be much obliged,” Burley said.

Lester stepped out of the firelight then. For a few seconds they heard his footsteps descending the slope, and then it was quiet. They could hear the hound, and that was all.

When Lester had gone, they began to feel their weariness. One by one they lay down beside the fire and slept.

“Couldn’t you stay awake? Couldn’t you stay awake?”

Gray daylight had come. The fire had burned down to white ash. Now, though the hound was exactly where he had been before, his voice sounded farther away and smaller. But what had wakened them was Nightlife standing over them, one foot in the ashes. He was holding the gun, but not threatening them with it. It dangled from his hand as unregarded as if it had been the bail of an empty bucket.

“Couldn’t you stay awake?”

The lenses of his glasses apparently as opaque as bark, he was looking right at them and not seeing them. They were frightened, astonished, tickled at their own and one another’s fright and astonishment, and most of all ashamed.

“Sit down, Nightlife,” Tol said. “Sit down, old bud. We’ll go home pretty soon and get some breakfast.”

“You think there ain’t no breakfast here?” Nightlife said. “Where the hell you think breakfast is at? I’ve got breakfast right here.”

His voice had grown louder, and now he raised the gun and gestured with it in a way that caused them to make various motions backward. “Couldn’t you stay awake?” he said.

“Well, we thought if you shot yourself it would wake us up,” said Walter Cotman.

Nightlife went on then. He stepped out of the circle of men around the dead fire, and started back up into the woods. They lay there with their heads raised and watched him go.

“Shoo!” Tom Hardy said quietly. It seemed to them all that they now began to breathe again.

Tol grunted, getting himself to his feet. “If he hadn’t found us,” he said, “I don’t reckon we ever would have found him.”

The others got up slowly and followed—“three meals in arrears by then,” Sam Hanks would say years later, “and we were feeling it, I can tell you.”

In a little while it seemed to them that they had never stopped. They went on as before. Even their hunger and thirst were familiar. They came to another spring and drank, and then they were only hungry.

They were going upstream through the woods on the westward side of Willow Run valley, which was the eastward side of Cotman Ridge, the westward side of which they had gone down the morning before. They were approaching Tol Proudfoot’s place from the direction opposite to that of their departure.

When Nightlife stopped again, Tol dropped back a little and beckoned Sam to him.

“Looks like we’ll be pretty close to home again before long,” he said.

“Maybe he’ll circle right back to there,” Sam said. “You reckon?”

“Maybe so. If he don’t, maybe we can at least get a bite to eat as we go by. If you don’t mind, would you just cut straight across to my house and ask Miss Minnie would she kindly see if she can’t scrape us up a little something to eat?”

“Why, sure,” Sam said. “Looks like that Nightlife would get hungry sooner or later hisself. Don’t you reckon a good meal mightn’t get him unfittified?”

“It might,” Tol said. “There’s a world of sanity in a little meat and gravy. It sho would help me.”

The women, of course, had anticipated this hunger. When Sam stepped into Miss Minnie’s kitchen, Thelma Cotman and the two Josie Hardys, Josie Braymer and Josie Tom, were frying chicken and baking biscuits and making gravy and slicing tomatoes and boiling beans and potatoes. Even old Mrs. Hample, Nightlife’s mother, was there. Miss Minnie had sent for her, and she had walked up not long after daylight, worried and needing company. She was making a kind of dutiful effort to help the other women, but was so distracted and full of hesitations that she was only getting in their way, wringing her hands beneath her apron and trying to disguise her repeated glances out the windows and the door. “I just don’t know what’s got into that boy’s head,” she kept saying. “I just wisht I knowed.”

The smell in the kitchen was almost too much for Sam Hanks. “I thought I was going to faint,” he said. “I had to sit down and hold on to the table.”

But he delivered his message: One way or another, sooner or later, they would be there to eat. They would need a lot. They were hungry.

“I should think so,” Miss Minnie said. “Poor Thacker Hample!”

“Poor Thacker Hample!” Sam said. “Good God!”

To appease him and to comfort him on his walk back into the woods, she gave him two chicken legs and three biscuits, which in pure kindness Sam ate in a hurry, so as not to torment Tol and the others by the sight.

It was not a true circle that Nightlife had traveled in. He had been governed too much both by the lay of the land and by his craziness for his course to have assumed any sort of regular shape. Nevertheless, it was clear by midmorning that he was headed back toward their starting place. He came up out of the woods and began picking his way across the pastures and hayfields and around the tobacco and corn patches of the ridgetop, and he was tending generally in the direction of Tol Proudfoot’s place.

For some time they had been hearing thunder in the distance, and every leaf in the woods had held still. When they came out of the woods onto the high and open ground, they could see under the general overcast a dark cloud sharply outlined above the horizon in the southwest. And the thunder was louder. They could hear it rumbling and stuttering. It had about it the quality of preoccupation, as if the Power inhabiting the cloud was too intent upon his preparations to concern himself yet with what he was going to do.

Keeping Nightlife in sight was no longer a problem now that they were on the open ridge. He went his way as before, looking neither left nor right, as if he were the only human being left on earth. Tol and the others maintained their distance from him, safely out of gun range, close enough to see him. When they got to the top of the ridge and could look down and see Tol’s house and outbuildings, Tol beckoned to Sam and Burley and Walter.

“Boys, work your way around on the right, now. Stay between him and the house. Don’t let him go to the house. Sam, you go tell the women to lock the doors.”

So now Tol and the Hardys followed Nightlife as before, but Walter and Burley and Sam walked almost even with him, well out to his right. And now the sky lowered and darkened until it seemed to enclose them all.

The road across from Tol’s place was bordered by a rock fence. Because they were approaching at an angle to the road, the three who were walking to Nightlife’s right got to the fence before he did, and crossed it and stepped down the bank into the road. Nightlife then approached the fence and started to cross.

And that was the last that Tol and the Hardys saw of him before the storm hit. It fell upon them all of a sudden—lightning and thunder and wind and hard rain all at once. Tom and Braymer started running and also disappeared from sight. The rain fell hard, so nearly a solid spout that, Burley said, “a fish could have swum up it.” When the big drops struck and splashed, the wind seized the spray and sped it along in sheets.

Tol went down the slope to the rock fence, clambered over it, fell, and slid down the bank into the road. He glimpsed the opening of the driveway, and went in under the greater darkness of the yard trees. By then he, too, was running.

The shop was the first outbuilding reachable from the road. And now Tol could see that the door of the shop was open, and he knew the others had gone inside. He was not fast on his feet, but he passed one other man who, he realized only after he had gone by, was walking, and carrying a gun.

“No, boys!” he called into the shop as he ran. “Wait! Come out!”

He stumbled into the dark interior of the shop only a step or two ahead of Nightlife, who stopped just inside the door.

When Nightlife stepped through the door behind Tol, and took his stand, cradling the gun in his hands as if expecting a covey of quail to flush at any second, that put an end to the little breathless laughter that had started among the others because of their wild run through the storm and their escape into shelter at last.

They hushed and stood still in their sopping clothes. Sam Hanks then quietly sat down on a nail keg in front of the forge. Now that they looked at Nightlife face-to-face, after all he had caused them to do and to think, they were struck by how ordinary he looked. He looked like his same old self—except that, looking straight at them, he appeared not to see them, or to be looking through them at whatever was behind them.

“Brethren,” he said, “let us stand and sing.” And he began, alone at first, to sing “The Unclouded Day.”

Staggeringly, the others began to join in. And here it was discovered that Sam Hanks, who was the only one sitting down, had not stood up. He had instead managed to find a dry match and had lit his pipe.

“Sam,” Tom Hardy said to him in a whisper, “ain’t you going to sing?”

“Naw sir!” Sam said out loud. “I ain’t a-going to sing just because the likes of him tells me to.”

“Well, he’s liable to shoot you.”

“Well, he’ll just have to do it, then, because I ain’t going to sing.” And Sam expelled several small complacent puffs of smoke, looking out past Nightlife into the rain.

But the others sang, and sang pretty well, too, Burley’s and Tol’s strong voices carrying the others:

O the land of cloudless day,

O the land of an unclouded day;

O they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise,

O they tell me of an unclouded day.

They lifted the fine old song up against the rattle of hard rain on the roof and up over the roof and out into the gray, rainy light—as if in them the neighborhood sang, even under threat, its love for itself and its grief for itself, greater than the terms of this world allow. By the time they got to the second verse, the onsetting force of the storm having abated, Miss Minnie and Thelma and the two Josies and old Mrs. Hample could hear them all the way to the kitchen, and I can hear them now:

O they tell me of a home where my friends have gone,

O they tell me of a land far away,

Where the tree of life in eternal bloom

Sheds its fragrance thro’ the unclouded day.

When they finished the hymn, Nightlife began his sermon—the one, as they supposed, that he had prepared for the revival service of the night before last. His text was Matthew 18:12, which he knew by heart:

How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?

Though Christ, in speaking this parable, asked his hearers to think of the shepherd, Nightlife understood it entirely from the viewpoint of the lost sheep, who could imagine fully the condition of being lost and even the hope of rescue, but could not imagine rescue itself.

“Oh, it’s a dark place, my brethren,” Nightlife said. “It’s a dark place where the lost sheep tries to find his way, and can’t. The slopes is steep and the footing hard. The ground is rough and stumbly and dark, and overgrowed with bushes and briars, a hilly and a hollery place. And the shepherd comes a-looking and a-calling to his lost sheep, and the sheep knows the shepherd’s voice and he wants to go to it, but he can’t find the path, and he can’t make it.”

The others knew that Nightlife knew what he was talking about. They knew he was telling what it was to be him. And they were moved.

Long afterward, Elton Penn asked Walter Cotman, “Did what he said make sense? I mean, did you feel for him?”

“Me?” Walter said. “Course I felt for him! The son of a bitch could preach!”

They were moved. Even Sam Hanks was moved. But they also began to be amused—begging sympathy’s pardon—because Miss Minnie’s old setting hen had returned from wherever she had been to breakfast, only to find Nightlife standing and preaching right in front of her nest. The hen began to walk back and forth at Nightlife’s feet, crying out with rapidly increasing hysteria, “My children! My children! What will become of my children?” Now and again, she squatted and opened her wings as if to fly up to her nest, and then changed her mind.

At last she crouched almost directly in front of Nightlife, and with a leap, a desperate, panic-stricken, determined outcry, and a great flapping of wings, she launched herself upward.

But she had miscalculated Nightlife’s height; he continued to rise up in front of her long past the point at which she had expected him to stop. She got up a little above breast height, and then either lost her nerve or decided to stop and reconsider. She hung there, flapping and squawking, right in Nightlife’s face, and Nightlife struck her an open-handed blow that Walter Cotman said would have given second thoughts to a mule.

After Nightlife hit the hen, Walter told Elton, she hung suspended in the air for many seconds, whirling like a pinwheel and shedding feathers around her in spirals.

That was all it took. By the time the hen hit the ground, still squawking, a change had come over Nightlife. He looked around like a man just awakened, and it was plain to the others that he saw that they were there with him and that he knew them. It looked to them as though the very lenses of his glasses were clarified by intelligence. He leaned the shotgun against the bench, and stood free of it.

Tol then stepped up beside Nightlife and picked up the gun. He said, “Nightlife, honey, I want you to see my gun. My daddy had it before me. It’s an old one.”

He opened the breech, removed the shell, and put the shell into his pocket. He snapped the breech shut again and handed the gun to Nightlife, who took it and looked it over.

“It looks like a right good old gun, Tol,” Nightlife said, and he handed it back.

They heard the dinner bell then, for Miss Minnie, feeling that she should do something, and not knowing what else to do, had sent Josie Tom out to ring it.

“Boys,” Tol said, “I believe Old Marster and the good women have kept us in mind. Let’s go eat!”

“Oh, that was a meal that was a joy to set on the table!” Miss Minnie said.

She and her nephew, Sam Hanks, had been telling Granny and me the story of Nightlife’s spell and his long ramble through the woods. It had taken most of the afternoon. Miss Minnie’s account of all they had to eat and of all they ate had been a small epic in itself.

It was a story I never forgot, and as time went on I would pick up bits of it from Braymer Hardy, from Walter Cotman by way of Elton Penn, and from others. But Miss Minnie, I think, understood it better than anybody. She had taught at least four of those young men at the Goforth school: Nightlife, Burley Coulter, and the two Hardys. And she and Tol had been neighbors to them all. She knew pretty exactly by what precarious interplay of effort and grace the neighborhood had lived.

“Poor old Thacker Hample,” she said. “They kept him alive that time, anyhow. They and the Good Lord.”

“And that old hen,” Sam Hanks said.

“Yes, that old hen,” Miss Minnie said.

She mused a while, rocking in her chair. Finally she said, “And don’t you know that old hen survived it all. She hatched fourteen chicks and raised them, every one!”

A Half-Pint of Old Darling (1920)

PTOLEMY PROUDFOOT and Miss Minnie did not often take a lively interest in politics. They were Democrats, like virtually everybody else in the vicinity of Cotman Ridge and Goforth. They had been born Democrats, had never been anything but Democrats, and had never thought of being anything but Democrats. To them, being Democrats was much the same sort of thing as being vertebrates; it was not a matter of lively interest. Their daily lives were full of matters that were in the most literal sense lively: gardens and crops and livestock, kitchen and smokehouse and cellar, shed and barn and pen, plantings and births and harvests, washing and ironing and cooking and canning and cleaning, feeding and milking, patching and mending. That their life was surrounded by great public issues they knew and considered, and yet found a little strange.

The year 1920, however, was one of unusually lively political interest, especially for Miss Minnie. In January of that year, the constitutional amendment forbidding “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” went into effect. And in August the women’s suffrage amendment was ratified. Miss Minnie did not approve of drinking intoxicating liquors, which she believed often led to habitual drunkenness. And she certainly did believe that women ought to have the vote.

Tol, for his part, enjoyed a bottle of beer occasionally, and occasionally he had been known to enjoy a good drink of somebody else’s whiskey—whether homemade or bottled in bond he did not particularly care, so long as it was good. He liked whiskey of a quality to cure a sore throat, not cause one. This was not something that Miss Minnie knew or that Tol had ever considered telling her. It was not something she had ever had any occasion—or, so far as he knew, any need—to know. Liquor also was something that he could easily go without. If the country chose not to drink, then he could comfortably endure the deprivation as long as the country could.

And so very little was said between them on the subject of the Prohibition amendment. Miss Minnie belonged to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and supported the amendment, and that was all right with Tol, and that was that.

On the question of the suffrage amendment, Tol’s conclusion was that if he had the vote, and if (as he believed) Miss Minnie was smarter than he was, then Miss Minnie should have the vote. Miss Minnie (who did not think she was smarter than Tol, and did not wish to be) said that though Tol had not accurately weighed all the evidence, his reasoning was perfect.

“The vote,” said Tol, “means that us onlookers and bystanders get to have a little bit of say-so.”

“And I want my little bit,” Miss Minnie said.

“So it’s out with the whiskey and in with the women,” Tol said.

Miss Minnie let him have a smile then, for she loved his wit, but she said that by and large she thought that was the way it would have to be, for women hated liquor because of all they’d had to suffer from drunken men. She had seen some of her own students grow up to be worthless drunkards.

Tol said that she was right there, and he knew it. By and large, he was content to believe as she believed. She had been a schoolteacher and knew books, and he looked up to her.

To say that Tol looked up to Miss Minnie is to use a figure of speech, for Tol was an unusually big man and Miss Minnie an unusually small woman. And so at the moment when he was in spirit looking up to her, he was in the flesh beaming down upon her from beneath a swatch of hair that projected above his brows like a porch roof.

It was still dark on a morning in the middle of November. Tol had done his chores while Miss Minnie fixed breakfast; they had eaten and, having completed their conversation, had stood up from the table. Tol’s hair, which he had wetted and combed when he washed his face, had reverted to its habit of sticking out this way and that. This condition had been aggravated by Tol’s habit of scratching under his cap from time to time without taking it off. To an impartial observer Tol might have looked a little funny, as though he had put a pile of jackstraws on his head.

Miss Minnie, however, was not an impartial observer. To her he looked comfortable. To her he was shelter and warmth. When he smiled down at her that way, it was to her as though the sun itself had looked kindly at her through the foliage of a tall tree.

It was a Saturday morning. That day they were going to make one of their twice- or thrice-yearly trips to Hargrave, the county seat, ten miles down the river from Port William.

Tol said he had a few odds and ends to do at the barn before he harnessed Redbird. And Miss Minnie said that would be fine, for she had to finish up in the house and ought to be ready by the time he would be.

Tol said, well, he thought they needn’t be in a big hurry, for it was a little nippy out, and maybe they should give it a chance to warm up. And Miss Minnie said, yes, that was fine.

And so in the slowly strengthening gray November daylight Tol set things to rights around the barn, the way he liked to do on Saturday, and brought Redbird out of his stall and curried and brushed and harnessed him, and left him tied in the driveway of the barn. Tol pulled the buggy out of its shed then and went back to the house. He shaved at the washstand by the kitchen door and put on the fresh clothes that Miss Minnie had laid out for him.

Miss Minnie had the gift of neatness. Her house was neat, and she was neat herself. Even in her everyday dresses she always looked as if she were expecting company. This in addition to her fineness of mind and character made her, Tol thought, a person of quality. Tol loved the word quality much as he loved the words of horse anatomy such as pastern, stifle, and hock. He liked it when a buyer said to him of his crop or a load of lambs or steers, “Well, Mr. Proudfoot, I see you’ve come with quality again this year.” And when he thought about what a fine woman Miss Minnie was, with her neat ways and her book learning and her correct grammar, he enjoyed saying to himself, “She’s got quality.”

Tol was like Miss Minnie in his love of neatness, and his farm was neatly kept. His barn was as neat in its way as Miss Minnie’s house. But Tol was not a neat person. He was both too big, I assume, and too forgetful of himself to look neat in his clothes. The only time Tol’s clothes looked good was before he put them on. In putting them on, he forgot about them and began, without the slightest malice toward them, to subject them to various forms of abuse. When he had got them on that morning, Miss Minnie came in and went over them, straightening his shirtfront, buttoning his cuffs, tucking in his pocket handkerchief and the end of his belt. She pecked over his clothes with concentrated haste, like a banty hen pecking over a barn floor, as if Tol were not occupying them at all, Tol meanwhile ignoring her as he transferred his pocket stuff from his discarded pants and put on his cap and coat.

“Now you look all nice,” she said.

And Tol said, “You look mighty nice, too, little lady.” That was his endearment, and she gave him a pat.

The sun had come up behind clouds, and from the looks of the sky it would be cloudy all day.

“Is it going to rain?” Miss Minnie said.

“I doubt it,” Tol said. “May snow along about evening, from the looks of things and the feel of that wind.”

They went together to where the buggy stood. Tol brought Redbird from the barn and put him between the shafts, handed Miss Minnie up into the buggy, and got in himself, the buggy tilting somewhat to his side as his weight bore on the springs, so that it was natural for Miss Minnie to sit close to him. Sitting close to him was not something she ever minded, but on that morning it was particularly gratifying, for the wind, as Tol said, was “a little blue around the edges.” They snugged the lap robe around them and drove out onto the road.

For a while they did not talk. Redbird was a young horse in those days, Tol having hitched him for the first time only that spring, and he was feeling good. The sharp air made him edgy. He was startled by the steam clouds of his breath, and he enjoyed the notion that he was in danger of being run over by the buggy rolling behind him.

“Cutting up like a new pair of scissors, ain’t he?” Tol said. “Whoa, my little Redbird! Whoa, my boy! Settle down, now!” Tol sang to the colt in a low, soothing voice. “You’ll be thinking different thoughts by dark.”

Redbird and his notions amused Tol. He gave him his head a little, letting him trot at some speed.

“He requires a steady hand, doesn’t he?” Miss Minnie said, impressed as always by Tol’s horsemanship.

“He’s a little notional,” Tol said. “He’ll get over it.”

Redbird abandoned his notions about halfway up the first long hill, and settled down to a steady jog. Tol could relax then, and he and Miss Minnie resumed their never-ending conversation about the things they saw along the road and the things those sights reminded them of, and this morning, too, they talked more from time to time about politics.

What brought the subject up now, as at breakfast, was that in this year of unusual political interest Latham Gallagher was running for the office of state representative. “The Gallagher boy,” as Miss Minnie called him, had been sheriff and court clerk, and now he aspired to the seat of government in Frankfort. He was the son of an old friend of Miss Minnie’s, and for that reason Miss Minnie thought him fine and handsome and an excellent orator. A month or so ago she and Tol had gone to hear him speak on the porch of the old hotel in Port William.

Tol thought that the Gallagher boy had already made far too much of some of his opportunities, and he did not like oratory made up of too many sentences beginning “My fellow Kentuckians,” but he kept his opinions to himself. The boy, after all, was a Democrat, which meant that there was at least one worse thing he could have been.

Now and again as they drove along, Tol and Miss Minnie would see one of the Gallagher boy’s posters attached to a tree or a telephone pole. “Gallagher for Representative,” the posters said, “A Fair Shake for the Little Man.”

“A Fair Shake for the Little Woman,” said Tol Proudfoot, nudging Miss Minnie beneath the lap robe, and she nudged him back.

They went through Port William and on down the river road to Ellville and over the bridge into Hargrave, talking the whole way. It had been a busy fall; Tol had been out of the house from daylight to dark, and Miss Minnie had been equally preoccupied with her own work, preparing for winter. So it was pleasant to ride along behind the now-dutiful Redbird, in no particular hurry, and just visit, telling each other all they’d thought of and meant to say as soon as they found a chance.

When they got to Hargrave, they left Redbird at the livery stable where he could rest well and have some hay to eat and a ration of grain while they went about their errands. At first they did a little shopping together, and carried their purchases back and stored them in the buggy. And then they went to the Broadfield Hotel to eat dinner. This was a place Tol particularly favored because they did not bring the meals out on individual plates to little separate tables, but instead the patrons sat together at long tables, and the food was set before them on heaped platters and in large bowls, and pans of hot biscuits and cornbread were passing around almost continuously, and pitchers of sweet milk and buttermilk and pots of coffee were always in reach, and when a person’s plate began to look clean, there would be waiters coming around with various kinds of pie, and all of it was good. It was a place where a man like Tol could eat all he wanted without calling too much attention to himself—cooking for him, Miss Minnie had been heard to say, was like cooking for a hotel—and where also he could have his fill of conversation. Tol loved to eat and he loved to talk. The hotel dining room appealed to him because while he ate there he could expect to be in the company of some people he knew and of some he did not know, and in the course of a meal he would extract from all of them a great deal of information about themselves, their families, and their businesses or farms—also their opinions about the national and local economies, the market prospects for tobacco, cattle, sheep, and hogs, and any other opinions they might care to express. The meal characteristically would take an hour and a half or two hours, for Tol stretched to the limit the leisure and the pleasure of it. It was one of the main reasons for their trip to Hargrave, as Miss Minnie knew, though Tol never said so. He ate and talked and laughed and complimented the cooks and urged more food on his fellow guests just as if he were at home.

When the meal was over and they had lingered, talking, at the table for long enough, Tol and Miss Minnie strolled out onto the hotel porch, from which they could see the broad Ohio River flowing past and the mouth of their own smaller river opening into it. The ferry that connected Hargrave with the nearby towns in Indiana pulled away from the dock while they watched.

And then Miss Minnie, who wanted to buy Tol’s Christmas present, a little awkwardly presented the falsehood that she had “a few little errands” and would meet him at the livery stable in an hour and a half. Her business would not require that long, but she knew that Tol, wherever he went, would get to talking and would be that long at least. Tol, who wished to do some private shopping of his own, agreed, and they parted.

Tol first returned to a dry goods store that he and Miss Minnie had visited together that morning. He had heard her say to a clerk of a certain bolt of cloth, intending perhaps that he should overhear, “Now that’s pretty.” He bought her enough of the cloth to make a dress. And then, because it took so little cloth to make a dress for Miss Minnie, he went to another store and bought her a pretty comb that caught his eye, and also—what he had never done before—he bought a bottle of perfume, which lasted for years and years because, as Miss Minnie said, it smelled so wonderful that she used it seldom and only the teensiest bit at a time. He stuck these things into various pockets to be smuggled home, talked with the clerk until another customer came in, and went back out to the street.

The thought struck him then that he might not get back to Hargrave before his ewes started to lamb, and he was out of whiskey. Tol always liked to keep a little whiskey on hand during lambing. Some sheepmen would say that if you had a weak lamb and a bottle of whiskey, it paid better to knock the lamb in the head and drink the whiskey yourself. But Tol believed that “a drop or two,” on a bitter night, would sometimes encourage a little heart to continue beating—as, despite his religion and Miss Minnie, he believed it had sometimes encouraged bigger ones to do.

And so, without giving the matter much thought, he went to the drugstore where he was used to buying the occasional half-pint that he needed. And then, as he entered the door, he thought, “Prohibition!” And then he thought, “Well, no harm in trying.”

So he went up to the druggist, whom he knew, who was leaning against a wall of shelves behind the counter in the back.

“I don’t reckon you could let me have half a pint of whiskey,” Tol said to him in a low voice.

“Medicinal?” the druggist asked.

“Medicinal,” Tol said, nodding.

The druggist handed him a half-pint bottle, and Tol stuck it into his pocket and paid. It was a local brand known as Old Darling—a leftover, Tol supposed.

The druggist, also a conversationalist, said, “Somebody a little under the weather?”

“No,” Tol said. “Lambs. I like to have a little on hand when I’m lambing.”

There followed an exchange of some length in which Tol and the druggist told each other a number of things that both of them already knew.

When he was back at the livery stable, hitching Redbird to the buggy, Tol remembered the bottle and tossed it onto the floor of the buggy box under the seat, thinking not much about it one way or another.

Redbird, well rested and fed and now going in his favorite direction, required a good bit of attention at first. They were across the bridge and well out into the country again before he settled down. When he settled down, Tol settled down, too, and so did Miss Minnie. The interests and pleasures of the town were all behind them, the trip had fulfilled its purposes, and now they had ahead of them only the long drive home and their evening chores, which would seem a little strange after their day in town. Tol drove with his eye on Redbird and the road ahead, humming to himself in a grunty, tuneless way that meant, Miss Minnie knew, that he had gone way off among his thoughts and no longer knew she was there. “Mr. Proudfoot,” she had actually said to him once, “when you are thinking you might as well be asleep.”

That made him laugh, for he enjoyed a good joke on himself. But it was true. Sometimes, in his thoughts, he departed from where he was.

Tol and Miss Minnie had been married for twelve years. In that time they had found how secret their lives had been before. They had made many small discoveries that were sometimes exciting, sometimes not. One of the best had been Tol’s discovery that Miss Minnie could whistle.

Though he had known a whistling woman or two in his time, he had always known also the proverb holding that

These will come to no good end:

A whistling woman and a crowing hen,

and he assumed that Miss Minnie, who had quality, would be the last woman on earth to whistle. Imagine his surprise, then, not long after they were married, when he was going by the house one morning and overheard Miss Minnie rattling the breakfast dishes and whistling “Old Joe Clark” as prettily and effortlessly as a songbird.

That night after supper, when they were sitting together by the fire, he said to her, “Go ahead. Whistle. I know you can do it. I heard you.”

So she whistled for him—“Soldier’s Joy” this time. It was a secret revelation. It made them so gleeful she could hardly control her pucker.

And now I am going to tell about the more famous revelation by which Miss Minnie learned Tol’s method of reviving a weak lamb.

Tol had been humming and thinking only a little while when Miss Minnie needed to blow her nose. Her handkerchief was in her purse, which she had set behind her heels under the seat of the buggy. She fished under the lap robe with her hand to bring it up and so encountered the cold hard shape of Tol’s half-pint bottle of Old Darling. It was a shape that, as an avid student of the problem of drunkenness, she knew very well. Thereupon a suspicion flew into her mind—as sudden and dark as a bat this suspicion was, and as hard to ignore in such close quarters.

She felt the bottle again to make sure, and then stealthily drew it up to the light on the side opposite Tol, and looked at it. At the sight of it, she could have wept and cried out with anger and with bitter, bitter disappointment. The label carried the seductive name of Old Darling, and it declared shamelessly that the bottle contained whiskey, ninety proof. That the amber liquid inside the bottle was actually rather beautiful to the eye did not surprise her, for she knew that the devil made sin attractive.

She almost flung the bottle into the roadside weeds right there and then, but two thoughts prevented her. First, she imagined that if the bottle did not hit a rock and break, then some innocent boy or young man might come along and find it and be tempted to drink the whiskey, and that would not do. Second—and perhaps this thought was not even second, for her mind was working fast—she remembered that whiskey was an expensive product. When she thought, “It would be a shame to waste it,” she meant of course the money that Tol had spent for the whiskey, not the whiskey itself.

But she did think, “It would be a shame to waste it,” and the thought put her in a quandary. For if she did not want to throw the whiskey away, neither did she want to put it back under the seat to be carried home and drunk by her wayward husband, from the mystery of whose being this bottle had emerged.

And now Miss Minnie’s mind revolved in a curious metamorphosis from the great virtue of thriftiness to the much smaller virtue of romantic self-sacrifice. Her anger and disappointment at Tol as she now had discovered him to be only increased her love for him as she had thought him to be—and as he might, in fact, become, if only she could save him from his addiction to the evil drug that she at that moment held in her hand. For such a man as he might be, she felt, she would do anything. She had read much of loyalties given and sacrifices made by the wives of drinking men. In her love for Tol, she had at times already wished to be capable of some legendary fidelity or sacrifice to make her worthy of her happiness in him. And by how much now was this wish magnified by her thought of Tol fallen and redeemed! “Oh,” she thought, “I will do it! I will say to the world I did it without hesitation.” She shifted as she might have shifted if she had wanted to look at something interesting off to the right-hand side of the road.

She broke the paper seal and twisted out the cork. She put her nose carefully over the opening and sniffed the vile fumes. “Awful!” she thought. And the thought of its awfulness made her sacrifice more pleasing to her. She tilted the bottle and drew forth bravely half a mouthful and swallowed it.

It was fire itself in her throat. If she had looked quickly enough, she thought, she would have seen a short orange flame protruding from her nose. Though she sternly suppressed the impulse to cough, there was no refusing the tears that filled her eyes.

But then as the fiery swallow descended into her stomach, a most pleasing warmth, a warmth at once calming and invigorating, began to radiate from it. For a few minutes she bestowed upon this warmth the meditation that it seemed to require, and then she tried another swallow, a more wholehearted one. The effect this time was less harsh, because less surprising, and the radiance even warmer and more reassuring than before. She felt strangely ennobled by the third, as if the rewards of her sacrifice were already accruing to her. The radiance within her had begun to gleam also in a sort of nimbus around her. If the devil made sin attractive, then she would have to admit that he had done a splendid job with Old Darling.

She sat half turned away from Tol, and leaning back so that she sat also a little behind him. He was still departed in his thoughts, no more aware of what she was doing than were the occupants of the occasional buggies and wagons that they met.

Miss Minnie sipped from time to time as they drove along, finding her sacrifice not nearly so difficult as she had expected. In fact, she was amazed at how quickly she was getting rid of the repulsive contents of the bottle. It occurred to her that perhaps she should drink more slowly, for soon there would be none left.

Suddenly she experienced a motion that recalled her to her school days when she had swung in swings and ridden on seesaws. But the likeness was only approximate, for Redbird, the buggy, the road, and indeed the whole landscape had just executed a motion not quite like any she had ever known.

“Whoo!” said Miss Minnie.

Tol had been humming along, figuring and refiguring how much he might get for his crop in view of the various speculations and surmises he had heard in town. When Miss Minnie said “Whoo!” it was news to him. “What?” he said.

“Do that again,” she said. “Oh! Whoo!”

He said, “What?”

“Old Darling,” she said. “Whoo!”

“Mam?” Tol Proudfoot said.

And then he saw the bottle in her hand. For a moment he thought he was going to laugh, and then he thought he wasn’t. “Oh, Lordy!” he said. “Oh, Lordy Lord! Oh, Lord!”

Now as they went around a curve in the road they met another couple in a buggy. Miss Minnie leaned forward and called out to them momentously the name of Gallagher. “A vote for Gallagher,” she cried, “is a vote for the little man!”

“Come up, Redbird,” said Tol Proudfoot.

But as luck would have it, speeding up only brought them more quickly face-to-face with the next buggy coming down the road.

“Gallagher!” cried Miss Minnie. “A fair shake for the little man is a fair shake for the little woman!”

“Miss Minnie,” Tol said, “I believe you’ve had about all you need of that.”

He held out his hand for the bottle, and was surprised to see, when she handed it to him, how little was left.

“Take it, then!” she said. “Drunkard!”

“Drunkard?” he said, and then put out his hand again to steady her, for she was attempting to stand up, the better to point her finger at him. “No, mam. I’m not no drunkard. You know better.”

“Then what,” Miss Minnie said, pointing to the incontrovertible evidence, “were you doing with that?”

“Lambs,” Tol said.

“You get little lambs drunk,” Miss Minnie declared. “Oh, my dear man, you are the limit.”

“For when they’re born on the cold nights,” Tol said. “Sometimes it’ll help the weak ones live.”

“Ha!” said Miss Minnie.

Tol said no more. Miss Minnie spoke only to urge Gallagher upon the people they met—though, fortunately, they met only a few.

By the time they went through Port William, she had ceased to call out, but she was saying in a rather loud voice and to nobody in particular that though she was not sure, she was sure the Gallagher boy had never taken a drink in his life—and though she was not sure, she was sure that he at least understood that now that women had the vote, there would be no more liquor drinking in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Her voice quivered patriotically.

When they drove in beside the house at last, and Redbird gladly stopped in front of the buggy shed, Tol stepped down and turned to help Miss Minnie, who stood, somewhat grandly spurning his offer, and fell directly into his arms.

Tol carried her to the house, helped her to remove her hat and coat and to lie down on the sofa in the living room. He covered her with the afghan, built up the fire, and returned to the barn to do his chores.

The house was dark when he came back in. Miss Minnie was lying quietly on the sofa with her forearm resting across her brow. Tol tiptoed in and sat down.

After a little while, Miss Minnie said, “Was it really just for the lambs?”

Tol said, “Yessum.”

And then Miss Minnie’s crying jag began. Regrets flew at her from all sides, and she wept and wept. Of all her sorrows the worst was for her suspicion of Tol. But she mourned also, for his sake and her own, the public display that she had made of herself. “I surely am the degradedest woman who ever lived,” she said. “I have shamed myself, and most of all you.”

Tol sat beside her for a long time in the dark, patting her with his big hand and saying, “Naw, now. Naw, now. You didn’t do no such of a thing.”

It was, as Miss Minnie would later say, a lovely time.

When at last she grew quiet and sleepy, Tol helped her to bed and waited beside her until her breath came in little snores. And then he went down to the kitchen and cooked himself a good big supper, for it had been a hard day.

This was, oddly, a tale that Miss Minnie enjoyed telling. “It was my only binge,” she would say, giggling a little. And she liked especially to quote herself: “I surely am the degradedest woman who ever lived.”

She said, “Mr. Proudfoot was horrified. But after it was over, he just had to rear back and laugh. Oh, he was a man of splendid qualities!”

The Lost Bet (1929)

AFTER PTOLEMY PROUDFOOT and Miss Minnie bought their Model A and partly quit using their buggy, they got around in the neighborhood more than they used to. But only a little more. Tol was never the master of the Model A that he was of a horse; if the car increased by a little bit the frequency of their going about, it increased their range almost not at all—except once, which is another story. For Tol and Miss Minnie, the Model A was an experiment—the only one they ever made—and it did not completely replace their horse and buggy, which Tol kept and continued to use for shorter trips until his death. He liked horses better than he liked the Model A, and he drove them better, too.

Before and after the advent of the Model A, Tol and Miss Minnie lived their lives almost entirely within a radius of about six miles. They cleaned up after dinner every Saturday and drove to Port William to take their cream and eggs, and to buy the few things they needed that they did not grow or make for themselves. All their business never took more than an hour, but they made an afternoon of it, visiting and talking with everybody else who had come in for the same purposes, and always getting back home in plenty of time to milk and feed.

On Sunday morning they went down the hill to the Goforth church, usually going back again for the evening services. And once a month Miss Minnie attended the all-day meeting of the Missionary Society. And that was most of their going, except when they went to a wedding or a funeral or to a neighbor’s house to visit or help with the work.

And except for an occasional trip, which Tol sometimes made alone, to Hargrave or to the stockyards in Louisville. He sold his tobacco at Hargrave, where there was also a small stockyard. But Tol was a pretty shrewd businessman, and when he had enough stock to justify the haulage—as when he shipped his lambs in June, and his finished steers in November—he liked to try the market at the Bourbon Stockyards in Louisville. The prices were noticeably better there than at Hargrave, but that was not all the reason. The rest of it was that Tol enjoyed making the trip with Sam Hanks, the trucker who hauled the stock. And Sam Hanks found it necessary to admit that he enjoyed making the trip with Tol. Sam Hanks was Miss Minnie’s favorite nephew, a lean, seldom-speaking man, who might go all day and not speak ten words, just doing his work and watching and being amused. He was a little amused at whatever happened—at least in his younger days. His major amusements were baseball and Tol. Over the years he collected a lot of stories about Tol, and he liked to tell them.

Tol would be up long before daylight on the appointed day, getting the steers or the lambs penned and ready to load. And then he would feed and milk and eat breakfast and clean up, so as to be ready when, maybe still before daylight, Sam’s truck would rattle up the driveway past the house into the barn lot, and back up to the loading chute.

Tol was a fellow who was neat as a pin in all his work, but who was to about the same degree careless of his own appearance. His little farm was almost as clean and orderly as Miss Minnie’s kitchen, which was immaculate. When he drove his team to the field they were as well groomed and harnessed as if he were driving them to town. And he used a plow or a mowing machine as precisely as some people use a comb. But he wore his clothes, as Sam Hanks said, the way a hog wears mud.

When he left the house to load his stock, he would be as clean and neat as Miss Minnie’s repeated instructions and inspections could make him. He would be washed and shaved and combed, dressed in his best everyday clothes, which would be spotless, as stiff with starch as if made of tin. By the time the stock were loaded, all the creases would be crisscrossed with wrinkles; there would be mud and manure on his shoes and britches and maybe on his shirt; he would have a loose cuff or suspender; after much head scratching, his cap or hat would be on crooked and some stray swatch of hair would be hanging in his eyes or sticking out over one ear.

After they got to the stockyards and got unloaded, Tol followed a procedure that in its general outlines never varied. And Sam always went along in a state of alert expectancy, because in its details it was never twice the same. Say it was in the fall. They would go back through the yards to where Tol’s steers were penned, and lean against the gate to wait for the buyers to come around. But it wasn’t just the buyers, Sam knew, that Tol was waiting for. Tol always had good steers—good in their individual quality, uniform as a lot, and well finished, showing a lot of bloom—and he liked to hear them praised. And so he stood there, leaning proprietarily against the gate, watching the drovers and the commission men and the farmers go by. And when one of them stopped to look into the pen at Tol’s cattle, Tol would look at him in such a way that the fellow nearly always asked, “Those your steers?”

And Tol would say, “Yes sir!” as if it ought to have been obvious.

And then the fellow would say something like “Mighty nice” or “Well, they’re the right kind.”

And Tol would say, “Yessir!” in a way that showed he knew the fellow had made pretty much of an understatement—which sometimes caused the fellow to try to say something even better and more intelligent about the cattle, and sometimes did not.

If it did not, Tol would turn the conversation to the subject of the fellow himself—what his name was, where he was from, whom he had married, how his family was, how much rain he’d had, how his crops had turned off, and so on. Tol loved that kind of visiting, and he talked to everybody he met whether the body in question wanted to be talked to or not. Sam followed these conversations with as much interest as he followed baseball. The thing was that Tol mostly liked everybody, and because he liked them he was genuinely interested in everything about them, and he pumped information out of them, Sam figured, that would be news to their wives. Tol never forgot them or anything he learned about them, and he was always glad to see them when he met them again. He had got acquainted with a lot of people in this way. But Sam knew that on these trips, because they were his adventures, Tol much preferred strangers to acquaintances.

When the cattle were sold and the talking was finished, they went to the office for their checks. Except for the few times when Tol thought his stock had been graded too low, Sam never heard him complain about the size of his check. He appeared to accept it simply as the necessary completion of a business in which he had ceased to have any live interest the moment the cattle ceased to belong to him.

And then Tol would invite Sam to be his guest at a certain saloon where, if it was fall, they would eat fried oysters, which Tol loved. The meal lasted an hour or two. They stood at the bar and ate, and Tol talked to whatever stranger happened to be standing next to him. Now, for Sam, the quality of the interest changed, for here Tol was less likely to be talking to a farmer and more likely to be talking to some city fellow who would not appreciate a stranger’s interest in his personal affairs. Sam had seen Tol get into some pretty tough spots. He was never sure that Tol ever realized that he was in a tough spot when he was in one; and Tol always got out of whatever tough spot he was in, and he never got out of it either by fighting or by shutting up. It was better than baseball, when Sam could maintain his detachment; when he couldn’t, it was worse.

After the oysters, Tol would always have something or other he wanted to buy that he couldn’t buy closer to home. And even if it wasn’t but one thing, shopping for it would take exactly all the rest of the time they had.

The time I am going to tell you about, Tol was looking for navy beans. He and Miss Minnie always grew a big garden and put up most of the stuff they needed, but something they never tried to grow was navy beans. And so one of Tol’s regular fall chores was to buy a two-bushel bag of them, which was usually enough to see them through the winter—some to keep and some to give away, according to the first rule of the Proudfoot household.

This year, Tol had found no navy beans in Port William and none in Hargrave. And so he made them the business of his and Sam’s annual cattle-selling trip to Louisville. Sam followed him through the Haymarket, a couple of steps behind, picking his teeth, watching Tol with the patient interest with which a man already satisfied awaits further satisfaction.

Navy beans were scarce in Louisville, too, it turned out, for Tol visited all the likely places he knew without luck, and then they worked their way out into strange territory.

They finally went into a store that was not the sort of feed-and-seed establishment usually patronized by farmers, but a grocery store obviously set up to cater to the city trade—and, by the look of it, prosperous. There was a long wall of shelves full of canned goods, and a long counter in front of that, and in front of that a long row of wire baskets of fresh produce: potatoes, turnips, parsnips, eggs, cabbages, apples, and pears. In the back there were three fellows in suits—drummers, Sam thought—standing by a big iron stove, for it was cold that day. And behind the counter, talking to them, was a dapper fellow with a round face and round eyeglasses, his hair parted in the middle, garters on his sleeves, and a cigar in his mouth.

When Tol walked in with Sam behind him, the drummers and the clerk quit talking and looked. And they kept on looking. By that time, Sam said, Tol had been beyond the reach and influence of Miss Minnie long enough to look unusual. He looked as tall and wide as the door. He wore a sheepskin coat, unbuttoned, that flared out at the back and sides, giving the impression of great forward momentum. Half his shirttail was out. The bill of his next-best winter cap hovered between his right eye and his right ear. His britches legs were stuffed into the top of a pair of gum boots plastered with manure. He had bought a big sack of hard candy as a gift for Miss Minnie, and the twisted neck of the sack now stuck out as though he carried a setting goose in his pocket.

The three drummers and the proprietor looked at Tol. They watched him come back through the store, and then the drummers looked at each other and grinned. The proprietor watched Tol until he stopped and faced him across the counter.

“What can I do for you, Otis?” the proprietor asked. He never cracked a smile, but he gave the drummers just the slightest little wink, and the drummers chuckled.

None of them saw the look that crossed Tol’s face, drawing one eye just a fraction of an inch narrower than the other, and if they had seen it they probably wouldn’t have known what to make of it. But Sam, who was hanging back near the door, did see it, and did know what to make of it, and he made himself comfortable against the doorjamb and folded his arms.

Tol’s eyes were set under bristly brows, and were much wrinkled at the corners. Mostly there was great candor in them; you could look through them right into his mind. But sometimes you could not see into his mind. At such times, thinking was going on in there that Tol didn’t want anybody to find out about. When Tol thought, Sam Hanks said, he looked like he wasn’t thinking at all; he looked like he was listening to a low rumble in his guts. And that was the way he looked for maybe about three seconds after the proprietor called him “Otis.” And then, as if suddenly remembering where he was, he looked back at the proprietor.

“Two bushel of navy beans, if you got ’em, please, sir,” said Ptolemy Proudfoot. If they had known their man, the proprietor and the drummers might have heard a very precise comment in the way Tol said “sir,” but they missed that, too.

“I don’t customarily sell them by the bushel, Timothy,” the proprietor said, “but I believe I can let you have them.”

“I’d be mightily obliged,” said Tol.

The proprietor walked to a door in the back and called, “A bag of navy beans for Mr. Wheatly here.”

Every time he called Tol by a new name, he glanced at the drummers, who seemed to be appreciating his wit a great deal, for they were grinning and nudging each other and whispering. And Sam appreciated it, too, in his way, for he knew, as they did not, that they were watching a contest.

A colored fellow came through the door in the back with the bag of beans on a hand truck and stood the bag up beside Tol.

The proprietor beat a little drumbeat on the edge of the counter with his hands. “Will that be all for you today, Mr. Bulltrack?”

“Well, I believe so,” Tol said. “How much, if you please, sir?”

The proprietor told him, and Tol began grabbling in his pocket. He held his suspenders with one hand and grabbled with the other, and finally drew out clenched in his fist an assortment of wadded bills, some coins, half a cut plug, a pocketknife, and the last three inches of a pencil. He made order of all this on one large stretched-out palm, and laid the price of the beans a bill or a coin at a time on the counter in front of the proprietor, the exact amount. And then he poked around in his hand and came up with a quarter.

He smiled over at the proprietor. “Ever see one of them disappear? I can make that disappear.”

“Why, you’re a magician, too, are you, Mr. Briarly?” the proprietor said, winking at the drummers. “Let me see.”

Tol made a violent jerk with his right hand that sent the coin bouncing to the floor between two baskets of produce. He got down, grunting, onto his hands and knees and laboriously retrieved it. The drummers were laughing out loud now, and the proprietor’s face had begun to wear the smile of the successful host.

“He’d done lost me,” Sam would say later when he would tell the story. “Looked like he was trying to make a fool of himself. I thought, ‘Now what?’ ”

“Well, you made it disappear, all right,” the proprietor said.

“Wait a minute,” Tol said, coming up with the quarter. “Watch it this time.”

He made the same jerk, and sent the quarter spinning under the stove, and crawled after it. The drummers were holding onto themselves.

“Well, that ain’t all the tricks I can do,” Tol said. “I’ll bet you this quarter I can jump into that basket of eggs and not break a one.”

“Well, Spud, old boy, I’ll just bet you can’t,” said the proprietor. And then he caught that look in Tol’s eye that Sam had been watching all along, and his own eyes got wide. “Wup,” he said.

He was too late. His lips had just shut on that little “wup” when Tol leapt into the air as light as a fox and came down with both feet in the basket of eggs. There was a loud crunch that totaled up the breaking of many small shells, and a viscous puddle began to spread slowly around the basket.

Tol’s light leap and heavy descent were funny, Sam told me, but nobody laughed.

“Didn’t you laugh?” I asked him.

“Hell, naw!” he said. “I was trying to act like I was there by myself. It was as quiet as a church with nobody in it. It was as quiet as a graveyard at midnight.”

Tol stood in the basket of broken eggs with what Sam described as “a sweet, innocent smile,” holding his quarter out to the proprietor. “Well, you got me. Dogged if you ain’t a hard man to get ahead of.”

The proprietor stood looking at Tol’s quarter with his mouth open. “And then,” Sam told me, “I swan if that fellow didn’t reach out, still not quite able to get his mouth to shut, and take that quarter and put it in his pocket.”

Tol stepped out of the basket, shouldered his sack of beans, and walked to the door, which Sam was holding open.

I heard Sam Hanks tell the story in town one July afternoon, and the next time I stopped by to see Miss Minnie, it occurred to me to ask her if she had ever heard it.

She had, of course. And she told it much as Sam had told it, but a good deal shorter. She was sitting in her rocker in the kitchen of the little house where she and Tol had passed the time their lives had been joined together. Now, their lives put asunder, Miss Minnie told the story with the mixture of approval and amusement with which she usually remembered Tol. When she finished the telling, she laughed. And then she sat in silence, reflecting, I knew, on the opposing claims of charity and justice in the story, and on the conflict of extravagance and gentleness in Tol’s character. The late sun threw a patch of warm light on the wall behind her. The clock ticked.

“Mr. Proudfoot was that way,” she said, and smiled. “But he was half sorry just as soon as he did it.”

NATHAN COULTER

For John

Chapter 1

DARK. The light went out the door when she pulled it to. And then everything came in close around me, the way it was in the daylight, only all close. Because in the dark I could remember and not see. The sun was first, going over the hill behind our barn. Then the river was covered with the shadows of the hills. Then the hills went behind their shadows, and just the house and the barn and the other buildings were left, standing black against the sky where it was still white in the west.

After supper it was only the inside of the house, lighted where we moved from the kitchen to the living room and upstairs to bed. Until the last of the light went out the door; and it was all there in the room, close enough to touch if I didn’t reach out my hand. The dark broke them loose and let them in. The memory was closer than the sight of them. What was left outside was the way it had been before anybody had come there to see anything.

I lay awake listening to the wind blow. It was the beginning of the dream, I knew, even if I was still awake listening. The wind came hard against the back of the house and rattled the weatherboarding and whooped around the corners; and went on through the woods on the hillside, bending the trees and cracking the limbs together; and on with a lonely, hollow sound into the river bottoms; and on over the country, over the farms and roads and towns and cities. It seemed that I could hear the sounds the wind made in all the places it was, all at the same time.

I never knew when I began to dream the wind and quit listening to it. But after a while the bed rose off the floor and floated out of the house. It flew up high over the roof and sailed down again to the hillside above the river. The wind pulled at the bedclothes and I had to hold them around my neck to keep them from blowing away.

Standing at the edge of the woods was a lion, looking up at the house, with the valley and the river lying in the dark behind him. I could see every muscle in his body rolled up smooth under his hide. The wind blew through his mane. His eyes reminded me of Grandpa’s, they were so fierce and blue.

While I watched he lifted his head and roared toward the house, his white teeth showing and his tongue curled under the sound. I knew then it wasn’t the wind I’d heard, but the lion’s voice, lonely and like a wind. The muscles in his belly hardened and heaved the voice out of his mouth; and he stood quiet while the sound went on and on over the country. I held the covers around my neck and watched him, and heard his voice go through the woods and into the valley and against the walls of the houses where the people were asleep.

Late in the night the bed floated into the house again. And it was quiet until the roosters began to crow in the dark where the voice of the lion had been. While the roosters crowed I dreamed of them, their voices crying in the barns and henhouses, close and far away under the dark. In my dream their combs were red, and their feathers black as coal. And while I slept they crowed the dark away.

Sunlight came red into my sleep and I nearly woke until I turned over and slept again in the shadow of my face. Then the light brightened and hardened in the room and I couldn’t sleep any longer. But I kept my eyes closed, remembering what I’d dreamed.

I heard Mother walk across the kitchen floor and shove the teakettle to the back of the stove. I listened to her clear away the dishes that she and Daddy had used for their breakfast and begin cooking breakfast for Brother and me. The sounds separated me from the night, and I let my eyes come open.

Brother was still asleep on the other side of the room. He’d thrown the sheet off and was lying on his back with one foot sticking over the edge of the bed. I watched his ribs fold and unfold over his breathing. The sun hit the mirror on top of the bureau and glanced off against the ceiling. Beside my bed my pants and shirt were piled on my shoes where I’d taken them off the night before. My clothes were hand-me-downs that Brother had outgrown and passed on to me. His clothes were newer, not so faded as mine.

I pushed the sheet back and sat up on the side of the bed. Out the window I could see Daddy harnessing the mules in the driveway of the barn. He took the gear off the pegs in front of their stalls and swung it over their backs and buckled it on. Then he led them out into the lot and shook out the checklines and snapped them to the bits. I was too far away to hear the sounds he made. One of the mules kicked at a fly and I waited for the harness to rattle, but there wasn’t any sound. He backed the mules into their places on each side of the wagon tongue and hitched them up. I could hear the wheels joggle when he started out of the lot. Mother went to the back porch, letting the screen door slam, and called something to him. He stopped and answered her, and drove on through the gate.

Across the hollow that divided our place from Grandpa’s I could see his house and the two barns white in the sun. The back door slammed over there and Grandma crossed the yard and emptied a pan of dishwater over the fence. Grandpa’s hogs came up to see if she’d given them something to eat, and smelled around where she’d thrown the water.

Grandpa and Uncle Burley were walking out toward the top of the ridge to meet Daddy and the wagon. Uncle Burley’s two coon hounds trotted along at his heels, sad-looking and quiet because they knew he was going to work and not hunting. Grandpa walked in front; he and Uncle Burley weren’t talking to each other. They got to the top of the ridge and stopped. Uncle Burley turned his back to the wind and rolled a cigarette. When Daddy came up they climbed on the wagon and rode out of sight down the other side of the ridge.

Grandpa’s farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa’s father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed money and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn’t have it at all. Uncle Burley said that was the reason Daddy had bought our farm instead of staying on Grandpa’s. They were the sort of men who couldn’t get along owning the same place.

Our farm was the old Ellis Place. Daddy had bought it before Brother and I were born, and we still owed money on it; but Daddy said it wouldn’t be long before we’d have it all paid. If he lived we’d own every inch of it, and he said he planned to live. He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.

Uncle Burley didn’t own any land at all. He didn’t own anything to speak of; just his dogs and a couple of guns. In a way he owned an old camp house at the river, but it was Uncle Burley’s only because nobody else wanted it. He’d never let Grandpa or Daddy even talk to him about buying a farm. He said land was worse than a wife; it tied you down, and he didn’t want to be in any place he couldn’t leave. He never did go anyplace much, except fishing and hunting, and sometimes to town on Saturday. But he wanted to feel that he could leave if he took the notion.

I stood in the patch of sun in front of the window and began putting on my clothes. The day was already hot. Hens were cackling, and a few sparrows fluttered their wings in the dust in front of the barn. I watched our milk cows wade into the pond to drink. Over Grandpa’s ridge I could see where the road came up from the river and went into Port William. At the top of the hill a gravel lane branched off to come back past Grandpa’s gate to our place. On the other side of town the road went down into the bottoms again and followed the river on to the Ohio. I couldn’t see the houses at town, but the white steeple of the church pointed up over the trees and I could make out the weather vane on top. On Sunday mornings we could hear the church bell ringing all the way to our house. And we heard it on Wednesday nights when it rang for prayer meeting.

Between the hills white fog covered the river and bottoms, and trailed off into the woods along the bluffs. Grandpa remembered when steamboats were on the river, carrying tobacco and passengers and livestock down to the Ohio and on to Louisville. But now there were only a few towboats pushing bargeloads of sand. The hills on our side of the river were green, and on the other side they were blue. They got bluer farther away.

Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

Mother came to the foot of the stairs and called us to breakfast. I shook Brother awake and waited for him to dress, and then we went down to the kitchen.

Our mother was sick, and in the afternoons when she’d washed the dinner dishes she had to lie down to rest. Daddy made Brother and me stay out of the house then so it would be quiet. When the weather was good we’d go to the field with Daddy or Uncle Burley, or go swimming, or just wander around looking for things to do. And even though we worried about our mother’s sickness it was good to have the whole afternoon to ourselves without anybody to bother us.

We went down the hill and into the woods that grew along the hollow between our farm and Grandpa’s. Just enough air was stirring to tilt the leaves without rustling them together, and except for our feet rattling dry leaves on the ground the woods was quiet. We climbed the fence and started on toward the dry streambed at the bottom of the hollow.

When we’d gone about ten feet on Grandpa’s side of the fence we came to Aunt Mary’s grave. The grave was a shallow trough in the hillside, filled with sticks and leaves. There was no stone to mark it.

Our Aunt Mary had been buried there a long time ago. It was the first thing anybody remembered about our family, and nobody could remember anything else for a good while after that; we didn’t know how many years it had been since she died.

Aunt Mary was our great-great-grandfather’s youngest daughter. His name was Jonas Thomasson Coulter. And about the time Aunt Mary was grown he got into an argument with a man named Jeff Ellis who was living on our place then. Jonas thought the line fence between their farms should be built on Jeff Ellis’s side of the hollow, and Jeff Ellis thought it ought to go on Jonas’s side. They squabbled over it for several years, and there was some shooting done by both sides before it was settled.

While they were in the worst of this fight Aunt Mary took scarlet fever and died. Jonas Thomasson Coulter went down to the hollow and dug a grave where he thought the fence ought to run, and he made the rest of the family bury her in it. His wife never would speak to him or even look at him after that; but it settled the argument over the fence.

Jeff Ellis was afraid of the dead, and he wouldn’t come close to the grave. So they built the fence ten feet on his side of it. That made Jonas’s farm ten feet wider than even he thought it should have been.

It didn’t really matter much, because the land in that hollow was steep and ill-natured anyway, and nothing ever grew there but trees and buck bushes. But Uncle Burley said that wouldn’t have bothered Jonas Thomasson Coulter. What he wanted was to own land; it didn’t matter a damn whether it was flat or straight up and down, or whether it would grow tobacco or buck bushes.

That was all we knew about Grandpa’s grandfather—his name, and how he’d made certain that Grandpa’s line would run where it did. We didn’t know where he came from, or even where he was buried.

It wasn’t long after they buried Aunt Mary there in the hollow until one of the Ellises saw her ghost. She walked back and forth across her grave on dark nights, carrying a dishpan in one hand and shaking a dishrag with the other one, the way she’d always looked coming back to the house after she’d emptied the dirty water over the yard fence. From then on a lot of people saw her, our people and different ones of the Ellises. Grandpa said he saw her once when he was a boy. And I thought I’d seen her a time or two, but I wasn’t sure enough to tell anybody but Brother.

Her ghost walked because she wanted to be buried in the graveyard with the rest of the dead people in our family. But nobody had ever taken the time to dig her up and bury her there. We never even put flowers on her grave.

The top of the grave was caved in where the dirt had fallen into the hollow places between her bones. I thought her bones had probably rotted too. It would have been hard to dig her up and take her anyplace. We’d waited too long. A big hickory grew up beside the grave, and she was just some earth tangled in the roots. It was strange to think of Aunt Mary being a part of Grandpa’s farm, or maybe a hickory tree.

We climbed out of the hollow and walked along the edge of the big woods on the river bluff, then crossed the point of the ridge and went down again until we came to the hollow where Grandpa’s spring was. Old Oscar was standing in the shade of the oak trees below the spring.

Grandpa had raised and trained saddle horses once until he went broke at it. And old Oscar had been his stud. He was a dark chestnut with a narrow white blaze on his face. He’d been beautiful when he was young, and high-spirited. When they were breaking him he kicked Grandpa in the face and left a long, jagged scar across his cheek. But now he was gentle. He was twenty-five years old, and he stayed thin because his teeth were bad. Uncle Burley said he’d finally starve to death because he wouldn’t have enough teeth to eat with. He was blind too, and his eyes were as white as milk. It was as if he’d turned his eyes back into his head to look at whatever it was he thought about.

Brother and I spoke to him and walked toward his head. He rattled his breath through his nose and trembled until we let him smell our hands and he recognized us. Brother caught him by a hank of his mane and led him over to the spring wall. I broke a switch off a tree and stripped the leaves; we climbed up on the wall and onto Oscar’s back. We guided him with the switch; when we wanted him to go to the right we jiggled the switch against the left side of his face, and against the right side of his face when we wanted him to go to the left.

Daddy and Grandpa always said that Oscar would fall down someday and cripple us. But he hardly ever stumbled. Uncle Burley said Oscar knew his way around the farm as well as he knew the inside of his skin. He had it all in his head. He didn’t need to see it. In a way, Oscar walked and grazed and drank in his own mind.

Brother guided him around the spring and along the side of the hill to the Coulter Branch hollow, and then turned down toward the river. Oscar didn’t like walking in a strange place, but we spoke to him and encouraged him, and before long he got used to the slant of the hill. He walked slower, though, than he did when he was in the pasture, as if afraid the road might drop out from under him or a tree grow up in his way.

We followed the old wagon road down Coulter Branch to the bottom of the hill and turned upriver past the old Billy Hole landing where Beriah Easterly had his store. The river ran close to the road there. We took the path down through a woods of water maples and elms and sycamores to where Uncle Burley’s fishing shack stood overlooking the river.

Once the shack had been painted green, but the paint had weathered to a color that was as much blue as green. The trees grew up close around it, and vines had grown over the walls and out along the eaves.

We got off old Oscar at the camp house and walked the rest of the way to the river. He stood still where we’d stopped him, as if he’d run against a wall and didn’t know how to get around it.

We walked upstream along the top of the riverbank. Behind us the trees closed around the camp house and Oscar; and then we went into a patch of horseweeds and out of sight. The horseweeds grew high over our heads, and so thick we had to bend them out of our way.

“This is a jungle,” Brother said. “Nobody ever was here before.”

All we could see was horseweeds. We had to look straight up to see the sky. But we knew where we were, and we went on, turning the bend of the river.

Brother stopped and broke off two dead weed stalks and handed one of them to me. “Here’s a gun,” he said.

“We’ll kill a lion,” I told him.

Before long we crossed a gully filled with tin cans and bottles, and followed a path into the open place that Jig Pendleton had cleared on the bank above his shanty boat. From there we could look down into the bend and see Uncle Burley’s camp. Oscar stood there with his head turned toward the river.

In the middle of the open place was a table where Jig cleaned his fish. Above the table an old set of grocery scales hung from a tree limb. A few worn-out nets were strewn around on the ground, and one of Jig’s trotlines was stretched between two trees to dry.

The path went to the edge of the bank, and then stair-stepped to the water. We went down the steps and crossed the plank to the shanty boat.

Jig Pendleton lived there alone and fished for a living. He was crazy on religion, and when he wasn’t busy fishing he’d fasten himself in the shanty and read the Bible from cover to cover over and over again. He worried all the time about the sins of the flesh, and believed that if he could purify himself the Lord would send down a chariot of fire and take him to Heaven. But he never could quite purify himself enough. Sooner or later he always gave it up and got on a drunk, and then he’d have to start all over again.

He’d invited Uncle Burley and Brother and me in to see him several times, and the inside of his shanty was a sight. He’d found an old Singer sewing machine, and thrown the sewing part of it away, and fastened the iron frame with the wheel and treadle to the floor. Then he’d wired a lot of spools to the walls and run strings between them, zigzagging and crisscrossing from one end of the shanty to the other. This contraption of strings and pulleys was hooked to the wheel and treadle. It worked like a charm, but Jig never had been able to decide what it was for. He just kept adding spools and string until it was more complicated than a spider web. The whole inside of his house was a machine that couldn’t do anything but run. When he was drinking Jig would sit and treadle the machine and sing and shout and pray for the Lord to purify him. One night when he came home drunk he got tangled up in it and nearly choked to death before Gander Loyd came along and found him the next morning. Some of the missionary society women in town saved string and spools to give to him because they felt sorry for him. He had a wife and daughter living somewhere, but they hadn’t had anything to do with him since he’d got so crazy.

A couple of times Jig had taken his boat out of the river and left the country. He stayed away a year both times, and nobody knew much about where he went or what he did. Once he told Uncle Burley that he just wandered around, looking at the mountains and rivers and oceans that the Lord had made. Since the Lord had gone to all the trouble of making them, he thought the least a man could do was go and look at them. He was as crazy as a June bug, but he was a good fisherman and didn’t bother anybody, and he was Uncle Burley’s friend.

Jig was busy loading bait and tackle into his rowboat, and we sat down to watch him.

“Hello, Jig,” Brother said.

“Hello there, Tom and Nathan,” Jig said. “How’re you little children?”

“Fine,” I said.

“We hunted for a lion up there in the horseweeds,” Brother said, “but we couldn’t find one.”

“The lion and the lamb shall lie down together,” Jig said, “and a little child shall lead them.”

“You wouldn’t lead the lion that lives in that horseweed patch,” Brother said. “He’d bite your durned arm off.”

“You oughtn’t to cuss,” Jig said. “It makes Jesus sad.”

Brother was ashamed of himself then, and he hushed. Jig began to bail out the rowboat.

“What’re you fixing to do?” I asked him.

“Fixing to run my lines,” Jig said.

“We’ll go with you,” Brother said.

Jig shook his head. “No, honey. You might drown. It’s awful easy to drown in this river.”

“We can swim,” Brother said. “We won’t drown.”

“Listen,” Jig said. “If the Lord’s planning for one of you all to drown, that’s His business. But He don’t want me to get messed up in it.”

He untied the boat and began rowing up the river. Brother and I went back to the bank.

“Let’s go swimming,” Brother said.

He started upstream again toward the sandbar, and I went with him, feeling a little guilty as if Jig might tell the Lord on us. But when we got to the sandbar Brother began to take his clothes off, running to the water; and I ran too, trying to beat him.

I kicked my clothes off and ran out into the river, letting the weight of it against my legs trip me under. I felt the water slap over my head, and I swam down the slope of the rock bottom until the deep cold made my ears ache. I rolled over and looked up into the blackness. The current carried me along. I loosened myself in it, and held still in the movement of the water. I couldn’t tell whether my head was up or down; I felt as if I could swim forever in any direction. My lungs tightened, wanting to breathe, and I kicked the bottom away from me and swam up until I saw a patch of light floating on the surface. I broke through it into the air again.

I shook the water out of my eyes and floated. The sky seemed a deeper blue after my eyes had been in the dark. Over my head a white cloud unraveled in the wind. The sky widened to the tops of the hills that circled around the valley. Inside the ring of hilltops trees grew along both banks of the river. They leaned toward me—willow and maple and sycamore.

I watched them, letting myself float in the slow current. I thought if I floated to the mouth of the river I’d always be at the center of a ring of trees and a ring of hills and a ring where the sky touched. I said, “I’m Nathan Coulter.” It seemed strange.

Brother swam up behind me and threw water in my face. We raced back to the shallow water, and waded out onto the bar.

I found a flat rock and stretched out to let the sun dry me. It was warm and I felt clean and tired. Across the river a hawk held his wings to the wind and circled. The sky was empty except for the hawk and the cloud. I cupped my hands around my eyes. And then there were three of us—the hawk and the cloud and me.

When we got back to Grandpa’s place we turned old Oscar loose; he wandered off down the hill toward his shade trees at the spring. We went on to the top of the ridge and back toward our place where Grandpa and Daddy and Uncle Burley were digging postholes. The ground was shallow along that part of the fence row; they were digging to the rock and blasting the rest of the way down with dynamite. When we got there Uncle Burley was sitting at the edge of a hole, guiding the rock drill, and Daddy was driving it down with a sledge hammer. Grandpa was working at the post pile, facing the posts with an axe. We sat behind Uncle Burley and watched.

Daddy glanced at us between swings. “Have you all been riding that old horse again?” He had to interrupt himself to say “Ah” when the hammer came down. The sun was beaming hot, and he was sweating through his shirt.

“No,” Brother said.

Daddy looked at Brother and then at me, and swung the hammer down. “If I see you on that horse one more time, I’m going to skin both of you. It looks like you can’t hear when I tell you something.”

Then he said, “Get out of the way, now, before you get hurt. You don’t have any business up here.”

He dropped the hammer and went to find the water jug. As soon as he was out of earshot Uncle Burley winked at us. “You’d better do what he tells you, boys. It’s a bad day.”

“What’s he mad at us for?” Brother said. “We weren’t bothering him.”

“That’s just his way,” Uncle Burley said. “He loves you boys.”

Several sticks of dynamite and a coil of fuse and a box of caps were lying on the ground behind us. When Uncle Burley turned his head and began working the drill back and forth in the hole, Brother picked up a scrap of fuse and took a cap out of the box.

We went out the ridge again and took the road to town. A few patches of red clover were blooming along the sides of the road, and daisies and sweet clover. Big dusty-looking grasshoppers flew up ahead of us, their wings clicking, and dropped back into the weeds, and flew again when we caught up with them. Finally we moved out to the middle of the road to be rid of them.

The road went slanting over the top of our ridge past Big Ellis’s pond and his house, then it made a sharp turn and ran straight on to where the town’s ridge pointed off on the river bluff. Beriah Easterly’s house set on the outside of the turn, and we stopped to see if his boy, Calvin, was at home. We knocked on the door, but nobody came. We guessed Mrs. Easterly and Calvin had gone down to the store with Beriah. Their old bird dog was asleep under the porch swing, but he just raised his head and looked at us and went to sleep again.

“It looks like somebody ought to be at home,” Brother said.

I knocked again. We could hear a clock ticking somewhere inside the house, and that was all. Things had quit working right. Daddy wouldn’t let us stay with him, and now Calvin was gone. All of a sudden it got lonesome. We went back to the road and didn’t stop again until we got to town.

The town strung out along the road for maybe half a mile—a few houses and other buildings and the bank and the church. Except for the preacher and the banker and the storekeepers, about everybody who lived there worked on the farms. There was one side road but no houses were built on it. We went past the poolroom and on up the street to where the drugstore and grocery store and harness shop stood in a row along the sidewalk across from the church. The harness shop had been closed a long time. The harnessmaker died and the town didn’t need another store, so it had been left empty. The door and windows had been boarded up and covered with political posters and cigarette advertisements, and Calvin Easterly said that bats lived inside. In the daytime the bats hung together like a curtain down the back wall. It was a scary place when we thought about it, especially at night. But it had been shut up for so long that we hardly noticed it was there.

Aside from the harness shop it was a pretty town. Most of the buildings were painted white, and tall locust and maple trees grew in the yards along the road.

Big Ellis and Gander Loyd and the Montgomery twins were squatting in front of the drugstore, leaning back into the shade of the wall. The Montgomerys didn’t look at us when we came up, and we didn’t speak to them. Grandpa had thrashed their father one time for calling Uncle Burley a drunkard, and none of them had ever got over it. They were always shamefaced and hangdog when even Brother and I were around, as if they expected one of us to walk over and kick them in the shins. Their names were Len and Lemuel, but everybody called them Mushmouth and Chicken Little. We walked past them to where Big Ellis and Gander were.

“How’re you boys?” Big Ellis said.

“All right,” I said. “How’re you, Big Ellis?”

“Hot. Too hot to work. What’re they doing over at your place?”

“Digging postholes.”

“Whoo,” Big Ellis said. “They’re feeling the heat.” He squinted his eyes and giggled.

We spoke to Gander and sat down. Gander turned his head and looked at us with his one eye. He was chewing on the end of a matchstick. “Hello,” he said. He wiped the matchstick on the bib of his overalls and began picking his teeth. Gander never had much to say. He’d killed a man and lost an eye in the fight, and it always took me a while to get used to his one-sided face. He stayed quiet, even when he was in town, keeping what he knew to himself.

“Could you boys use a chocolate ice cream cone?” Big Ellis asked us.

“We had dinner a while ago,” Brother said. “Thank you just the same.”

“Aw hell, you can eat a chocolate ice cream cone anytime. Let’s have one.”

We got up and went into the drugstore.

“Three chocolate ice cream cones,” Big Ellis said. The girl behind the counter scooped them up for us. Big Ellis gave her three nickels and we went out and sat down again.

“You boys ever get in a fight?” Big Ellis asked me.

“No,” I said.

“If we ever did I’d win,” Brother told him.

Big Ellis looked around at Gander and giggled. But Gander wasn’t paying any attention. Big Ellis let it go, and ate his ice cream without talking anymore. He wasn’t likely to stir any conversation out of Gander—or the Montgomerys, either, as long as we were there. It wasn’t very good company. After we finished the ice cream we stayed a while to show Big Ellis that we appreciated his buying it for us, then we thanked him and left.

Up the street from the harness shop was the hotel. It was a long, two-story frame building with a porch running all the way across the front of it. Salesmen and travelers used to spend the night there, but now the rooms were rented out by the month, to old people mostly. Some of them were sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch when we went by. An old woman nodded her head to us. “Good afternoon, young gentlemen.” She turned to the others and said, “Such fine young men.”

An old man leaned toward her and said, “Whose boys are they?”

“Why, they’re Dave Coulter’s grandchildren.”

“Well, God damn,” he said. “Are they old Dave’s boys?”

“Grandchildren,” she said.

On a rise at the far end of town was the graveyard. In a way it was the prettiest part of the town—with its white headstones and green grass and flowers, shady under the gray-trunked cedars. From there you could see a long stretch of the river valley. Grandma said it was a restful place, and it was. But it was hard to forget all the dead people buried underneath it. In the summer it was easier to forget them than it was in the winter. In the winter you felt they must be cold.

We went through the gate and up the driveway. Toward the top of the rise, jutting up even taller than most of the cedars, was the Coulter family monument. It was made of granite—a square base, then a long shaft like a candle with an angel standing on top of it. Grandpa’s mother had bought it from a traveling salesman when she was old and childish. Grandpa said she must have been crazy too. It had taken twenty mules to pull the base of it seven miles from the railroad station. And the old woman had been dead about five years before Grandpa was able to pay for it. On the front of the monument was written:

FATHER ——— MOTHER

George W. Coulter  Parthenia B. Coulter

1826–1889     1835–1917

Beneath this monument
the mortal remains
of George and Parthenia
parted by death
wait to be rejoined
in Glory

George and Parthenia were Grandpa’s mother and father. On the other side of the monument was Grandpa’s name:

THEIR SON

David Coulter

1860–

Grandpa was the only one of Parthenia’s children left at home when she bought the monument, and she’d left the other names off—had forgotten about them, or was mad at them for leaving. But Grandpa wasn’t flattered that she’d remembered him. The last thing he wanted was to have his name carved in four-inch letters on a tombstone. The monument had been enough trouble to him without that. He still got mad every time he thought about it. It was as if she’d expected him to write his other date up there and die right away to balance things.

It had finally bothered him so much that he’d sent Daddy to buy a new lot for the family. He said he’d be damned if anybody was going to tell him where to be buried. The new lot was way off on the far side of the graveyard. Nobody was buried there yet, and it was all grown up in weeds.

The angel on top of the monument had his wings spread as if he were about to fly down and write the rest of our names in the blank spaces. Parthenia B. Coulter had left plenty of room for whoever might come along. Uncle Burley said the angel probably would fly on Judgment Day. That kind of talk always disturbed Grandma; she thought it was sacrilegious. And so he’d usually mention it when the subject of graveyards came up. He said he could just see that old angel flying up out of the smoke and cinders and tearing out for Heaven like a chicken out of a henhouse fire.

A little past the graveyard gate was the Crandel Place. When we passed there Mrs. Crandel’s grandson, who had come to visit her from Louisville, was sitting in the front yard playing with a pet crow. Old man Crandel had caught the crow for him before it was big enough to fly. The boy was cleaned up and dressed as if it were Sunday.

He walked over to the fence and looked at us. “Hi,” he said.

We told him hello.

“What’s your name?” he asked Brother.

“Puddin-tame,” Brother said.

“Would you like to come over and play with me?” the boy asked. “I’ll let you ride my bicycle if you will.”

Brother and I climbed over the fence.

“Where’s the bicycle?” Brother asked him.

“On the porch.”

We followed him up to the porch. The bicycle was a new one. And he had a new air rifle too.

He brought the bicycle down the steps and rode it around in the yard. It was painted red and the sun shone on the spokes of the wheels. I wished Brother and I had one.

In a little while the boy got off and gave the bicycle to Brother. But Brother couldn’t ride it, and it turned over with him. Then I got on it and it turned over with me. Mrs. Crandel came out on the porch and told the boy not to let us tear up his bicycle.

When she went back inside Brother said, “Let me try it one more time.”

The boy said, “No, you can’t. You might break it.”

He caught the pet crow again and we went over to the corner of the yard and sat down under a locust tree.

“That’s a mighty fine crow you’ve got there,” Brother said. “Can I look at him?”

The boy said, “You can if you’ll be careful not to hurt him. Grandfather’s going to let me take him home with me.”

“Sure. I won’t bother him.” Brother put the crow on his shoulder and smoothed its feathers. “Say,” he said, “I’ll bet you don’t know much about crows.”

“Not much. Grandfather says they’ll eat about anything, and if you split their tongues they’ll talk.”

“I can show you a little trick about crows. You want to see it?”

“Yes,” the boy said.

Brother motioned to me to come and help him. I held the crow while he got the dynamite cap and the piece of fuse out of his pocket. The boy came up and watched Brother put the fuse into the cap and crimp the cap against a rock.

“Here,” Brother told me. “Hold his tail feathers up.”

I held the tail feathers up and he poked the cap into the crow’s bunghole. I gave him a match and he struck it on his shoe.

“Now you watch,” Brother said. “You’ll learn something about crows.” He lit the fuse and pitched the crow up in the air.

The crow flew around over our heads for a minute, and Brother and I got out of the way. Then he looked around and saw that little ball of fire following him, spitting like a mad tomcat. He really got down to business then. He planned to fly right off and leave that fire. But it caught up with him over old man Crandel’s barn. BLAM! And feathers and guts went every which way. Where the crow had been was a little piece of blue sky with a ring of smoke and black feathers around it.

Brother and I took off over the fence. When we looked back the boy was still standing there with his mouth open, staring up at the place where the crow had exploded. He started to cry. I felt sorry for him when I saw that, but there was nothing to do but run.

When we got back to the graveyard we were out of sight of the Crandels’ house and we stopped running. The angel on top of the monument was looking in the direction of town. I could still hear the explosion going off.

Brother said, “He thought a lot of that crow.”

“He was crying,” I said.

It was late; but we wouldn’t have supper until dark, after Daddy quit work, and we didn’t hurry.

“Do you think Mrs. Crandel heard the explosion?” I asked.

“If she wasn’t dead she did.”

“If she didn’t he’ll tell her.”

“Whoo,” Brother said.

Big Ellis and Gander Loyd had gone home by the time we got to town. Mushmouth and Chicken Little Montgomery were sitting by themselves in front of the drugstore, and we walked down the other side of the street to keep them from seeing us. If one of them had pointed at us and said, “There go Tom and Nathan Coulter, and they just blew up a poor old boy’s crow,” we couldn’t have said a word. The sun had gone down and the nighthawks were flying. I was glad Brother and I were together.

When we were outside town again Brother said, “We’ll tell Uncle Burley about it when we get home. He’ll get a kick out of it.”

That made us feel a little better. But Uncle Burley was still at the fence row with Grandpa and Daddy when we got there. They were busy, and we didn’t go where they were.

By the time we got home that evening Mrs. Crandel had telephoned our mother and told on us. Mother made us stay at the house until Daddy came in from work. We sat on the back porch and waited for him.

When he came Mother told him what we’d done, and he cut a switch and whipped us. He was already mad at us for riding old Oscar, and he whipped us for that too while he was at it.

“Now I know what that crow felt like,” I told Brother.

“That crow never felt it,” Brother said. “He was dead before he heard the explosion.”

The next morning Daddy said that if we didn’t stay out of trouble he’d take up where he left off the night before. After he went out of the house Mother told us not to feel bad because he was mad at us. He was just tired, she said.

It started raining that afternoon, and rained off and on for a couple of days. The wet weather kept Daddy from working in the field; that gave him a chance to rest and he got into a better humor. He let us stay with him while he did odd jobs around the barn, and we enjoyed each other’s company.

On the morning after the ground had dried Daddy hitched the team to the cultivator and drove to the tobacco patch. We watched him leave; and then we fed Mother’s chickens for her because she wasn’t feeling good.

After a while we saw Grandpa riding his saddle mare across the field toward our house, and we ran to open the lot gate for him.

“Where’s your daddy?” he asked us.

“Plowing tobacco,” Brother said.

He turned the mare around and rode back through the gate. Brother and I watched him go up the ridge. When he rode the mare he kept his walking cane hooked over his arm. Mother said he carried the cane because he was old, but mostly he used it as a riding whip. He could walk almost as fast as Daddy, poking the cane straight out in front of him as if to get the air and everything out of the way so he could move faster. He always hurried, even across a room, setting his feet down hard. You could never imagine him turning around and going the other way. When he walked through the house he made the dishes rattle in the kitchen cabinet, and you half expected to find his tracks sunk into the floor. He was tall and lean, his face crossed with wrinkles. His hair was white and it hung in his eyes most of the time when he wasn’t wearing a hat, because he didn’t use a comb for anything but to scratch his head. His nose crooked like a hawk’s and his eyes were pale and blue.

Before long he came over the ridge again, and Daddy came with him. Daddy had unhitched the team and the wind blew the sound of the loose trace chains down into the lot. Grandpa rode through the gate ahead of him and unsaddled the mare and put her in a stall, and then helped unharness the mules.

“Did you get done, Daddy?” Brother said.

“No,” Daddy said. He sounded mad again.

I was going to ask him why he’d quit, but Grandpa told me to get out of the way before one of the mules kicked my head off.

“They won’t kick me,” I said. “I feed them all the time.”

He looked at me and snorted. “Shit,” he said.

When they got the mules unhitched Daddy went to the house, and Grandpa led the mules to the barn to put them in their stalls. Brother and I followed him into the driveway. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from these mules?” he said. “Go to the house.”

Daddy was in the kitchen talking to Mother when we came in.

“What’s going on?” Brother asked.

Daddy didn’t answer. He went out and started the car, and he and Grandpa drove off toward town.

In about half an hour they came back. Uncle Burley was slouched between them in the front seat. Grandpa got out and hooked his cane around Uncle Burley’s arm and told him to come on out of there. Uncle Burley crawled out and stood up, holding on to his head with one hand and on to the car door with the other one. He hadn’t shaved for two or three days, and his whiskers were matted with blood and dirt.

There was a knot on the left side of his head, starting above the ear and ending in a cut an inch long across his cheekbone.

“Hello, Uncle Burley,” I said.

“Well now,” he said, “good morning boys.” He let go the door to wave to us and fell down in a pile.

“For God’s sake, look at Uncle Burley,” Brother said.

Daddy and Grandpa picked him up between them and helped him into the house. Mother filled a pan with hot water and got the iodine out of the medicine cabinet and followed them to the living room. They stretched Uncle Burley out on the sofa and Mother began washing the blood off his face. She was gentle with him, and washed carefully around the cut so it wouldn’t hurt.

“What did he hit you with, Burley?” Daddy asked.

“Jack handle. Surely must have been a jack handle.”

“It’s a damned shame he didn’t use the jack,” Grandpa said.

Mother finished washing Uncle Burley’s face, and then poured some iodine into the cut. He whooped and sat up.

Grandpa jobbed the cane into his ribs. “Lay down there, God damn it.”

Uncle Burley lay down again and let Mother bandage his face. Then they got him up and led him out to the kitchen. Brother and I kept out of the way and watched them set him down at the table. Mother poured him a cup of coffee, and she and Daddy and Grandpa went out on the back porch and began talking.

Uncle Burley’s hands shook so much that he splashed some of the coffee out into his saucer; he tried to drink it out of the saucer and shook it all over his shirt.

He saw Brother and me watching him and grinned at us. “Now boys,” he said, “let Uncle Burley tell you something. Don’t ever drink. It’s bad for you.” Then he said, “But if you ever do drink be sure to get to hell away from home to do it.” He set the coffee cup down and touched the side of his head with his fingers. “If you ever drink, and you ever get in a fight, always try to make an honorable show.” He laid his right hand on the table so we could see it. It was skinned up across the knuckles and the middle finger was out of joint. “Boys,” he said, “I was after him just like a hay rake.”

He finished the cup of coffee and Brother got the pot and poured him another one. He put an arm around each of us and said, “Don’t let on to the rest of them, but Uncle Burley was drunk.”

He told us to keep it to ourselves, because there were some things that were a man’s own business. We said we’d be quiet about it.

“It don’t pay to talk too much about your business,” he said.

When he’d finished the second cup of coffee Grandpa and Daddy loaded him back into the car and started home with him. Mother told us to stay in the kitchen and help her, but she had to leave the room for something and we ducked out the back door.

We cut across the field and got to Grandpa’s house just as they were helping Uncle Burley out of the car again. Grandma was in the kitchen cooking dinner. When she saw them coming across the back porch with Uncle Burley, she dropped a pot full of green beans on the floor, and stood there saying, “Oh Lord, oh Lord.”

Then she hurried to help them bring Uncle Burley in. Grandpa told her to get out of the way; Uncle Burley wasn’t dead yet, he said. Grandma’s old yellow cat started rubbing against Grandpa’s leg and purring. He took a cut at it with his cane, but missed.

“Scat, damn you.”

The cat backed off a little, and then followed them into the house and up the stairs. Grandma fixed Uncle Burley’s bed and they undressed him and put him under the covers. He really did look sick then. Under the whiskers his face was as white as the pillow. Grandma leaned over him and smoothed the covers and asked if there was anything he wanted.

“That’s right, by God,” Grandpa said. “You coddle him.”

They looked at each other for a minute; and Grandpa turned around and started out of the room, the cat weaving in and out between his feet. He took another swing at it with his cane as he went out the door, but missed again.

Grandma looked at Uncle Burley and said, “Lord help us. I don’t know what’s going to become of us.”

“Shhhh,” Uncle Burley said. “It don’t pay to talk too much.”

She sat down beside him on the edge of the bed, rolling her hands into her apron. “Oh, Burley. Why do you have to be so bad, Burley?”

Daddy took Brother and me down the stairs.

“Is everything all right?” I asked him.

“It’s going to be.”

When we went out on the back porch Grandma’s cat was hanging by a piece of string from a limb of the peach tree. It didn’t look as if it ever had been alive. The wind swung it back and forth just a little.

“Look at that old cat,” Brother said.

Chapter 2

OUR MOTHER had been sick since I was born, Daddy told us. And she began to get worse. She had to spend more and more time in bed, until finally she didn’t get up at all. Grandma came every day and cooked our meals for us and did the housework, and took care of Mother while Daddy was in the field.

Daddy got short-tempered with us, and stayed that way longer than he ever had before. He took us to the field with him every morning to keep us out of the house and we stayed with him all day. It was hard to have to be with him so much. Brother and I were careful not to aggravate him, but scarcely a day passed that we didn’t get at least a tongue-lashing from him. He was worrying a lot and working hard, and the least thing could set him off. The worst times were when we came to the house at noon and at night. He wouldn’t let us make a sound then.

I quit having the dream about the lion, and began dreaming things that woke me up in the middle of the night. I came awake sweating and afraid, but I could never remember what I’d dreamed. It always took a long time to get used to the room and the darkness again and go back to sleep.

On one of those nights when I woke up I heard Daddy talking on the telephone. I couldn’t hear what he said, and I dozed off again until I heard a car come in the driveway and stop beside the house. The door of the car opened and slammed; and I heard Daddy’s voice and then the doctor’s on the front porch. They came inside and their footsteps went down the hall and into the room where Mother and Daddy slept. Before long the back door opened and I heard Grandma talking to Daddy in the kitchen. “I saw the light burning and thought I’d better come over,” she said.

They went into the bedroom and it was quiet again for a while. I went back to sleep finally. But I woke again several times before morning, and each time I’d hear them talking quietly downstairs and tiptoeing over the floors. The last time I woke the sky was turning gray. I heard the doctor’s car leaving.

Nobody called Brother and me to wake up, and we slept a little past the regular time. When we got dressed and went downstairs Daddy was standing in the living room looking out the window. He didn’t speak to us, and we crossed the room and started down the hall to the kitchen. Grandma opened the bedroom door and came out, shutting it quickly behind her. Her face looked tired, and her eyes were red.

“Boys, your mother’s dead,” she told us.

She stood there watching us. I nodded my head, and Brother said, “Yes mam.”

She walked down the hall. “Come with me. I’ll fix your breakfast.”

We followed her into the kitchen and sat down in our chairs at the table. The sun wasn’t up far; the light came in at the windows and stretched halfway across the room before it touched the floor. Off in the distance I could hear somebody calling his cattle.

Grandma took the lids off the stove and kindled a fire. When it had caught she added wood and set the lids back in place. She put the skillet on and got out the bacon and eggs while the stove warmed and ticked in the quiet.

Daddy came into the kitchen while she was filling our plates.

“Here’s some breakfast for you,” Grandma told him. “Eat. You’ll need it.”

He didn’t answer her. He went on out the back door. After a minute we heard his axe at the woodpile.

We weren’t long eating. When we’d finished we went out where he was. He didn’t notice us. We sat down on a log at the edge of the woodpile and watched him. He took a chunk of sawed wood from the pile and propped it against the chopping block. He swung the axe over his head, sinking the blade, and drew it out and swung again. The chunk split clean, down the middle. Then he split each of the halves and threw them into another pile. Every time the axe came down he said “Ah!”—the keen sound of it ready to turn into crying, until the bite of the axe stopped it; and he tightened his mouth and swung again.

The undertaker came in his black hearse and took our mother’s body away. Then some of the neighbors began coming. Big Ellis and his wife came, and the preacher and Gander Loyd and Beriah Easterly and his wife and Mrs. Crandel. As they came in they looked at Daddy working there at the woodpile, then stood on the back porch with the others and watched him, wondering when he’d quit and come to the house and allow them to speak to him.

Grandpa came, riding his mare into the lot, and stopped on the other side of the woodpile. He looked at Daddy for a minute, as if he wanted to tell him to quit or say something to comfort him. He looked away finally and sat still, only jerking the bridle reins a little when the mare got restless and began to paw and toss her head. Daddy never looked up from his work. The axe blade glinted in the sun and came down. Grandpa spoke to the mare and rode home again.

When Daddy had split all the wood, he stuck the axe into the block and started to the house. The people watched him cross the yard; when he came to the porch they turned away from him, embarrassed because they’d come to say they were sorry and the look of him didn’t allow it.

They backed away from the door to let him through. He went into the bedroom and cleaned up. When he came into the living room he stood at the window again, not speaking to any of them.

The preacher told Brother and me that we should go upstairs and put on clean clothes. “You must be quiet,” he said. “Your mother has gone up to Heaven.”

“We know it,” Brother said. “We knew it before you did.”

As we were going up the stairs Mrs. Crandel came to the living room door and said, “Do you boys want me to help you get dressed?”

Brother said, “No mam.”

“Do you know where to find everything?”

“Yes mam.”

We went upstairs to our room and poured some water into the washpan. The sun came through the window curtains and made their shadows on the floor. When the wind waved the curtains the shadows on the floor waved.

“Let’s both wash at the same time,” Brother said.

I said all right. We put the pan between us on the floor and began washing. Brother squeezed the soap and it flew out of his hands and splashed water on me. I splashed back at him; both of us laughed. He started snapping at me with the towel and I caught the end of it, trying to pull it away from him.

I heard a step behind me, and when I looked around there was Daddy. He grabbed me by the shoulders and held me clear off the floor and shook me. Then he put me down and caught Brother and shook him. He went out the door without saying a word to us.

I sat on the floor and kept from crying until I started to feel better.

“Did he hurt you?” Brother asked me.

“No,” I said.

I got up and we put our dirty clothes back on; we slipped down the stairs and out of the house.

“If Mother was alive he wouldn’t pick on us,” I said.

“She wouldn’t let him,” Brother said.

I felt like crying again, and I could see that Brother was holding it back too. We started across the hollow toward Grandpa’s place.

“I’m not going to stay here any longer,” I said. “He doesn’t have any right to treat us that way.”

Brother kept quiet.

“Are you coming with me?”

“We’ll both go,” he said.

We heard one of the cars start at our house, and Big Ellis and his wife drove out the lane.

“We’ll go and live with Big Ellis.”

“All right,” I said.

We found old Oscar at the spring and rode him out the gate and up the road toward Big Ellis’s place.

“As long as we’ve got Oscar we’re all right,” Brother said. “If Big Ellis won’t let us stay with him we can go as far as we need to.”

“We can stay at Big Ellis’s,” I said. “He’ll be glad to have us.”

When we got to his house Big Ellis was sitting out on the front steps. He still had on his black suit; but he’d loosened his tie and taken his shoes off to rest his feet, and his shirttail had come out.

We rode through the gate and into the yard.

“We’ve come to live with you, Big Ellis,” Brother said.

Big Ellis got up and tramped barefoot across the grass. He forgot old Oscar was blind and couldn’t see him coming. “Hello, boys,” he said.

When Oscar heard that, he snorted and shied and ran backwards into a flower bed. He hit a wagon wheel that Annie May Ellis had put there for a morning glory to climb on, and sat down on his haunches like a dog. Brother and I fell off.

“Whoa, boy,” Big Ellis said.

Annie May ran out on the porch waving her hands in the air. If Oscar hadn’t been blind he’d have run off then for sure. But he just sat there trying to figure out what had happened to him.

“Get that old horse and them boys out of my flowers,” Annie May said.

Oscar got up and shook himself, and Big Ellis caught him by his forelock and quieted him. “Never mind about your flowers,” he said. “Go on inside and be still.” He led Oscar out of the flowers.

Annie May waited until she was certain that Oscar was going to behave himself, and then she did what he’d told her.

Big Ellis looked at us and giggled. “That old horse can’t see any better going backwards than he can going forwards, can he?”

“He can’t see either way,” Brother said. “We thought we’d stay at your house for a while, Big Ellis, if you don’t mind.”

“What do you want to stay here for? We haven’t got any more to eat than anybody else,” Big Ellis said. He was still holding on to Oscar’s forelock.

“Daddy’s mad at us,” I said.

“Aw hell, he ain’t mad at you all.”

“We’ll work for you,” Brother said.

“Well, I could use a couple of boys all right. But we’d better think about it first. Annie May’s nearly got dinner ready, so you boys just as well come in and have a bite to eat while we think.”

We heard a horse coming up the road, and Grandpa turned his mare into the driveway. He had a halter and a lead rope over his arm.

“Don’t tell him about old Oscar falling down,” I said.

“I won’t,” Big Ellis said.

Grandpa kept the mare in a stiff rack right up to the gate, then he slowed her down and walked her into the yard. I was afraid he was going to whip us, he came in such a hurry. But he only nodded to Big Ellis and told us that Grandma had our dinner ready.

Big Ellis took the halter and slipped it over Oscar’s head and handed the lead rein to Grandpa. “I was about to feed them some dinner here,” he said. He came around and helped Brother and me onto Oscar’s back.

“I’m much obliged to you,” Grandpa told him. He turned the mare and led us out of the yard. When we were going down the driveway he said, “Damn it, your daddy’s told you to stay off of that old horse.” After a minute he said, “And damn it, I’ve told you.”

But he kept his face turned away from us, and he let us ride old Oscar home.

For three days they kept our mother’s body in a coffin in the living room. They kept the lid of the coffin open so people could look at her. They kept flowers around her coffin, and a lamp always burning at her head. The lights never went out in our house during those three days.

Grandma began staying with us even at night. She told Brother and me to stay in the yard or in the kitchen with her, and not to go in the room where our mother’s body was. Once or twice we looked through the windows at the coffin and the people talking in the living room. But most of the time we stayed away. We’d see Daddy now and then walking around in the house or in the yard, but when he saw us he always turned around and went the other way. He’d changed and we didn’t try to talk to him.

Everybody brought food to us when they came to sit by the coffin, until the kitchen was fairly stacked with cakes and pies and ham and fried chicken. Brother and I enjoyed looking at all the things they brought, but we didn’t enjoy eating them. Mealtime always reminded us of Mother. It seemed strange to be sitting at the table eating while her dead body was there in the house with us.

Once while we were eating breakfast Brother looked at me and said, “Many’s dead.”

I said, “Minnie who?”

“Many people,” he said.

We laughed. Grandma turned away from the stove and said, “Oh Lord, boys, you never will see her any more.” And she cried, holding the dish towel against her face.

We cried too, and then she hugged us and told us not to grieve. She said our mother was in Heaven with all the angels, and she was happy there and never would have to suffer any more.

“Why, she’s probably up there right now, singing with the blessed angels,” Grandma said. She wiped her eyes on the towel and went back to the stove. “Oh, it’s a pretty place up there, boys.”

At night a few of the neighbors always came and sat up by the coffin. We could hear them talking and the chair rockers creaking for a long time before we went to sleep, and it seemed that we still heard them while we slept. We felt as if we never had lived in that house before.

For the first two days there were always cars parked in the yard, and people coming in and out. But on the morning of the funeral it got quiet. Big Ellis and Annie May and Uncle Burley had spent the night by the coffin, but they left early, and nobody else came. Grandma worked until noon, getting the house ready for the funeral, and then she warmed some leftovers for our dinner.

After we finished eating Brother and I went out on the back porch. Daddy and Grandma were sitting in the swing, talking. When we came out they hushed.

Grandma stood up and smiled at us. “Well, the boys can come and help me,” she said. She leaned over and laid her hand on Daddy’s arm. “It’ll be time now before long.” She went into the house and up the stairs.

Daddy sat there looking down at his hands, handling them, running the fingers of one hand across the palm and out over the fingers of the other one. His hands were heavy and big, with white scars on them that never sunburned. His hands never quit moving. Even when he went to sleep sometimes at night sitting in his rocking chair in the living room his hands stirred on the chair arms as if they could never find a place to rest.

Finally he looked up at us. “You’d better go help your grandma, boys.”

We went upstairs and found her in our room. She had the bureau drawers open and was packing our clothes into a big pasteboard box.

“What’re you doing that for?” Brother asked her.

“You’ll have to come over and live with us for a while. Your Uncle Burley’ll bring the wagon to get you.”

We started helping her pack the clothes.

“How long are we going to live at your house?”

“Oh, a while.”

“Why do we have to leave?” I asked.

“Your daddy’s not going to be able to take care of you. He’s going to be by himself now.”

I saw that she was about to cry again. I didn’t want her to do that, and so I laughed and said what a good time Brother and I’d have with Uncle Burley.

We packed all the clothes that were in the drawers, and then took our Sunday clothes off the hooks in the closet and folded them on top of the rest and closed the box. Grandma left to get ready for the funeral.

Brother and I went out in the back yard and waited for Uncle Burley. And before long he came, driving the team and wagon down the ridge toward our house, sitting dangle-legged on the edge of the hay frame.

He left the team standing in front of the barn and came on into the yard. “Hello, boys,” he said.

It didn’t come out the way it usually did when he said it. It had the same sound as everything that had been said to us for three days, as if it were embarrassing to be around people whose mother was dead. So all we said to him was hello.

Grandma came to the back door. “Burley, take Tom and Nathan in to see their mother before you go.” She went back inside, and we didn’t see her any more until that night.

Uncle Burley put his hands on our shoulders and went with us into the house and down the hall to the living room. When we went through the door I realized that Grandma had forgotten to make us dress up.

The people quit talking when they saw us. It made me uneasy to have them quiet and watching, and I looked down at the floor while we crossed the room to the coffin.

Big Ellis and Annie May were there ahead of us, and we stopped to wait for them to get out of the way.

“Ain’t she the beautifullest corpse!” Annie May said. And she started crying.

Big Ellis looked around at us and grinned. “Howdy, boys,” he said. His shirttail was half out, and he’d sweated until his collar had rolled up around his neck like a piece of rope. Seeing him made me feel better. I told him hello.

Annie May finished crying and we went up to the coffin. Our mother had on a blue dress, and her head made a little dent in the pillow. Her hands were folded together, and her eyes were closed. But she didn’t look really comfortable. She looked the way people do when they pretend to be asleep and try too hard and give it away. I touched her face; it felt stiff and strange, like touching your own hand when it’s asleep and can’t feel.

The inside of the coffin looked snug and soft, but when they shut the lid it would be dark. When they shut the lid and carried her to the grave it would be like walking on a cloudy dark night when you can’t see where you’re going or what’s in front of you. And after they put her in the ground and covered her up she’d turn with the world in the little dark box in the grave, and the days and nights would all be the same.

We went up to our room to get our clothes. The wind blew the window curtains out over the corner of the bureau where the empty drawers were, and I could see the barn out the window with the sun shining on it. It seemed awful to go. I felt like crying, but I held it down and it knotted hard in my throat. I took the pillow off my bed and crooked my arm around it.

“You’d better leave the pillow, boy,” Uncle Burley said. “We’ve got plenty of them.”

“It’s mine, God damn it.” I said it loud to get it over the knot.

Uncle Burley laughed. “Well, take it then, old pup.”

Brother and I laughed too, and it wasn’t so bad to leave then.

Uncle Burley picked up the box and we went down the stairs. As we walked out the back door they started singing in the living room. I listened to them, while we crossed the yard and went through the lot gate:

There’s a land that is fairer than day,

And by faith we can see it afar;

For the Father waits over the way,

To prepare us a dwelling place there.

Uncle Burley set the box on the wagon and we climbed on and started out of the lot. I heard them singing again:

We shall sing on that beautiful shore

The melodious songs of the blest,

And our spirits shall sorrow no more,

Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.

My mother’s soul was going up through the sky to be joyful with the angels in Heaven, so beautiful and far away that you couldn’t think about it. And we were riding on a wagon behind Grandpa’s team of black mules, going to live with Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Burley, leaving the place where they were singing over her body. The sun was bright on the green grass up the ridge and glossy on the slick rumps of the mules. When we were driving away from the lot gate the people at the house were singing:

In the sweet by and by,

We shall meet on that beautiful shore;

In the sweet by and by,

We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

It was pretty; and sad to think of people always ending up so far from each other. We could hear Annie May Ellis’s high, clear voice singing over all the rest of them.

“That Annie May’s got a voice on her,” Uncle Burley said.

He let the mules into a brisk trot, and we went up the ridge and around the head of the hollow where Aunt Mary was buried, and down the next ridge toward Grandpa’s house.

It was strange at first to wake up in the mornings and remember that I wasn’t at home any more, and to see Daddy go away every night and leave us at Grandpa’s. But before long we got used to the way things were and began to feel like a family again. Brother and I began calling Grandpa’s house our home.

Things got pretty jolty there sometimes. Once in a while Grandpa would get mad at Brother and me and swat us with his cane, and then he and Grandma would get mad at each other because she always took up for us. The two of them didn’t agree on much. Grandma said you didn’t live with a man like Grandpa; you lived around him. And that was pretty much the way things were between them. Grandpa didn’t feel at home in the house, and when he wasn’t at work he spent most of his time at the barn. When he was in the house they lived around each other.

Both of them were usually aggravated at Uncle Burley. Grandpa thought Uncle Burley was a disgrace because he’d rather hunt or fish than work. Grandma didn’t mind that so much, but she was always grieving because he was so sinful. He never was very sorry for his sins, and that got her worse than anything. But he hardly ever paid attention to their haggling. When they started on him he’d grin and ask them if they didn’t think it was going to rain, and that usually put a stop to it. When it got to be more than he could stand, he’d leave and spend a few days in his camp house at the river. Brother and I stayed with him whenever we could, and when the three of us were together we had a good time.

We’d been living at Grandpa’s for a little more than a year when Mrs. Crandel died. And the next day Kate Helen Branch had a baby. Uncle Burley said that was just the way things were. They put one in and pull another one out.

Mrs. Crandel’s funeral was the day after that. Grandma tried to get Grandpa to go, but he wouldn’t. He said the Crandels needed thinning out anyway. Uncle Burley and Brother and I laughed until Grandma made us shut up. After dinner was over and Grandpa had gone out she cautioned Brother and me about laughing at the sinful things Grandpa said. She told us it was an awful thing to speak that way of the dead, and that it was written down against Grandpa in the Great Book of the Judgment. Uncle Burley said he imagined Grandpa had been giving the bookkeeper about all he could handle for a good while now. Grandma told him to hush his mouth. She said that he and Grandpa were doing all they could to make sinners out of Brother and me.

“Tom and Nathan want to be good boys,” she said, “so they can go up to Heaven where their mother is.”

Brother was going to the funeral with her, and she’d said that I could go too. But I’d never liked Mrs. Crandel much, and I didn’t like funerals, so I was going to stay at home with Uncle Burley.

While they got ready to go I went out on the front porch to talk to him. He was propped against one of the porch posts, whittling on a piece of yellow poplar two-by-four. The sun was shining straight down and hot beyond the shade of the porch roof. Down in the yard the locusts were singing. First one would start and then the rest would take it up, until it seemed they made the air and the sky rattle. When they stopped I could feel the quiet muffling down into my ears.

“Plague of Egypt,” Uncle Burley said.

“What’re you whittling?” I asked him.

“A piece of wood.”

“What’re you going to make out of it?”

“Be right quiet,” he said.

I sat down beside him on the edge of the porch and watched.

He split off four chips as thin as a ruler and laid them in a neat pile between us. Then he started scraping them smooth, whistling “Molly Darling” through his teeth. He frowned as if he were taking pains to do everything just right.

Daddy came in the car to take Grandma and Brother to the funeral. Uncle Burley watched them leave, and went back to his whittling.

“When will they be back?” I asked.

He held one of the chips up to the sun and squinted at it with one eye. “Shhhh. Be awful quiet, boy.”

He went on shaving and scraping at the pieces of wood. After he got them all shaved down fine enough to suit him, he split a thicker piece off the two-by-four and began trimming on it. The shavings curled all the way from one end of the piece to the other without breaking. He didn’t let on that I was there at all. When he caught me looking at him he’d gaze off across the river and start whistling again. He shaved on that stick until it was round, then tapered the ends and cut four notches longways down the center of it.

“What’s it going to be?” I asked.

Without looking at me he gathered up the pieces and lined them in a row on the porch. “Boy,” he said, “I just can’t think with you doing all that talking.”

He got out his whetrock and walked down in the yard, sharpening his knife. There was a big maple by the fence and he walked around it a time or two and finally cut two forked branches. I waited on the porch while he trimmed them, afraid that if I bothered him again he wouldn’t finish what he was making.

He came back and squatted down by the steps and started putting the pieces together. He stuck the little blades of wood into the notches he’d made in the round piece. Then he looked at me under the brim of his hat and grinned.

“Well, I’ll be dogged,” he said. “It turned out to be a water wheel.”

We stuck the maple branches in the ground and laid the axle of the water wheel in the forks. Uncle Burley flipped one of the blades with his finger and twirled it around.

After he’d watched me twirl it for a minute he got up and started into the house. “Well, put it away now, Nathan. You can set it up at the spring tomorrow.”

I took the water wheel upstairs and put it away. When I came down Uncle Burley was waiting for me in the living room. He’d put on a clean shirt and his newest pair of shoes.

“Are we going someplace?” I asked him.

“Well, since everybody else is gone, I figured we might as well go and see Kate Helen Branch’s new baby. How’d that suit you?”

“All right.”

“We’ll just keep it to ourselves around your Grandma and the others. It’s not any of their business where we go.”

I said it wasn’t. We went back to the kitchen and Uncle Burley got enough matches to last him the rest of the afternoon and stuck them in the band of his hat.

“It won’t do to talk too much about your business,” he said.

We took the road to Port William, and stopped at the grocery store. Uncle Burley bought a sack of Bull Durham and a box of snuff, and a candy bar for me. We went on through town toward the house where Kate Helen and her mother lived.

There were a lot of cars parked at the church, where Mrs. Crandel’s funeral was being held; and when we went past the graveyard we saw the fresh dirt mounded beside her grave.

Uncle Burley pointed to the angel on top of the Coulter monument. “Chairman of the welcoming committee,” he said.

“Uncle Burley,” I said, “do you think Mrs. Crandel was good enough to get to Heaven?”

“Beats me. It’s hard to tell what happens after they get them planted.”

“Planted?” I said.

“Planted in the skull orchard.”

That was odd to think about. It sounded as if people’s bodies were like seeds and could grow up into trees after they were dead, and maybe those trees had skulls on them instead of apples or pears.

I thought how my mother was dead. But I didn’t think of her growing up into a tree. Her body had to stay in the ground, but her soul was in Heaven because she’d been good. Grandma said she was happy up there with the angels. I thought it would be a bad thing to be dead anyway. I figured it was probably darker there than it was on Earth. And maybe she missed Brother and me.

I said, “Uncle Burley, there’s not any way to find out how many times they’ve got your name in that book, is there?”

“I reckon not.” Then he pointed his finger down the road. “Well, boy, if there’s not the prettiest little walnut tree you ever saw.”

I looked, and it was, sure enough.

When we got down to Kate Helen’s house, old Mrs. Branch was sitting on the porch. The shadow of the roof had moved until it ran in a straight line down the middle of her face.

Uncle Burley tipped his hat to her and said, “Good evening, Mrs. Branch.”

She squinted the eye that was in the sun and looked at us. “Howdy,” she said. “Is that you, Burley?”

“Yes mam,” Uncle Burley said. He asked her how her rheumatism was.

“Well, it’s summer now and it’s better. But before long it’ll be winter again and the cold’ll cripple me. I just live from one summer to the next one.” She laughed as if she’d told a joke.

Uncle Burley laughed a little too, and said that she looked mighty spry to him. He took the box of snuff out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Thought you might be needing some.”

She said it was good of Uncle Burley to be so thoughtful of an old woman.

“We thought we’d come over to see the baby,” Uncle Burley said.

“Kate Helen’s yonder in the bed,” Mrs. Branch told him. “You all go right in.”

Uncle Burley took his hat off when we went through the door and said, “Well, hello there, Kate Helen.”

She smiled and held the baby up so we could look at it.

“Well, I’ll be dogged,” Uncle Burley said. “It’s a boy, ain’t it, Kate Helen?”

She said yes, it was a boy. Uncle Burley wanted to know what his name was, and she said it was Daniel.

“That’s a fine name.” Uncle Burley laid his hat on the foot of the bed. Kate Helen let him hold the baby and he sat down with it in a rocking chair.

“Well, I’ll declare,” he said. “If that’s not a fine-looking baby.”

The baby stuck one of its fists up in the air and started crying. But Uncle Burley rocked it a little and whistled to it, and it settled down and went back to sleep.

Uncle Burley looked at Kate Helen and looked at the baby again and said, “Well, I’ll be switched.”

He motioned for me to come and look too. And I did.

“Now ain’t that a pretty baby, Nathan?”

It didn’t look like much to me. But I could tell that Uncle Burley thought a lot of it, so I said it was the prettiest baby I ever did see.

“Little Daniel,” Uncle Burley said.

I went across the room and sat down in a chair by the window. And then Uncle Burley began telling Kate Helen how we were getting along with our work. He told her how most of the tobacco crop had ripened early, and how we’d already cut all of it that was ripe. He said we were planning to cut the rest of it in about a week. And then he talked about how many young squirrels he’d seen that year, and promised to bring Kate Helen and her mother a couple of fat ones as soon as he got time to do a little hunting. After that he said he looked for an early frost, because the katydids had been singing for about three weeks already. Kate Helen took a little nap while he was talking.

After a while she woke up and said it was time for the baby to eat. I looked out the window while she fed him, and Uncle Burley got busy and rolled a cigarette.

The baby finished its supper and went to sleep again. It was late and we got up to leave. Mrs. Branch came hobbling in from the porch and asked us to have supper with them.

Uncle Burley said we’d like to, but we had to get on home and fire up the coke stoves in our tobacco barn. He told her that the tobacco had a lot of sap in it that year, and we had to keep the fires under it so it wouldn’t rot in the barn.

He leaned over the bed to look at the baby again. It was smiling in its sleep. “Look at him. He’s seeing the angels,” Uncle Burley said. “Well, I’ll swear.” He put his hat on and started backing toward the door. “Well now, Kate Helen, don’t take no wooden nickels.”

We walked home and went to the tobacco barn to fire up the coke stoves. Uncle Burley shook the ashes out, and then we took a bucket apiece and started carrying fresh coke to the fires. There was enough trash in the coke to make the stoves smoke a little at first, and it made my eyes smart. It was already dark in the barn, and the row of stoves glowed red-hot down the driveway. I could see Uncle Burley’s legs passing back and forth in front of them under the smoke. I imagined that Hell looked like that. It was hot enough too when I leaned over the stoves to empty my bucket. My eyes watered when I looked at the blue flames crawling over the coals. It would be a bad place to stay forever, I thought.

When we came out of the barn it was dark, except for a thin red cloud stretched along the edge of the sky. A cool breeze was blowing and it was fine to be outside again. I thought it would be better to sprout into a tree than to stay down there in the fire.

“Uncle Burley,” I said, “it’s a bad thing to be dead, ain’t it?”

He lit a cigarette and flipped the match out. “Well, this world and one more and then the fireworks.”

Chapter 3

FOR A WEEK before the Fourth of July, Brother and I worked at Big Ellis’s place, cleaning out a fence row. The fence was a good half a mile long, running all the way down one side of the farm, and we contracted to clean it out for five dollars apiece so we’d have plenty of spending money for the Fourth. We worked from daylight to dark every day except Sunday, axing out the sassafras and locust and thorn and scything down the briars, with the sun as hot as it could get at that time of year.

Early on the morning of the Fourth, Grandpa hitched his team to the mowing machine and went to help Daddy mow a field of hay. After he’d gone the day began to feel like a Sunday because we weren’t going to work and it was so quiet around the house. The sun wasn’t up far, but already you could hear the heat ticking down like a flock of sparrows on the back porch roof.

In a little while Uncle Burley came out and asked Brother and me to help him with a little work before we left for the Fourth of July picnic. We followed him to the smokehouse. He went inside and came out with a long-handled dip net.

“What’re you going to do?” I asked him.

“It would be bad for a man to pass up a chance to make some money, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose it would,” I said.

He sent me to the corncrib to get an ear of corn, and when I came back we went down to the pond. Grandma’s ducks were swimming single file close to the bank, dabbling their bills into the water. Uncle Burley shelled the corn and scattered it along the bank. When the ducks came to eat he dipped up five of them in the dip net. We tied their bills shut with pieces of fishing line to keep Grandma from hearing them quack and carried them to the barn. We found an old wire chicken coop and loaded it on the wagon and put the ducks in it. Then we got the long galvanized tank that Grandpa kept shelled corn in, and loaded it on the wagon with the coop.

Uncle Burley sat down and looked at the tank. “Well, all we need now is water.” After a minute or so he said, “Well, we can fix that.”

He got up and brought two buckets from the barn and pitched them into the tank. And we loaded two water barrels.

“What’re you going to do with all this?” Brother asked.

“Did you ever hear why they call a duck a duck?”

Brother looked at me and laughed, and we gave up asking him questions. We harnessed a team of mules and hitched them to the wagon, and went back to the house to wash and put on clean clothes.

When we were leaving the house Uncle Burley swiped three of Grandma’s embroidery hoops and stuck them into the crown of his hat. On the road to town he whistled to himself, letting the mules trot on the downgrades. Once or twice he winked at Brother and me and said, “A duck is a duck.” That always seemed to please him, and he’d grin and start whistling again.

Before we’d gone halfway to the picnic we caught up with a man who was walking in the same direction we were going. Uncle Burley stopped and asked him if he wanted a ride.

“God bless you, brother,” the man said. And he climbed on the wagon.

“Where you going?” Uncle Burley asked him.

“Wherever the Lord’s fixing to send me.”

“You a preacher?”

“I am, brother.”

He looked as if he’d been a long time going wherever the Lord was sending him.

“I am one of them it has pleased the Lord to send to the four corners of the world to preach the gospel,” he said.

He began to talk about unbelievers and the sin of the world, and who was going to Hell and who wasn’t. The Lord had appointed him to be a witness, he said, to all the people he met. Uncle Burley whistled and spoke to the team, trying not to pay any attention. But I could see that he was getting aggravated. After a while he handed the reins to Brother and rolled a cigarette.

“A cigarette is as much of an abomination in the sight of the Lord as a bottle of whiskey,” the preacher said.

Uncle Burley lit the cigarette and smoked, looking straight down the road.

The preacher said, “If the Lord had wanted you to smoke He’d have give you a smokestack, brother.”

Uncle Burley took the reins again and stopped the team. He looked at the preacher. “If He’d wanted you to ride, you’d have wheels,” he said. “Now you get off.”

The preacher got off and stood in the ditch looking up at us. He raised his hand and said, “‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you.’ Matthew, five-eleven.”

We drove off and left him standing there preaching in the ditch.

“If he’s going to Heaven I want him to have to walk every foot of the way,” Uncle Burley said.

A couple of miles from Hargrave, we turned out the side road toward the picnic ground. Just before we got there we went by a pond, and Uncle Burley pulled the wagon off the road. We took the buckets and made a line between the pond and the wagon and filled the barrels with water. Then we drove on into the grounds.

The picnic ground was a fifty-acre field, and when we drove through the gate we could see automobiles parked everywhere, looking hot and shiny with the sun baking down on them. In the center of the field was a grove of tall oaks; people stood under them talking and laughing. Here and there a woman sat by herself in the shade beside a dinner basket. A carnival was set up outside the grove, the tents of the side shows in a double line, facing each other across a kind of street like the houses of a town. At one end of the carnival was a Ferris wheel, and at the other end was the dance hall where the Odd Fellows held a dance on the night of the Fourth.

Uncle Burley drove around the carnival and pulled in by the dance hall on the far end of the rows of tents. We unloaded the tank and set it on the ground with the long side parallel to the street of the carnival, about twenty-five feet from the tent next to us. That tent was a shooting gallery, and we could hear the rifles cracking and a bell ringing when somebody hit a bull’s-eye. When we got the tank leveled to suit Uncle Burley we filled it with water from the barrels. We found five good-sized rocks and tied pieces of fishing line to them, and then used them to anchor the ducks in the tank of water. Uncle Burley scratched a line in the dirt in front of the tank and looped the embroidery hoops over his hand.

Brother and I drove the wagon out of the way and hitched the mules to a tree. When we came back Uncle Burley was walking up and down in front of the tank, twirling the hoops around his finger. Before long a big pimply-faced boy came over from the shooting gallery and looked at the ducks. He was wearing a little hat that he’d won at one of the carnival booths, with a red felt ribbon that said I’M HOT STUFF pinned to the top of it.

Uncle Burley twirled the hoops. “Boy, do you think you can ring one of them ducks?”

“Hell yes,” the boy said. “How much?”

“Three rings for a dime.”

The boy looked at the ducks and then at the hoops in Uncle Burley’s hand. “What do I get if I ring one?”

“Five dollars cash money, plus the satisfaction of it.”

The boy handed Uncle Burley a dime and took the hoops. He aimed a long time before he made a throw, and I was afraid he was going to win on the first try. But when the duck saw the hoop coming she stuck her head under the water. He made three tries and every time the duck ducked her head.

“Takes a lot of skill,” Uncle Burley said.

“Hell,” the boy said. He paid another dime and tried it again. He spent seventy cents standing there throwing those embroidery hoops at the ducks, throwing at whichever duck wasn’t looking at him. But they always ducked in time. The boy gave up finally and went away.

“That’s why they call a duck a duck,” Uncle Burley told us.

A fat man in a wrinkled brown suit, who’d been watching the boy, staggered up to Uncle Burley. “Give me a try on them ducks.”

Uncle Burley looked him up and down and shook his head. “Fellow, don’t you reckon you’re too drunk to throw straight?”

The man pointed his finger at Uncle Burley. “You’re a liar if you say I’m drunk. I can ring one of them ducks left-handed.”

“I’m willing to bet you can’t ring one right-handed,” Uncle Burley said.

The man took two dollars out of his pocket and laid them on the ground.

Uncle Burley laid two more on top of them. “Three rings for a dime,” he said.

The man had the same luck the boy had, only he spent a dollar. After the first ten throws he got mad and started throwing hard, trying to kill the ducks. He never even hit the tank after that. The more he missed the harder he threw, and the harder he threw the more he missed.

Finally he turned around and hollered, “I quit!”

Uncle Burley picked up the money and put it in his pocket. The man watched him, swelling up and getting red in the face.

Then he shook his fist at Uncle Burley and hollered, “I’m a mean son of a bitch!”

Uncle Burley caught him by the necktie and tightened the knot until you could see the veins pumping in his neck. He said, “You don’t look so mean to me, son of a bitch.”

The man walked off, loosening his tie and cursing to himself, down the tent rows.

Pretty soon Uncle Burley had as many customers as he could handle. A crowd was gathering and some of the men knew him. They laughed and asked him when he went into the carnival business. He grinned and kept quiet, taking their dimes and gathering the hoops after they finished throwing. One or another of the ducks was always looking over the back of the tank, and that gave them something to try for.

Brother and I stood around and watched until it got tiresome. Nobody ever managed to ring a duck. After the first dozen or so customers had tried and failed, we went to see the carnival.

One of the side show tents had a sign on it that said THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD in red and gold letters. An old woman stood out in front with a loudspeaker, telling what they had inside.

“See the two-headed baby,” she said. “See the big jungle rat. It ain’t like the rats you got around here—ain’t got no tail—all spotted and striped like a tiger.”

Another show had a fire-eating cannibal and a woman who weighed eight hundred pounds and a turtle with two tails. We didn’t go into either tent. It was bad enough to know such things as eight-hundred-pound women and two-headed babies could be in the world without paying a quarter for it.

In the middle of the carnival was a tent with pictures of half-naked women on the front, and a sign that said BUBBLES: BEWITCHING ENCHANTRESS OF THE FAR EAST. A crowd of men and boys had gathered around a ticket stand where a big-nosed man in a derby hat was making a speech.

“Starting right now with one of them old bloodboilers,” he said. “Hottest—fastest—meanest little burlesque show you ever saw. The show starts in ten seconds, gentlemen. Only a few seats left.”

He stood there a minute, looking over the crowd, then started again. “Gentlemen, it’s as hot as a billy goat in a pepper patch. It shakes—it bumps—it bounces like a Model T Ford on plowed ground. Only fifty cents to see Bubbles unveil the secrets of the East. Gentlemen, if you suffer from heart trouble, high blood pressure or dizzy spells I beg you not to come in here. You won’t be able to stand it.”

He wound up again and told how Bubbles was the Crown Princess of Mesopotamia, and had been kidnapped and carried on a camel through the enchanted deserts of the Far East, and how she had spent six years in the harem of the Sheik of Araby.

While he was in the middle of this somebody piped up in the crowd and asked him if she’d take it all off.

He said, “Gentlemen, you will see Bubbles as fully clothed as she came into this world. That is, you will see her in the garment which the good Lord give her—her naked hide. Come in, gentlemen. We only got a few seats left. It’ll cost you only fifty cents, one half of one dollar, to see what you can’t afford to miss for any price.”

A few of the men crowded up to buy tickets.

“Let’s go in,” Brother said. He looked at me and grinned. “Come on.”

I wanted to ride the Ferris wheel, but I let him go in front and we got into the line at the ticket stand. When we bought our tickets the man said, “Now here are two young men seeking to further their education. Go right in, gentlemen. You’ll never be the same again.” That got him a big laugh from the crowd. I felt silly then with everybody looking at us and laughing, but we’d already paid our money and there was nothing to do but keep going.

It was so dark inside the tent after we’d been out in the sun that we could hardly see. But our eyes got used to it, and we stood around waiting for the show to start. There weren’t any seats. About a third of the tent was roped off to give Bubbles room to put on her show. In a corner of the roped off part was a kind of booth made of old carpets, and beneath the front flap we could see a woman’s bare feet with red polish on the toenails.

We waited a good while, hearing the man making his speech again in front of the tent, and now and then another bunch of men and boys came in. The tent filled up. Mushmouth and Chicken Little Montgomery came in with one of the last bunches, but they were the only ones we knew. I’d seen most of the others before, but I didn’t know their names.

Mushmouth and Chicken Little were ashamed to be seen in such a place. While we waited they stood together on the edge of the crowd, pretending they were the only ones there. They were both a little drunk, and when somebody happened to look at them they’d grin and back up.

Finally the man in the derby hat quit talking and followed the last bunch through the door. Everybody crowded up to the rope, thinking the show was about to start. But he went into the booth where Bubbles was and came out with a little table and a deck of cards. He set the table up on our side of the rope.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we still have a few minutes before show time.” He shuffled the cards and made them rattle down in a pile on the table. “There’s nothing to ease the body, clear the mind, and settle the soul like a friendly card game.” He shuffled the cards again, but that time he made a mislick and they fell out of his hands. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’ve had a little too much of your good Kentucky whiskey, I’m afraid.” He picked up the cards and shuffled them again, then thumbed three cards off the top of the deck and held them up. “I have here the queen of spades, the nine of diamonds and the four of clubs.” He laid the three cards face down on the table and switched them around.

Then he looked at Mushmouth and Chicken Little, who were standing on the other side of the table. “Now, can one of you gentlemen pick the queen?”

The queen card had a bent corner and it was easy to pick out. Chicken Little looked around the tent and grinned, then he turned the card. It was the queen.

“You have a fine eye, sir,” the man in the derby hat said. “A wonderful eye.”

He turned the card over and began switching them again. “And now for a dollar, sir, can you tell me the queen?”

Chicken Little laid a dollar on the table and turned the card with the bent corner. He had it right again, and the man in the derby hat paid off. It seemed he’d had too much whiskey to keep straight on what he was doing.

Mushmouth and two or three others laid down dollar bills and the man lost again. On the next round about a dozen of the men laid down dollar bills, and Brother and I laid down a dollar apiece. He asked which was the queen. Somebody turned the card with the bent corner, but it was the nine of diamonds. The next time it was the nine of diamonds. And the next time it was the four of clubs. Before we realized what had happened the man had crossed the rope and was in the booth. Everybody was awfully quiet, feeling too foolish even to be mad.

The man in the derby came out again and said that Bubbles would now dance for us. Some thumpy music began playing, and he pulled back the flap and let Bubbles out. We crowded up to the rope.

She was a tall black-haired woman who looked hardmouthed and tired until she faced us and began to smile and sway back and forth to the music. Her eyebrows were painted black and curled around on the ends; where she’d sweated the paint had run down the sides of her face. Her clothes were made of a gauzy red material that you could see through, except for a skimpy brassiere and pants. She was decked out in feathers and jewels, and a silky tassle was fastened to each of her breasts. Mushmouth and Chicken Little were standing next to me. I kept my head turned away from them so they wouldn’t recognize me.

Bubbles danced back and forth across the tent a time or two, and then she stopped midway of the rope and stood there smiling, looking at us under her eyebrows. She started the tassle on her right breast twirling around. She stopped that tassle and twirled the other one. After that she twirled both of them at the same time. Everybody whistled and cheered.

“I’m going to teach my old lady to do that,” somebody said.

When Bubbles got both tassles going she began to wiggle her hips. Mushmouth looked as if somebody had hit him in the face with a big grin and it had stuck there. He leaned over the rope and started grabbing at Bubbles, and the man in the derby had to come and tell him to behave himself. Chicken Little looked the other way, trying to act like somebody else’s twin brother.

Bubbles sashayed across the tent again and went back into her booth. The man in the derby walked out and told us that for fifty cents more we could see Bubbles reveal other secrets of the mysterious East. Nobody liked that, and there was a good deal of cursing and grumbling. But they all shelled out. Brother and I did too. It seemed a shame to leave after we’d all stared at Bubbles and let her begin her show, even if it was wrong to make us pay a dollar for what they’d told us was worth fifty cents.

The music started and Bubbles came back. She wiggled and danced and took off her clothes until she was as naked as a jaybird. With all the jewels and feathers gone she looked the way any ordinary person would look naked, except for the eyebrow paint streaked down the sides of her face. She wasn’t as pretty as I’d thought she’d be. It was hard to think of her as the Princess of Mesopotamia, or even somebody named Bubbles. I felt sorry for her then, standing there without her clothes in front of a crowd of men who’d paid a dollar to look at her. It was a cheap thing, and she couldn’t grin enough to change it.

Then before anybody could catch him Mushmouth had climbed over the rope and was trying to catch Bubbles. She never did quit dancing. She just skipped from one place to another as nimble as a cat, keeping out of his way, with Mushmouth slobbering and floundering after her, smacking his mouth like a blind dog in a meathouse.

“You come out of there, Mushmouth,” Chicken Little said.

Half of the men were whooping for him to get away and leave her alone, and the other half were whooping for him to catch her.

“Go to it, Mushmouth,” somebody said.

Chicken Little said, “Mushmouth, you quit that now.”

Then the man in the derby caught him and threw him out over the rope. He and Chicken Little went out the door together, hanging their heads. They seemed to get the worst of everything.

The show was over then, and we were happy to get out. It was dinnertime by then and we were hungry. We found a tent where they were selling hamburgers and ate three apiece. Then we went to another tent where a man was selling watermelons and ate four slices apiece for dessert. After that we decided to go and ride the Ferris wheel.

But on the way to the Ferris wheel we passed a tent where some gypsy women were telling fortunes. Three of them were standing in front of the tent, calling to the crowd. One pointed to Brother and me. “You boys are brothers. You let us tell your fortune.”

Brother said he didn’t want his fortune told and kept walking toward the Ferris wheel. But the youngest of the women ran out and caught my hand.

“You got nice things in your future, handsome boy. Let me tell you about it. For a quarter I will tell you all that will happen to you.”

She was pretty, and she sounded like she really needed the money. I gave her a quarter and followed her into the tent. The inside was divided into rooms and we went into one of them. She took my hand and looked into the palm. There was a mole under her left eye and she was wearing a scarf and bright gold earrings.

“I see you will have happiness,” she said, “and sorrow, but not as much sorrow as happiness. I see you will have a beautiful wife. I see you will have a lot of money before you are old.”

She looked down into my hand again. “I see you will travel. You will see strange parts of the world.”

I didn’t believe in fortunetelling, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable, as if she saw how I looked without my clothes on.

She traced her finger across my hand and said, “From this line I see that you will have a very long life.”

That line was a scar from a barbed-wire cut, but I didn’t tell her that.

“You are a nice boy,” she said. “If you will let me I will bless your money for you. For free. Because I like you.” She held out her hand and smiled at me.

I never had heard of that, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I got out my pocketbook and handed it to her.

“Now,” she said. “You must put your hand on my heart.”

She took my hand and put it down inside her dress. She didn’t have on any underwear at all. The feeling of her went all through me. I couldn’t look at her. She spoke some sort of conjure over my pocketbook and handed it back to me.

After I got away from the tent I looked to see what she’d done to my money when she blessed it. It was gone. Two dollars. She’d stolen it all. And there wasn’t a thing to do about it.

I started looking for Brother, edging through the carnival and watching in front of the tents. The crowd was thick. The afternoon was hot and close, and the carnival had begun to have the smell of sweat and cotton candy. Everybody had been there long enough to be tired and bad-tempered. It was miserable. I wished I was at home, a long way from that crowd and the gypsies and the two-headed babies and the Sheik of Araby’s wife.

I found Brother playing some sort of game with a mean-looking little man in a checkered shirt. There was a circle of nails driven into the counter of the man’s booth, and in the center a wooden arm set on an axle. You bought a red washer for a quarter and put it on one of the nails. The man spun the arm, and if it stopped on your nail you won a dollar. If you bought two washers you stood to win two dollars. When I came up Brother had just laid down a quarter.

“Have you got any money?” I asked him.

“I will have just as soon as he spins this thing again,” Brother said. He had eight washers stuck around on the nails.

The man spun the arm and it stopped on a nail that Brother didn’t have a washer on.

“That was my last quarter,” Brother said.

I had two quarters left and I gave him those. He bought two more washers and tried it again. If he’d won he’d have had eighteen dollars. But he lost. He had a nickel left, but that wasn’t enough to buy any more chances, and I was glad of it. We never did get to the Ferris wheel, and I didn’t mind that either. I guessed that if we’d paid the dime or quarter or whatever it cost to get on, somebody would have made us pay a dollar to get off.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see how Uncle Burley’s doing.”

We went back through the crowd to where Uncle Burley had his tank of ducks. People were still waiting to try their luck with the embroidery hoops. Uncle Burley winked at us. His pockets were crammed with the dimes he’d taken in.

We went off to the side and sat under a tree to watch the people try to ring a duck and wait for Uncle Burley to be ready to go home.

It wasn’t long until the ducks began to get tired. They’d had a hard day of it, and one after another they quit ducking when the hoops came at them. They just sat there, looking fretful and disgusted and let the people win Uncle Burley’s profit. He’d made the throwing line only a few feet from the tank, and everybody began ringing ducks. The people who’d lost in the morning heard what was going on and came back. Uncle Burley’s pockets were flattening out fast. He looked more fretful and disgusted than the ducks.

Finally he called Brother and me. He was down to six or seven dollars, and he gave us all but one of them. “Take care of things until I get back,” he said. “I won’t be a minute.”

After Uncle Burley left, Brother stood by the tank to pick the hoops up, and I handled the money. Our first customer was the man in the brown suit who’d lost the bet to Uncle Burley that morning. I could see that he’d come back to get even, and I was afraid he’d make trouble, but he won five dollars on his second throw; that seemed to satisfy him, and he left. But then I was really in a mess; Uncle Burley hadn’t come back and I only had eighty cents.

I was wondering what in the world I’d do if somebody else won and found out that I didn’t have money enough to pay him, when I saw the head fly off one of the ducks. It couldn’t have been done any neater with a butcher knife, but nobody was even close to the tank. I looked over at the shooting gallery, and there was Uncle Burley popping away at the target and ringing the bell every time. Then I saw him lead off toward the ducks as if he were making a wing shot; and another duck flopped in the tank.

When he’d killed all the ducks Uncle Burley walked off toward the other end of the carnival without looking back. He was carrying a big red plaster frog that he’d won at the shooting gallery. Everybody stood around, looking at us and looking at the ducks and looking at Uncle Burley going off through the crowd, with their mouths open. Then they all laughed a little and began to straggle back into the carnival.

I put Uncle Burley’s eighty cents in my pocket, and Brother and I started after him.

We caught up with him in front of Bubbles’ tent. He and Big Ellis were listening to the man in the derby hat make his speech. We stood with them, listening a while, then Uncle Burley said, “Let’s go.”

We elbowed our way out of the crowd and Big Ellis went with us.

“I’d like to have a little something to drink,” he said to Uncle Burley.

Uncle Burley just carried his red frog and didn’t say anything.

Big Ellis said, “I got a little something.” He looked at Brother and me and then at Uncle Burley. “It’s all right, ain’t it?”

“I imagine,” Uncle Burley said.

He let Big Ellis take the lead, and we followed him across the grounds to where he’d parked his car. When we got there Big Ellis opened the door and rammed his hand into a hole in the driver’s seat and pulled out a pint of whiskey. He said that was the first Fourth of July he’d ever been able to hide it where Annie May couldn’t find it.

“She can smell it before it’s even uncorked,” he said.

He opened the bottle and passed it to Uncle Burley. Uncle Burley set the frog on the seat of the car and drank.

“She couldn’t track it inside that seat,” Big Ellis said. He giggled and drank out of the bottle when Uncle Burley passed it back to him.

They sat down and leaned against the side of the car, handing the bottle back and forth. Every time Big Ellis took a drink he’d giggle and say something about Annie May’s nose not being as good as it used to be.

And the happier Big Ellis got the sadder Uncle Burley got. Those ducks had hurt his feelings and he couldn’t get over it.

“God Almighty, women are awful,” Big Ellis said, and giggled and wiped the whiskey off his chin.

He hadn’t any more than said it before Annie May came around the car, mad as a sow and screeching like a catamount. She told Big Ellis to get himself in that car and take her home. They left with Uncle Burley’s red frog sitting bug-eyed on the seat between them.

Uncle Burley stood there with the bottle in his hand and watched them go. Then he drank the rest of the whiskey and threw the bottle down. He swayed back and forth, looking down at it.

“Well,” he said, “around and around she goes.”

It was dark by the time we got the tank emptied and loaded on the wagon and started home. Brother drove, and Uncle Burley sat on the back of the wagon leaning against the tank. He was quiet all the way.

The moon was up when we turned into Grandpa’s gate, shining nearly as bright as day. The river bottom was white and quiet below us, and away off somewhere we could hear a dog barking. It seemed a long time since the Fourth of July.

The next morning Annie May Ellis came over to bring the red frog home, and told Grandma about Uncle Burley’s day at the picnic. Grandma told Grandpa and Daddy, and from then on Uncle Burley had no peace. Grandma lit into him about his sinful behavior every chance she got. Grandpa ignored him, but he ignored him in a way that kept all of us from being comfortable when the two of them were together. Even Daddy was aggravated, and that was unusual because he and Uncle Burley had always allowed each other to be the way they were and had got along.

Nobody knew what to do with the red frog. Uncle Burley was too proud to claim it, and Grandpa was too proud to throw it away. Annie May had set it on the mantelpiece in the living room when she came in that morning, and it stayed there. Grandma said she’d just leave it as a reminder to Uncle Burley. But it was a better reminder to her and Grandpa and Daddy than it was to Uncle Burley. He never looked at it.

He was used to that sort of trouble and he stood it well enough. He stayed in a quiet good humor that kept him always a little beyond their reach. But it was intentional good humor; there were times when it was too quiet and too pleasant, and although it spared him a lot of his trouble it could be as insulting as the red frog. He wouldn’t say he was sorry and he wouldn’t let them make him mad. That kept them after him.

During the week he worked hard. He stood the work the same way he stood everything else, laughing when he could, saying no more than he had to. The work sheltered him; he didn’t give them a chance to find fault with him in that. When it was over on Saturday night he ate his supper and left. He’d go to the camp house at the river and stay until Monday morning, avoiding Sunday when Grandma had sin on her mind and Grandpa and Daddy had time enough to be quarrelsome.

While this was going on Brother and I quit being as good friends as we’d always been. I didn’t know when it started, but things gradually began to change between us. He started running around with boys who were older than I was, and he went to town every Saturday night. Sometimes I noticed that I called him Tom instead of Brother. I was sorry, but he never gave me a chance to talk about it, and it just kept happening. I spent more time with Uncle Burley; and once in a while I’d walk to the Easterlys’ and talk to Calvin. I didn’t like Calvin much, but he was about my age, and he was better than nobody.

One Saturday at the end of July, while we were at work in the hay, Big Ellis and Gander Loyd began riding Brother about having a girl in town. I didn’t pay much attention to it then. But that evening, after we’d done the chores and Brother had gone upstairs to get ready for town, Grandma said, “Tom’s got a girl, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know either. But he’s getting old enough. And if I know the signs he’s got a girl.” She shook her head. “Lord, it seems just yesterday when he was a baby.”

She finished straining the milk and went into the kitchen to start supper, and I went to the front porch and sat in the swing. I could hear Uncle Burley calling his hounds. He whistled and called each one by its name. In the field by the house Grandpa’s mules were grazing along the side of the hill. I could see the sweaty marks of the harness on their backs and shoulders. They looked naked and strange without the harness. The day had come apart. After the week of hard work Sunday would feel awkward and too quiet, and even though we were glad of the rest we’d be a little relieved when it was Monday again. I heard the hounds come up to be fed, barking around Uncle Burley until he pitched the food to them, then quiet. A few swifts circled up into the sky and down again over the tops of the chimneys. The mules grazed side by side on the hill, walking together as if they were still at work.

In a little while Brother came around the corner of the house. He’d already eaten his supper and was dressed up, ready to go. His hair was shiny and black from the oil he’d put on it, and I could smell shaving lotion.

“You going to town?” I asked him.

“You got any objections?”

“What’re you going to town for?”

He grinned at me, feeling the part in his hair with the ends of his fingers. “You don’t know, do you?”

I watched him walk down the driveway and turn toward town. Uncle Burley came up and leaned against the post at the corner of the porch. He’d hunted me up to stay with me until supper was ready; he wouldn’t risk being alone with Grandpa even that long. I scooted over and made room for him.

But he stood there, watching Brother walk out the lane. “Where’s he going?”

“To town.”

“He’s courting a little, I expect.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Uncle Burley sat down. He leaned his head back and yawned and then closed his eyes. “There’s one good thing about work,” he said.

“What?”

“Stopping.”

Grandma called us to supper. We went inside and washed our hands and sat down at the table. It was hot and stuffy in the kitchen, and with Brother gone the meal was quieter than usual. As long as Uncle Burley was there Grandma and Grandpa wouldn’t allow themselves to say anything pleasant, and they seemed too tired to be in a bad humor.

When Grandpa had cleaned his plate he turned his chair to the window and looked out at the sky. “We’ll get a rain,” he said. “It’s been too hot.”

He got up after a minute and left the room, and before the rest of us were finished eating we heard him going up the stairs.

“He’s gone to roost,” Uncle Burley said.

“You’ve got no respect, Burley,” Grandma said.

She’d meant to say more, but held it back. She looked down at her plate, and then got up and began clearing the table.

Uncle Burley and I went to the porch again. He lit a cigarette and sharpened the end of the match to pick his teeth. Neither of us said anything. The day had been hot, and it was still hot. No air was stirring.

Uncle Burley flipped the butt of his cigarette out into the yard. He laughed then—quietly and to himself, as if it were the laughter he’d had ready for whatever Grandma had intended to say to him; and now he used it up, wasted it on himself, to be rid of it.

He got up and stood on the edge of the porch, looking out in the direction of the road. He held his hands open in front of him and looked at them, then rubbed them together. “Well,” he said. He stepped off the porch and walked slowly across the yard. Halfway down the driveway he looked back and waved at me. After that he walked faster, on down the driveway and out the lane.

When he was out of sight I called to Grandma that I was going over to see Calvin, and I started through the field toward the Easterlys’. It was nearly dark, but when I looked back the swifts still circled above the house. They dived at the chimney tops, and swerved away as if they couldn’t bear for the day to end. Finally, I knew, they’d give up the light and go down for good.

When I got to the Easterlys’ I called Calvin from the back door. He came out and we sat down on the step.

“What you been doing?” he asked me.

“Working mostly.”

“Where’s Tom?”

“Gone to town.”

“He’s got a girl out there, ain’t he?”

“They say he has.”

“He has,” Calvin said. He took a sack of peppermint sticks out of his pocket and took one and gave one to me.

“Maybe he has,” I said.

“What we ought to do,” Calvin said, “is slip out to town and watch him.”

“It’s his business,” I said.

“Come on. It won’t hurt anything. You’ll have something to tell on Tom when you go to work Monday morning.”

“All right,” I said.

Calvin laughed and stomped his foot. “God durn, I wish I could be there when you tell it on him.”

There was a crowd in town. Groups of men squatted on the sidewalk in front of the stores, talking and greeting each other. Up the street beyond the store lights the small children played tag, running and laughing around the parked automobiles. Women collected in the stores and talked while they shopped, and carried out armloads of groceries. A few of them were already standing at the edge of the sidewalk, holding their babies, waiting for their men to be ready to go home. Above the rest of the noise you could hear the jukebox playing in the poolroom.

Brother and four or five other boys were standing with two girls in the light of the drugstore window. He was talking and the others leaned toward him, listening to what he said. The prettiest one of the girls stood next to Brother, smiling at him while he talked, and he spoke mostly to her. She was his girl, I imagined, and I was proud of him for having one so pretty. While I watched him standing there with the other boys it seemed to me that he was the best of them, and I began to be ashamed of what I’d come to town for.

When he finished talking all of them laughed. The girl swung away from him, holding to his hand, and he pulled her back and put his arm around her.

I stood with Calvin, pretending to look in the grocery store window, hoping Brother wouldn’t see me. But then the whole bunch of them started up the street past us. I didn’t want Brother to know I’d sneaked on him, and I turned toward him to make the best of it.

“Hello,” he said. “What’re you doing here?”

For a minute I couldn’t think what to say. Then I said, “Let’s go down to the river and talk to Uncle Burley for a while.”

They laughed, looking at Brother and then at me.

“Go ahead,” Brother told me. “Who’s stopping you?”

The way he said it made me mad. “I reckon you’d rather stay here and fool around with a damn girl,” I said.

Brother’s face got red and he took a step toward me, but the girl pulled at his arm. “Come on,” she said.

He looked at me and laughed, then he turned around and they went past me and on up the street.

I stood still for a minute, feeling my own face red and knowing I’d made a fool of myself. There was no other way to see it. What I’d said had been wrong. Brother ought to have slapped my face for saying it. And I thought I should have knocked Calvin’s teeth out for suggesting that we come to town in the first place. I turned to tell him so, but he was gone. I looked around for him and saw him going into the drugstore. He was ashamed of me too.

I started back down the street. The game had moved down in front of the stores, the children chasing each other in and out of the crowd. As I walked away I heard a woman’s voice telling them, “Get someplace else if you want to play.”

I went out the road toward home, feeling lonesome and stupid and ashamed. For a while I could hear the noise of the town, the music and talking and laughter, more quietly and more quietly as I got farther away. The frogs were singing in Big Ellis’s pond when I passed, the sounds getting louder and then quieting too. I turned into our lane, but I didn’t feel like going to bed and I went on past the house and down Coulter Branch toward the river. Now and then I’d hear a screech owl calling, and now and then a dog barked down in the bottom.

When I got to Uncle Burley’s shack a light was burning in the window. I opened the door and went through the dark kitchen and into the other room where Uncle Burley and Big Ellis were sitting with a bottle of whiskey and a lighted lamp on the table between them. Their backs were turned to the kitchen door, and Uncle Burley had pulled one of the cots away from the wall and propped his feet on it. When Big Ellis looked around and saw me he started to hide the bottle, but Uncle Burley caught his arm and stopped him.

“It’s all right.”

“He’s a good boy, that boy is,” Big Ellis said.

Uncle Burley grinned at me. “The more the merrier,” he said. “Have a seat.”

I crossed the room and sat down on the other cot.

“Where you been, boy?” Uncle Burley asked me.

“I went to town a while,” I said, “and then I came down here.”

“I’m glad you came,” Uncle Burley said.

“He’s a pretty damn good boy, I tell you,” Big Ellis said.

Neither of them could think of anything else to say. They just smoked, and passed the bottle once in a while, looking at the wall.

Finally Uncle Burley said, “It’s hot.”

“It’s too hot,” Big Ellis said. “We’re bound to get some rain.”

They were quiet again for a minute or two, and then Uncle Burley looked at Big Ellis and grinned as if he’d just thought of something that made him happy.

“I wonder if old Jig’s at home,” he said.

Big Ellis leaned toward the window and looked up the river toward Jig Pendleton’s shanty boat. “No light up there. I expect he’s asleep.”

“The more the merrier,” Uncle Burley said. He got up and went out the door.

Big Ellis and I followed him onto the porch. Jig’s boat was dark and quiet. We could barely make out the shape of it through the trees.

“Call him,” Big Ellis said.

Uncle Burley cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Jig!”

There was no answer.

“Call him again,” Big Ellis said; and Uncle Burley called again.

“What?” Jig said.

“Come on down,” Uncle Burley said. “We’re having a little social event here.”

Jig didn’t answer, but before long he came out with a lantern and untied his rowboat. We heard the knock and creak of his oarlocks as he came down the river toward us.

Jig tied the boat to a tree and climbed the bank. When he came onto the porch we went back inside and he followed us.

“How’re you, Jig?” Uncle Burley asked.

Jig blew out his lantern and hung it on a nail over the door, and then he shook our hands. I’d never seen anybody look so sad in my life.

“No man’s strength is equal to his wickedness,” he said. “God has to forgive us before he can love us. Surely the people is grass.”

“The more the merrier, Jig,” Uncle Burley said. “Have a seat.”

Jig sat down. Big Ellis handed him the bottle and he drank.

“That’s an evil thing, Burley,” he said. He looked at the bottle and handed it to Uncle Burley.

“But ain’t it a mellow-ripe sample of it?” Uncle Burley said.

Jig shook his head. “Mellow as sin, Burley, and ripe.”

Uncle Burley looked at him and then patted his shoulder. “You’ll feel better when it’s morning, old Jig.”

Uncle Burley and Big Ellis sat down and began drinking again. But Jig had made them sad and they were even quieter than they’d been before. The three of them passed the bottle back and forth, drinking as if it were a chore they’d be glad to be done with.

Their seriousness and quietness began to bother me. I was more in the dumps than I’d been when I got there. I wished I’d gone on home to bed.

“I’d just as soon it was morning,” Uncle Burley said.

“I’d just as soon it was,” Big Ellis said.

“What time is it?”

Big Ellis got out his watch and held it to the light. “Half past eleven.”

“She’s a slow one, ain’t she?” Uncle Burley said. Then he said, “Wind that thing.”

Big Ellis wound the watch and put it back in his pocket.

Jig got up and wobbled out the door, and I heard him take his boots off and lie down on the porch. Uncle Burley and Big Ellis didn’t seem to notice he was gone. I leaned back against the wall and dozed off. But I couldn’t get all the way to sleep; every little sound woke me. Sometimes I’d hear Jig turning over on the porch. He’d grunt and say, “Oh me,” and then be quiet again. And Uncle Burley and Big Ellis sat on, drinking at the table.

Finally I heard Big Ellis say, “Where’s Jig?”

“I don’t know,” Uncle Burley said. “We ought to get him to come and talk to us.”

“Tell him to,” Big Ellis said.

Uncle Burley stood up, and then he got down on his hands and knees and began crawling toward the door.

Big Ellis giggled. “What’re you crawling for?”

“You got to watch this floor,” Uncle Burley said. “It’s a booger.”

He got to the door and called, “Oh, Jig!”

Jig stirred and grunted. “What?”

“Come on down, Jig. We got a little social event going on here.”

“All right,” Jig said.

Uncle Burley cocked his ear up the river and listened.

“Is he coming?” Big Ellis asked.

“No,” Uncle Burley said. “I can’t even see a light.”

“He’ll come,” Big Ellis said. “Call him again.”

Uncle Burley called, “Jig!”

I heard one of Jig’s elbows thump on the porch.

“What?”

“Come on.”

“All right.”

Uncle Burley listened again.

“You hear him yet?” Big Ellis asked.

“Aw, he ain’t coming,” Uncle Burley said. “He’s scared of the dark.” He stretched out across the doorway and folded his hands over his chest. “We’ll see him in the morning, I reckon.”

When I looked back at Big Ellis he was asleep, his head resting against the tabletop. They seemed to have settled down for the night. I was too sleepy to go home, so I took off my shoes and stretched out on the cot, thinking I’d take a nap and then get home before daylight to keep from worrying Grandma.

When I woke it was thundering. A strong wind had come up, fluttering the lamp flame until the whole house seemed to sway and jiggle in the wind. The rest of them were still asleep. Big Ellis hadn’t moved since I’d lain down. The light bobbled his shadow over the wall behind him, and when the lightning flashes came his shadow jumped to the other wall and flickered there. It was like waking up on Judgment Day.

I was trying to untangle the blanket to pull it over my head when the rain came—a few big drops spattered the roof, and then a sheet of water blew into the door where Uncle Burley was sleeping.

He rolled over. “Quit,” he said. He wiped the water out of his eyes and scrambled into the room. Jig followed him in and slammed the door.

Big Ellis sat up and rubbed his eyes. “It’s raining,” he said.

“You ought to been a prophet,” Uncle Burley said. He sat down at the table again.

The lightning got worse. Jig stood in the middle of the floor and watched it, as wild-eyed as a ghost.

“Burley,” he said, “He could strike us down with one of them.”

“I reckon so,” Uncle Burley said.

“He could strike you down just like a rabbit.”

“He can shoot ’em like a rifle,” Uncle Burley said.

It lightened again; the thunder clapped down, jarring the house.

“Oh,” Jig said. He fell on the floor with his hands over his face.

“Bull’s-eye,” Uncle Burley said.

The thunder bumbled away over the top of the hill.

“Burley, that one struck something,” Big Ellis said.

“It must have,” Uncle Burley said.

We went to the windows and looked out, but it was raining too hard to see anything. Jig was still on the floor hiding his face.

“Get up, Jig,” Uncle Burley said. “You’re not dead.”

He and Big Ellis helped Jig onto his feet.

“He ain’t even wounded,” Big Ellis said.

Jig sat down on one of the cots and put his hands over his face again. “Burley, He let me live. And He didn’t have to do it. He didn’t have any reason to do it. It was out of his goodness. He don’t have to stand for any such foolishness, Burley.”

The rain didn’t last long. When it was over we went out on the porch to see if we could tell what the lightning had struck. The stars were shining where the cloud had passed, and everything was cool and fresh-smelling. I felt as wide awake as if I’d slept all night.

Big Ellis went around the corner of the house, and then we heard him say, “Burley, yonder’s a fire.”

“Where?” Uncle Burley asked him. He went around the house, and Jig and I hurried after him.

Big Ellis pointed. “Right up there.”

We saw the smoke beginning to roll up over the top of the hill, and under it the dim red shimmer of the fire.

“It’s at our place,” I said.

“It could be,” Uncle Burley said.

He started toward the road and Big Ellis went with him. Jig had gone back to the porch to put his boots on, and I ran into the house to get my shoes. Jig waited for me at the door, and then we started after the others. We ran hard and caught up with them a little past Beriah Easterly’s store.

The trees hid the smoke from us, but by the time we were halfway up the hill we heard a bell ringing.

“That’s the dinner bell,” Uncle Burley said.

He broke into a run, and the rest of us strung out behind him. I could hear Jig’s rubber boots bumping and stumbling behind me.

We were out of breath when we got up on the ridge and we slowed to a walk. But by that time we could see that the fire was in Daddy’s barn, and we only walked a few steps before we started running again.

When we went past Grandpa’s house Grandma was standing in the yard in her nightgown, ringing the dinner bell. She waved and called something to us.

Uncle Burley slowed down. “What?”

“Buckets!” she said. “Get some buckets.”

We ran to the back porch and got the milk bucket and the slop bucket and the two water buckets. When we ran back into the yard she was ringing the bell again. She called something else to us when we went past her, but we didn’t stop to hear what she said. She was barefooted, the firelight red on her face and gown.

Daddy’s team had been in the barn, and he and Grandpa had got them out and turned them loose in the lot. The two mules stood together in the farthest corner, their heads up, turning to face the fire, then snorting and whirling away.

Daddy and Grandpa were dipping water out of the trough at the well and carrying it into the driveway where part of the loft had broken through. The fire had started in the far end of the barn, and the wind seemed to be holding it back a little.

When we got into the lot Jig stopped and pointed at the fire. “That’s what it’s like,” he said. “The fire of Hell, my brothers in sin.” Then he grabbed the pump handle and began pumping.

We stood in line to fill our buckets, and carried them into the barn and emptied them. Grandpa and Daddy had set the pace, and we kept it up, running from the well to the fire and back again. The driveway was so full of smoke that we could hardly breathe or see. I held my breath and ran in until I could see the light of the fire, and flung the bucket of water at it and ran out again, coughing and wiping my eyes while I waited in line at the well.

“It’s got too much of a start,” Uncle Burley said. “We’ll never stop it.”

I knew he told the truth. It had been hopeless when we got there. But he never stopped or slowed down, and none of the rest of us did either.

A crowd had gathered at the yard fence. The red light flickered and waved on their faces, and shone on the roofs of the automobiles behind them. Their faces looked calm and strange turned up into the light of the fire, like the faces of people around a lion’s cage, separate from it, only seeing.

And once when I came back to the well with my empty bucket I saw that Brother was standing in the line ahead of me. Gander Loyd and Beriah Easterly and Mr. Feltner had come to help us too. But it was hopeless. Nothing was there to save, only a thing to look at. Grandma still rang the dinner bell, but we couldn’t hear it now above the sound of the fire. Jig worked at the pump.

For a few minutes we managed to hold the fire at the back of the driveway. But it was spreading into the loft, and there was nothing we could do about that. Finally the heat drove us outside. The driveway ticked and cracked like an oven, and then the whole barn blazed up at once. Flames shot over the well top and we dropped our buckets and ran. We stood in the center of the lot, watching the fire and getting our breath.

“You all haven’t got any barn,” Gander said. “You’ve just got a fire.” He turned around and walked toward the crowd at the fence.

Beriah stood with us for another minute or two, and then shook his head. “It’s gone now.” He followed Gander away.

Daddy never looked at them, nor at any of us. He watched the fire die down after the first big blaze; and when the wind turned the flames back from the well he moved toward the barn again, without looking back or asking us to go with him, and without any hope, but going anyway. Grandpa started after him, hurrying to catch up. Uncle Burley and Big Ellis and Mr. Feltner and Brother and Jig and I followed them.

Jig ran past us and splashed water on the pump handle to cool it, and pumped again. We filled our buckets and began dowsing the wall nearest the pump. Daddy wet his clothes so he could get closer to the fire, and we passed our buckets to him. He was furious, throwing water at the fire as if he were trying to bruise it. We worked to keep the fire away from the pump, and to save the crib and the granary and the wagon shed. Cinders dropped on our faces and hands, and scorched our clothes; we brushed them off and kept going. Jig worked the pump with his whole body, rattling the handle up and down as if he were doing some kind of dance.

Big Ellis yelled, “Look out!” and we ran again.

We ran to the fence and turned around in time to see the whole barn cave in—loft and roof and walls—like logs in a fireplace. Red ashes spewed around it on the ground; sparks from the hay spiraled and wound into the smoke.

We went back to the well again. From then on we worked more slowly, but we never stopped. Daddy and Grandpa kept us going. They hated the fire and they had to fight it, and none of us would leave them to fight it alone. We stayed with them, and we saved the outbuildings.

By morning the fire was out. We left our buckets at the well and went into the lot and sat down. We were too worn out to try to talk. We were blackened and parched and blistered, our eyes bloodshot and stinging from the smoke.

While daylight came we sat and looked at the black pile of ashes. We hadn’t accepted the fire; we’d been able to fight that as long as it burned. But now, in the daylight, in our tiredness, as if we’d fought all night in a dream, we accepted the ashes.

It was quiet. The crowd had gone soon after the barn caved in, and Grandma had long ago quit ringing the bell. At the far end of the lot the two mules grazed on the short grass. After a while they walked over to the trough at the well, and Jig got up and pumped water for them.

“Bless you, God’s creatures,” he said.

They drank, and then Daddy opened the gate and turned them out on the hillside.

Uncle Burley found the drinking cup where it had been kicked into the ashes. Jig rinsed it and filled it for each of us and we drank. Daddy was the last to drink; when he finished he turned the cup upside down and set it carefully beside the base of the pump. After that there seemed to be nothing to do.

After the fire Uncle Burley quit leaving home on the weekends. He could be free with his own troubles but not with Daddy’s. He did his best to be agreeable; and with the loss of the barn to worry about, everybody seemed to have forgotten how he’d misbehaved on the Fourth of July.

One day he carried the red frog to Big Ellis’s house and asked Annie May to accept it as a gift from a friend. There was nothing she could do but take it and thank him.

Several weeks went by before we cleaned up the ruins of the barn. The black pile of ruck and cinders was too dismal. Daddy hated the sight of it; and I knew it was hard for him to think of cleaning it up, as if that would only finish what the fire had begun. After the swiftness of the fire I felt the ashes would stay forever.

But finally one Friday morning all of us went to work and hauled away the leavings. Once we’d got beyond our dread of the job we were anxious to be rid of every trace of the fire.

Brother stayed mad at me for what I’d said to him in town the night the barn burned. I’d been in the wrong, and he never gave me a chance to forget it.

On the Saturday night after we’d cleared away the remainders of the old barn Calvin came over to our house. I hadn’t seen him since he’d slipped away from me in town, and I didn’t care if I never saw him again. But when I went out of the house that night, after we’d finished supper and Brother had left for town, Calvin was coming across the yard.

He grinned at me, sucking on a peppermint stick. “What’re you doing?”

I didn’t go to meet him. “I’m standing here looking at you,” I said.

He came on across the yard and sat down. I walked away toward the barn, and he got up again and followed me.

“Want some candy?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

“Let’s do something.”

He trailed along behind me. I heard him close the sack and put it back in his pocket.

“I’m walking out to the barn,” I said, “and I don’t need your help.”

“Let’s go down to the river and talk to Uncle Burley for a while,” he said, mocking the way I’d said it to Brother.

I turned on him and he dodged. I waited until he looked at me, and then I grinned. “Give me a stick of candy,” I said.

He held the sack out and I helped myself.

“Let’s go and see how Brother’s getting along with his courting,” I said.

He looked away. “We’d better not do that.”

“Come on,” I told him.

I started toward the road. He stood there a minute and then hurried after me. When we got to the road he caught up and walked beside me into town.

Brother and his girl were drinking Cokes at one of the tables in the back of the drugstore. We stood in front and watched them through the window until they got up and started out.

“We’d better get out of sight,” Calvin said.

We crossed the street to the churchyard and watched them leave the drugstore. The moon had come up, but the trees around the church made shadow enough to hide us.

“Let’s follow them,” I said.

“We oughtn’t to do that.”

I told him to quit being such a chicken, and he didn’t say any more.

We let them get a long way off, then followed. They went along the road toward the river, walking slowly with their arms around each other. When we’d got beyond the noise of the town we could hear Brother talking—the rising and falling of his voice, too quiet for us to make out the words. And now and then the girl laughed. Sometimes when she laughed she laid her head on Brother’s shoulder.

Calvin nudged me in the ribs. “Look at that. Wait till you tell Tom you saw that.” He had another peppermint stick in his mouth.

We passed the graveyard and I could see the angel on the Coulter monument standing up black over the tops of the trees. Brother and the girl walked close together. The moon threw their shadows behind them on the road.

They turned off where the road started down to the river and went along a path to a level place on the hillside. We stopped behind a bush at a bend in the path where we could look down on them.

“God durn if this ain’t some fun,” Calvin said.

The girl sat down and held her hand out to Brother, and he sat down beside her. She took the scarf off and put it in her purse, then ran her fingers through her hair and let it fall back over her shoulders. She reached and touched Brother’s face. The light on her hair moved when she moved. Brother put his arms around her and kissed her. I looked at Calvin. He was standing there with his mouth open, watching them as if it were happening in a picture show. I jerked his sleeve to tell him to come on, and went up to the road again.

Before long Calvin came up opening the sack of peppermint sticks. He was grinning. “We’ve sure got a good one on old Tom now. You wait till we tell it on him.”

“You’d better not,” I said.

He looked at me. “Why?”

I caught him by the collar and shoved him backward. The peppermint sticks shook out all over the road.

“God damn you, go home.”

I shoved him again, and he ran until he was out of sight over the hill.

I went on toward home then, and where our lane turned off I stopped and waited. There was nobody on the road. All the houses I’d passed were dark and quiet.

I heard Brother’s footsteps. And then I could see him. When he saw me he took his hands out of his pockets and walked faster.

“What’re you doing here?” His voice sounded peaceful and friendly.

“Just messing around.”

“Well, let’s go home.” He started into the lane.

“Tom,” I said. “I saw you.”

He turned around. “Saw who?”

“You and that girl. Down there on the hillside.”

He hit me square in the face and I fell. My head hit the road.

His footsteps went away and it got quiet again. I felt the blood running out of my mouth.

Brother never mentioned what had happened that Saturday night, and he was peaceable enough afterwards. But he wasn’t friendly. He kept his distance. We got along better than I’d expected we would. I had to be grateful for the distance. If we’d been any closer, or tried to be brothers the way we’d always been, we’d have had to keep fighting each other. But we’d quit being brothers, and it was my fault.

When the work let up early in September and Uncle Burley suggested that he and I go fishing for a few days, I was glad of the chance to get away.

We’d been busier than usual during the last part of the summer, and all of us were tired. The weather had been wet, and Daddy and Grandpa hadn’t been able to plan work more than a day ahead. That had kept them on edge and hurrying, and Grandpa’s patience had worn out.

When we sat down to breakfast that morning Grandpa noticed one of the kitchen windows was shut. He told Grandma to open it.

“It’s stuck,” she said. “The damp weather made it swell.”

“Get up and open the window,” Grandpa told Brother.

Brother got up and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. Grandma came to help him. But it was stuck tight, and they only got in each other’s way.

Grandpa watched them fumbling at the sash for a minute; and then without saying a word he unhooked his cane from the back of his chair and knocked out the glass.

Grandma and Brother dodged the splinters, and Brother sat down again. Grandma stood still for a minute looking at Grandpa, her eyes snapping. But he’d turned his back to her and begun eating. She went to the stove then and took the biscuits out of the oven. We ate without talking or looking at each other.

Grandpa finished in a hurry and went to the barn. Uncle Burley looked at the broken window and the pieces of glass on the floor and began laughing. He looked up at the ceiling and rocked back and forth in his chair, whooping and howling with laughter until Grandpa must have heard it at the barn. He’d stop for a second to get his breath, then he’d look at the window and say “Oh my God” and start laughing again.

“You’re a fine one to be laughing,” Grandma told him. “It’s no funnier than some of the things you do.”

He looked at her, still laughing, and said, “Oh my God.”

She left the room then, and Uncle Burley quit laughing. He looked across the table at me and said, “Let’s go fishing, for God’s sake.”

I said that suited me but I was afraid Grandpa had work for me to do, and I didn’t want to ask him because of the mood he was in.

“I’ll take care of that,” Uncle Burley said.

Grandpa was harnessing his team in the driveway of the barn. He hadn’t told us what he was going to do that day, but nearly always when we had a break in our regular work he’d slip away from us and spend a day or two at odd jobs around the farm—mowing weeds or mending a fence. He liked to work by himself, and he was always resentful if we asked where he was going or offered to help him.

Uncle Burley went into the barn and squatted in the middle of the driveway so that Grandpa had to walk around him. “What’re you fixing to do?” he asked.

Grandpa didn’t pay any attention to him. He threw the harness over the back of the second mule and buckled it on. He picked up his cane and led the mules out into the lot and began hitching them to the wagon. Uncle Burley got up and followed him.

“You’ve got the lead mule hitched too short.”

“I was working mules before you were born,” Grandpa said.

“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “Nathan and I think we’ll go fishing for a few days.”

Grandpa said he didn’t give a damn if we fished the rest of the year, and Uncle Burley said he hadn’t thought about that but we might do it.

He sent me to the house to tell Grandma we were going. Then we went to the smokehouse and got a side of bacon and a tin can full of salt.

It was a fine brisk morning, cool and bright, the wind in the north. The leaves on some of the bushes beside the road had begun to turn yellow. I knew we wouldn’t think of summer again; it was easier to imagine cold and fire in the stoves and snow.

When we came over the brow of the hill we stopped and looked down at the river. The corn in the bottoms had ripened and turned brown; the tobacco patches were naked now that the crop had been put in. The river lay green and quiet between the rows of trees.

“Poor old Chicken Little,” Uncle Burley said.

I turned to look at him; he stood there watching the river as if he didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud.

Chicken Little Montgomery had fallen out of a boat and drowned the week before, but this was the first time I’d heard any of our family mention it. None of us had ever been friends with the Montgomerys, and we’d never spoken of them. But now that Chicken Little was dead you noticed the silence. All of us felt uneasy about his drowning. He stayed on our minds as if our dislike for him while he was alive had somehow made us guilty of his death.

“Wonder if they’ve ever found his body,” Uncle Burley said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We went on down the hill, and up the bottom to Beriah Easterly’s store.

Beriah and Gander Loyd were sitting on nail kegs in front of the store, looking up toward the top of the hill. Beriah saw us coming and called, “Morning, Burley.”

“Morning, Beriah,” Uncle Burley said. “Morning, Gander. I hear you got married.”

“It’s a fact,” Gander said.

Beriah pointed up at the top of the hill. “A lot of buzzards up there this morning. Must be something dead.”

We looked at the buzzards for a minute. Then Uncle Burley and I went into the store and Beriah got up and came in after us. He went behind the counter and propped his elbows on it, waiting to hear what we wanted.

Uncle Burley ordered two pounds of line and a hundred hooks, five pounds of meal and three sacks of Bull Durham.

“Going to do some fishing, are you, Burley?” Beriah said when he came back with the line and hooks.

“Thinking about it,” Uncle Burley told him.

“Pity about Chicken Little, wasn’t it?” Beriah said.

“It was,” Uncle Burley said.

“You know they never found his body. They gave him up.”

Beriah sacked up the things we’d bought and handed the sack across the counter to me. “Looks like we’re going to have some more fishing weather.”

“Could be,” Uncle Burley said.

“Well, I hope you all have luck.”

Gander was still sitting on the nail keg when we came out. Uncle Burley nodded to him. “Give my respects to your wife, Gander.”

“Thank you, Burley,” Gander said. He got up and went into the store.

When we were on the road again Uncle Burley said, “Gander’s out awfully bright and early for a bridegroom.”

“I didn’t know he was married,” I said. “Who did he marry?”

“Old Gander outdid himself, from what I hear. They say he married a young woman. And a pretty one too. Her name was Mandy something or other.”

When we got to the camp house Uncle Burley shoved the door open and we went inside. “Well, here we are,” he said.

He told me to open the windows, and he got a broom and swept the floors. We took the bedding down and spread it over the beds. After we got everything clean and in order we sat outside to talk and look at the river. There was a breeze blowing and a few spots of sunlight came through the leaves onto the porch; it was quiet and comfortable. We’d gone a few days without rain and the river had cleared, although there was still some current. It felt good to have nothing to do but be there.

“I don’t see how Gander ever persuaded a pretty woman to marry him,” Uncle Burley said. “That one-eyed old pup. She must be blind in both eyes. I wonder if she’s looked at him yet.”

“He’s not very pretty,” I said.

Uncle Burley laughed. “His face would stop an eight-day clock and run it backwards two weeks.”

He lay down on his back and pulled his hat over his eyes. After a minute he laughed again. “Your grandpa sure did ventilate the kitchen,” he said. “Damned if he can’t be outrageous sometimes.”

“It’s hard on Grandma,” I said.

“And everybody else,” Uncle Burley said. He sat up and put his hat back on, folding his arms across his knees. “But I tell you, there’s no give in him. And no quit. You’ve got to admire that. He’s been a wheel horse in his time. He’s worked like the world was on fire and nobody but him to put it out. It’s a shame to see him getting old.”

I nodded. Grandpa had been hard on all of us. He’d kept himself stubborn and lonely, not allowing any of us to know him; we saw him and he saw us through his loneliness. But his loneliness and stubbornness humbled us too. We had to admire him.

At dinnertime Uncle Burley lit the coal oil stove, and I filled the water bucket at the spring behind the house. We fried some bacon and a pile of corn bread and sat down to eat.

Uncle Burley raised his hat and said,

“Oh Lord, make us able

To eat all that’s on this table,

And if there’s some we haven’t got

Bring it to us while it’s hot.”

After dinner we found the boat where Uncle Burley had hidden it in a patch of horseweeds and turned it over and slid it down the bank to the river. And then we got the bait box and the fish box from under the porch and tied them in the river by the boat.

We climbed the bank again and sat on the edge of the porch to rest.

“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “we got her fixed. We’re in business.”

When we’d rested Uncle Burley said we’d better be thinking about catching some bait if we were going to fish. He said there ought to be plenty of perch up in the creek, and we could try them for a start. He found the minnow seine and I got a five-gallon bucket from under the stove in the kitchen. We started upstream toward the mouth of the creek.

Uncle Burley carried the seine on his shoulder, whistling a tune and watching the river.

“Do you think we’ll catch any fish?” I asked him.

“The river’s full of them,” he said. “We ought to. If we get another rain to stir the water and freshen it a little, we ought to have good fishing.”

We caught a bucketful of perch up in the creek and carried them back and put them in the bait box at the river. It was getting late by then. Uncle Burley said there wasn’t much use in trying to fish that day, so we made another meal off the bacon and corn bread.

As soon as supper was over we set a lantern on the table in the bedroom and started getting our fishing gear in shape. We rolled the hanks of line into balls so they’d run out without tangling when we put them in the river. Uncle Burley got out a ball of lighter line and we snooded the hooks, cutting the line into pieces about a foot and a half long and tying the hooks to them.

It was comfortable work to do after supper. We were full and a little sleepy. A couple of owls called in the woods. Frogs were singing.

The next morning we finished breakfast by sunup. We loaded the lines and hooks and a baiting of perch into the boat and started up the river. Uncle Burley rowed. The red sunlight slanted through the trees on the bank and down to the water. A soft wind was coming up the river, rippling it, and the reflections of the trees were speckled and pointed in the water like big fish. Two or three herons flew from one snag to another, keeping ahead of us. We went past Jig’s boat, but it was quiet and we didn’t call him.

When we got to the bend where Uncle Burley wanted to fish I tied the end of one of the lines to a willow, and let it unwind as Uncle Burley rowed across to the other bank. We found another willow on that side and fastened the line, then tied on the weights—a small rock near each shore and one in the middle. We pulled ourselves back across on the line, and I tied on the hooks and Uncle Burley baited them.

The sun was getting hot when we finished putting the lines out. Uncle Burley said it would save a lot of rowing if we stayed there for the rest of the morning; we’d run the lines at noon and maybe get a mess of fish, and then go in. He pulled the boat into the shade along the bank and we tied up to a snag.

We made ourselves comfortable and watched the river, talking about how many fish we might catch and what kind and how big. Uncle Burley remembered all the good ones he’d ever caught and what he’d caught them on and what time of year it had been. Finally we ran out of talk, and he lay down in the bottom of the boat and went to sleep.

I watched the sun climb up toward the top of the sky. A few birds were singing, and I could see a mud turtle sunning himself on a log. Kingfishers flew over the willows, calling, tilting down to the water after minnows. After a while it got hotter and the river quieted down. The only things moving then were the clouds and the water.

The surface of the river was still. You could see every leaf of the trees reflected in it. The white glare of the sun glanced so brightly it hurt your eyes; and in the shade where we rested the water darkened, rippling a little as it passed the boat. The whole calm of the river moved down and past us and on, as if it slept and remembered its direction in its sleep. And somewhere below the thin reflections of the trees was Chicken Little, hidden in that dark so quietly nobody would ever find him.

After a while I propped my back against the side of the boat and went to sleep too.

It was nearly noon when Uncle Burley woke me. We ran the lines and took off four or five little catfish, and then rowed back to the house to cook them for dinner.

That afternoon we caught another bucketful of perch, and ran the lines again after it began to cool off. We took six nice channel cats on that run and baited the lines up fresh. Three of the fish made enough for our supper, and we put the other three in the fish box to keep them alive.

It began to rain at supper time, a slow drizzle at first, then hard and steady against the roof and windowpanes. It sounded as if it had set in for the night. When supper was over we sat in the bedroom and talked and listened to the rain fall.

I’d about made up my mind to go to bed when Uncle Burley picked up the lantern and put his hat on. “I feel my luck working,” he said. “Let’s go see what we’ve caught.”

“At this time of night?” I said.

We waited until the rain slacked up a little, and went down to the boat. It was dark. The rain fell out of the black sky and splattered our clothes and sizzled on the lantern globe. Uncle Burley set the lantern in the front of the boat and we shoved off. We stayed in close under the trees. The lower branches caught in our light and we guided by them.

We ran the first line and took off two white cats and three channel cats, all of a good size. I rowed to the other line and Uncle Burley began raising it. We went about fifteen feet from the bank and I saw the line jerk in his hands. It pulled him off balance and he turned the line loose and caught himself on the other side of the boat.

He wiped his hands on his pants and looked at me. “We got a fish, boy.”

“Can you tell how big?”

“Pretty near too big.”

I rowed to the bank. He caught the line again, and I held the lantern up so he could see. The line tightened in his hands, cutting back and forth through the water. It was still raining, and pitch-dark beyond the light of the lantern. Uncle Burley knelt in the front of the boat, working us slowly toward the fish. He had his underlip in his teeth, being careful.

We heard the fish roll up on top of the water, his big tail splashing out in the dark toward the middle of the river. He went down then, and Uncle Burley had to turn the line loose. We played the fish for what seemed an hour, running out, losing the line, and rowing back to the bank to start all over again.

Finally we wore him out. He came to the top of the water, and Uncle Burley held him there and pulled the boat out to him. He was a white cat, the biggest I’d ever seen. Uncle Burley hooked his thumb into the fish’s mouth and ran the fingers of his other hand into the gills. I caught the tail and we hauled him over the side of the boat. He flopped down at our feet and lay there with his big red gills heaving open and shut. Uncle Burley was breathing hard, and the thumb he’d hooked in the fish’s mouth was bleeding. He sat down and looked at the fish while he got his breath, then he grinned at me. “He’s a horse, ain’t he?”

We were drenched with rain, and by the time we got back to the house our teeth were chattering. We stripped off our clothes and hung them on the chairs to dry. Uncle Burley lit the stove and we stood in front of it until we were warm. When we went to bed the rain was still coming down, rustling through the trees and rapping the tin roof. We lay snug and awake for a long time, remembering everything that had happened.

After breakfast the next morning we went down to the river. We’d tied the fish to the back of the boat with a piece of strong line, doubled and looped through one of his gills. Uncle Burley lifted him out of the water. We were surprised again to see how big he was.

“What’re we going to do with him?” I asked.

“We’ll get Beriah to put him on ice for us so he’ll keep,” Uncle Burley said. “You can cut slabs of meat off of him as big as steaks, and just as white as snow.”

When we’d finished looking at the fish Uncle Burley let him back into the water so he could breathe. He jerked his head against the line like a horse jerking against a hitch rein.

“There’ll be a lot of fine eating on that fish,” Uncle Burley said. “We ought to have a fish fry. We’ll get Big Ellis and Jig and Gander to come down tonight and have a feast. We’ll have to let Beriah in on it too, so he’ll be willing to furnish some ice.”

As soon as we’d baited the lines we took the fish out of the water again. We tied him to one of the oars and started up the road, carrying him between us, holding him high to keep his tail from dragging.

“We’ll cook plenty of corn bread,” Uncle Burley said, “and maybe get hold of a watermelon. It’ll be a supper they won’t forget for a while.”

Beriah was sitting in front of the store again, and when he saw us he came out to meet us. “Lord amercy,” he said. “Look what a fish.”

“We’re going to use him for bait,” Uncle Burley said. “We’re going to try to catch one big enough to eat.”

Beriah held the door open for us and we carried the fish inside and stretched him out on the floor in front of the counter.

“Lord amercy,” Beriah said. “You’ve caught the granddaddy of them all.” He knelt down beside the fish and patted its head as if it were a dog. “You don’t see a fish like this more than once in a lifetime, Burley.”

When I saw how Beriah admired our fish I was prouder than ever and so was Uncle Burley.

“Don’t it make your mouth water just to look at him?” Uncle Burley said.

“There’s some fine eating on him, all right,” Beriah said.

“I’ll tell you what,” Uncle Burley said. “We’ll clean him and you can put him on ice for us, and then we’ll all get together tonight and have a big fish fry.”

“Nothing could suit me any better,” Beriah said. “But, Burley, you all don’t want to dress that fish yet. Keep him a while so people can see him.”

They looked at the fish. Uncle Burley leaned over and picked up the line again and held it, as if he were going to lead the fish out of the store.

“He’ll spoil.”

“No, he won’t. We’ll keep him alive. Hell, Burley, you don’t want to treat him like an ordinary fish. People don’t get a chance to see a fish like that every day.”

Beriah went to the back of the store and opened the cooler. “Bring a couple of those crates,” he said.

He began to take the bottles out of the cooler and we brought the crates and helped him.

“Now, what’s the matter with that, Burley? He’ll stay alive a long time in that cold water.”

“I reckon he will,” Uncle Burley said.

Beriah picked up the fish. “Lord amercy,” he said.

We helped him lift the fish into the cooler, and then we stood there looking in.

“Why, that’s a regular aquarium,” Beriah said. “I just wish it had glass sides on it.”

Uncle Burley laughed. “Well, we could caulk up the candy counter and put him in that.”

Beriah and I laughed too, and we looked at the fish again.

“Well, he looks comfortable enough,” Uncle Burley said. He shut the lid and turned around. “We’ll be seeing you, Beriah.”

Beriah sat down on the bench beside the cooler. “Aw, stick around a while, Burley.”

Uncle Burley didn’t say whether he’d stay or not, but I could see that he was relieved when Beriah asked him to. He opened the screen door and started out.

“When did you all catch him, Burley?”

Uncle Burley stopped and turned around. “Last night.” He stepped back inside and let the door close behind him.

“Last night?” Beriah said. “You all caught a fish like that in the dark?”

“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “it wasn’t a lot of trouble.”

Beriah kept asking questions; and while Uncle Burley answered them he moved back into the store. He walked to the counter, and to the cooler again, and finally sat down on the bench with Beriah and propped up his feet. He’d tell only as much as Beriah asked for, and then he’d wait for another question.

“And what did you do then?” Beriah would ask. And when Uncle Burley told him, he’d let his hands drop onto his knees and say, “Well, I’ll swear.”

When Uncle Burley began to tell how we’d fought the fish out in the dark and the rain his voice got tight and excited in spite of all he could do. He sounded like somebody was tickling his feet.

Before he got it all told Gander Loyd came in.

“Gander, go look there in the cooler,” Beriah said.

“What for?”

“Just go look in it.”

Uncle Burley straightened up and Beriah rubbed his hands together and patted his feet while Gander opened the lid and looked in.

“Nice fish,” Gander said. “Who caught him?”

“Burley and Nathan here.”

I was glad Beriah included me, but he was about to turn the fish and Uncle Burley and me into some sort of freak show. He’d got to be as proud of the fish as we were and I was sorry we’d let it get out of our hands.

“How’d you catch him, Burley?” Gander asked.

“Caught him last night in the dark,” Beriah said. “Ain’t that right, Burley?”

Uncle Burley nodded, and Beriah began asking him the same questions he’d asked before, making him tell the story again from the beginning.

He got it all told that time, and after he finished everybody was quiet for a while. Beriah and Uncle Burley had used up all of their talk, and Gander wouldn’t help them any. Now and then Beriah slapped his knees and said, “Uhhhhhhh-uh!”

After a while Big Ellis’s car pulled up in front of the store and stopped.

Beriah yawned and stretched. “Customers,” he said. He went behind the counter and set his elbow on the top of the cash register.

Annie May came in and began ordering groceries. Big Ellis and two other men followed her through the door and walked on back where we were.

“This is J.D.,” Big Ellis told us, pointing to one of the men. “He’s my brother-in-law. And this other one is William.”

J.D. and William stepped up and shook hands with Uncle Burley and Gander and me.

“They work at the same place in Louisville,” Big Ellis said. “This is their vacation.”

“Well, I’ll declare,” Uncle Burley said.

Big Ellis sat down on the bench between Uncle Burley and Gander; J.D. and William stood in front of them, shifting their feet and looking around the store.

Finally Big Ellis said, “J.D. hasn’t been here for thirty years.”

“I grew up around here,” J.D. said.

Everybody kept quiet. Uncle Burley was studying J.D.’s face, but I saw that he couldn’t recognize him. Gander had turned his blind side to them and was looking at the toe of his shoe.

“Yep, this is where I was raised,” J.D. said. He looked at Gander and then at Uncle Burley. “I expect you all remember me.”

Uncle Burley got embarrassed then and looked away, and so did Big Ellis. I began to feel sorry for J.D. He stood there waiting for somebody to remember him and be glad to see him now that he’d come back home after thirty years. But he was a stranger to us. I knew Big Ellis had relatives who’d moved away, but he never talked about them.

J.D. looked at Uncle Burley. “You’re Burley Coulter, aren’t you?”

Uncle Burley nodded.

“And I remember you had a brother.”

“That’s his boy there.”

J.D. turned to me and said, “Is that so? Well, I’ll declare. How’re your folks, son?”

“Fine,” I said.

Uncle Burley looked down at his hands for a minute, and then he said, “Why, I believe I remember you.”

J.D. nodded. He looked grateful enough to have paid money for that. I knew Uncle Burley was lying, but I was glad for J.D.’s sake.

“You married Big Ellis’s sister,” Uncle Burley said.

J.D. nodded again. “That’s right.”

Uncle Burley laced his fingers around his knees and leaned back. “I was just a boy when you left here.”

“That’s right, Burley.”

After that all Uncle Burley had to do was listen. J.D. talked about his boyhood; and told why he’d left home and how he’d got to be a foreman where he worked and was doing well for an old country boy. He told it all to Uncle Burley, looking at him while he talked. Uncle Burley had said he remembered who J.D. was, and J.D. was Uncle Burley’s friend.

“Burley,” J.D. said, “it don’t seem like more than a few days since I was a boy here, and it’s been half a lifetime. I tell you, time goes in a hurry.”

“That’s right,” Uncle Burley said.

Beriah hustled around, waiting on Annie May. He filled a box with groceries and pushed it across the counter, and then we heard him say, “Right there in the cooler, Annie May. Just help yourself.”

He looked at us and winked. And we watched her walk to the cooler and open it.

“Ouch!” she said, and slammed the lid down.

Beriah’s belly shook with laughter, but he kept his face straight.

“What’s the matter, mam?”

Annie May backed out into the middle of the floor. “A stinking catfish!” she said.

As soon as they heard her say catfish, Big Ellis and J.D. and William went to the cooler and looked in. Uncle Burley and Gander and I got up and followed them. And then Beriah came, forgetting all about Annie May.

“Who caught that one?” Big Ellis asked.

“Burley and Nathan,” Beriah said.

“You might know it would be Burley’s,” Annie May said. But when she saw that nobody was going to pay any more attention to her she picked up her box of groceries and started to the door. “I’m going home,” she said. “If you all don’t want to come now, you can walk.”

“Well,” Big Ellis said. He never looked up when she slammed the door.

“That’s a pretty good fish,” William said, “for a river fish.”

“That’s about as good a fish as you’ll ever see caught,” Beriah said.

William ignored him. “Of course now, you can catch them plenty bigger than that in the ocean.” And he began telling us that he’d lived near the ocean once and used to go fishing clear out of sight of land. I figured he was going to tell how he’d caught a bigger fish than we had, and I didn’t want to hear it; but he finally noticed that nobody had turned away from the cooler to listen to him. He slowed down then; and Beriah horned in and started telling how Uncle Burley and I had caught our fish.

Beriah stretched the truth in some places and added to it in others. Every time he got beyond the facts he’d say, “Ain’t that right, Burley? Ain’t I telling them just what you told me?”

Uncle Burley only nodded his head, without looking at anybody. It seemed to me that if he talked much longer Beriah would believe he’d caught the fish himself. William walked around the store, looking at the merchandise, being as uninterested in our story as we’d been in his.

The door opened and shut quietly; when we turned around there was Mushmouth Montgomery wandering up to the counter. Looking as much like Chicken Little as he did, and so lonesome-faced and grieved, it was as if a corpse or a ghost had come in. All of us stood still for a minute, and then Beriah closed the cooler and hurried behind the counter.

“What can I do for you, Mushmouth?”

Uncle Burley went back to the bench, and Big Ellis and Gander and I went with him. Mushmouth’s coming made the fish seem unimportant—as out of place there as it would have been at a funeral. We kept quiet, each one dreading the chance that one of the others might mention it.

Mushmouth bought smoking tobacco and a candy bar. We watched him walk toward the door, hoping he’d leave. But he sat down by himself in the front of the store and began to eat the candy. J.D. and William leaned against the cooler, waiting for one of us to say something.

Beriah stayed at the counter, shuffling through a handful of bills. Once in a while he’d thumb one out and look at it, then shake his head and lay it on top of the cash register.

Finally J.D. lost his patience and walked up to Mushmouth. “Say,” he said, “you ought to see what a fish Burley’s caught. I imagine it’s as fine a fish as was ever caught in this river.” He said it proudly, as if he and Uncle Burley had been friends all their lives.

Uncle Burley got up and headed for the door. “Well, I reckon we’ll get on back.”

I went with him, trying not to seem in a hurry, past Mushmouth and out to the road. It was the middle of the morning and the sun had turned warm.

“Boy, we’ve let it all turn into talk,” Uncle Burley said.

Big Ellis called to us; and we stopped and waited while he and J.D. and William caught up with us.

“It’s too solemn to stay at the store,” Big Ellis said, “as long as Mushmouth’s there.”

“That Mushmouth’s a one-man funeral procession,” Uncle Burley said.

We walked to the shack and sat on the porch in the shade.

Big Ellis got Uncle Burley to tell him where we’d caught the fish; and then he wanted to know what size hooks we’d used and what kind of bait. William started in again to tell how he’d fished in the ocean. But Big Ellis had catfish on his mind, and William didn’t get any farther than he had before.

Big Ellis said he knew where there was a fish nearly as big as the one we’d caught, and he and J.D. started planning how Uncle Burley could catch that one. William walked over to the edge of the porch and sat down by himself. It looked like he’d never get a chance to tell his story, and I could see that it was beginning to sour on him. He and J.D. had both been strangers when they’d come to the store, but now that J.D. thought Uncle Burley remembered him he’d changed sides. William had been left out. I wished Uncle Burley would pay some attention to him, but he was fed up with all the talk about fish. Big Ellis and J.D. spoke to him and he listened, staring past them at the river.

Jig Pendleton came in sight, rowing his boat down toward the store, and Big Ellis called, “Come up, Jig.”

Jig waved and pulled in to the bank. When he came up on the porch he nodded his head to us and sat down.

“We haven’t seen much of you, Jig,” Uncle Burley said.

“I haven’t been getting out much, Burley. But I’ve noticed you and the boy fishing.”

Big Ellis introduced J.D. and William. William only looked at Jig and said hello, but J.D. got up and shook hands.

“I used to live here once,” he said. “I expect you remember me.”

“Not a single sparrow falls without He knows about it,” Jig said. “No sir, I don’t remember you. But that don’t make any difference.”

J.D. looked puzzled, but then he said, “Yes sir,” and sat down again.

William stared at Jig for a minute and began laughing.

“What’s funny?” Uncle Burley asked him.

William looked at Uncle Burley and then down at the ground. “Nothing,” he said.

“You all had any luck fishing?” Jig asked.

“Burley caught one as long as from here to the door,” Big Ellis said.

It was about ten feet from where Big Ellis was sitting to the door. Uncle Burley winked at me, but he didn’t say anything.

“Burley, if you caught one that big I’m glad you caught it,” Jig said.

William got up all of a sudden and started off the porch. “Hell,” he said, “I’ll show you all how to catch fish.”

We watched him go up the path toward the road.

“He’s kind of odd,” Big Ellis said, “ain’t he, J.D.?”

“Kind of odd,” J.D. said.

Before long William came back, carrying a paper sack in his hand.

“Where you been?” J.D. asked him.

“To the store,” William said.

He put the sack on the porch and took out a half stick of dynamite with a piece of fuse already set in it. He started down the bank, carrying the dynamite by the fuse, holding it away from him as if he were carrying a live wildcat by the tail. Before anybody could say anything to stop him he lit the fuse and flung the dynamite into the river.

After the explosion we sat there, watching the dead fish float up to the surface.

William turned toward us and grinned, without looking at any of us as if he grinned at the empty house. He was already ashamed of what he’d done, but he wasn’t going to back down.

“How’s that for fish?” he asked.

Big Ellis said, “Burley, do you want some of them fish?”

“No,” Uncle Burley said. “Help yourselves.”

Big Ellis asked to borrow our boat, and he and J.D. and William rowed out to pick up the fish.

“Jig,” Uncle Burley said, “they’ve got enough fishes to feed a multitude.”

Jig shook his head. “It’s unblessed, Burley, and no loaves.”

“Maybe they’ll blow up a bakery,” Uncle Burley said.

When they’d gathered the fish and strung them they came up the bank again. Big Ellis went by the porch without stopping; J.D. and William followed him, neither of them looking at us.

“Thanks, Burley,” Big Ellis called back.

Uncle Burley raised his hand. “Don’t mention it.”

After they’d gone Jig said, “That kind of doings is what ruins fishing, Burley.”

“It don’t help any.”

I looked in the sack that William had left on the porch and there was another half stick of dynamite and a fuse. I held it up for Uncle Burley to see.

“Well,” he said, “it’s good bait.”

Jig left then, and Uncle Burley and I went inside and fixed dinner.

In the afternoon we were sitting on the porch again, talking and letting our dinner settle, when we heard a car stop out on the road and the door open and slam. We went around the house to see if somebody else was coming to visit us. Before long we saw a tall, heavy-set man walking down the path through the trees. Uncle Burley touched my arm and whispered that he was the game warden.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“I know him all right. But he don’t know me.” Uncle Burley watched the game warden for a minute, and then he said, “He thinks we did that dynamiting.”

The game warden came on down the path. “Howdy,” he said.

Uncle Burley told him good evening.

The game warden said he was from out of the county, just driving through, and had heard we might have some fish for sale.

“We don’t sell fish,” Uncle Burley said.

But the game warden wouldn’t stop at that. He’d laid his trap for us, and he had to try to catch us in it. “I’m sure this is the right place,” he said. “The fellow at the store directed me here. He said you’d been catching a lot of fish.”

Uncle Burley frowned when he heard that, and I began to get scared. If the game warden had been to the store there was no telling what Beriah had said to him. And Big Ellis had borrowed our boat to bring in the fish William killed. I was afraid we were half caught already.

“We do all our fishing for fun,” Uncle Burley said.

“Well,” the game warden said, “if you’ve got more fish than you can use, I’d like to buy a few pounds.”

Uncle Burley looked down at the boat, scratching his cheek. “How many fish do you need?”

“About fifteen pounds.”

Uncle Burley thought a minute and said, “Well, we’ll have to go get some then.”

The game warden turned his head and coughed. “Do you mind if I go along?” he asked.

“Help yourself,” Uncle Burley said. He went to the porch and picked up the other half stick of William’s dynamite.

The three of us got into the boat and rowed out to the middle of the river.

Uncle Burley looked at the game warden. “About fifteen pounds, you say?”

The game warden said yes, that would be plenty.

Uncle Burley lit the fuse and watched it splutter for a second or two, then he dropped it under the game warden’s feet.

The game warden jerked back and stared at Uncle Burley. He couldn’t believe it. But Uncle Burley didn’t give him any help. He just smiled, as if we had all the time in the world. The game warden snatched the dynamite and threw it down the river. He shut his eyes until the blast went off.

We picked up the fish we’d killed and rowed to the bank.

Uncle Burley said he judged we had at least fifty pounds of fish, and he offered them all to the game warden for ten cents a pound.

The game warden didn’t say anything. We strung the fish and he helped us carry them to the road and put them in the trunk of his car.

When we got the fish loaded he took out his billfold and handed Uncle Burley three dollar bills. He said that was all the money he had with him, and he wondered if we’d trust him to pay the rest of it when he came through that way again. Uncle Burley told him that would be fine.

We stood in the road and watched him drive away.

“It’s a shame we had to mistreat him,” Uncle Burley said.

I knew how he felt. There was no reason for what we’d done, except that we’d all wound up together in the same mess. We’d been having a good time, and now we’d ruined it. “It takes the pleasure out of fishing,” I said.

“It sure does.” He folded the money and put it in his pocket. “Well, let’s go home. We’ve stayed a day too long already.”

“What about the fish fry?” I asked.

“It’s called off,” he said. “I’m tired of fish.”

We put things in order at the house and took the lines up and pulled the boat out of the river. It was getting late. We strung what fish we had left and started home.

When we came to the store we saw that Beriah had hung our fish outside the door so everybody could see it. Flies were swarming over it, and several men were standing there looking and talking.

As we passed one of them called, “Is this your fish, Burley?”

“It’s Beriah’s fish,” Uncle Burley said.

Chapter 4

THERE WERE SIX of us in the tobacco harvest—Grandpa and Daddy and Uncle Burley and Gander Loyd and Brother and I—swapping back and forth from Grandpa’s crop to Daddy’s to Gander’s, taking tobacco from each as it got ripe from one day to the next; hurrying, because it was a late season and everybody was anxious and on the lookout for frost or rain.

The weather had changed a little toward fall at the end of the first five or six days—the mornings cool and brisk and clear, baking-hot in the middle of the day, and cool again late in the afternoons. Morning was the best part of the day, when we worked the sleep and stiffness off, and joked and laughed around the wagons, loading what we’d cut the day before and left in the patch overnight to wilt, and riding the loaded wagons down the ridges to the barns. The heat built up toward noon, and we stopped a half hour or so for dinner. Then the long hot afternoon when we just stood it, driving ourselves to quitting time. After supper was over we sat and talked around the table until we couldn’t put off sleep any longer, then slept to daylight, when Grandpa called us out of bed. After the first days, when our tiredness had got to be more than a night’s rest could cure, we dreamed of work, moving through the ripe and golden rows in our sleep until morning. During the day we’d begun to notice the little whirlwinds full of dust and dried tobacco leaves that were a sure sign it was getting close to fall.

We’d worked almost an hour past dinnertime, Daddy pushing us, trying to make up the time we’d lost when he let his team jerk a load off the wagon early in the morning. He stood on the wagon, cursing, mad at himself and at us and at the team, and grieved because what he’d done could have been avoided and because the sun wouldn’t stop to let him make up the time, building the load again and calling on us to move faster than we could move. And he pushed us through the rest of the morning, until we quit and ate green beans and potatoes and fried ham and corn bread at the big table in Grandma’s kitchen.

Daddy finished eating before any of us and slammed out of the house again, and Grandpa picked up his hat and followed him, hurrying to catch up. Grandpa had been like Daddy once; and now he was old and could only do a boy’s work—drive a team or carry water or do the other odds and ends of jobs that saved time for the men who were stronger, cursing the walking cane that he had to depend on a little more every year. He hated to be old and was ashamed of his weakness, because he was work-brittle; what had driven him to work all his life had used up his strength and outlasted it. And even though he was proud of Daddy for taking his place as well as he had, you could tell sometimes that he grieved.

He sat on the edge of the wagon bed while we drove back up the ridge to the tobacco patch, holding his hat in his lap, looking out over the river valley.

We stopped the wagon under a walnut tree at the edge of the patch, and sat down in the shade to sharpen the cutting tools. Uncle Burley used the file and handed it to Gander, then he rolled a smoke and sat looking at the sun beat through the hot air outside the shade.

“You know,” he said, “when the first fellow that owned this cut the trees off of it and dragged the logs and brush away and grubbed out the stumps and plowed it and planted a crop on it and an Indian came along and shot him, that son of a bitch was better off.”

Gander stopped filing and snickered, his whole face tilting up in the direction of the eye that was out. He filed again, saying over to himself what Uncle Burley had said, and passed the file on to Daddy.

Daddy set the blade against his knee and ran the file across it carefully, stopping to feel the edge with his thumb. “Well,” he said, “you work on this damned old dirt and sweat over it and worry about it, and then one day they’ll shovel it in your face, and that’ll be the end of it.”

Grandpa prodded the cane into the ground between his feet, looking out at the sun. “Ah Lord,” he said.

Brother used the file and passed it to me, and I used it while the rest of them stood up and began to move out of the shade toward the patch.

Daddy turned around and looked at me. “Come on, Nathan. You’ll file the damned thing right down to the handle.” He was half joking, wanting the others to hear too, wanting to make it up to us for losing his temper that morning; but still not able to spare any of us.

I laid the file on the wagon and followed them.

Daddy picked up the first stick in his row and stuck it in the ground. “Take a row, boys. Move fast, but be careful.” He leaned and cut a stalk and speared it, then another one. “Do your damnedest. That’s all a mule can do. I wouldn’t ask a man to do more.”

He warmed to it, talking himself and us into the work, talking against the dread of heat and sweat and tiredness that always came after dinner and that he felt too. We took a row apiece and followed him toward the other side of the patch.

“Show it to me, boys,” he was saying. “Make me know it.”

I watched him out the corner of my eye, working himself into the motion of it, his shoulders swaying in the row ahead of us. He worked without waste or strain, bending over his movement.

“Ah boys, when the sweat runs it quits hurting.” The sound of his voice had changed—not talking to us anymore, but a kind of singing his own skill and speed and endurance.

I quit watching him and let myself into the work. Sweat stuck my shirt to my back. And a wide swath opened behind us to the edge of the patch.

The afternoon went on, hot and clear, the ground soaking up the heat and throwing it back in our faces. We cut one row and went back and started another. When we ran out of water Grandpa took the jug to the house and filled it. We stopped to drink, and worked again. The rows were long, and the tiredness wore down into our shoulders and backs and legs.

It was lonely to work that way, bending over your own shadow, without energy enough to talk or listen or do anything but push yourself into the row. Uncle Burley and Gander and Brother and I worked along together, not to talk, but for what little comfort it was to hear somebody working next to us, and so we could walk back together to the starting end and joke a little at the water jug.

And Daddy led us. He gained a row, and passed us again, not stopping to drink as often as we did, and not saying much. Only now and then he’d sing out to us, “Follow me, boys—you’ll wear diamonds,” or, “It won’t be as long as it has been.”

By five o’clock we could see it was the best day’s work we’d done since we started. That made us feel good, and we worked faster, looking forward to quitting time when we could talk about what we’d done and brag on ourselves a little.

Daddy finished a row ahead of the rest of us and came back to where we were. He stood there with his hands on his hips, grinning at us and watching us work.

“Well,” he said, “the old man’s laying right in there, right there in front all day long. When the sun comes up in the morning and when it goes down at night he’s right there, laying ’em in the shade.”

It was a challenge, not so much to Gander and Uncle Burley because they had their pace and stuck to it and wouldn’t pay any attention to him, but to Brother and me.

He joked sometimes about how one day we’d be able to do more than he could. “One of these days they’ll go by the old man,” he’d say. “They won’t even look at him. They’ll say, ‘We’re coming, old man,’ and there won’t be a thing for me to do but get over.” And he usually wound up, “But, by God, they’ll have to have the wind in their shirttails when they do it. I’ll tell them that. When they go past me they’ll look back and know they’ve been someplace.”

And Brother and I had thought about it and talked about it between ourselves. In a way passing him would be the finest thing we could do, and the thing we could be proudest of. But in another way it would be bad, because it would kill him to have to get out of the way for anybody. We’d told each other that we might never do it, even when we were able, because of that. And both of us knew that if the time ever came it would be a hard thing to do, and a risky one. Once we’d passed him we could never be behind again. We’d have to stay in front, and it was a lonely and a troublesome place.

But once or twice a year, and nearly always during tobacco cutting, he’d have to challenge us. He’d tease us into it. He’d stop and wait for us to get close to him, the way an old fox will sometimes stop to wait on the dogs; then race with us for the love of it, and beat us for the love of it. He had to have somebody pushing him to really feel himself ahead. And always one of us would have to try him. After the race started we forgot what we’d thought about it and went after him for all we were worth; and he’d hold his lead, working as if he had to stay in front forever.

He stood there grinning, waiting to see if one of us would answer him. Then he looked at Brother and said, “Did you notice how that gap between us keeps widening?”

“You’d better go on back to work and be quiet,” Uncle Burley told him. “One of these days you’ll ask for it and they’ll give it to you.”

Daddy said, “They’ve got to move faster than they’re moving now if they do it.” As he started away he looked back and said, “When the old man’s dead and gone I want you all to walk in front of the coffin so you’ll know what the country looks like out in front of him.”

He went on to the other side of the patch then and got a drink out of the water jug and sat there smoking, watching us.

Brother led us to the end, and when we started back Daddy got up and took the next row. Uncle Burley and Gander and I went to get a drink, and by the time we got to the jug, Brother was already in the row next to Daddy’s, starting after him.

Uncle Burley unscrewed the top of the jug and handed it to Gander to drink first, then squatted on his heels watching Daddy and Brother. “There they go,” he said.

“It’s bad enough to have to work,” Gander said, “without trying to kill each other at it.”

Daddy glanced over his shoulder and saw that Brother was after him. “Well, look who’s coming. If it’s not old Tom. Going to put it on the old man today. Look at him come.”

It was an old song. We’d been hearing it ever since we’d been big enough to threaten him. Sometimes when we raced with him he’d talk us into a mistake, and then just loaf along in front of us, talking and laughing at us, until finally we’d have to quit. But it didn’t seem to be bothering Brother. He was holding his own.

“Brother’s staying with him,” I said.

“He’s getting more apt to beat him every year,” Uncle Burley said. “And it’ll never stop until he finally does. It was the same way between your daddy and grandpa. For a while there it got to be a race between them just to be breathing.”

“Look at the boy coming on,” Daddy said. “Look at him lay it on the stick. He don’t talk about it, but he’s thinking it. Thinking, ‘Go ahead and talk, old man. Your day is done. I’m coming after you. Just go ahead and talk while I’m coming on.’ Ah, the old man knows. And the old man’s going on. The boy may be coming. But the old man’s going. Right out in front where he always is. Nobody been to the end of the row ahead of him. And damn few can get there very soon afterwards.”

I put the top back on the jug and followed Uncle Burley and Gander into the next rows. We worked along behind them, watching them in the corners of our eyes. They held together, the distance between them strained tight, until sooner or later it would have to break and go one way or the other.

The strain of it suited Daddy. He was happy in it, as if he’d just made the world over to suit himself, feeling the demand on his strength and endurance close to him, and feeling himself good enough. He’d had to work hard for so long, pushed by creditors and seasons and weather, until now it was a habit. That had made him what he was. That was the way he knew himself, and he needed it.

We could hear him, working up the row ahead of us:

“He ain’t the boss, he’s the boss’s son,

But he’s going to be boss when the boss is done.

“But I tell you, boys, it’s going to be a long time yet. The old man’s going through the middle of a lot of days yet with the whole pack behind him. I tell you, boys, when he’s dead and gone they’ll be standing in line to see what the country looks like without him wheeling and dealing in the middle of it. And it’ll be a sight they never saw before.”

They finished their rows and went back and started again. Brother couldn’t gain any ground, but he wasn’t losing any either. That was beginning to bother Daddy, and he quit talking so much. Brother was just coming up to the pace that Daddy had been working in since noon, and that was in his favor. But watching from where we were, it didn’t look as if Daddy was even hurrying. He’d made every movement so many times that he could do it almost without thinking about it, as naturally as he walked. It was like watching a machine that could go on at the same speed until it got dark and the lights went out in the houses at bedtime, and on through the night until the lights came on again before sunup. The race had lasted longer than it ever had before, and I began to dread the finish of it.

Uncle Burley straightened up and watched them for a minute, wiping his face with his sleeve. “They’re getting serious about it, ain’t they? I’ve seen friendlier dogfights.”

“I wish they’d quit,” I said.

He laughed. “The last one to drop dead is the winner.”

It was getting on toward sundown, and turning cooler. The sun slanted red across the green and gold of the tobacco, filling the spaces between rows with shadows.

Then I heard Brother cursing. He’d made a mislick and it took him three tries to fix it.

“That looks like the end of it,” Uncle Burley said. “He’s let himself get flustered.”

Daddy took up his song again. “Some people just can’t work without floundering and falling around at it. But there’s always one who can do it all day long and never miss a lick.” He kept talking and kept working, and we could see that he was beginning to move away from Brother.

And before long Brother made another mistake.

“Yes sir,” Daddy said, “these little boys just barely weaned come out and try the old man. And they want to put it on him so bad, and they work at it so hard. But they just can’t quite make it.”

Brother threw down his tools and went for Daddy. Daddy turned and met him. We heard them come together, the thump of bone and muscle that sounded as if they’d already half killed each other; and then they went down, gripped together and rolling in the dirt. We could hear Brother cursing, nearly crying, he was so mad and hurt over losing. And Daddy was laughing; from the sound of it I knew that he was in a mood to fight everybody in the world one at a time and would enjoy doing it.

We laid our tools down and started to them. But Grandpa was nearer them than we were. He was in the middle of the patch, counting the rows we’d cut. And he got there first. He waded into the dust they were raising and tried to prod them apart with his cane, but they rolled under him and knocked him down. He sat there with his hat twisted around on the side of his head, cursing and flailing at them with the cane.

We hurried to him and picked him up. Gander brushed some of the dirt off his clothes and led him down the ridge toward the house. By that time Daddy had Brother down on his back and was straddling him, slapping him in the face. He was laughing, his teeth gritted and his face caked with sweat and dust, breathing hard.

Uncle Burley locked his arms around Daddy’s shoulders and dragged him away, and I helped Brother up. Daddy stood there with Uncle Burley still holding him, laughing in Brother’s face.

“You God-damned baby,” he said.

“Go to hell,” Brother said. And he turned around and followed Grandpa and Gander down the ridge.

Uncle Burley let go his hold on Daddy, and the three of us walked back across the patch to where we’d left the team and wagon. We didn’t say anything. We tried to act as if we’d just quit work and were going home.

When we got to the other side, Uncle Burley picked up the water jug and he and I climbed on the wagon. Daddy started across the hollow to his house.

“Good night,” he said.

We said we’d see him in the morning.

Uncle Burley and I didn’t talk after that either. It had got quiet all of a sudden, and there was only the jolt and rattle of the wagon and the knowledge of what had happened. Daddy and Brother had fought. It had happened, and it was over. We couldn’t think of anything to say.

I felt sorry for both of them. Brother had been beaten and insulted until it would be a long time before he’d know what to think of himself. And I knew that in the night, when he was by himself in his house, Daddy would lie awake thinking about it, and be sorry.

While we drove home the sun went down.

Uncle Burley and I unharnessed the mules and put them in their stalls and did the feeding and milking. It took us until nearly dark. When we finished the work and started to the house, Brother was coming out the yard gate. His face was cut up a little and his lower lip was swollen. He had a bundle of clothes under his arm.

“Boy, are you going?” Uncle Burley asked him.

“I guess I am.”

“You’re going to let us know about you?”

“I will.”

Uncle Burley took some money out of his pocket and put it in Brother’s hand. And then we told him good-bye.

A few stars were out. We stood in the gate a long time after Brother was out of sight, dreading to believe that he was gone.

We worked on through the tobacco cutting. Daddy was easier to get along with after Brother left. He joked with us more, trying to make himself pleasant; and even though we were shorthanded he started giving us time to rest before we went back to work in the afternoons. Nobody talked about Brother’s leaving when Daddy was around, but we could tell that it was on his mind and that he hated what he’d done. He didn’t push us so hard anymore, but he drove himself harder than ever. There were a good many days when he worked in the field by himself until it was too dark to see, after the rest of us had quit and gone home.

Brother’s leaving was harder on Grandma and Grandpa than it was on any of the rest of us. They grieved over him most of the time, and it made them seem older. We hadn’t heard from him; and every morning Grandma talked about how she expected to get a letter from him that day, and at night when no letter had come she wondered where he was and if he was well and why he hadn’t written to us. Sometimes at the supper table she’d remember things he said and did when he was little, and then she’d cry and have to get up and leave.

Grandpa never talked about it when she did. Her grief made him ashamed of his own. And he never mentioned the fight in the tobacco patch, because he was ashamed of that too, and embarrassed that he hadn’t been able to stop it. But Brother had been a satisfaction to him, and now and then he’d mention to Uncle Burley or me that Brother promised to have a better head on him than anybody in the family, saying it as if Brother was dead.

After we finished the tobacco harvest we harrowed the ground and sowed it in grain. Then we cut the fall hay crop and put it in the barn. In a day or two after that the first hard frost came. The good brittle days began. The trees turned brown and red and yellow and dropped their leaves, and wild geese flew over the house at night. Uncle Burley and I went out in the early mornings to hunt squirrels in the woods. If Brother had been there it would have been perfect. Uncle Burley and I talked about him a lot, remembering the other years when we’d hunted together.

We spent two weeks mending fences and doing other work that had to be done before the weather got cold. And after that we began the corn harvest. There was no letup in the work, and I was glad of it for Daddy’s sake. It kept him from worrying too much about Brother, and as long as he was busy he could take some pleasure in himself. He and Uncle Burley and I worked together, or swapped work with Gander or Big Ellis, watching the season change and planning the winter’s work. The cool weather made us feel good, and it was a pleasant time.

Winter set in. The first snow fell and melted, then it turned cold again and the ground froze hard and stayed frozen. We scooped the last of the corn into the crib on a Wednesday, and then slacked off work to rest before we started stripping the tobacco and getting it ready for market. And that Saturday, for the first time in a couple of months, Uncle Burley and I cleaned up after dinner and walked into town. It was clear and bright and beginning to thaw a little. We cut across the fields to the road, taking our time and looking at things. It hadn’t been winter long enough for us to be tired of it, and it felt good to be outside with the whole afternoon ahead of us. On the tops of the ridges the wind stung our faces and hummed in our ears, and when we went down into the hollows we could feel the warmth of the sun and it was quiet.

The grass on the hillside was brown, and the trees in the hollows were bare and black except for a few green patches of cedars. Now and then a rabbit jumped up ahead of us, and we’d find his snug nesting place in a clump of grass.

“It’ll be Christmas before we know it,” Uncle Burley said.

All at once I had the feeling I used to have when I was little, enjoying the newness of the winter and waiting for Christmas. Then I thought about Mother being dead and Brother gone away, and I lost the feeling.

“We’ll have to go coon hunting before long,” Uncle Burley said. “It’s getting about that time.”

I knew by the way he said it that the notion excited him. He always started hunting at about that time of year, and hunted almost every favorable night from then until the end of the winter. In the mornings when we went to work he’d talk about what a fool a man was to hunt half the night when he had to work the next day, and he’d swear he’d never go on a weeknight again. But by four o’clock in the afternoon he’d have the fever to hunt; and he’d usually go, by himself if the rest of us were too tired to go with him.

“If this thaw keeps up we’ll have good tracking for the dogs,” he said.

We walked the rest of the way to the road, planning what night we’d hunt. When we got to the road we saw Jig Pendleton coming up the hill toward us, and we stopped to wait for him.

Uncle Burley called, “Come on, Jig. We’ll walk in with you.”

Jig came up and said hello to us, and we went on toward town.

“You see that hand, Burley?” Jig said. He held his hand out for Uncle Burley to see.

“I see it, Jig.”

“It’s putrefied,” Jig said. He flapped along with his head tilted up sideways, as sober and dead serious as an undertaker.

“Well, it might be, Jig.”

Jig held out his other hand. “There now, Burley, can’t you tell the difference? That one ain’t. One of them’s good and the other one’s evil. One of them’s blessed and the other one’s damned.”

“You’re in a fix,” Uncle Burley said. “You tried a poultice on that bad one?”

“Now Burley, there ain’t but one poultice that’ll heal her. There ain’t but one poultice that’ll draw the corruption out of that hand. And that’s the poultice of the Holy Spirit.”

He’d stopped in the middle of the road and was beating the palm of the putrefied hand with the fist of the sound one. We saw that he was about to start into a sermon, so Uncle Burley said, “Got any nets in the river, Jig?”

Jig hushed and caught up with us. “Aw now, Burley, the water ain’t right. The water’s got to be right first.”

We kept him on fishing for a while, then he asked Uncle Burley how everybody was getting along at our house.

“All fine. We’re getting ready to start stripping tobacco the first of the week.”

“Tobacco,” Jig said. “I used to raise tobacco once. But I quit. I was plowing one morning, and the Lord said, ‘Jig, how’d you like for your daughter to smoke?’ And I said, ‘I wouldn’t like it, Lord. It’s a sin for a woman to smoke.’ And I unhitched the mule right there in the middle of the row, and I left.”

“You say you left?”

“Left,” Jig said. “I went to fishing then. You know that’s where He called them from. From fishing. One of these mornings He’ll come and stand on the riverbank and He’ll say, ‘Jig.’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes, Lord?’ And He’ll say, ‘Follow me, Jig.’ And I will arise and follow Him. Aw, He ain’t come yet. But He’s coming. He’s got to get my mansion ready first, but He’ll be here.”

Then Jig told us about Heaven. He said it was a million miles square and a million miles high, and every street was gold and every house was a mansion. And at night every star was brighter than the sun.

“Do you know why He made the stars?”

Uncle Burley said he didn’t know.

“He liked to hear them sing,” Jig said.

When we got to town Uncle Burley and I went into the poolroom, and Jig went on up the street to the grocery store. Inside the poolroom it was dark, except for the three green tables in a row down the middle of the floor with lights shining on them. We went past the counter and on to the center of the room, where half a dozen men were standing in a circle around the stove. Big Ellis and Gander Loyd were there, and they made room for us between them.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” Uncle Burley said. He held his hands over the top of the stove and rubbed them together. “That wind’s kind of brittle around the edges, ain’t she?”

“We haven’t seen you for a while, Burley,” Gander said. “Where you been keeping yourself?”

Big Ellis giggled. “We heard you were dead, Burley.”

“So did I,” Uncle Burley said. “But I knew it was a lie as soon as I heard it.”

They laughed, and then drifted into a conversation about who had started stripping tobacco and who hadn’t. They talked about what kind of season it promised to be for that work; and from there they went into an argument about the prospects for a good market that year.

After we got warmed up Uncle Burley and Big Ellis and I played two games of straight pool, and Uncle Burley won both of them. The games lasted a long time. All three of us were out of practice, and we were missing easy shots; but after he won the second game Uncle Burley said he guessed he might as well quit since the competition was so poor.

We went back to the stove and talked again. You couldn’t remember how the conversation started, or figure out why it should have got to where it was from the last subject you could remember. Now and then somebody buttoned his coat and left. And others came in, letting a cold draft through the door with them, and stood with us at the stove and smoked and talked. The talk shifted from weather to jokes to crops. The wind muffled at the corners of the building. The sound of the fire whipped in the stove like a flag.

Mushmouth Montgomery came in and stood by himself at the counter, eating cheese and crackers; the conversation slowed and hesitated as we turned to look at him and looked away. Since Chicken Little’s drowning Mushmouth’s face had changed—had turned hollow and blank as if his eyes had given up seeing. And in my memory of him Chicken Little’s face had changed the same way; I couldn’t remember how he’d looked when he was alive. Mushmouth’s face burdened us and quieted us as if we were seeing Chicken Little’s ghost. He didn’t stay in the poolroom long, and when he left the talk hurried again.

After a while we heard laughter and commotion in the street, and we went out to see what was happening. A crowd of men and boys had gathered at the edge of the sidewalk. They’d caught a stray dog and were tying a roman candle to his tail.

One of them lit the fuse and they turned him loose. The dog ran up the street with the roman candle fizzing behind him, shooting red and yellow and blue balls of fire under his tail. He stopped two or three times before he was out of sight and tried to catch his tail in his teeth, but then another ball of fire would hit him and send him howling off again. Everybody stood there on the sidewalk and laughed. I hated to think of anything being treated that way, and I was sorry I saw it. But every time one of those colored balls of fire flew out and hit the dog under the tail I had to laugh too. The idea of it was funny, and if it hadn’t hurt the dog it would have been all right.

As the crowd began to break up and go back into the stores we saw Brother coming across the street.

“Well, I’ll swear,” Uncle Burley said. “Look who’s here.”

We shook hands and laughed and clapped each other on the back. Uncle Burley caught Brother in his arms and held him off the ground, hugging him.

I hadn’t realized until then how much I’d missed him. I couldn’t think of anything glad enough to say.

Uncle Burley put Brother down. “How’re you doing, old boy?”

“All right,” Brother said.

We went into the poolroom and drank a Coke together while Brother told us about himself. Since he left home he’d been working for a man named Whitlow who owned a farm on the other side of the county. He said that Mr. Whitlow and his wife had treated him kindly, and they had fixed a room in their house for him. Mr. Whitlow had hired him to work by day through the fall and winter and had promised a crop of his own for the next year.

“Well, you’ve got a good place,” Uncle Burley said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

When we’d finished our Cokes we sat on a bench behind the stove and talked some more. Uncle Burley and I were relieved to have found Brother and to know he was all right. It felt familiar and good to be there with him, and I hated for the afternoon to pass.

We spoke of Daddy, and Brother didn’t seem to be mad at him anymore; but he said that he didn’t intend to come back to live with us. He wanted to stay on his own. He was saving his money and planning to buy a farm for himself.

He asked how Grandma and Grandpa were, and we talked about them for a while. And Uncle Burley and I told him how we were getting along in our work.

Finally Brother said it was time for him to start home. We walked along with him to where Mr. Whitlow’s car was parked. The sun was nearly down and there was more chill to the wind.

Uncle Burley turned his collar up and looked at the sky. “It’s going to be a coon hunting night,” he said.

Mr. Whitlow was standing beside his car when we got there; Brother introduced us and we stood around and talked a while with him. He told us that he thought he was lucky to find as good a hand as Brother, and that we’d be welcome at his house any time we wanted to come and visit. We promised we’d be over before long and we made Brother promise to come to see us.

“Write to your grandma,” Uncle Burley said.

They got into the car and drove away, and we were sad to see them go.

On our way home we went around by Daddy’s house to tell him our news. Nobody had mentioned Brother to him since their fight, and I felt embarrassed about it now. I dreaded it a little.

It was dark when we came into his yard, and a light was on in the kitchen. We went around the house and called to him from the back door. He answered us and we went in. He was sitting at the table with his supper dishes empty in front of him, eating a piece of corn bread. We pulled out chairs and sat down; and Uncle Burley began telling him about Brother, where he was and what he was doing and what his plans were and what kind of people he was living with. Daddy didn’t say anything while Uncle Burley was talking. He sat there looking at his plate and taking a bite off the corn bread now and then.

When Uncle Burley had finished I said, “He’s not mad at you anymore.”

And then Daddy cried. He didn’t say that he was glad Brother wasn’t mad at him, or that he was sorry for their fight. He just sat there, looking at his plate and chewing on a bite of corn bread, with tears running down his cheeks.

I could have cried myself. Brother was gone, and he wouldn’t be back. And things that had been so before never would be so again. We were the way we were; nothing could make us any different, and we suffered because of it. Things happened to us the way they did because we were ourselves. And if we’d been other people it wouldn’t have mattered. If we’d been Mushmouth or Jig Pendleton or that dog with the roman candle tied to his tail, it would have been the same; we’d have had to suffer whatever it was that they suffered because they were themselves. And there was nothing anybody could do but let it happen.

We left Daddy sitting at the table and started home.

“It’s bad,” Uncle Burley said. “It’s bad.” After a minute he said, “We’re going to have a fair night. Let’s you and me hunt a while.”

We hurried through our chores and went to the house. Grandma had supper waiting for us when we came into the kitchen, and Grandpa had already finished eating and turned his chair to the stove. We ate, and Uncle Burley told them we’d seen Brother. They listened while he told them all that Brother had told us.

When he quit talking Grandma said, “And he’s not coming home?”

“No,” Uncle Burley said.

Grandpa got up then and went into the living room. And Grandma filled the dishpan with water and set it on the stove.

“We thought we’d hunt tonight,” Uncle Burley told her.

She nodded, keeping her face turned away from us.

Uncle Burley went upstairs and got his rifle and flashlight and I lit the lantern. We went out the back door and called the dogs. They came, wagging their tails and whining, knowing when they saw the rifle in Uncle Burley’s hands that we were going to hunt. There were two of them—Sawbuck and Joe. Uncle Burley let them rear against him. He rubbed their faces and spoke their names.

We walked down the hill toward the woods on the river bluff. Behind us the walls of the house were dark; the lighted windows shone as if they were floating and might twist or slant or change places. On the next ridge a light was still burning in Daddy’s house.

When we came to the brow of the hill and saw the house lights scattered through the river bottoms, it wasn’t the place of daytime or our memories, but only a distance filled up with night where a few lights burned, the woods and the hunt dividing us from them.

“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “they’ll grieve in this old land until you’d think they were going to live on it forever, then grieve some more because they know damn well they’re not going to live on it forever. And nothing’ll stop them but a six-foot hole.”

When we went into the woods the dogs trotted off ahead of us, and we walked in the room of light the lantern made, our shadows striding tall against the trunks of the trees. The light was an island, drifting until the dogs would strike a track and give us a direction.

We walked slowly, stopping now and then to listen, moving along the face of the bluff toward the creek valley. After a while Joe bayed a time or two down near the creek. And then the quietness settled around us again and we heard the wind in the tops of the trees. We climbed higher on the bluff so we could hear better, and went on toward the point where the creek valley came into the valley of the river. We crossed the point and climbed down to the edge of the woods on the other side, then squatted on our heels by the lantern and listened to the dogs.

First one of them and then the other crossed the trail and bayed, then lost it, and the quiet came down into the valley again.

Uncle Burley shifted his feet a little, and his hunched shadow swayed against the trees behind him. “They may finally straighten it out.”

The dogs worked the trail until it got warm, and then they bayed up the hillside across the valley, running fast and mouthing at every jump, their voices hacking through the dark.

“That sounds more like it,” Uncle Burley said.

We started down the hill, taking our time and listening. When we got to the creek bottom the dogs had gone almost out of earshot. We stood still for a few minutes, straining to hear them above the sound of our breath.

“They’re treed, aren’t they?” I said.

“If they’re not they’re good liars,” Uncle Burley said.

They’d followed a draw out of the bottom all the way to the top of the bluff; and we went up after them, climbing where the streambed stair-stepped down the hill.

We found them treed at a thick-trunked old hickory on the side of the draw. Uncle Burley leaned the rifle against a stump and turned the flashlight up into the branches. We walked around the tree, searching until we saw the coon sitting humpbacked in the fork of a long limb, his eyes glowing in the light.

“There’s plenty of limbs all the way up,” Uncle Burley said. “You can climb up and shake him out, and we’ll let one of the dogs have him.”

I set the lantern down and climbed, feeling my way up in the dark while Uncle Burley held the light on the coon. The dogs whined and barked, trotting back and forth under the tree.

I got to the limb where the coon was and eased out on it, holding to the limb above my head. Uncle Burley caught Sawbuck by the collar and moved down the hill. He called Joe into the place where the coon would fall, and I shook the limb.

Joe was on the coon by the time he hit the ground, and they went growling and snarling down the slope toward Uncle Burley. He held the light on them, following them where they rolled and fought in the leaves. The ground was too steep for Joe to get a foothold, and the coon was having a fairly easy time of it. He’d wrapped himself around Joe’s head, and Joe couldn’t stand up long enough to shake him loose. Sawbuck howled and reared against the collar, trying to get into the fight; and Uncle Burley slid and plunged after him, trying to hold him out of it. The coon kept his hold on Joe’s head as if he’d decided to spend the night there; and Joe bucked and rolled and somersaulted through the underbrush, the leaves flying up around them. Sawbuck jerked Uncle Burley off balance, and the two of them scrambled in with Joe and the coon. I saw Uncle Burley’s hat fly off, and then the beam of his flashlight began switching around so fast that I couldn’t tell what was happening. I could only hear them crashing farther down the hillside, Uncle Burley yelling, and the dogs growling, and the coon hissing and snarling—the beam of light flickering and darting this way and that through the trees like lightning flashes.

Then the light steadied and I saw Uncle Burley dragging Sawbuck out of the fight. Joe caught the coon behind the forelegs and held. That was all of it.

“Whoo,” Uncle Burley said.

He picked up the coon and found his hat, then turned the light up into the tree to help me down. The dogs trotted off into the woods again. Uncle Burley slung the coon over his shoulder and I took the rifle and lantern; we climbed to the top of the bluff and started across the ridge.

We were walking parallel to the river again, the valley dark on our left, and three or four miles behind us a few lights were still burning in town. It was easier walking on the ridge, and there were a lot of stars. But the wind was strong up there, and cold. We could hear it moving through the grass and rattling in the woods below us.

At the top of the ridge we went through an old graveyard. When we’d gone halfway across it Uncle Burley stopped and told me to bring the lantern closer. He pointed to a set of false teeth lying on the edge of a groundhog hole that ran down into one of the graves. “God Almighty,” he said.

He picked up the teeth and we looked at them. They were covered with dirt and one of the eyeteeth was broken off. “I wonder who these belonged to.” He took the flashlight out of his coat and turned it on the headstone, but it was so badly weathered we couldn’t read the name. He dropped the teeth back into the hole and kicked some dirt in after them, and we went on toward the woods on the far side of the ridge.

“We’re all dying to get there,” Uncle Burley said.

After we killed the first coon things were slow for a long time. We went into the woods again and sat down. Once in a while we’d hear the dogs, their voices flaring up as they fumbled at a cold trail, then quiet again while we waited and talked beside the lantern. Finally we got cold and built a fire, and Uncle Burley lay down beside it and slept. He woke up every time one of the dogs mouthed; but when they lost the trail and hushed, he turned his cold side to the fire and went back to sleep. I watched the flames crawl along the sticks until they glowed red and crumbled into the ashes, then piled on more. It was quiet. The country was dark and filled with wind. And in the houses on the ridges behind us and below us in the river bottoms the people were asleep.

About midnight the dogs started a hot track and ran it down the hillside, and treed finally out in the direction of the river. We went to them. They were treed at a white oak that was too tall and too big around to climb. So I held the flashlight over Uncle Burley’s rifle sights and on the coon, and he shot it.

After that he said he was ready to call it a night if I was, and I said I was. We were a long way from home, and since Jig Pendleton’s shanty boat was tied up just across the bottom we decided to go and spend the rest of the night with him.

The boat was dark when we got there. We stopped at the top of the bank and quieted the dogs.

Uncle Burley called, “Oh, Jig.”

“I’m coming, Lord,” Jig said.

We heard him scuffling and clattering around trying to get a lamp lighted.

“It’s Burley and Nathan,” Uncle Burley said.

The shanty windows lighted up and Jig came out the door in his long underwear and rubber boots, carrying a lamp in his hand.

Uncle Burley laughed. “Jig, if the Lord ever comes and sees you in that outfit, He’ll turn around and go back.”

“Aw, no He won’t, Burley. The Lord looketh on the heart.” Jig stood there shivering with the wind blowing through his hair. “You all come on down.”

We went down to the boat, the dogs trotting after us across the plank.

“We thought we’d spend the night with you, Jig,” Uncle Burley said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Why, God bless you, Burley, of course you can,” Jig said. He asked us if we’d like some hot coffee.

Uncle Burley said we sure would if he didn’t mind fixing it. Jig built up the fire in his stove and put the coffee on to boil, and Uncle Burley and I sat down on the side of the boat to skin the coons.

When we finished the skinning, we cut one of the carcasses in two and gave a half of it to each of the dogs. They ate and then curled up beside the door and licked themselves and slept. The coffee was ready by that time. We washed our hands in the river and went inside, ducking under the strings of Jig’s machine.

The coffee was black and strong; we sat at the table drinking out of the thick white cups and feeling it warm us. Jig asked how our hunt had been, and Uncle Burley told him about it, Jig nodding his head as he listened and then asking exactly where the dogs had treed. When Uncle Burley named the place he’d nod his head again. “The big white oak. I know that tree. I know the one you’re talking about, Burley.”

Then Jig mentioned that ducks had been coming in on the slue for the last couple of days. They talked about duck hunting for a while, and Uncle Burley said we’d cross the river early in the morning and try our luck.

Jig gave us a quilt apiece when we’d finished our coffee. We filled the stove with wood and stretched out on the floor beside it. Jig sat at the table reading the Bible for a few minutes, then he blew out the lamp, and we slept.

Uncle Burley woke me the next morning while it was still dark. The lamp was burning on the table again, and Jig was making us another pot of coffee. It seemed darker and quieter outside the windows than it had been when we went to sleep. While we drank the coffee a towboat passed down the river, its engine humming and pounding under the darkness.

Uncle Burley borrowed Jig’s shotgun and a pocketful of shells.

“There ought to be plenty of ducks up there,” Jig said. “I expect you’ll have luck, Burley.”

We led the dogs up the bank and tied them to trees, and went over to the slue. The air was cold and brittle, the sky still full of stars. A heavy frost had fallen toward morning; the ground was white with it, and our breath hung white around our heads. When we got away from the trees that grew along the riverbank the wind hit us in the face, making our eyes water. We buttoned our collars and walked fast, hurrying the sleep out of our bones.

We got to the slue and made ourselves as comfortable as we could in a thick patch of willows near the water. Uncle Burley smoked, and we waited, hearing the roosters crow in the barns and henhouses across the bottoms. The sky brightened a little in the east; and we could make out the shape of the slue, the water turning gray as the sky turned, the air above it threaded with mist. While it was still too dark to shoot, four or five ducks came in. Their wings whistled over our heads, and we saw the splashes they made as they hit the water.

The sun came up, the day-color sliding over the tops of the hills; and we heard Gander Loyd calling his milk cows. Then a big flock of mallards circled over our heads and came down.

Uncle Burley raised the gun and waited, and when they flew into range he shot. His shoulder jerked with the kick of the gun, and one of the ducks folded up and fell, spinning down into the shallow water in front of us. Uncle Burley grinned. “That’s the way to do it,” he said.

He reloaded the gun and we waited again, watching the sky. The rest of the morning the flocks came in, their wings whistling, wheeling in the sunlight down to the water. And the only thing equal to them was their death.

Chapter 5

AFTER UNCLE BURLEY and I saw Brother in town at the beginning of the winter, he came home every two or three Sundays to eat dinner and spend the afternoon with us. When we’d finished eating all of us sat around the table and talked a while, then Uncle Burley and Brother and I usually went out to hunt rabbits or wander around together and look at things. We always enjoyed ourselves when Brother was there, and we began to think of him as part of the family again.

When Daddy and Brother were together they were friendly, but they never had much to say to each other. In the months that had gone by since their fight Brother had got to be his own man. He wasn’t asking any of us for anything, and that made a difference. While he’d been a boy living with us at home he and Daddy had known how to think about each other. They had known themselves in Daddy’s authority. But their fight had ended that; and the old feeling had been too strong and had lasted too many years to allow them ever to know each other in a different way. They were always a little uncomfortable when they tried to talk to each other. Still I could see that both of them were relieved when they were on speaking terms again.

We finished stripping the tobacco crop in the first week of January and shipped the last truckload to the market. And from then until the last of February the cold days came one after another without a thaw. Grandpa said it was the hardest winter he’d ever seen. And for him it was. It seemed to us that every day of the cold left him older and weaker. He could never get warm enough. While we kept ourselves busy feeding the stock and cutting and hauling wood to burn on the plant beds in the spring, he sat in the house bundled up in a sheepskin coat, throwing coal into the stove and poking the fire with his cane until it roared.

When spring came and the warm days began he didn’t get stronger as we’d thought he would. Daddy and Uncle Burley and I put out the crops and plowed them and looked after them through the spring and early summer, but Grandpa didn’t go to the field with us as often as he always had. He still got up every morning before daylight, but more and more often when we went to work we’d find him asleep again, sitting in the sun in front of the barn. And he began talking about his death.

One day he told Daddy, “I reckon another twenty years’ll see me out.” That got to be a kind of byword with us. Daddy or Uncle Burley would repeat it while we were at work, and we’d laugh.

Another day when the four of us were sitting in the door of the barn watching it rain, he pointed toward a corner of the lot and said, “When I die I want you to bury me there.”

Uncle Burley laughed and told him, “You’ve got to go farther away from here than that.”

He never mentioned it often, and he tried to keep from showing that he grieved about it. But talking about his own death was a new thing for him, and it saddened us.

It seemed to us that we’d never thought of him before as a man who would die. He never had thought of himself in that way. Until that year, although he’d cursed his weakness and his age, he’d either ignored the idea of his death or had refused to believe in it. He’d only thought of himself as living. But now that he finally admitted that he would die we thought about it too. We couldn’t get used to the feeling it gave us to go to work in the mornings without him. He stayed in our minds, and on the days when we left him sleeping at the barn we talked about him more than anything else. We wished he could have enjoyed his sleep now that he was old and nobody expected him to be at work. But he always woke up bewildered and ashamed of himself, and we felt sorry for him.

Uncle Burley was more troubled by the change in Grandpa than any of us. Daddy and Grandpa had argued and fallen out at times, but that had happened because the two of them were alike. They had fought when their minds crossed because they were stubborn and proud, and because they couldn’t have respected themselves if they hadn’t fought. And Daddy had made himself respectable on Grandpa’s terms. But Grandpa and Uncle Burley were as different as he and Daddy were alike. They never had been at peace with each other, and there never had been any chance that they would be. Their lives had run in opposite directions from the day Uncle Burley was born. Grandpa’s life had been spent in owning his land and in working on it, the same way Daddy was spending his. But Uncle Burley had refused to own anything. When he was young he worked only because he had to, and Grandpa never had forgiven him for it. They’d been able to live together in the same place mostly by being quiet, and because Grandma and Daddy had stood between them. And although Uncle Burley was a kind man and had as much need to be sorry for Grandpa as Daddy and I, he didn’t have a right to. That embarrassed him, and when he wasn’t able to joke about it he didn’t say anything.

One morning toward the end of July Grandpa rode with us on the wagon to help Gander Loyd put in a field of hay. We’d been held up nearly a week by wet weather; and when it had cleared off two days before, Daddy had helped Gander mow the field. The air was still fresh and clear from the rain, and as we started down to Gander’s place we could hear other wagons all around us rattling out to the fields—everybody behind in his work and hurrying.

A heavy dew had fallen, covering the trees and bushes along the sides of the road, and the sun glittered on the wet leaves. The mules were skittish and Daddy leaned back against the lines. They set their heads high and pranced sideways.

“I’ll cure you of that nonsense when I get a load behind you,” Daddy told them.

Uncle Burley stood up, slack-kneed against the jolt of the wagon, and rolled a cigarette, singing,

“Down along the woodland, through the hills and by the shore,

“You can hear the rattle, the rumble and the roar . . .”

After he rolled the cigarette he lit it and sat down again, dangling his feet over the edge of the hay frame.

Grandpa sat beside us, watching the land open in front of the wagon and close behind it, his eyes on it as if it had some movement that only he knew about and could see. The land was what he knew, and it comforted him to look at it. Since he’d been too old to work we’d noticed that he spent more and more of his time watching it, forgetting what was going on around him. Now and then he turned away from it to speak to us of his death, as if hearing himself talk about it could make it real, and turned back to his watching again to be comforted. His hands held the cane across his lap, the skin brown and thin over the knuckles and blue veins.

When we pulled into the hayfield Gander was already there with his team hitched to the rake. “It’s too wet,” he called to us when we stopped. “We’ll have to wait for the dew to dry off.”

He and Daddy walked across the field together, picking up wisps of hay and twisting them in their hands to test the moisture. After they came back we sat on the wagon and talked. Once in a while Gander or Daddy got up to see if the hay had dried, but it was past ten o’clock before we could begin work.

Gander drove the rake, putting the hay in windrows. And Daddy and Uncle Burley and I followed him with pitchforks, shocking it. We sweated; the wind blew dust and chaff into our faces and down our necks, and it stuck to the sweat and stung. Now and then we’d see a meadowlark fly up and whistle—a clear cool sound, like water—and drop back into the stubble.

Before long Uncle Burley began to sing. He’d gather a fork load of hay and as he lifted it onto the shock sing, “Ohhhhhhh, ‘down along the woodland . . .’ ” And as he strained at the fork again: “Ohhhhhhh, ‘through the hills and by the shore . . .’ ”

“You must be happy,” Daddy said.

“I was thinking about the good old days,” Uncle Burley said, “when I was a teamster for Barnum and Bailey’s circus. You didn’t know about that, did you?”

“Never heard of it before,” Daddy said.

Uncle Burley had invented the story about driving a team for Barnum and Bailey to tell to Brother and me when we were little, and all of us had heard it a hundred times. But when the work got hard he’d usually tell it again to make us laugh, and because he enjoyed hearing it himself. He said he’d driven a team of eight black horses with silver harness and red plumes on their bridles. His team had drawn the calliope at the head of all the parades, and it had been a glorious sight. He told about the girl bareback riders on their white horses and the tightrope walkers and the trapeze men and the lion tamers. Finally he got fired, he said, because he whipped one of the elephants singlehanded in a fair fight. He tied the elephant’s trunk to his tail and ran him around in a circle until he passed out from dizziness. Barnum and Bailey told him that he was the best teamster they’d ever had, but they just couldn’t stand for him mistreating their elephants.

Daddy said he supposed it must make Uncle Burley awfully sad at times to have such fine memories of his past.

Uncle Burley shook his head. “I tell you, back in those days when I had three flunkies to polish my black boots and brush my red forked-tail coat, I never would have believed that I’d end up here, sweating on the handle of a pitchfork. It’s enough to make a grown man cry.”

While we worked Grandpa sat in the shade at the edge of the field, nodding off to sleep, and waking up to carry us a fresh jug of water when we needed one.

“Look at him sleep,” Uncle Burley said. “He’s living the good life, ain’t he? When I get that old I want somebody to wake me up every once in a while just so I can go back to sleep again.”

“I reckon so,” Daddy said.

“I reckon so. Sleep and fish. That’s all I’ll do. I’ll switch back and forth from maple shade to sycamore shade. And when it’s chilly I’ll sleep in the sun.”

Gander called dinnertime. We fed and watered the teams and went to the house. Gander filled the washpans with water and we washed our hands, then sat at the kitchen table while Mandy Loyd brought the food to us. She was young enough to have been Gander’s daughter—slender and well made, and always smiling though she never talked much when we were there. It seemed strange to me that she could have married anybody as old and ugly and one-eyed as Gander. And he must have wondered about it too, because he was jealous of her and he kept her at home most of the time. It made him uncomfortable to have other men in his house; when we ate dinner with him he always clammed up, and nobody ever felt free to joke or laugh. We ate without talking except to ask for the food, feeling as uncomfortable as Gander, and hurrying to finish the meal. Only Grandpa felt free enough to compliment Mandy on her cooking. And she smiled and thanked him.

We went back to work, and Grandpa sat in the shade again, and slept, and woke up to bring us water.

“I wish he’d stay awake,” Uncle Burley said. “It makes the shade look too cool and good when I see him sleeping in it.”

In the middle of the afternoon when Grandpa was bringing the jug from the well we saw him stagger a little. He steadied himself with the cane and came on; but when he handed the jug to us and Daddy asked him if he was all right he said he’d had a dizzy spell. He looked pale, and it would be a long time before we could quit for the day, so Daddy told me to walk home with him.

He told Grandpa that Uncle Burley had broken the handle out of his pitchfork and he was sending me to get another one. “Do you want to go along with Nathan? You’ll feel better when you get home and rest a while.”

Grandpa said he’d go with me, and we started up the hill, stopping every couple of hundred yards for him to rest. Once when we stopped he said, “An old man’s not worth a damn. He might as well be knocked in the head.”

He rested, and we went on again. He climbed the hill almost as fast as a young man, ashamed that I had to wait on him, until the tiredness caught up with him and he had to stop to rest.

When we came up out of the woods, the bottom spread out below us, and I could look back into Gander’s hayfield where they were loading one of the wagons. From that distance the three men looked like dolls, but I could tell them apart: Daddy on top of the load, taking the hay as they pitched it to him, placing it and tramping on it; Gander leaning backward against the weight of his loaded fork, his head tilted, favoring the good eye; Uncle Burley making the whole thing into as much of a joke as the heat and strain of the work would allow, the joke ready in the set of his shoulders and in the way he walked from one shock to another as the wagon moved across the field. On the other side of the river the hills were blue, as if the sky came down in front of them.

When we got to Grandpa’s spring we stopped to drink.

The water of the spring came from a notch in the rock just under the brow of the hill, and the land sloped steeply around it. The grove of oaks that stood there made the hollow a kind of room where it was always shady and cool in summer, filled with the sound of water running.

Grandpa sat on a ledge of the rock, and I dipped the drinking cup full of water and carried it to him. He drank, then held the cup in his hands, looking at the spring.

“That’s a good vein of water,” he said. “Nobody ever knew it to go dry.”

I thought of the spring running there all the time, while the Indians hunted the country and while our people came and took the land and cleared it; and still running while Grandpa’s grandfather and his father got old and died. And running while Grandpa drank its water and waited his turn. When I thought of it that way I knew I was waiting my turn too. But that didn’t seem real. It was too far away to think about. And I saw how it would have been unreal to Grandpa for so long, and how it must have grieved him when it had finally come close enough to be known.

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn’t be divided from the days he’d spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn’t know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn’t recognize the country when he was dead.

After he rested we started toward the house again. We got to the top of the slope above the spring, and Grandpa stopped, holding the cane off the ground, his mouth open, staring off in the direction of the house.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

Then he fell. He hit the ground limp, and the wind caught his hat and rolled it down the hill.

I straightened him out and knelt beside him, rubbing his hands and speaking to him. But I couldn’t bring him to. The wind whistled through the grass, and the sky was hot and blue, too quiet and lonely to let him die.

I called his name, but he didn’t stir. I picked him up in my arms and I carried him home.

Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows (1930)

YOU WOULD think a fellow whose paunch was bigger than his ass would take the precaution of underdrawers. Or suspenders. Or bib overalls. Big Ellis didn’t, of course. He never thought of precautions until too late. After it was too late he could always tell you what the right precaution would have been if only he had thought of it. “Burley,” he would say, “I see the point. I’ve got my sights dead on it.” But he saw it going away, from behind. And so when he was a young man, and had grown to his full girth, his pants as a rule were either half on or he was holding them with one hand to keep them from falling off.

Big was late getting married. Marriage was a precaution he didn’t think of until his mother died and left him alone to cook and housekeep for himself. And then he really began to hear the call of matrimony.

He was quite a dancer in his young days. You would think at first it was the funniest thing you ever saw. The fiddle music would carry him clean out of his head, and there he would be, swinging his partner like she didn’t weigh anything, with his hair in his eyes, his shirttail half out, sweating like a horse, his pants creeping down, and that one hand from time to time jerking them back up. But if you paid attention to him, you would soon see that he really was a dancer. He was a smooth mover, a big man but light on his feet. His feet had ways of going about their business as if he himself didn’t know what they were up to. They were answering the music, you see, and not just the caller. He could really step it off. He could cut a shine.

He did all right in his socializing until he got his eye set on a girl, and then he would get shy and awkward and tongue-tied. He would figure then that he needed to get her cornered in some clever and mannerly way that would be beyond his abilities. And he would come up with some of the damnedest, longest-way-around schemes such as nobody ever thought of before and were always well worth knowing about. He edged up to a girl one time at the Fourth of July and said, “I know a girl’s about the prettiest thing ever I looked at,” and was struck dumb when she said, “Who?” He wrote one a love letter in his outrageous pencil-writing and signed it “A Friend.” He brought one a live big catfish and held it out to her like it was gold-plated, and never offered so much as to skin it. Those times, I have to say, he was not very serious. What he had in his mind then was sport. As you might call it.

When he began to shine up to Annie May Cordle with the honorable intention of marrying her if she would have him, he outdid himself for judgment. She was about as near the right match for him as he could have found. But he went about the business as perfectly hind-end-foremost as you would have expected. For a while he just hung around her every time he got a chance, looking as big-eyed and solemn as a dying calf. If she looked at him or said anything to him, he turned red and grinned with more teeth than a handsaw and hitched up his pants with both hands.

After he got his crop sold that winter, Big did what he usually would do. He took it in his head to trade off the team of mules he already had, maybe adding a few dollars to boot, for a better team. He always thought he got “a good deal” on “a better team,” and that was why he never in his life owned a team that was better than passable. In fact he was too big-hearted and generous, especially if he’d had a drink or two, to be any account at all as a trader. Somebody always took his old team and his money, and he wound up with a team just a teensy bit better or worse than what he had before. And so of course he was always wanting to trade.

By springtime sure enough he had his new team, a rabbity pair of three-year-old red mules, not above fifteen hands. Dick and Buck. They sort of matched, and he was proud of them, though they were not hardly what you would call well broke.

The weather got warm. We needed rain, and then we got a showery day that was about what the doctor ordered and made us feel good. The next day it faired up. The ground being too wet to work and the day fine, I walked over to Big’s to see what I could put him up to. He was a good one to wander about with on such a day. He was a good companion, always ready for whatever you needed him for. I thought we might drop down to the river and fish a while, maybe.

But when I got to his place he was hitching his new team to the sled. He was going to take a bunch of broken tools to the blacksmith shop in town to get them fixed. It was never any trouble at Big’s to find broken tools, which wasn’t because he worked all that hard. He just used things hard, or he used them for purposes they weren’t meant for. He treated wood the same as steel. He had piled onto the sled a plow with a broken handle, a hoe with a broken handle, a grubbing hoe with no handle, a broken doubletree, and other such, too big a load to take in his old car.

“Why don’t you use the wagon?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “I forgot. Here. Hold the lines a minute.”

He went into the wagon shed and came back rolling a wagon wheel with two broken spokes.

So there was nothing for it but the sled, which wasn’t the best vehicle on a gravel road, and with no tongue, behind a team the least bit touchous. And especially that little Buck mule, if I had pegged him right, was just waiting for a good reason to demonstrate his speed. He was the reason Big asked me to hold the lines while he went to get the wagon wheel.

Big had left himself a place to stand in amongst the load. I made myself a place and turned up a five-gallon bucket to sit on. Big told the mules to come up, gave the lines a little flip, and we started off with pretty much of a jerk.

When we hit the gravel, which we would be on all the way to town, you could see that both mules became deeply concerned. They got into a little jiggling trot and backed their ears so as not to miss anything that might be gaining on them. And the runners did screech and batter something awful. But Big was stout enough to hold them and two more like them, if his old lines and bridles held together. Just looking at the back of him, I could see how pleased he was with his team, showing spirit the way they were. And they matched, you know. To some people, and Big was one, a bad team that matches is better than a good team that don’t.

So we went stepping pretty lively into Port William. I unloaded the sled at the blacksmith shop while Big kept hold of the lines. And then we started back. There was no chance of loafing a while in town, for the mules couldn’t be trusted to stand tied. One backfire from somebody’s automobile and they might’ve disappeared off like two mosquitoes.

But when we got to the mouth of our lane, Big drove right on by. I saw then what he had on his mind. His real business for that morning wasn’t to take a bunch of broken tools to town. He was going on out by the Cordles’ place. If Annie May was where she could see, she was going to have the benefit of a look at that well-matched, high-spirited team of mules, and of old Big standing there holding the lines, calm as George Washington, everything under control.

The trouble was, by the time we were closing in on the Cordles’, after the extra mile or so, the mules had lost their fine edge. They had worn down to a civilized manner of doing business. They were walking along, nodding their heads and letting their ears wag like a seasoned team. Looked like they both together didn’t have an ounce of drama left in ’em, and the large impression Big was wanting to make had fallen by the wayside.

So without making a sudden motion I got on my knees and skimmed up a rock about the size of a pocket watch and settled back onto my bucket.

Big, among other things, was a lucky creature. For when we came in sight of the Cordles’ house down in the pretty little swale where their farm was, there was Annie May, sure enough, looking sweet as a rose, right out on the front porch. She was churning, working the dasher up and down at a steady gait. She looked patient, gazing off at the sky. Maybe the butter was slow to come and she had been at it a while.

I was wanting to help Big all I could, of course. I waited until I was sure Annie May had seen us coming, until we could almost hear the dasher chugging in the churn, and then I shied that little rock almost under the Buck mule’s tail where he felt it the most.

He lost no time in taking offense. He clamped his tail down and humped up in the back, which notified the Dick mule that the end of the world was at hand. They shot off both at once like their tails were afire.

I swear I had no idea I was going to need a handhold as quick as I did. Just as I was starting backwards off of my bucket, I grabbed a double handful of Big’s pants, and down they came.

He said very conversationally, “Burley Coulter, damn your impudent hide.”

But he stood to his work. He had to, of course. He made the drive past the Cordles’ as magnificent as you please, proudly and calmly in control of his spirited team that was plunging on the bits, with his pants down around his ankles and his shirttail flying out behind. As we went past, I glanced up at Annie May and, so help me Jesus, she was smiling and waving—a good-hearted, patient, forgiving, well-fleshed girl, just right for Big.

Well, old Big did keep his team in hand. He never let them out of a short lope. Pretty soon he stopped them and got his pants back up more or less where they belonged, and took the long way home so he wouldn’t have to pass the Cordles’ again. He never looked at me or said a word. He wasn’t speaking.

But when we finally got back to his place and had put away the mules, which were a good deal better broke by then, I felt obliged to have a serious talk with him.

“Big,” I said, “you’re going to have to ask that woman to marry you, after you’ve done showed yourself to her the way you have.”

You couldn’t beat him for good nature. He just grinned, clean back to his ears. He said, “All right. I reckon I will.”

So he was speaking to me again. And afterwards he told me all about it. He was giggling, red in the face, and absolutely tickled almost to death.

He gave up all his clever notions about courting, and was forthright. When he saw Annie May in town next time, he said, “Come here. I want to talk to you.”

She followed him out of earshot of the other people, and he said, “Well, you’ve done had a look at my private life. Don’t you reckon me and you ought to get married?”

She looked straight back at him and laughed. She laughed right into his face like the good old gal she was.

She said, “I would like to know why not!”

Thicker than Liquor (1930)

WHEN THE telephone rang, Wheeler Catlett was thinking about his future. Not that he knew much about it. The future was going to surprise him, as it had surprised all his mothers and fathers before him, but he had hopes. He had come back from his eastern law school four years ago, set himself up as a lawyer in two upstairs rooms overlooking the courthouse square in Hargrave, and increased his yearly income from nearly nothing to almost a living, with prospects for improvement. And now he was a married man with a future that needed thinking about.

Between his own hard times and those of the nation, Wheeler had grown familiar with the scarcity of money—indeed, as the son of a struggling small farmer, he had never known an abundance of it—and the present year of drouth and depression certainly offered no promise of financial astonishment. But he had worked hard, been careful, paid attention, lost no time, wasted nothing, and in spite of the hard times, he now and again had a few small bills to rub together. And that was partly what he was thinking about: the heartwarming friction of one piece of legal tender against another. These were not thoughts that could be considered mercenary; he had no yearning for mere money in a pile. He was thirty years old, he had been married just under a month, and money, for him, was as symbolic as it should be. His need for it tended as much toward substantiality as did his love for his bride. He was thinking about a home of his own, a place of his own. He liked his thoughts—which were, in fact, visions of Bess as happy as she deserved to be—and that was why he let the phone ring three times before he answered.

“I’m trying to get hold of Mr. Wheeler Catlett.”

“This is Wheeler Catlett speaking.”

“Mr. Catlett, this is the desk at the Stag Hotel in Louisville. We have a message for you from Mr. Leonidas Wheeler, who is staying here.”

“Well, what’s the message?”

“He says to tell you that he’s sick, and he has no way to get home.”

“Is he drunk?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. And, ah, his situation with respect to his bill appears to be somewhat embarrassing.”

“I’ll bet it is.” Wheeler looked at his watch. “All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

He hung up, and then rang and asked for his home number.

“Hello,” Bess said.

“Would this be the beautiful young widder Catlett?”

“Herself. What did he die of?”

“Love, of course.”

“For me?”

“For you.”

“Well, wasn’t that sweet!”

“Bess, my star client, Uncle Peach, requires my services at Louisville.”

“Oh goodness! Is Uncle Peach having one of his attacks?”

“He’s about down to the lower side of one, it sounds like. I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

“I’ll expect you when I see you?”

“I’m afraid so, Bess. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll miss you. Give my love to Uncle Peach.”

“I don’t think I will,” Wheeler said.

When he had hung up, he sat still for a minute to think, and then he counted the few doomed bills that he had in his wallet.

Wheeler’s earliest associations with Uncle Peach were among his privileges. In those days, when he was sober, and Wheeler only knew him sober in those days, Uncle Peach was a good-looking, good-humored man who could be charmingly attentive to a small boy. He was the first man Wheeler wanted to be like when he grew up.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” his father asked him. It was after supper, and Wheeler was sitting in his father’s lap by the kitchen stove.

“I want to be like Uncle Peach.”

His father laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned! You do, do you?”

And his mother said quietly, “Marce.”

And then one night—it must not have been long after that, Wheeler must not have been more than five—he was waked up by a commotion in the house, and when he went to see what it was, he met his mother coming out of the spare bedroom, carrying a lamp.

“Go back to bed. Uncle Peach is sick.”

“What’s he got?”

“He’s having one of his spells. Go back to bed, now, like I told you.”

But he did not go back to bed. He went into the spare room where his mother had left Uncle Peach.

Uncle Peach had all his clothes off down to his underwear. “Hello, Wheeler boy,” he said. “Uncle Peach is sick. Uncle Peach been going at a fast pace through the thorns and thistles that the ground has brought forth.” And then he said, “Oh, me!”

Uncle Peach was standing in the middle of the floor, aiming at the bed, his feet wandering here and there and the rest of him staying mainly still.

“It’s coming around!” he said. And he watched the bed and said again, “It’s coming around!”

He made a mighty leap then toward the bed, but it was coming around too fast and he missed. He landed in the corner by the washstand, and lay there the way he fell, with his arms and legs strewn around him. Wheeler’s mother came running back into the room. “Oh, Peach!” she said, in a way Wheeler had never heard her talk before. “What is ever to become of you?”

And Uncle Peach said, “Sing ‘Yellow Rose o’ Texas’ to me, madam.”

Uncle Peach was Dorie Catlett’s trial. He was her baby brother. Their mother died when Peach was born, when Dorie, the oldest child, was thirteen. Their father never remarried. The story was that Andrew Wheeler had to take Peach to the field with him to plow when Peach was still a baby in arms. Andrew would take off his coat at the field edge, and spread it on the ground with his purse and all his money in one of its pockets and Peach asleep on top of it. Andrew’s brother, James, would say later that if a thief had stolen Peach and all the money and left the coat, Andrew would have had the best of the trade. That was a story that Wheeler had often heard his mother tell. And she always quoted Uncle James and laughed, and then said, “Hmh!” not in refusal, Wheeler thought, but simply in dismissal; it was a judgment that she understood but did not find possible. She had had much of the raising of Peach, and he was her failure, or so she felt.

He never married, for the reason, according to him, that he could never accomplish a short courtship; no woman who came to know him well enough to make up her mind about him would make it up in his favor. And so his dependence on Dorie continued. He was always departing from her in a spirit of high resolve, going off, a new man, to seek his fortune, and always returning to her failed, drunk, sick, and broke, to be nursed to sobriety and health again, and reinfused with the notion that he was master of a better fate than available evidence encouraged even her to expect. He was her trial because she let him be, because she loved him and would not give him up.

He was Marce’s trial for the opposite reason. Marce did not love him. He was constrained to be kind to him without benefit of love. He tolerated him, was patient with him, even helped him so far as he was able, for Dorie’s sake, and for the sake of principle, but he found no excuse for him, and he gave up on him on fairly short acquaintance.

As a child, Wheeler was soon aware of his father’s judgment and his mother’s grief, and after the time when he wanted to be like Uncle Peach there was a time when he held him in gleeful contempt. Once, when Uncle Peach had come in drunk, and eaten, and fallen asleep in his chair, his head tilted back and his mouth open, Wheeler and Andrew his older brother took the pepper shaker and half filled Uncle Peach’s mouth with pepper, and Uncle Peach woke up after a while and said, “I feel like I’m going to sneeze!”

That was the last time Uncle Peach came to the house drunk. There must have been words between him and Marce about it, because after that Uncle Peach came sober and he came sick, but he did not come drunk.

When he worked, which was far from all the time, Uncle Peach was a carpenter, and for a while he was known as a good one. His failing in his younger years was merely infidelity. He was absolutely dependable as long as his pockets were empty. Money made him thirsty; once he got thirsty, he left; and then there was no getting him back until he had passed through flight, gallantry, drunkenness, devastation, and convalescence.

He was never a fast worker, but in his ponderous way, by much deliberation and some trial and error, he was capable of working well. People who were not in a hurry liked to hire him, for he cheapened his work in accordance with his own estimate of his faults, he was easy to get along with—was good company, in fact—and in the long run, if they had time for the long run, he satisfied his employers.

Later, as hopelessness and carelessness and perplexity grew upon him, his work became rougher. He declined gradually in public esteem until nobody would hire him to build a house, and declined further until nobody would hire him to build a barn. He became finally an odd-jobs man, a mender of leaky roofs, an overhauler of small outbuildings. He lost such habits of neatness and order as he had ever had, and worked in the midst of steadily increasing confusion. Whatever he was done with, for the day or the moment, he dropped wherever he was, until he built under his feet a sort of midden of lumber, scraps, and tools, in which whatever he needed at any given moment was lost.

In his puzzlement, he fell into the habit of talking to himself. He would go lurching and stumbling, sweating and puffing among the shambles of his work, picking up scraps and tools in one place, flinging them out of the way only to increase the disorder someplace else, muttering all the while to himself in steady commentary on his problem: “Now where did I put that damned saw? Did I lay it under here? No, sir. Did I lay it over there ? No, sir.” Sometimes what he was looking for was in plain sight. Sometimes it was in his hand.

Once, when he was about fifteen, Wheeler watched Uncle Peach try to untangle a hundred feet of inch rope. Instead of imposing order on the tangle, he became more and more involved in it, until finally, trying to take up a length that was looped around his foot, he fell into the midst of it. What most impressed Wheeler at the time was that Uncle Peach was not embarrassed. He seemed too implicated in his clumsiness even to be aware of it. It was Wheeler who was embarrassed. Uncle Peach lay on his back, toiling like Laocoön among the interloopings of the rope, and Wheeler was astonished. It took him a year to see that it was funny.

And still, when Uncle Peach was down and sick and needed help, Dorie would help him. She would put him in bed in the spare room at home. Or he would send for her, and Marce would drive her in the buggy the ten miles to Uncle Peach’s little farm over by Floyd’s Station. The farm had been partly Marce’s idea. He had encouraged and then helped Uncle Peach to buy it. It was the sort of place, Marce thought, that could put a sound footing under a tradesman’s economy. And he probably thought too, or so Wheeler guessed, that the ten miles would put Uncle Peach out of the way. But if that was what he thought, he was mistaken; the distance was too short for impossibility and too long for convenience.

Seeing how his mother troubled herself with Uncle Peach and mourned over him, Wheeler said, bullying her in her own defense as a seventeen-year-old boy is apt to do, “To hell with him! Why don’t you let him get on by himself the best way he can? What’s he done for you?”

Dorie answered his first question, ignoring the second: “Because blood is thicker than water.”

And Wheeler said, mocking her, “Blood is thicker than liquor.”

“Yes,” she said. “Thicker than liquor too.”

The day was warm and clear, the sky an immaculate brilliance. The brighter leaves had all fallen, leaving only the oaks still darkly red or brown. After the long summer of drouth, there had been rain through the fall, and now the pastures were green. Wheeler had planned to end the day outdoors with his dog and gun. It was a day for which there were many better uses than the present one, and Wheeler was full of the bitterness of waste and loss. “Why don’t I just leave the old son of a bitch down there?” he asked himself, driving too fast down the gravel road, a long white cloud of dust blooming behind him. And though he knew very well why, the question seemed to remain unanswered.

He wanted to be done with ordeals. The summer had been an ordeal. One hot, rainless day had followed another while pastures withered, crops parched, and ponds and springs went dry. Marce Catlett kept his stock alive by hauling water in barrels from the one spring that stayed constant. He hauled load after load, day after day, dipping the water out of the walled basin of the spring with a bucket. When he could leave the office early enough, Wheeler would drive up to help him, to ease the work a little and to keep him company.

One afternoon, when they had watered the cattle and were watching them drink, Marce looked at his son and smiled. “Awful, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” Wheeler said, and he did think so. Another merciless day was ending, the sun glared on the burnt world, the cattle were poor, the grass all but gone, and the sight depressed him.

“Well, I’ve seen dry years before this, and I’ll tell you something. It’s so miserable you think you’ll never get over it. You’re ready for the world to end. But it’ll pass. There’ll come a time when you won’t think about it.”

Marce raised his hat, ran his hand over his white hair, and put his hat back on, looking sideways, still smiling, at Wheeler.

They were sitting side by side on the edge of the wagon bed. The emptied barrels gleamed where water had spilled down their sides. All around them the late sunlight slanted brazenly over the greenless, dusty fields, and over the fly-covered backs of the lean steers. And Marce Catlett sat looking at his son with a light in his eye that came from another direction entirely, waiting to see if he saw.

It was a moment that would live with Wheeler for the rest of his life, for he saw his father then as he had at last grown old enough to see him, not only as he declared himself, but as he was. And in that seeing Wheeler became aware of a pattern, that his father both embodied and was embodied in, that also contained the drouth and made light of it, that contained other hardships also and made light of them. For his father’s good work was on that place in a way that granted and collaborated in its own endurance, that had carried them thus far, and would carry them on. Looking at his father, Wheeler knew, and would not forget, that though they were surrounded by the marks and leavings of a bad year, they were surrounded also by the marks and leavings of good work, which for that year and any other proposed an end and a new beginning.

He slowed down as he entered the town of Langlay. In the center of town he turned off the main road, drove to the railroad station, and parked his car. He did not have long to wait to catch the interurban, and soon he was seated in a nearly empty car, looking out the windows at the farms and little towns as the rail joints clicked under the wheels.

It seemed to him that for the last hour he had been passing through the stages of an abandonment of his own will, working his way toward a leap past which his own wishes would be idle dreams. At each stage, it seemed to him, turning back had become less possible. Now, sliding down toward the city along the same tracks that Uncle Peach had followed days ago, it was easy for Wheeler to imagine himself telling the desk clerk, “I don’t know anybody named Leonidas Wheeler.” But he knew better than that. He knew that he had not passed the place of turning back that day, or that year. He may, he thought, have been born on the downhill side of it.

When Wheeler headed home from law school, he did not have Uncle Peach much in mind, one way or another. But when he arrived, there was Uncle Peach, older, grayer, worse for wear, traveling at a slower pace now among the thorns and thistles that the ground brought forth, but still on the same route. And Dorie was still seeing him through.

“Blood is thicker than liquor,” Wheeler said to her, no longer mocking, but gently stating the fact as he knew she saw it.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “It is.”

And as he knew by then, she had more than that in mind. Uncle Peach was, she thought, “one of the least of these my brethren”—a qualification for her care that the blood connection only compounded. If one of the least of Christ’s brethren happened to be her brother, then the obligation was as clear as the penalty. She had long ago given up hope for Uncle Peach. She cared for him without hope, because she had passed the place of turning back or looking back. Quietly, almost submissively, she propped herself against him, because in her fate and faith she was opposed to his ruin.

Marce, who was the most craftsmanly of farmers, the artist of his particular domain of earth and flesh, stood outside this push and pull of opposition. He was Uncle Peach’s opposite, all right, but Marce could stand opposite without opposing. Dorie opposed Uncle Peach because she loved him. Wheeler had opposed him, so far, because he was affronted by him. Marce merely maintained his difference. He was a man of simple preferences and complex abilities—a better carpenter, for instance, in answer to his own occasional need to be one, than Uncle Peach had ever been. He simply knew what he desired, and worked toward it with whatever means he had, without fuss. Not having inherited Uncle Peach, he patiently tolerated as much of him as he thought tolerable. The rest he ignored.

Wheeler, who loved his father and liked his ways, assumed that he thought and felt as his father did. But Wheeler loved his mother too, and so he inherited Uncle Peach. When he returned home, Uncle Peach devolved upon him.

When the train stopped, Wheeler stepped off so quickly that he did not stop. He went through the station to the street, and set off on foot for the hotel, too impatient to wait for a streetcar. He went through the Haymarket, stepping past boxes and bags and bins and baskets of produce, crates of eggs, chickens in cages along the edge of the sidewalk. And then, the street opening in front of him again, free of encumbrances, he went on toward the stockyards and its satellite businesses and shops catering to the needs and the weaknesses of country people.

He came to the hotel, a turreted corner building of dingy elegance, with its name in white block letters on windows and door, went in, and stopped and let the door shut behind him. He stopped because at that point he had come to a place he would never have come to on his own. He had been there before, for the same reason, and the lobby was familiar to him: the white tiled floor mopped with dirty water, the black wainscoting, the hard chairs pushed back to the walls, the spittoons gaping up at the pressed-metal ceiling—a room meager and stark from the expectation of hard use. In the chairs a few men merely sat, as they had been sitting, so far as Wheeler could tell, when he was there last.

Behind the desk, the clerk stood leaning against a wall of pigeonholes, reading a newspaper. When Wheeler crossed the lobby and stopped at the desk, it seemed to him that he came to the end of the slant he had been on; now he spoke the words that sent him, like a diver, into the air: “Mr. Leonidas Wheeler?”

“Oh,” the clerk said, looking up and folding his paper, “you must be Mr. Catlett.” He fingered his ledger.

“What’s his bill?”

The clerk named the sum, and Wheeler paid.

“Thank you very much, sir.”

And then the clerk spoke to a Negro porter who was mopping the floor in the hallway off the lobby: “Take him up. Mr. Wheeler’s room.”

“This way, sir,” the porter said, and led the way to the elevator in long, pushing strides. He held the door for Wheeler, and then shut it, and they started up.

“You Mr. Wheeler’s kinfolks?” the porter asked over the bumping and groaning of the elevator.

“I’m his nephew.”

The porter gave a somewhat embarrassed laugh, as unwilling to intrude as to leave Wheeler unwarned. “Mr. Wheeler done got hisself plumb down.”

Before the elevator even reached the floor where Uncle Peach’s room was, Wheeler could hear him roaring. “Oh ho ho ho!” he was saying. “Oh, Lord! Oh, me! Oh ho ho ho ho!”

Wheeler glanced at the porter, who smiled obligingly and said, “He been doing that quite some time.”

When they unlocked the door and went in, Uncle Peach never even heard them. It was a tiny room, its one window looking out at a blank wall across an alley, and it was as much a shambles as one man could have made it without the use of tools. The room’s one table and chair were turned over on the floor. Uncle Peach’s pants, shirt, shoes, socks, necktie, coat, and hat were scattered all over it. Bedclothes and pillows had been flung off the bed in several directions. Beside the sagging bed was a wastebasket that Uncle Peach had attempted to vomit into, but missed. Uncle Peach was lying on the bed under a blanket with his feet sticking out, his face a mess, his eyes shut tight, still hollering.

“Be still, Uncle Peach!” Wheeler said sharply.

Uncle Peach instantly quieted down.

“Huh?” he said. “Who is it?”

“It’s Wheeler. What in the world have you done to yourself?”

“You know damned good and well what I’ve done to myself.”

“I got your message,” Wheeler said. “Are you ready to go home?”

Uncle Peach groaned. He lay still a moment. And then he opened his eyes and looked at Wheeler. He cleared his throat. “I’m ready, Wheeler boy, but I’ve got to have a drink before I can move.” As his way was at such times, he spoke of himself so matter-of-factly that Wheeler knew he was telling the truth.

Wheeler turned to the porter, who was still standing in the open door. “Can you give him a bath and a shave?”

“Yes, sir. For a consideration.”

Wheeler grinned at the delicacy of that. “What do you consider a consideration?”

“One dollar.”

Wheeler handed him a dollar. “As cold as possible,” he said.

In the street again, Wheeler stopped to think. He knew beyond doubt, having seen the evidence, that whiskey was within reach, but he did not know where to find it. He had not asked Uncle Peach for directions because he knew that Uncle Peach’s directions, even when he was sober, were not followable. He was almost ready to turn back and lay his problem before the desk clerk, when he saw a man coming toward him in a swaying, hobbling gait that he recognized unmistakably. It was Laban Jones, Wheeler’s friend from childhood, a Port William farmer’s son, crippled from birth, who was working in an office at the stockyards. Wheeler caught his arm. “Laban,” he said. The face that turned to look at him was as sweet and honest as the day itself.

“Why, hello, Wheeler. How in the world are you?”

“All right,” Wheeler said. “Nearly all right. I need a half-pint of whiskey, and I don’t know where to find it.”

“You do, Wheeler?” Laban laughed. As always his hat was set far back on his head as if that was just the place he kept it in case he might want to put it on.

Wheeler laughed too. “I may need it before this is over. But at present Uncle Peach is the one in need.”

Laban widened his eyes and nodded. “I see. You’ve got to patch him up and get him home.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, come with me.”

Laban turned and started back the way he had come, hobbling along at a pace Wheeler had to hurry to keep up with. Laban’s eagerness to be of use was familiar to Wheeler, but it was strange to him to have Laban as a guide. Always before, it had been the other way around. Wheeler had been the one who knew, Laban the innocent who learned late. Once he had actually sawed off a tree limb that a squirrel was on, forgetting that he himself was standing on the same limb. Now he was guiding Wheeler through the invisible world that lay beneath the visible one. Wheeler walked along beside him obediently and asked no questions.

They went several blocks, and then Laban abruptly entered a hardware store. Wheeler walking behind him now, they went through the store, through a large stockroom at the back, winding their way among stacks of boxes, crates, and kegs. And then Laban opened another door and they emerged in the bottom of what appeared to be a deep shaft, brick walled, with a tiny patch of sky at the top. It was a dark, damp place, smelling of mold, as hidden from the rest of the world as the bottom of a well. The place astonished Wheeler, and he was grateful not to be there alone.

Laban pointed to a ragged hole in one of the brick walls. “Hand a dollar bill through that hole.”

“Through that hole?” Wheeler said.

Laban was grinning, greatly amused. “That’s right.”

Wheeler did as he was told, although, as much as he trusted Laban, he did not do so gladly. But he felt the bill gently withdrawn from his fingers, and felt the cold glass of a small bottle pressed firmly upon the palm of his hand.

He slipped the bottle into his pocket, and followed Laban back out through the meanders they had come in by and into the daylit street.

“Well, that ought to fix him up,” Laban said. “He’ll be a new man now.”

“He’s been a new man many a time before this,” Wheeler said. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Laban said, and hobbled away before Wheeler could ask the question he had in mind.

Uncle Peach, scrubbed, shaved, and reassembled in his blue suit and tie, his hat, reshaped, on his knee, was sitting in the chair in the middle of the room, which the porter was now setting to rights. The suit was the only one Uncle Peach had; he used it only to get drunk in. It was a garment a man could feel comfortable either wearing or walking on, as need might be. And Uncle Peach looked as old and exhausted as his suit, pale and wasted, his neck too small for his collar. And yet his head, despite its snow-white hair, was somehow still a boy’s head, the ears sticking innocently too far out, the hair, which had been wetted and combed down, already drying and rising stiffly like the hackles on a dog’s neck. Wheeler could see a crooked vein pulsing at his temple.

“Here,” he said. “See if that’ll help.”

Uncle Peach held the bottle of colorless whiskey up, trembling, against the window light, and looked through it, and then he pulled the cork and drank. “Ah!” he said, and made a face.

Wheeler took the bottle back.

“Ter’ble stuff ! Awful stuff!” Uncle Peach said, fighting for breath.

“But you like it,” Wheeler said and laughed. He had begun to feel a little relieved; he was involved in the problem now, getting something done.

“I like a little, from time to time,” Uncle Peach said, and then, feeling a sudden access of moral seriousness, he said to Wheeler and the porter and anyone who might be passing by in the hall, “But don’t never drink, my boys. Stay clean away from it.”

And then the three of them stayed quiet for what must have been several minutes in that little room that, even straightened up, oppressed Wheeler by its measliness, Wheeler and the porter watching Uncle Peach who was staring at the window. Slowly he seemed to grow steadier within himself. He took a deep, tremulous breath and smacked his mouth as though tasting the air. And then he reached for the bottle. “Bird can’t fly with one wing, Wheeler boy.”

Wheeler, who had flight in mind, let him have another drink. But when he took the bottle back that time he handed it to the porter. “That’s all,” he said to Uncle Peach.

“That’s all,” Uncle Peach said, in a tone of finality in which Wheeler recognized the familiar intention of reform. For a while now Uncle Peach would be a prohibitionist, a new man. “I’m going to wipe the slate clean!”

But far from flying, when they put his hat on and helped him up, Uncle Peach collapsed back onto the chair and would have continued to the floor, had they not held him. He shook his head. “Whoo!”

“You’re going to have to work at this,” Wheeler told him. “Pay attention.”

Uncle Peach paid attention, and when they got him up again, he stood. They walked him out to the elevator, they descended with him to the lobby, and then the porter walked ahead and held open the street door.

If he could keep Uncle Peach on his feet, Wheeler was determined to walk to the station. Uncle Peach needed the effort and the fresh air, Wheeler thought, and he was right, for as they went along Uncle Peach recovered some of his capabilities. He was not standing up on his own, but he was walking on his own. And Wheeler began to be a little hopeful. Maybe, he thought, he could get Uncle Peach back in charge of himself by nightfall. Wheeler wanted to go home. He imagined himself finally free of this story he was in, telling it to Bess. Encumbered as he was, he imagined how neatly and nimbly she would walk beside him.

As he and Uncle Peach made their way slowly along, they necessarily attracted the attention of the passersby—a handsome, erect, nicely dressed young man walking arm in arm with an aging drunk. Wheeler bore it well enough, for he had expected to have to, and he knew there was no escape. But the pressure of so many curious, amused, or disapproving stares produced in Uncle Peach a desire to rise above his condition. If he was a man who obviously did disgrace and degrade himself with drink, he wished at least to appear to be a man who knew that he should not.

“My boy,” he said loudly, “there’s a moral lesson in this for you, if you’ll only learn it. Here’s a awful example right before your eyes.”

“Hush,” Wheeler said. “Just please hush.”

But Uncle Peach’s heart was full. His voice was trembling. “You got a good mother and daddy. Finest a man ever had. You don’t have to be like old Uncle Peach. Let this be a lesson to you, Wheeler boy. I know what a life like mine goes to show.”

“For God’s sake, be quiet,” Wheeler said. And then, though he knew better, he said, “Lesson to me! If it’s no lesson to you, why should it be a lesson to me?”

“It is a lesson to me. I’ve learnt it a thousand times.”

Wheeler usually put up with Uncle Peach by finding him funny, which was easy enough, for Uncle Peach’s life and conversation were rich in absurdities, and Wheeler’s involvements with him invariably made good stories. But underlying the possibility of laughter was the possibility of anger, and he was close to that now. He did not need a moral lesson from Uncle Peach. He did not need Uncle Peach, so far as he was aware, for anything—not him or the likes of him. So far as he was aware, nobody did.

“There’s no moral lesson in a man’s inability to learn a moral lesson,” he said, and wondered if that was true. But Uncle Peach’s thoughts had strayed to other matters; if he heard, he did not answer.

The train was crowded, people were standing in the aisle, and the car was hot. Wheeler tried to open a window, but cold weather had come officially, if not in fact, and the windows had been locked shut.

When the train gained speed outside the city and the car began to sway, Uncle Peach became sick again. He swallowed and smacked his mouth, and drops of sweat ran down his face. Wheeler looked for a way out, perhaps to the vestibule at the end of the car, but with the aisle full of people escape appeared to be impossible, and anyhow it was too late, for suddenly Uncle Peach leaned forward and, with awful retches and groans, vomited between his spread knees. Wheeler caught hold of him and held him. All around them people were giving them looks and drawing their feet away. Wheeler gave Uncle Peach his handkerchief, helped him out of his coat, and fanned him with his hat, encouraging and helping him the best he could. But the spasms came repeatedly, with unabated violence, and with each one Uncle Peach’s gasps and groans and roars of supplication became louder. “Ohhhh, Lord!” he said. “Ohhhh, me! Ohhhh, Lord, help me!” Wheeler’s pleadings with him to be quiet might as well have been addressed to a panic-stricken horse. As soon as he would be almost recovered and quiet, suddenly he would lean forward again. “Uuuuuup! Oh, my God!” And when the spasm passed he would roll his head against the seatback. “Ohhhh, me!”

It was an awful intimacy carried on in public. To Wheeler, it was endurable only because it was inescapable. He knew that Uncle Peach was suffering, and yet his suffering seemed merely the cause, the relatively minor cause, of the calamitous uproar that he was filling the car with. And yet, in the very midst of it, Wheeler knew that it was rare. It would make a good story, as soon as he could get out of it. But it was not funny now.

Once they had landed, mercifully, on the station platform at Langlay, Wheeler steadied Uncle Peach a moment to let him secure his balance, and then he said, “Let’s go.”

“All right,” Uncle Peach said.

His hand caught firmly under Uncle Peach’s arm, Wheeler turned then to walk to his car, only to feel Uncle Peach turn in the opposite direction, a difference of intention that came close to bringing them both down.

“What are you doing?” Wheeler said, angry sure enough now.

“Got to get the old mare and buggy.”

Wheeler turned him loose, half hoping he would fall, for Uncle Peach, who had used up the afternoon, had now laid claim to the night as well. Wheeler was not going to get home by breakfast, let alone supper. His leap had not ended yet. “Well, damn it to hell!” he said. “Let’s go get the damned old mare.”

“Got to get her,” Uncle Peach said. “Got to have her.”

And so they went to the livery stable and had Uncle Peach’s old sorrel mare, Godiva, harnessed and hitched to the buggy. Wheeler paid the bill there too, and they started for Uncle Peach’s place, Wheeler driving and Uncle Peach leaning back in the seat, holding on.

It was a long six miles. Uncle Peach’s stomach objected as strenuously to the motion of the buggy as it had to that of the train. He had long ago emptied himself, but the spasms came anyhow, prolonged clenches that left him fighting for balance and breath. And each time, Wheeler had to stop the mare and hold Uncle Peach to keep him from falling out of the buggy.

Finally, after this had happened perhaps half a dozen times, Wheeler, who had remained angry, said, “I hope you puke your damned guts out.”

And Uncle Peach, who lay, quaking and white, against the seatback, said, “Oh, Lord, honey, you can’t mean that.”

As if his anger had finally stripped all else away, suddenly Wheeler saw Uncle Peach as perhaps Dorie had always seen him—a poor, hurt, weak mortal, twice hurt because he knew himself to be hurt and weak and mortal. And then Wheeler knew what he did need from Uncle Peach. He needed him to be comforted. That was all. He put his arm around Uncle Peach, then, and patted him as if he were a child. “No,” he said. “I don’t mean it.”

When they got to the house it was almost nightfall. Wheeler left the mare standing at the back door while he helped Uncle Peach into the house. It was a bachelor’s house, rudimentary, spare, unadorned, and, on top of that, a mess, for as he always did, Uncle Peach had lost interest in housekeeping as he gained interest in travel. Wheeler led him to a chair, and then he straightened the bedclothes on the bed and took off Uncle Peach’s shoes and helped him to lie down.

In the failing light he drove the mare to the barn, unhitched her, watered her at the cistern trough, unharnessed and fed her. She applied herself to her supper as though all were well.

Uncle Peach’s little farm had always endeared itself to Wheeler, and he could remember when Uncle Peach had kept it moderately well. Now, like Uncle Peach himself, it was running down. The fences barely served to contain and the brushy pastures to feed the one old mare. The garden was ragged with tall frost-killed weeds. The tobacco crop was hanging cured in the barn, poorer than the year.

Lying on the bed in the lamplight, Uncle Peach looked like a corpse, and lay as still as one. Wheeler stood and watched him a moment to make sure he was breathing. And then he lighted a lamp in the kitchen and moved around for some time, straightening the place up. He drew a fresh bucket of water from the well, drank, and built a fire in the cooking stove. But when he searched the kitchen for food he found nothing except—under a cloth spread over the table—a jar of jam, half a can of pork and beans covered with gray mold like a mouse’s pelt, and most of a box of stale crackers.

“Well, damn it!” he said, for he was hungry himself, and he knew he needed to get something in the way of food into Uncle Peach. He lighted the lantern that he found beside the woodbox, and went out. Searching the henhouse, the hayloft, and every trough and manger in the barn, he found five eggs.

As he walked back to the house, carrying the eggs in his hat, peering beyond the lantern light into the dark, and the rising wind, it seemed to him strange beyond belief that he was where he was, doing what he was doing. It seemed to him that he was still in his leap, still falling, still attached to Uncle Peach, who was still falling. Sooner or later they would hit bottom together and could start climbing out. He did not know when. He did not know how he was going to get back to his car. All the world to him now was the darkness and the wind, himself and Uncle Peach—two needy men and five eggs. Between the stars and the ground the only lights he could see were the lantern he carried and the windows of Uncle Peach’s house. The only sound was the long breath of the wind in the top of the old locust by the back door. He no longer thought of telling his story to Bess. He only missed her. He missed his life.

He was glad to get back inside, where the stove had made it warm. He scrambled the eggs, and warmed some of the crackers in the oven to make them crisp again. He got Uncle Peach up and fed him, and ate what was left himself. He found clean sheets and remade the bed, and helped Uncle Peach to undress and get under the covers. He quickly washed the dishes they had used, thinking to have a little time, finally, to sit down in and be still.

But Uncle Peach began to dream bad dreams, struggling and crying out in his sleep: “Oh! Lord God, I see him a-coming! On his old smoky horse!” And Wheeler lay down beside him to quiet him. For a while he did sleep quietly, and then his dreams returned again. Wheeler was awake for hours, soothing and consoling Uncle Peach when he fretted and muttered and cried out, struggling with him when he fought.

And so they waged the night, Uncle Peach striving with the Devil, Wheeler striving with Uncle Peach. It seemed to Wheeler that the two of them were lost together there in the dark house in the dark sky. He could not have told the time within three hours.

Once, after they had passed through yet another nightmare, Uncle Peach, who had momentarily waked, said slowly into the darkness, “Wheeler boy, this is a hell of a way for a young man just married to have to pass the night.”

“I thought of that,” Wheeler said. “But it’s all right.” And he patted Uncle Peach, who went back to sleep and for a while was quiet.

Later, Wheeler himself went to sleep, his hand remaining on Uncle Peach’s shoulder where it had come to rest.

And that is where daylight found him, far from home.

Nearly to the Fair (1932)

IN THE neighborhood of Cotman Ridge and Goforth, and even as far away as Port William, Ptolemy Proudfoot had earned a small fame as a horseman. He never had need on his ninety-eight acres for more than three horses at once, and had rarely owned a brood mare; still, it was understood around and about that Tol was a good judge of horses and that he “had a way” with them. He was a good hand to break a colt, and he had been known to take an older horse that was spoiled or mean and settle him down to a life of useful citizenship. People knew that in his dealings with horses Tol could accomplish pretty much what he wanted or needed to, and without so much as raising his voice. “He was half horse himself,” Sam Hanks liked to say.

He always kept as a work team a well-matched pair, usually of geldings, grays if he could find them. And he kept a somewhat lighter third horse that he drove to his buggy, and used with his team on the cutting harrow or breaking plow. The buggy horse, like the workhorses, would be a good one, and when Tol and Miss Minnie set out for town or for church, they traveled in some style. They looked, perhaps, as any moderately prosperous farm couple of that time and place would have looked, except for one thing. Tol, who was large in all dimensions, weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds and Miss Minnie never more than about ninety, and so, when they traveled together in the buggy, the buggy leaned to Tol’s side and Miss Minnie, as a consequence, always sat very close to Tol. Fortunately, Miss Minnie felt romantic about Tol—he was her bulwark, she said; it was not merely gravity that drew her to his side. But perhaps it was not ordinary in their time and place for a couple on the far side of middle age to sit as closely together as Tol and Miss Minnie did.

On his part, Tol’s affection for Miss Minnie was always somewhat breathlessly mingled with awe. Miss Minnie had been a schoolteacher, and Tol looked up to her for her book learning and her correct grammar. For him, a certain romance adhered to their marriage because of his conviction that she was above him, that she deserved not only all he could do for her, but more.

And that, probably, is why he bought the little Model A coupe in 1929, just before the Depression. Tol, I think, would have been satisfied to stick to his horse and buggy for the rest of his days. Traveling in cooperation with a good horse interested him more than any other form of travel could have done. When they drove together he was in the habit of saying to Miss Minnie from time to time, gesturing toward Ike or Fiddler or Redbird or Sunfish or Hickory, “He’s a good one, ain’t he?” or “Stepping out now, ain’t he?”—just as he liked often to say to her, when they had been away and had come back into sight of their neat gingerbreaded house and its outbuildings that stood just where the Goforth Hill road dropped down off Cotman Ridge toward Goforth in the valley, “Now I wonder who lives in that pretty place.”

But Tol was no stranger to the fact that automobiles had come to be the thing. It got so that almost every time they went onto the road they met one—if it was good weather, that is, and the road was passable for automobiles. When they went down to Goforth to church, there several automobiles would be, not lined up at the hitch rail, but scattered hither and yon, not needing to be tied to anything when you were not using them. Even old Uncle Arn Ekrum had bought one; when it threatened to rust, he had covered it with a coat of whitewash so that now it looked like a ghost. And it came to Tol that Miss Minnie, abreast of things as he knew her to be, undoubtedly longed secretly in her heart to ride in an automobile of their own.

Tol could not bear the thought that Miss Minnie might long secretly in her heart for anything that he could provide. And so the next time they went to Hargrave—a trip they didn’t make but two or three times a year—Tol, speaking of a “surprise” he said he had for her, and revealing his own excitement by a smile that made his face shine like a ripe tomato, drove her to the place where a man sold automobiles and, stopping in front of a glossy Model A coupe, merely held out his hand, palm open, like Columbus presenting the New World to the Queen of Spain. And Miss Minnie—who despite Tol’s suspicions had never dreamed of owning an automobile, who in fact loved Tol’s way with a horse and loved to sit beside him while he drove, and who, now that she was suddenly face-to-face with a car of their own, thought it the homeliest black bug she had ever seen—assuming that it was something that Tol had longed for secretly in his heart, said, “Why, Mr. Proudfoot, it is perfectly beautiful!”

The next day the salesman delivered the car and taught Tol how to drive it: how to start it by twisting its crank, how to guide it by twisting its steering wheel, how to make it go forward and backward. Tol did not know what to expect it to do next. But he got good enough finally to drive it three times slowly around the front pasture and then out the gate and down the road to Goforth, and then back up the hill and into the yard again, with the salesman beside him, smiling and saying, “You’re getting the hang of it, sir. Just go easy.”

And so Tol and Miss Minnie went easy into the modern world, never really getting the hang of it. She sat close to him in the Model A as she had in the buggy, because of the same conditions of gravity and attraction. And in the automobile, as in the buggy when the horse trotted, she always held her hat on with one hand, even when the windows were shut. All the neighbors, except when they had to meet him in the road, enjoyed watching the way Tol drove, as later they would enjoy remembering it. When Tol traveled by horse and buggy, his horse stayed in the road more or less on his own, leaving Tol free to look around. Though the Model A required much more supervision than a horse, Tol still spent a good deal of time looking around. It would have seemed to him a discourtesy to travel through the country without looking at it. His course therefore involved a series of strayings to one side or another, alternating with sudden corrections. The corrections were usually inspired by the warnings of Miss Minnie, who always spoke in the nick of time (who, on those journeys, lived in the nick of time), and who nevertheless retained to the end of her days an almost devout admiration of Tol’s ability to run an automobile.

Because they never entirely trusted their new machine, which Tol always referred to as “the Trick,” and because they had an almost superstitious fear of getting it wet or muddy, they kept their horse and buggy for use in emergencies and when the weather was bad and when Tol needed to go somewhere by himself, for he would not go anywhere in the Trick without Miss Minnie. And so the Model A stood in the wagon shed as innocent of rain or mud as a pet canary, and gleaming as on the day it was new, for Miss Minnie went over the outside of it almost every day with her dust mop.

Having an automobile might have caused them to think many thoughts that they had never thought before, but in fact it only caused one such thought. For the most part, they continued in their familiar, modest, frugal ways. They went to Port William to shop and visit a while on Saturday afternoon. They went down to Goforth to church on Sunday. They went to a neighbor’s sometimes and sat till bedtime, or some of the neighbors would come to sit with them. And pretty often they would have company and Miss Minnie would load the table with one of her bountiful meals, and these were Tol’s favorite occasions, for he loved food and talk and laughter. In the fall Tol would go to Hargrave to market his tobacco crop. He would go to the stockyards at Louisville in June to sell his lambs, and again in November to sell his steers. Occasionally Miss Minnie and the other women of the Missionary Society would hold a bake sale. But mostly she and Tol stayed home and stayed busy in the leisurely way of people who know exactly what they have to do and how to do it and have got used to doing it, and who don’t have to do too much.

The one thought that the automobile caused them to think was the thought of the State Fair, which took place in Louisville at the end of every summer. They had heard of the Fair, and they had dreamed of it. They had heard of the perfect ears of corn laid side by side in rows, and of the perfect garden vegetables, the fruits and the canned goods, the needlework, the flowers; of the cages of beautiful chickens and ducks and geese, of guinea fowl and pigeons, of turkeys bronze and white; of ranks of fine cattle, and pens of excellent sheep and hogs; of the mule show and the horse show. Tol and Miss Minnie knew what good things were, and they had but to close their eyes to see them at the Fair as they must have been: all the produce of the cultivated earth, perfect in all its shapes and colors, cherished and gleaming. But they had never seen it with their own eyes. They had never gone.

But now that they possessed an automobile, they could think of going, for the world had changed. Now they could think of going fifty miles to the Fair and fifty miles home again on the same day, and only because they wanted to. It fairly took their breath. They talked about it for three years.

“If we wanted to go,” Tol said prophetically to Miss Minnie, “the Trick could take us there.”

“Yes, it’s the modern world now,” Miss Minnie replied. “People do such things.”

But the truth was that in his heart Tol knew he belonged to an older world, and he was afraid. For him, to walk the aisles of the great exhibit halls among fruits and vegetables grown splendidly ripe, and to see the good animals fed and groomed to a royal excellence, would have been to set foot in Eden itself. But now, as never before, the thought of these things set off a tremor of anxiety in his mind. Getting there would be the problem.

And then one day something happened that enabled Tol Proudfoot to think of getting there. It was the middle of the summer, and Tol had walked through the field to Corbin Crane’s to see if he could borrow back the corn planter that Corbin had borrowed from him in the spring. He thought that if he came walking, Corbin might offer to bring the planter home with his own team rather than wait, as he usually did, for Tol to come with his team to get it. Tol had thought it best to ask for the return of the planter several months ahead of time because if he knew Corbin, the planter would need fixing before it could be used. Corbin was hard on tools, as he was on everything else, which was perhaps why he saw fit to get along without any of his own.

He did, however, own a car. And when Tol came over the ridge, he saw the car running at what appeared to be terrific speed around the corner of the barn. It made a big loop in the pasture, disappeared again around the same corner of the barn, and reappeared in the lane, heading out toward the road gate. It disappeared again, and then in a few minutes it came back into sight, going backward nearly as fast as it had gone forward.

Tol, who had continued walking, stopped then and stood by the lane where it came up between the house and the barn. When the car flew backward past him, he hollered, “Whoa!” and the car stopped. Behind the wheel Tol saw his friend Elton Penn, Corbin Crane’s stepson. Elton was twelve years old that summer, and as he raised his hand in greeting to Tol he had a grin on his face that could have been distributed among three or four boys and still showed them all to be in a good humor.

“Want a ride?” Elton said.

“No, thanks. Not today,” Tol said. “Where’s Corbin?”

“Over to Braymer Hardy’s, putting up hay,” Elton said.

“Your mammy, too?”

Elton nodded.

“I thought so.”

“They sent me home to milk.”

“Well, why ain’t you milking?”

Tol knew what Elton was doing. He was not just enjoying himself; he was taking revenge on Corbin Crane, who did not like him and was mean to him. It was because of Corbin’s meanness to Elton that Tol and Elton had got to be friends.

One day Tol had stopped to talk to Corbin when Corbin and Elton were hoeing tobacco. While the two men talked, Elton, who was only about nine at the time, got to fiddling with the water jug, and he dropped it. It didn’t break, but some water spilled, and Corbin turned around and cracked Elton across the wrist with his hoe handle. It was a hard reckless lick, and Elton started to cry.

Tol heard no more of what Corbin was telling him. He reached down with his big old hand and picked up Elton’s hand and led him away.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, not looking back at Corbin Crane, “I’m going to borrow this boy for a while.”

They walked along together, Tol not saying anything, and Elton blubbering and sniffling. After a while Elton said, “Someday I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.”

“Aw, son,” Tol said, “you don’t want to do that.”

“I taken a shine to the boy,” Tol told Miss Minnie later that day, meaning that from then on he was going to be Elton’s friend.

And they were friends from then on. Tol would pay Elton a dime or a quarter to help him out with some job. Or Miss Minnie would make cookies and lemonade, and they would call Elton on the party line to come over and play croquet. And often at night Tol would call Elton up and play Miss Minnie’s Victrola for him over the telephone. A many a night Elton stood by the wall with the receiver to his ear, listening to “Mother Machree” or “There’s a Cradle in Carolina” or, his and Tol’s favorite, a song called “Nothing but Something Cool.”

Once Tol offered Elton a dime to split a pile of stove wood. The wood split hard and the job took Elton a long time. Tol paid him his dime, and then showed him how to play the game of heads-or-tails.

“Now,” Tol said, “look. If we bet a dime and you win, you’ll have two dimes instead of one.”

“All right,” Elton said.

So they flipped.

“Call it,” Tol Proudfoot said.

“Tails—wup—I mean heads!” Elton said.

And Tol showed his coin and took Elton’s dime. Elton sat down on the pile of split wood and was not able to say anything, and Tol stood and looked down at him. After the suffering had gone on as long as Tol could stand it, he handed Elton back his dime.

“Son,” he said, “don’t never gamble.”

And sometimes they just sat together while Tol told things.

One night, Tol said, when there was a full moon, he woke up, it must have been about three o’clock, and he could see Miss Minnie lying beside him on her back with her mouth open. Tol took the end of his forefinger and dabbled it into Miss Minnie’s mouth and wiggled it around. And then he composed himself and breathed deeply. He heard Miss Minnie smacking her mouth. And then she sat straight up in bed.

“Mr. Proudfoot! Mr. Proudfoot, wake up! I have swallowed a mouse!”

“Miss Minnie,” said Tol, his laughter shaking the bed so that, of course, she caught him, “there ain’t much I know of to do for somebody that’s swallowed a mouse.”

Elton was a fine addition to Tol’s and Miss Minnie’s life. He liked them, they made him welcome, and it got so he would be over at their place whenever he could escape from home. He was a help. He didn’t mind work, and he was bright. He saw things. He was interested in things. It often turned out that something Tol or Miss Minnie needed to have done and did not much want to do was something Elton was glad to do. He not only wanted to earn one of Tol’s dimes or quarters and eat quite a lot of Miss Minnie’s good cooking—he wanted to do the work. He seemed a godsend to Tol and Miss Minnie, who had no child of their own. They loved every little opportunity to pay attention to him. When he ate with them, they stuffed him like a sausage. Miss Minnie served him biscuits two at a time; when he bit into the second one, she popped two more hot ones onto his plate; while he buttered them, Tol would refill his glass. Miss Minnie baked pies and cookies for him, and brought him little snacks where he was at work.

When Tol saw how apt Elton was at driving a car, all his worry about getting to the Fair melted right out of his mind and flowed away. He saw that Elton, being young himself, belonged to the young world of machines. Whereas Tol could drive an automobile only fearfully, and certainly with no skill, this Elton was already master of it, even at so young an age, and had no fear.

“Miss Minnie,” Tol said, “the boy can drive. He can take us to the Fair.”

And Miss Minnie said, “Oh, why didn’t we think of that before?”

She thought and then added, “But, Mr. Proudfoot, won’t it be too expensive?” They were then in the very pit of the Depression and, though she and Tol owed nothing and had savings, she felt that it was appropriate to worry.

“Well,” Tol said, “we ain’t going probably but this once. If we average in all the times we haven’t gone and all the times we ain’t going to go, it’ll come out pretty cheap.”

“It would be nice to go once,” she said.

“You ought to see him go,” Tol said, laughing. “That boy’s worth a share in the railroad.”

They secured Elton’s agreement, broaching the subject with some care lest, after all, he might not want to undertake so daunting a project.

“Why, sure!” Elton said, grinning on behalf of himself and several others. “I imagine I can drive her.”

They set the date. They told Elton to get permission from his folks.

And Elton did. Understanding the situation a good deal better than they did, Elton got permission from his folks to help Tol clean a fencerow on that day, which, as it happened, was a Saturday. He said he was supposed to stay overnight and go to church with Tol and Miss Minnie the next day, so he would need to take his Sunday clothes.

As a last precaution, Miss Minnie got her nephew Sam Hanks, who drove a cattle truck, to draw her a map showing how to get to the Fair. Sam sat between Tol and Miss Minnie at the kitchen table.

“Now here’s the stockyards, Tol. You know how to get there.”

“Aw, I know how to get there, all right!” Tol said.

“Well, starting from there, here’s what you do.” And Sam drew the streets onto a paper, telling them the various buildings and other landmarks by which they would recognize the turns, and they watched and listened and nodded their heads. He folded the map when he had finished and handed it to Miss Minnie, who laid it by her place at the table so she would remember to put it in her purse.

Sam had his doubts about Tol’s driving. If they had had a bigger automobile, he might have offered to drive them himself, but he didn’t favor being squeezed into that little coupe with Tol and Miss Minnie, and so he let it slide, only hinting a little warning to Tol.

“You’ll be all right, now, won’t you, Tol?”

“Sure.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

If he had known their driver was to be a twelve-year-old boy, he surely would have interfered, but they didn’t tell him, because he didn’t ask. As for them, they just took for granted that if Elton could drive in a pasture, he could drive anywhere—and as it turned out, they were right.

Elton had to raise his chin to see over the dashboard, but under his guidance the Trick, as Tol Proudfoot pointed out to Miss Minnie, performed like a circus horse. They pulled out onto the road just as the sun was coming up. For the first dozen miles or so, they were on roads that were dry enough, but were chug-holey and narrow, and they had to go slow and be careful. And then they got onto the blacktop and just went whirling along, going faster by a good deal than Tol and Miss Minnie had ever gone in their lives. Elton drove with a big grin on his face, concentrating on his work, and Tol and Miss Minnie watched the country fly past and commented on what they saw. And every so often Tol would point out to Miss Minnie how splendidly Elton was driving.

Tol was having a wonderful time. For there they went, speeding through the world in the early morning, the Trick running as dependably as a good horse, but much faster; Tol had left his cares behind. And even though she had been a schoolteacher and felt a certain obligation to remain serious in the presence of the young, Miss Minnie, too, felt the intoxication of their speed and became merry and carefree.

“I just wish you would look at that young man, how he can drive!” Tol said. “Why, he can handle this Trick like he’s a piece of it.”

“I’m just the nut on the steering wheel,” Elton said.

And Miss Minnie said, “Well, Mr. Nut, drive right on!”

That was when the left hind tire went “pish-pish-pish-pish,” and Elton had to pull off on the side of the road.

Tol, who could do anything that needed doing with a horse and any of the tools he had been raised with, was utterly perplexed when confronted with a flat tire. Largely because of Tol’s eager help, it took Elton the better part of forty-five minutes to get the car jacked up and the impaired wheel off and the spare on and the car jacked back down again.

“Well, I don’t expect we’ll have any more flat tires today, do you?” Tol said when they were going again.

“There is no way to know what to expect,” Miss Minnie said pleasantly but with a noticeable diminution of merriment. “We had better have that one fixed.”

And so at the next filling station they came to, they turned in. Only one man was working there, and he was busy, and they had to wait. There was a car ahead of them, also with a flat tire, and cars kept coming to the gas pump. It was getting hot now, and Tol and Elton got out to watch the mechanic while he worked, and Miss Minnie sat in the Trick with her white-gloved hands crossed on top of her purse in her lap, the picture of patience.

When the mechanic started work on their tire, which gave them license to draw closer, Tol started passing the time of day with the mechanic. Commercial transactions embarrassed Tol. When he had to receive payment from somebody, the feeling would always come over him that it was too much; when he had to give payment, the same feeling would suggest that it was too little. The passage of money seemed to him to discount all else that might pass between people. And so he always strove to see to it that when the money finally had to pass, it would pass as if in secret under cover of much sociable conversation. And besides, he was interested in people and curious about them.

He found out the man’s name, which was Bob Shifter. He found out where he lived, and where he had lived before. He found out that Bob Shifter was no kin to old man Claude Shifter who used to live close to Ellville down by Hargrave, or if he was he didn’t know it. He found out how long Bob Shifter had been married and how many children he had. He found out the mechanic’s wife’s maiden name and his mother’s maiden name. He found out all that and a lot more, and he didn’t have to ask more than three or four direct questions, for Bob Shifter was more than glad to tell the story of his life, and not in much of a hurry, once the talk started, to fix the tire.

The day was no longer young by the time they paid Mr. Shifter and got a good drink out of their water jug and started on again. But soon they were coming into the outskirts of the city. Now Tol began to experience their adventure as a reality, for the outskirts stretched out a long way before the city itself began. They would go through some of the city before they got to the stockyards, and there was a vast amount of it beyond.

He cleared his throat and said, “When you get me beyond the stockyards, by thunder, you’ve lost me!”

Nobody said anything.

After a while, to make sure they understood exactly what his qualifications were, he said again, “When you get me past the stockyards, I don’t know left from right, nor up from down. I don’t for a fact.”

But by then they were approaching the stockyards, and Miss Minnie was digging in her purse for Sam Hanks’s map.

“Now!” she said, drawing it out and unfolding it.

And then it was her turn to be assaulted by the reality of that day, for the map, past the stockyards, which had been boldly labeled “STOCK YARDS,” did not have a single name on it. Beyond the stockyards, where they now were, and going past in a hurry, the map was just a squiggle of straight lines and right-angle turns. And Miss Minnie understood, in a sort of lightning flash, the urban experience of her well-traveled nephew: When he drove his truck in the city, he went by landmarks, even such landmarks as he had recited while he drew his map, causing her and Tol to see visions of where they were going; past the stockyards, he didn’t know the name of anything.

“Well, there is an example of misplaced faith,” said Miss Minnie in a voice that was precise and restrained and carried unmistakably the tone of familial exasperation.

They stopped for a red light and then went on again.

“What’s the matter?” Tol said. Miss Minnie had never taken that tone with him, but he knew how he would have felt if she ever had, and so he felt sorry for Sam Hanks.

“There are no street names,” Miss Minnie said. “The map is perfectly useless.”

“Aw, naw, now, it’s not,” Tol said.

“I fear it is,” said Miss Minnie.

“Well, it shows you where to turn,” Tol said, putting his big forefinger down onto the paper. “Here. Look a-here. Right here. Turn!” he said to Elton, pointing the way.

And Elton turned left out of the middle of the great street they were on into a smaller one.

“Listen to all the horns,” Tol said.

“If we don’t know the names of the streets,” Miss Minnie said, “how can we know where to turn?”

“Well, we just turn where the line turns,” said Tol. “Keep a watch out now. Sam told us what to look for. Maybe he said the names of the streets. Maybe we’ll remember some of them. Look at the signs.”

So they began watching for the street signs. Miss Minnie was wearing a black straw hat with a stiff brim. “She was turning her head this way and that, looking for signs,” as Elton would tell it later, “and that hat like to sawed off Tol’s left arm and my head.”

“Now,” Tol said, “didn’t he say to turn past that big building yonder?”

“Yes, perhaps he did,” Miss Minnie said.

Elton turned, and they went along another street, and before long they turned again. They went on that way for a considerable time. Finally they could no longer be sure which of the anonymous angles on their map they had come to.

“Well,” Miss Minnie said, “we’re lost.”

“Well, we know something for sure, anyhow,” Tol said, and Miss Minnie allowed him to laugh at that all by himself.

“Why don’t we ask somebody?” Elton said. “Looks like some of these people ought to know.” Elton had never ceased to grin. He was having a good time. As long as he was driving, he didn’t care whether they were lost or not.

Miss Minnie, too, had thought of asking somebody, but she had her pride. If there was anything worse than being a person who did not know where she was, it was appearing to be a person who did not know where she was. Perhaps she understood also that by giving Tol an opening for conversation with the public at large, they might delay their arrival at the Fair indefinitely. And now that her confidence had failed, she saw pretty clearly that they would have to ask not one person but many. She saw that the place was complicated beyond her imagining or her ability to imagine. She saw that even if they had good directions, they would get them wrong. There was no telling the mistakes they would make.

“It would be reasonable,” she said, having calmly resolved to think it through again, “since the Fair is so large an event, that there ought to be signs along the way, saying, ‘To the Fair.’ And so perhaps if we just look around a little we will see one of those signs.”

Buoyed up by the cheerfulness of logical thought, Tol agreed.

“And it seems to me,” she said, pointing with her gloved forefinger, “that a promising direction would be that way.”

And so they wandered about for a while, looking for a sign, and found none.

“Well,” Tol said finally, “why don’t we just look for a big street where a lot of people are going in the same direction. They’ll probably be going to the Fair, for there’s a many of them that goes. And we can just follow along. Don’t you see?”

But it had got to where thinking did not much help either their spirits or their condition. And though they came to some more big streets, it appeared that about the same numbers of people were going in both directions.

“We must go back to the stockyards and begin again,” Miss Minnie said.

And that was the worst thought of all, for only then did they understand how lost they were. That they did not know where they were suddenly proved to them that they did not know where the stockyards were. They did not know where home was.

Failure and despair came upon them. They could no longer say that they were on their way to the Fair. They had come to a place of railroad spurs, tall chimneys, and low buildings—a sooty, ugly, purposeful place that sunlight did not improve. And all the time they were wandering around lost, wasting their precious day, the Fair was happening; it was fleeing as a bird to the mountain. Miss Minnie had a vision of the light fading from the polished skins of apples and pears and plums.

“Oh, goodness!” she said, and Elton thought she was going to cry, but she did not.

And then a sort of wonder happened. Until he was about forty-five—when it was revealed to him that if he was going to get up early he ought to go to bed early—Tol Proudfoot had been a coon hunter, and so he was accustomed to being lost and to finding himself again. Once he understood that Miss Minnie herself was hopelessly bewildered, and that all rational measures had failed, Tol’s sense of direction began to operate. “Now, the stockyards,” he said, “if that’s where we want to go, is right over yonder.” And he pointed the direction.

It was a direction diagonal to the streets, and so they had to go in a zigzag, tacking back and forth like a sailboat.

“Slant her over that way a little, son,” Tol would say. And then, in a little while, “Now cut her back over this way.”

And finally they were going pretty fast, amid much traffic, down the middle of a long, broad street, and they could see, far down at the end of it, the stockyards. Tol was waving his hand, signaling to Elton to go straight ahead.

“Oh, Mr. Proudfoot!” said Miss Minnie. “Where would we be without you?”

And then, over on the left-hand side of the street, Tol spied a man on tall stilts, carrying a sandwich board that said:

You’ll find it, friend,

At the Outside Inn.

It was perhaps the chief spectacle of the day so far. For fear the others would not see it, Tol lunged in the direction of the sandwich man and extended his hand to indicate where to look.

“Look a-yonder!” he said.

He had stuck his hand right in front of Elton’s face. His hand looked as big, Elton said, as a billboard. And when they had seen the sandwich man and exclaimed and Tol withdrew his hand, the world had changed. The car in front of them was stopping in a hurry for a red light. Elton clapped his foot onto the brake. And what happened after that happened faster than it can be explained.

When the man in front applied his brake, as Elton would tell it, “his ass-end as-cended.” When Elton applied his brake, which he did a little too late, the Trick’s front end de-scended. And as everything stopped and got level again, the back bumper of the car in front chomped down onto the front bumper of the Trick.

Elton and Tol got right out to see what the damage was.

“It’s all right,” Elton said. “It didn’t make a scratch.”

But Tol Proudfoot knew a calamity when he saw one. “Hung like two dogs!” he said. “By thunder, son, they’re hung like two dogs!”

The car in front was far longer and far shinier than the Trick. And now its driver had got out and come back to see also. He had a white mustache and a red face and was wearing a suit and was in a hurry.

Elton was grinning as if he could not wait for the world to show forth more of its wonders.

“What do you propose to do about this, sir?” the man said, and then, seeing that he addressed a mere boy, turned to Tol Proudfoot and said, “Sir, what do you propose to do about this?”

At that point the light turned green, and the traffic began to pour along on both sides of them, and behind them horns began to blow.

It seemed to Tol that the world, or anyhow his part of it, had come to an end, for he could see no way out. If he had any conviction still in force, it was that when a calamity has happened to somebody, other people ought to come to a respectful and helpful stop. But there he and Elton and Miss Minnie were, trapped and defeated beyond the power of man to conceive, and nothing stopped. The cars and trucks and streetcars and wagons sped past, horns blew, and people shouted. The high, hot sun glared down into the crevice of the street without the mercy of a single tree.

He lifted his voice across their conjoined vehicles to the man with the mustache. “Hung like two dogs!” He spoke as sympathetically as he was able at the required volume, as if hoping to ease their predicament by so apt a description of it. He was sweating with heat and with panic. Behind him, in the Trick, Miss Minnie’s eyes were round and watery with unfallen tears, and her lips were shut tight together; her hands in their white gloves lay crossed over her purse in her lap and did not move.

“You must do something about this,” the man shouted to Tol. “I don’t have all day for this. I’m in a hurry!”

Tol then saw it through, as far at least as indignation. “Drive on!” he shouted back. “I reckon we can drag as fast as you can haul!”

Elton, who had been waving his hand for attention for some time, then said, “Mr. Tol, stand right here,” and he pointed to the two stout brackets to which the Trick’s bumper was attached.

“What?” Tol said.

“Stand on these!”

Elton showed him again. Propping himself on the back end of the other car, Tol clambered up onto the brackets, and the Trick bowed down under his weight.

“Now take hold of that other bumper and lift up,” Elton said.

When Tol lifted—which he did, Miss Minnie said, “as with the strength of ten”—Elton applied himself with all his strength to the left front fender of the Trick, which rolled back and came free. The man in a hurry, without looking again at them, stepped back into his machine and slammed the door.

Elton got back in behind the steering wheel. Tol, whose conviction held further that all calamities should be followed by conversation, stood in disappointment, watching the other car drive away. And then he got in, too.

“Well,” Elton said, still grinning, “where does that map say to go now?”

“Home, son.” Tol Proudfoot laughed a little, as if to himself, and patted Miss Minnie’s crossed hands. “By thunder, it says to go home.”

“Yes,” Miss Minnie said, “let us go home.”

That is the story as I heard it many times from Elton Penn—and from Sam Hanks, too, of course, for he had his version of it, though Elton was its principal eyewitness.

One day, when I happened by to see Miss Minnie, it occurred to me to ask her about that famous trip. She had been long a widow by then, and we neighbors often made a point of happening by. We needed to know that she was all right, but also it was good for us to see her and to have her pleasant greeting.

“Oh, yes!” she said, when I brought the subject up. “We weren’t able to get all the way to the Fair. We got nearly all the way. I’m sure it was wonderful. But we did succeed in getting all the way home. And wasn’t Mr. Proudfoot happy to be here!”

Burley Coulter’s Fortunate Fall (1934)

IT HAS been a long, long time since old Uncle Bub Levers was called on to pray at the Bird’s Branch church for the first and last time in his life, and he stood up and said, “O Lord, bless me and my son Jasper. Amen.”

The Lord must have thought that was a good idea. For with His help, maybe, Jappy Levers grew up and got himself educated for a lawyer. When he hung out his sign in Hargrave, he wasn’t Jappy Levers any more. He was J. Robert La Vere, Attorney at Law. That might not have been all put-on. Some say that La Veres was what the Leverses were before they turned up around Port William. People in Port William don’t say things they haven’t heard of. They never had heard of La Veres. They had heard of levers.

With the Lord’s help maybe, maybe not, Mr. La Vere got to be a rich man. Getting rich, you know, does not always meet with everybody’s approval. There was always somebody, or several bodies, in Port William who would tell you confidently that Mr. La Vere got rich by finding out where the money was and helping himself to a good deal more than his share. In fact they didn’t know, and I don’t know. To find out how such things are done, you will have to ask somebody besides me. Maybe you can do like Mr. La Vere, who gaveth the credit to the Lord, at the same time keeping a good deal of it for himself, the Lord maybe not minding, maybe.

Anyhow, the Lord either did or didn’t bless Mr. La Vere with the money he scraped together by the time he was forty-five or so, when he bought the biggest house in Hargrave with a front porch two stories tall. After Uncle Bub died, Mr. La Vere kept the old Levers home place out on Bird’s Branch, and as the chances came he bought other farms hither and yon.

So he was right smart of a big deal and on the downward slope when he topped himself off by taking to wife, as Wheeler Catlett put it, the elegant, accomplished, and beautiful Miss Charlotte Riggins. Miss Charlotte was from somewhere off. She could have been rich herself for all I know, maybe, maybe not, but she did come up in the world by changing her name from Riggins to La Vere and setting up housekeeping behind the tallest front porch in Hargrave.

How Mr. La Vere and Miss Charlotte hit it off as a loving couple is anybody’s guess. I somehow never quite could imagine it myself, so I will leave it to you. But Mr. La Vere lived long enough that by the time he died, Miss Charlotte had taken on all his dignity and become a great lady.

By the time Mr. La Vere departed, Miss Charlotte’s hair had turned mortally blue, but she wasn’t exactly an old woman yet. If widowhood hadn’t suited her so well, and with all her goods and money, surely somebody would have married her. I reckon I might have married her myself, maybe, if she had ever asked me.

Mr. La Vere died at about the start of the Depression or a little before, and Wheeler Catlett, who was a wingshot of a young lawyer then, settled the old man’s estate, nearly all of it directly onto Miss Charlotte. At about the same time the tenant on the old Levers place gave it up, and Wheeler traded with Grover Gibbs to be the new tenant. And so Grover and his wife, Beulah, and their children moved into the old Levers house that was the Gibbs house then until Beulah’s mother and daddy had gone from this world and left her the little piece of it where she was raised.

Grover was one of my old running mates, a little younger than I am, but it seems like I was young a long time. So from then on I was party to the doings of Miss Charlotte and to her, what do you call it? relationship, I guess, with Grover. Grover was probably the ideal man for the place—Wheeler probably couldn’t have done any better. The Levers place was run down but still a pretty good farm, and Grover was a pretty good farmer, so it was a fit. Being a pretty good farmer was good enough for Grover. Now and again, when he was a little down in the mouth, he would make the usual complaints about farming on the halves, but being a tenant farmer suited him really well enough. He had several other things he needed to see to: fishing and hunting, and drinking a little whiskey from time to time for his health, and holding up his end of the conversation out at town. Well, he held up his end along with the ends of several others in case they couldn’t make it.

And, too, he took a particular pleasure in his relationship with Miss Charlotte. Miss Charlotte, you might say, was an enjoyable lady. I don’t believe she was as enjoyable a lady as Beulah Gibbs, fact is I know she wasn’t, but she was in her own way enjoyable. Wheeler, who was Miss Charlotte’s lawyer for the next thirty or so years, had the gift of enjoying her for her own sake. Which was fortunate for Wheeler, for after she died her relatives decided that her estate was beyond the powers of “a country lawyer.” So Wheeler was paid for in fact a lot of bother mostly by a little pleasure. But Grover enjoyed the idea of himself as her tenant, and the idea of her as his landlady.

While she was still a widow in mourning, Miss Charlotte took over the supervision of the farms, and I don’t believe there has been anything like it in the history of the world before or since. She would come riding in, always unexpectedly, in the back seat of her long green car that was about the same color as folding money. It would be shined so slick, Grover said, that a housefly couldn’t stand up on it. She would be wearing a dress that was like a cloud or like a flower bed in full bloom or like a pool with goldfish—this is Grover talking. And she would have on white gloves and a hat with a veil, and if the weather was the least bit cool she would have a fox or a mink fur piece around her neck and her hands stuck into a fur muff with every hair standing on end. And she would be sitting straight up like a queen in a picture, in reference strictly to herself.

Driving her would be Willard Safely, of the black branch of the Hargrave Safelys, wearing a black coat and an official little black chauffeur’s cap, Willard being a whole nuther item of interest himself. When he wasn’t wearing his black coat to be Miss Charlotte’s chauffeur, he would be her butler or table waiter wearing a white coat. His wife, Bernice, was Miss Charlotte’s cook and housemaid, always starched and white and waiting to be told what to do next. Willard’s life was in a way glorious, for who else anywhere around drove such a car? But it was difficult too, and not just when Miss Charlotte joined forces with Bernice in regard to several of his pleasures. I know some of what I know, not just from Grover, but also from Wheeler.

I don’t mean to give you the idea that Wheeler Catlett went around gossiping about his clients. But when his boy Andy got big enough to be some account at work, he would tell us things. At that age, Andy wasn’t always on the best of terms with his father, but he enjoyed Wheeler’s knowledge and his language. So when we were all together at work and the stories would get started, Andy sometimes had good things to pass along. It’s a mystery how the voices gather. Our talk at row ends or in the barn or stripping room would call up the voices of the absent and the dead. Somebody maybe would wonder what old Uncle Bub would think of Miss Charlotte, and though we never knew him and he never knew her he would say about her what he said about everybody of wonder. “Hell and dammit, boys! She’s a ring-tailed twister!” About everybody knew of Miss Charlotte and took some interest in her. She was surrounded, you might say, with observation. And of course also, as Wheeler said, with her own glitter.

Grover said he could tell when she was coming because first he would see Willard in his chauffeur’s cap driving around the corner of the rock fence along the driveway and then, well behind him, Miss Charlotte would come into sight in the back seat. They would drive up in front of the feed barn. They would look around. If they didn’t see Grover, Miss Charlotte would tell Willard to blow the horn, and he would give forth a toot. When Grover appeared, if he did, Miss Charlotte would roll her window down.

Grover, you would think, might have gone over and leaned down to speak to her at a respectful level through the window, but Grover never felt dressed for the occasion. So he stood back at some distance, requiring her to raise her voice to, as he put it, his level to speak to him, and he would holler back to her. She took herself too seriously to notice that he took her unseriously.

“Grover, are you giving milk regularly to the cats?”

“Yes mam, Miss Charlotte.”

“Grover, you aren’t looking well. Are you well?”

“I was feeling pretty well, Miss Charlotte, but I got over it.”

“I see you have a nice automobile, Grover,” she said once, pointing to one of Grover’s semi-wrecks that he said would roll down any hill it couldn’t pull up. “What kind is it?”

“A small Packard, Miss Charlotte.”

Grover liked that remark so well that every old car he had from then on he always called it a small Packard.

But maybe more often than she came, Miss Charlotte would send Willard by himself. When she sent Willard it was usually with a message she didn’t want to deliver in person.

Neither one of them ever said so, but Willard and Grover saw eye to eye on a lot of things. They enjoyed a lot of the same pleasures without ever so much as a look or a wink passing between them.

Willard’s natural laugh was something to see and hear. He would bend way forward and then rear way back and give out a great bellow that would loosen shingles. But when more was going on than met the eye he had a little pecking laugh, “heh-heh-heh.”

Miss Charlotte was maybe the president of the widows and old maids of the Hargrave aristocracy, and she made a big thing of giving all her constituents an old ham every Christmas, a big ham to the widows with families and a little ham to the old maids. How she got the little hams was a matter of some embarrassment to Willard, and a matter of artistic pride and satisfaction to Grover.

Every fall when the nights were getting cold and hog-killing time was getting close, Willard would come driving in by himself. He would say, “Trim them shoulders round, Mistah Grover, heh-heh-heh.”

Miss Charlotte’s hogs, you see, were the only ones ever known to have hams at both ends. “They had hams coming and going!” Wheeler Catlett said.

Sure enough, Grover could trim a shoulder so anybody who didn’t know the difference would take it for a ham. And the aristocratic old maids at Hargrave didn’t know the difference.

When it was coming Christmas there would be Willard again, by himself. He would back the big car up to the smokehouse door, Grover would hand the yearling hams out to Willard, and every time Grover handed him one of the little hams Willard, never looking at Grover, said, “Heh-heh-heh.”

What made Willard laugh his big true laugh was for instance this.

One afternoon Willard was driving Miss Charlotte and a lesser widow or two and Miss Agnes Heartsease home from some function, and they were overtaken by a big storm of rain at the same time that Miss Heartsease, full of coffee, was overtaken by an urge to uncork herself that she was powerless to resist—this is Wheeler talking.

Miss Heartsease was a schoolteacher and a lady of the strictest religion. Her virtue, Wheeler said, was a mighty fortress that she had successfully defended against every assault, as many maybe as one.

Anyhow, and this was probably something else new in history, Miss Charlotte made Willard stand out in the rain to hold an umbrella over Miss Heartsease, looking away, while she peed I’m sure a genteel little trickle on the gravel.

The only one who would have told that was bound to be Willard, so I guess he told it. And of course it got back to Grover. And if it happened to be raining, Grover, who liked to make Willard laugh, would say perfectly serious, “Willard, I hate to ask it of you, but that coffee’s working on me. Have you got your umbrella?”

When Miss Charlotte came to supervise the farming, she never got out of the car. Her need to supervise was fulfilled just by making the trip, passing a few words with Grover, and looking lovingly across the hollow behind the house at the roof of what she called “Father La Vere’s tobacco barn.”

“Father La Vere” was what with deep respect and daughterly love she called Uncle Bub. It had been Uncle Bub’s barn, sure enough. And hard telling whose before him. It was old. Part of it was log. It went back maybe to the time of D. Boone. It had been pieced out and added to by later generations until it sprawled all over the hillside. Sometime toward the end of his earthly passage, Mr. La Vere had got a good deal on, it must have been, a barrel or two of blue paint, and he hired some brave fellows to brush it onto the rusty roof of that old barn. So when Miss Charlotte looked at Father La Vere’s barn, what she saw was half an acre of blue roof that made Chicken Little look like a true prophet. You could say, and maybe Mr. La Vere did say, that a barn is no better than its roof. But Miss Charlotte’s philosophy on barns was that if the roof is all right then the barn is all right.

In fact, under the roof, the barn was just a collection of splices and patches. It was tiered off with old fence rails and locust poles, all nailed and wired up every which way. All of us who ever worked in it fell out of it at least once. And there was a big old cedar tree grown up on the downhill side with its limbs bushed out until they touched the wall. The tree had no business there, but way before Grover some tenant had let it get started, and every one since had left it, maybe as a comment on the barn that said more or less “To hell with it!”

Well, after Grover had been there must have been four or five years, the rust began showing through the blue paint to where it was visible even to Miss Charlotte. And faithful to tradition, she wanted it painted again with blue paint.

She put the proposition to Grover, but Grover couldn’t do it. He couldn’t work high off the ground. It made the world whirl. It made him so dizzy and sick he couldn’t hardly hold his dinner he was so scared he would fall. This was either true or it wasn’t, but it saved Grover a good deal of trouble along with maybe his neck.

So Miss Charlotte authorized Grover to see who would take the job, and Grover put the proposition to my brother, Jarrat, who took him up. Out of generosity he took him up on my behalf as well as his own.

“Hang on!” I said. “I don’t want to paint that damned roof. I can’t spare the time. And high places make me sick like they do Grover.”

Jarrat, a man of few words, said, “You could use the money.”

Matter of fact, I could. But like Jarrat I also could have done without it, and unlike Jarrat would have been glad to. But I was in and I knew it.

Jarrat had traded with Grover for two dollars a day and our dinner, dinner to be furnished by Beulah Gibbs, which was the best part of the deal, for Beulah was a fine cook, paint and brushes and so on to be furnished by Miss Charlotte.

So as soon as we got our crops laid by we gathered up ladders and ropes and everything we thought we’d need, and we got started. We had a long job of it. That roof must have been half an acre, give or take a tenth or two, and in them days nobody had thought of spraying paint or rolling it on. We rubbed it on with brushes, making sure to cover the nailheads and the rust, doing a thorough good job.

We did the uphill side first because that was the bigger side. But also we wanted to get ourselves well used to the job before we got to work on the downhill side which was all of it steep and almighty high at the eave. To tell the truth, I didn’t have Grover’s problem with heights, but I knew that if you fell from so high onto that old ledgy hillside you wouldn’t get up again maybe until resurrection morning.

Finally we did conquer the uphill side. We passed our ropes over the comb of the roof then and tied our ladders on the downhill side. And we were keeping our feet always on the ladder rungs. We weren’t taking any chances. We started each one on a side and worked toward the middle. After it seemed like forty days and forty nights we were working pretty close together, which back then wasn’t always the ideal arrangement for Jarrat and me.

We came back onto the roof one day after dinner and went at it again. We were meaning to get the job over with that day if it took us till dark. I don’t know why it is, but even when you’re getting paid by the day, you want to get done. You’re eager to get done, just as you’d be if you were working for yourself at no wage. And it did seem like we’d been there nearly forever when there were better things to do. Looked back at, it was beginning to seem like a waste.

And my Lord it was hot ! You couldn’t touch that roof bare-handed, and you could barely see for the sweat. It was pure punishment. By the middle of the afternoon I began to feel unhappy with Jarrat for including me in the deal. I began to put on a little speed, laying that paint on slappity-slap, knowing he couldn’t help but hear. I had to keep it up quite a while before he said anything.

Finally he said, “What’s your hurry?”

“Well, you said it’s time we were getting done with this,” I said, no matter that we clearly were getting done with it. “I’m just taking your word for it, that’s all.”

He didn’t answer. But I knew he was getting mad. It would make him mad when you were being unserious about work. I went on, slappity-slap, loading my brush with paint and making it pop against the roof. Jarrat was commenting by not saying anything. I was cooking him on a slow fire, and I ought to’ve had my ass kicked, for the poor fellow all his life had a harder time of it than I did, but being a man of weak character I couldn’t stop.

I said, “And I got places to go and things to do.”

He went ahead, serious about his work, and didn’t say anything for another while. And then he said, “Well, don’t slobber it on.”

I straightened up and unseriously rolled a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of my mouth and lit it and picked up my bucket and brush. I hadn’t hardly more than just started painting again when we heard this low buzz way off in the sky, and it got louder. We looked where the sound was coming from, and directly out of the heat haze and the shimmer this airplane just appeared.

Back then an airplane was a rare sight, and this one was a four-winger flying lower than we’d ever seen one. The idea that some body was in that thing flying through the sky seemed to come somewhere between prime idiocy and a miracle. It passed right over the top of us.

And then several events took place so fast they almost happened at the same time. While I was looking so straight up that my hat started to fall off, I stepped backwards to see better and threw my whole weight right onto the wet paint. I grabbed for my hat with my right hand that had the loaded brush in it and only painted the side of my face, the hat was gone. And so was I, of course. I dropped bucket and brush both to try for a handhold in the thin air, and didn’t find one.

Half a gallon of spilled paint makes a tin roof uncommonly slick. I hadn’t had time to fall over, so I was going down that roof standing up, like a boy sliding on ice, and I was saying very clearly in my mind, “Well, this is the end of you, old bud.” I shot off the roof right into the top of that old cedar tree, and that’s how come I’m here to tell about it. I never could make my mind up whether it was Providence or luck, so I split the middle and thanked Providence for my luck.

A tree like that, you know, grows its top branches upwards and its lower ones outwards. As I was flying in among them, the top branches raked some skin off here and there, and I reckon that slowed me down. When I came to the outreaching lower branches, they just bent and tumbled me from one to the next, sort of gently, maybe gracefully, until the bottom one dropped me without too much of a thump onto the ground. And there I sat, spraddle-legged in the shade, cooler than I’d been since dinner.

When I got reorganized enough to look up at where I’d come from, there was Jarrat holding to his rope and looking over the eave of the roof to see what was left of me. We looked back and forth at each other what seemed a long time, and it was awfully quiet.

After a while he said, “Well, are you practicing up for something, or was that it?”

It came to me I was alive. That cigarette was still stuck in the corner of my mouth, still lit. I didn’t answer. I sat there with half my face painted blue and finished my smoke. Jarrat watched me until I reckon he was satisfied, and then he got back to being himself.

“Long as you’re on the ground, how ’bout getting us a fresh jug of water?”

The Solemn Boy (1934)

PTOLEMY PROUDFOOT’S ninety-eight-acre farm lay along the Goforth Hill road between the Cotman Ridge road and Katy’s Branch. It included some very good ridgeland, some wooded hillside above the creek, and, down between Katy’s Branch and the Katy’s Branch road, two acres or so of bottomland. This creek-bottom field, small and narrow and awkwardly placed, seemed hardly to belong to the farm at all, and yet it was the one piece of truly excellent land that Tol owned. He called it the Watch Fob. He kept it sowed in red clover and timothy or lespedeza and timothy, and every three or four years he would break it and plant it in corn.

Since the Watch Fob was so out of the way, whatever work Tol had to do there tended to be put off until last. And yet, such was the quality of the crops that came from that land, and such the pleasantness of the place, down among the trees beside the creek, that Tol always looked forward to working there. The little field was quiet and solitary. No house or other building was visible from it, and the road was not much traveled. When Tol worked there, he felt off to himself and satisfied. There were some fine big sycamores along the creek, and while Tol worked, he would now and then hear the cry of a shikepoke or a kingfisher. Life there was different from life up on the ridge.

Nineteen thirty-four was one of the years when Tol planted the Watch Fob in corn. And that was fortunate, for it was a dry year; the ridge fields produced less than usual, and the Watch Fob made up a good part of the difference. Tol cut and shocked that field last, and then he shucked and cribbed the upland corn before he went back again to the creek bottom.

Perhaps Tol agreed with the sage of Proverbs who held that “he that hasteth with his feet sinneth”—I don’t know. It is a fact, anyhow, that Tol never hurried. He was not by nature an anxious or a fearful man. But I suspect that he was unhurried also by principle. Tol loved his little farm, and he loved farming. It would have seemed to him a kind of sacrilege to rush through his work without getting the good of it. He never went to the field without the company of a hound or two. At the time I am telling about, he had a large black-and-tan mostly hound named Pokerface. And when Tol went to work, he would often carry his rifle. If, while he was working, Pokerface treed a squirrel or a young groundhog, then the workday would be interrupted by a little hunting, and Miss Minnie would have wild meat on the table the next day. When Tol went down to the Watch Fob to cultivate his corn, he always took his fishing pole. While he worked with plow or hoe, he would have a baited hook in the water. And from time to time he would take a rest, sitting with his back against a tree in the deep shade, watching his cork. In this leisurely way, he did good work, and his work was timely. His crops were clean. His pastures were well grassed and were faithfully clipped every year. His lambs and his steers almost always topped the market. His harvested corn gleamed in the crib, as clean of shuck and silk as if Tol had prepared it for a crowd of knowledgeable spectators, though as like as not he would be the only one who ever saw it.

By the time Tol got around to shucking the corn down on the Watch Fob that fall, it was past Thanksgiving. People had begun to think of Christmas. Tol had put off the job for two or three days, saying to himself, “I’ll go tomorrow.” But when he woke up on the morning he had resolved to go, he wished that he never had planted the Watch Fob in corn in the first place. Tol was sixty-two years old in 1934. He had not been young for several years, as he liked to say. And that morning when he woke, he could hear the wind ripping past the eaves and corners of the little farmstead, and rattling the bare branches of the trees.

“I’m getting old,” he thought as he heaved his big self off the mattress and felt beneath the bedrail for his socks.

“I’m getting old”—he had said that a number of times in the last few years, each time with surprise and with sudden sympathy for his forebears who had got old before him.

But he got up and dressed in the dark, leaving Miss Minnie to lie abed until he built up the fires. Tol was a big man. When he dressed, as Miss Minnie’s nephew Sam Hanks said, it was like upholstering a sofa. In sixty-two years Tol had never become good at it. In fact, putting on his clothes was an affair not in the direct line of his interests, and he did not pay it much attention. Later, while he sat with his coffee after breakfast and was thus within her reach, Miss Minnie would see that his shirt collar was turned down and that all his buttons had engaged the appropriate buttonholes.

Tol, anyhow, approximately dressed himself, went down the stairs, built up the fire in the living room, and lit a fire in the cooking range in the kitchen. He sat by the crackling firebox of the range, wearing his cap and coat now, and put on his shoes. And then he sat and thought a little while. Tol had always been a man who could sit and think if he had to. But until lately he had not usually done so the first thing in the morning. Now it seemed that his sixty-two years had brought him to a new place, in which some days it was easier to imagine staying in by the fire than going out to work. He had an ache or two and a twinge or two, and he knew without imagining that the wind was from the north and he knew how cold it was. Tol thought on these things for some time there by the warming stove, and he thought that of all his troubles thinking about them was the worst. After a while he heard Miss Minnie’s quick footsteps on the floor upstairs. He picked up the milk buckets then and went to the barn.

A little later, having eaten a good breakfast and hitched his team to the wagon, Tol experienced a transformation that he had experienced many times before. He passed through all his thoughts and dreads about the day, emerging at last into the day itself, and he liked it.

The wind was still whistling down from the north over the hard-frozen ground. But his horses looked wonderful, as horses tend to do on such a morning, with every hair standing on end and their necks arched, wanting to trot with the wagon’s weight pressing onto their britchings as they went down the hill, and their breath coming in clouds that streamed away on the wind. Tol’s fingers grew numb in his gloves with holding them back.

They quieted down presently, and he drove on to the Watch Fob, sticking first one hand and then the other into his armpits to warm his fingers. And then he untied the first shock, slipped his shucking peg onto his right hand, and began tossing the clean yellow ears into the wagon. It was not yet full daylight. He settled into the work, so that presently he paid less attention to it, and his hands went about their business almost on their own. He looked around, enjoying the look of the little field. Even on so gray a day it was pretty. After he had cut and shocked the corn, he had disked the ground and sowed it in wheat, and now the shocks stood in their straight rows on a sort of lawn that was green, even though it was frozen. And it was pleasant to see the humanly ordered small clearing among the trees. Nearby the creek flowed under thin ice and then broke into the open and into sound as it went over a riffle and back again under ice. But the best thing of all was the quiet. Though he could hear the wind clashing and rattling in the trees around the rim of the valley, there was hardly a breeze down there in the Watch Fob. Surrounded by the wind’s commotion, the quietness of the little cornfield gave it a sort of intimacy and a sort of expectancy. As his work warmed him, he unbuttoned his jacket. A while later he took it off.

A little past the middle of the morning, snowflakes began to fall. It was nothing at all like a snowstorm, but just a few flakes drifting down. Up on the ridgetops, Tol knew, the wind would be carrying the flakes almost straight across. “Up there,” he thought, “it ain’t one of them snows that falls. It’s one of them snows that just passes by.” But down where he was, the flakes sifted lackadaisically out of the sky as if they had the day off and no place in particular to go, becoming visible as they came down past the treetops and then pretty much disappearing when they lit. It would take hours of such snowing to make even a skift of whiteness on the ground. Pokerface, who in dog years was older than Tol, nevertheless took shelter under the wagon.

“Well, if you ain’t something!” Tol said to him. “Go tree a squirrel.”

Pokerface had a good sense of humor, but he did not appreciate sarcasm. He acknowledged the justice of Tol’s criticism by beating his tail two or three times on the ground, but he did not come out.

There had been a time when a Proudfoot almost never worked alone. The Proudfoots were a big family of big people whose farms were scattered about in the Katy’s Branch valley and on Cotman Ridge. They liked to work together and to be together. Often, even when a Proudfoot was at work on a job he could not be helped with, another Proudfoot would be sitting nearby to watch and talk. The First World War killed some of them and scattered others. Since then, the old had died and the young had gone, until by now Tol was the only one left. Tol was the last of the Proudfoots, for he and Miss Minnie had no children. And now, though he swapped work with his neighbors when many hands were needed, he often worked alone, amused or saddened sometimes to remember various departed Proudfoots and the old stories, but at other times just present there in the place and the day and the work, more or less as his dog and his horses were. When he was remembering he would sometimes laugh or grunt or mutter at what he remembered, and then the old dog would look at him and the horses would tilt their ears back to ask what he meant. When he wasn’t remembering, he talked to the horses and the dog.

“Me and you,” he said to Pokerface, “we’re a fine pair of half-wore-out old poots. What are we going to do when we get old?”

It amused him to see that Pokerface had no idea either.

For a while after Tol started that morning’s work, it seemed to him that he would never cover the bottom of the wagon box. But after he quit paying so much attention he would be surprised, when he did look, at how the corn was accumulating. He laid the stalks down as he snapped off the ears, and then when he had finished all the stalks, he stood them back up in a shock and tied them. The shucked ears were piling up nearly to the top of the wagon box by the time Tol judged it was getting on toward eleven o’clock. By then his stomach had begun to form the conclusion that his throat had been cut, as Proudfoot stomachs had always tended to do at that time of day. And now he began to converse with himself about how long it would take to get back up the hill and water and feed his horses. He knew that Miss Minnie would begin to listen for him at about eleven-thirty, and he didn’t want to get to the kitchen much later than that. He thought that he could go in with what corn he had, but then he thought he might shuck just a little more. He had conducted thousands of such conversations with himself, and he knew just how to do it. He urged himself on with one “little more” after another until he filled the wagon properly to the brim, and in plenty of time, too.

The day was still cold. As soon as he quit work, he had to put his jacket back on and button it up. The thought of reentering the wind made him hunch his shoulders and draw his neck down into his collar like a terrapin.

He climbed up onto the wagon seat and picked up the lines. “Come here, boys,” he said to the team. And they turned and drew the creaking load out of the field.

If Tol had a favorite thing to do, it was driving a loaded wagon home from the field. As he drove out toward the road, he could not help glancing back at the wagon box brimming with corn. It was a kind of wonder to him now that he had handled every ear of the load. Behind him, the little field seemed to resume a deeper quietness as he was leaving it, the flakes of snow still drifting idly down upon it.

When they started up the hill the horses had to get tight in their collars. It was a long pull up to the first bend in the road. When they got there, Tol stopped on the outside of the bend and cramped the wheels to let the horses rest.

“Take a breath or two, boys,” he said.

“Come on, old Poke,” he said to the dog, who had fallen a little behind, and now came and sat down proprietarily beside the front wheel.

Where they were now they could feel the wind. The snowflakes flew by them purposefully, as if they knew of a better place farther on and had only a short time to get there.

Pretty soon the cold began to get inside Tol’s clothes. He was ready to speak to the team again when he heard Pokerface growl. It was a quiet, confidential growl to notify Tol of the approach of something that Pokerface had not made up his mind about.

When Tol looked back the way Pokerface was looking, he saw a man and a small boy walking up the road. Tol saw immediately that he did not know them, and that they were poorly dressed for the weather. The man was wearing an old felt hat that left his ears in the cold and a thin, raggedy work jacket. The boy had on a big old blue toboggan that covered his ears and looked warm, but his coat was the kind that had once belonged to a suit, not much to it, the lapels pinned shut at the throat. The sleeves of the boy’s coat and the legs of his pants were too short. The man walked behind the boy, perhaps to shelter him a little from the wind. They both had their hands in their pockets and their shoulders hunched up under their ears.

“Hush, Poker,” Tol said.

When the man and boy came up beside the wagon, the boy did not look up. The man glanced quickly up at Tol and looked away.

“Well,” Tol said cheerfully, for he was curious about those people and wanted to hear where they came from and where they were going, “can I give you a lift the rest of the way up the hill?”

The man appeared inclined to go on past without looking at Tol again.

“Give the boy a little rest?” Tol said.

The man stopped and looked at the boy. Tol could tell that the man wanted to let the boy ride, but was afraid or embarrassed or proud, it was hard to tell which. Tol sat smiling down upon them, waiting.

“I reckon,” the man said.

Tol put down his hand and gave the boy a lift up onto the load of corn. The man climbed up behind him.

“We hate to put the burden on your team,” the man said.

Tol said, “Well, it’s all right. All they been doing is putting in the time. Get up, boys.”

“They’re right good ones,” the man said.

Tol knew the man said that to be polite, but it was a pleasing compliment anyhow, for the man spoke as if he knew horses. Tol said, “They do very well.”

And then he said, “You all come far?” hoping the man would tell something about himself.

But the man didn’t. He said, “Tolable.”

Tol glanced back and saw that the man had positioned his son between his spread legs and had opened his own coat to shelter him within it. As soon as he had stopped walking, the boy had begun to shiver. And now Tol saw their shoes. The man had on a pair of street shoes with the heels almost worn off, the boy a pair of brogans, too big for him, that looked as stiff as iron.

“Poor,” Tol thought. Such men were scattered around the country everywhere, he knew—drifting about, wearing their hand-me-downs or grab-me-ups, looking for a little work or a little something to eat. Even in so out-of-the-way a place as Cotman Ridge Tol and Miss Minnie had given a meal or a little work to two or three. But till now they had seen no boy. The boy, Tol thought, was a different matter altogether.

Tol wanted to ask more questions, but the man held himself and the boy apart.

“That wind’s right brisk this morning, ain’t it?” Tol said.

“Tolable so,” the man said.

“I’m Tol Proudfoot,” Tol said.

The man only nodded, as if the fact were obvious.

After that, Tol could think of nothing more to say. But now he had the boy on his mind. The boy couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old—just a little, skinny, peaked boy, who might not have had much breakfast, by the look of him. And who might, Tol thought, not have much to look forward to in the way of dinner or supper either.

“That’s my place up ahead yonder,” he said to the man. “I imagine Miss Minnie’s got a biscuit or two in the oven. Won’t you come in and eat a bite with us?”

“Thank you, but we’ll be on our way,” the man said.

Tol looked at the boy then; he couldn’t help himself. “Be nice to get that boy up beside the stove where he can get warm,” he said. “And a bean or two and a hot biscuit in his belly wouldn’t hurt him either, I don’t expect.”

He saw the man swallow and look down at the boy. “We’d be mightily obliged,” the man said.

So when they came to his driveway, Tol turned in, and when they came up beside the house he stopped.

“You’ll find Miss Minnie in the kitchen,” Tol said. “Just go around to the back porch and in that way. She’ll be glad to see you. Get that boy up close to the stove, now. Get him warm.”

The man and boy got down and started around the back of the house. Tol spoke to his team and drove on into the barn lot. He positioned the wagon in front of the corncrib, so he could scoop the load off after dinner, and then he unhitched the horses. He watered them, led them to their stalls, and fed them.

“Eat, boys, eat,” he said.

And then he started to the house. As he walked along he opened his hand, and the old dog put his head under it.

The man and boy evidently had done as he had told them, for they were not in sight. Tol already knew how Miss Minnie would have greeted them.

“Well, come on in!” she would have said, opening the door and seeing the little boy. “Looks like we’re having company for dinner! Come in here, honey, and get warm!”

He knew how the sight of that little shivering boy would have called the heart right out of her. Tol and Miss Minnie had married late, and time had gone by, and no child of their own had come. Now they were stricken in age, and it had long ceased to be with Miss Minnie after the manner of women.

He told the old dog to lie down on the porch, opened the kitchen door, and stepped inside. The room was warm, well lit from the two big windows in the opposite wall, and filled with the smells of things cooking. They had killed hogs only a week or so before, and the kitchen was full of the smell of frying sausage. Tol could hear it sizzling in the skillet. He stood just inside the door, unbuttoning his coat and looking around. The boy was sitting close to the stove, a little sleepy looking now in the warmth, some color coming into his face. The man was standing near the boy, looking out the window—feeling himself a stranger, poor fellow, and trying to pretend he was somewhere else.

Tol took off his outdoor clothes and hung them up. He nodded to Miss Minnie, who gave him a smile. She was rolling out the dough for an extra pan of biscuits. Aside from that, the preparations looked about as usual. Miss Minnie ordinarily cooked enough at dinner so that there would be leftovers to warm up or eat cold for supper. There would be plenty. The presence of the two strangers made Tol newly aware of the abundance, fragrance, and warmth of that kitchen.

“Cold out,” Miss Minnie said. “This boy was nearly frozen.”

Tol saw that she had had no luck either in learning who their guests were. “Yes,” he said. “Pretty cold.”

He turned to the little washstand beside the door, dipped water from the bucket into the wash pan, warmed it with water from the teakettle on the stove. He washed his hands, splashed his face, groped for the towel.

As soon as Tol quit looking at his guests, they began to look at him. Only now that they saw him standing up could they have seen how big he was. He was broad and wide and tall. All his movements had about them an air of casualness or indifference as if he were not conscious of his whole strength. He wore his clothes with the same carelessness, evidently not having thought of them since he put them on. And though the little boy had not smiled, at least not where Tol or Miss Minnie could see him, he must at least have wanted to smile at the way Tol’s stiff gray hair stuck out hither and yon after Tol combed it, as indifferent to the comb as if the comb had been merely fingers or a stick. But when Tol turned away from the washstand, the man looked back to the window and the boy looked down at his knee.

“It’s ready,” Miss Minnie said to Tol, as she took a pan of biscuits from the oven and slid another in.

Tol went to the chair at the end of the table farthest from the stove. He gestured to the two chairs on either side of the table. “Make yourself at home, now,” he said to the man and the boy. “Sit down, sit down.”

He sat down himself and the two guests sat down.

“We’re mightily obliged,” the man said.

“Don’t wait on me,” Miss Minnie said. “I’ll be there in just a minute.”

“My boy, reach for that sausage,” Tol said. “Take two and pass ’em.

“Have biscuits,” he said to the man. “Naw, that ain’t enough. Take two or three. There’s plenty of ’em.”

There was plenty of everything: a platter of sausage, and more already in the skillet on the stove; biscuits brown and light, and more in the oven; a big bowl of navy beans, and more in the kettle on the stove, a big bowl of applesauce and one of mashed potatoes. There was a pitcher of milk and one of buttermilk.

Tol heaped his plate, and saw to it that his guests heaped theirs. “Eat till it’s gone,” he said, “and don’t ask for nothing you don’t see.”

Miss Minnie sat down presently, and they all ate. Now and again Tol and Miss Minnie glanced at each other, each wanting to be sure the other saw how their guests applied themselves to the food. For the man and the boy ate hungrily without looking up, as though to avoid acknowledging that others saw how hungry they were. And Tol thought, “No breakfast.” In his concern for the little boy, he forgot his curiosity about where the two had come from and where they were going.

Miss Minnie helped the boy to more sausage and more beans, and she buttered two more biscuits and put them on his plate. Tol saw how her hand hovered above the boy’s shoulder, wanting to touch him. He was a nice-looking little boy, but he never smiled. Tol passed the boy the potatoes and refilled his glass with milk.

“Why, he eats so much it makes him poor to carry it,” Tol said. “That boy can put it away!”

The boy looked up, but he did not smile or say anything. Neither Tol nor Miss Minnie had heard one peep out of him. Tol passed everything to the man, who helped himself and did not look up.

“We surely are obliged,” he said.

Tol said, “Why, I wish you would look. Every time that boy’s elbow bends, his mouth flies open.”

But the boy did not smile. He was a solemn boy, far too solemn for his age.

“Well, we know somebody else whose mouth’s connected to his elbow, don’t we?” Miss Minnie said to the boy, who did not look up and did not smile. “Honey, don’t you want another biscuit?”

The men appeared to be finishing up now. She rose and brought to the table a pitcher of sorghum molasses, and she brought the second pan of biscuits, hot from the oven.

The two men buttered biscuits, and then, when the butter had melted, laid them open on their plates and covered them with molasses. And Miss Minnie did the same for the boy. She longed to see him smile, and so did Tol.

“Now, Miss Minnie,” Tol said, “that boy will want to go easy on them biscuits from here on, for we ain’t got but three or four hundred of ’em left.”

But the boy only ate his biscuits and molasses and did not look at anybody.

And now the meal was ending, and what were they going to do? Tol and Miss Minnie yearned toward that nice, skinny, really pretty little boy, and the old kitchen filled with their yearning, and maybe there was to be no answer. Maybe that man and this little boy would just get up in their silence and say, “Much obliged,” and go away, and leave nothing of themselves at all.

“My boy,” Tol said—he had his glass half-full of buttermilk in his hand, and was holding it up. “My boy, when you drink buttermilk, always remember to drink from the near side of the glass—like this.” Tol tilted his glass and took a sip from the near side. “For drinking from the far side, as you’ll find out, don’t work anything like so well.” And then—and perhaps to his own surprise—he applied the far side of the glass to his lips, turned it up, and poured the rest of the buttermilk right down the front of his shirt. And then he looked at Miss Minnie with an expression of absolute astonishment.

For several seconds nobody made a sound. They all were looking at Tol, and Tol, with his hair asserting itself in all directions and buttermilk on his chin and his shirt and alarm and wonder in his eyes, was looking at Miss Minnie.

And then Miss Minnie said quietly, “Mr. Proudfoot, you are the limit.”

And then they heard the boy. At first it sounded like he had an obstruction in his throat that he worked at with a sort of strangling. And then he laughed.

He laughed with a free, strong laugh that seemed to open his throat as wide as a stovepipe. It was the laugh of a boy who was completely tickled. It transformed everything. Miss Minnie smiled. And then Tol laughed his big hollering laugh. And then Miss Minnie laughed. And then the boy’s father laughed. The man and the boy looked up, they all looked full into one another’s eyes, and they laughed.

They laughed until Miss Minnie had to wipe her eyes with the hem of her apron.

“Lord,” she said, getting up, “what’s next?” She went to get Tol a clean shirt.

“Let’s have some more biscuits,” Tol said. And they all buttered more biscuits and passed the molasses again.

When Miss Minnie brought the clean shirt and handed it to him, Tol just held it in his hand, for he knew that if he stood up to change shirts the meal would end, and he was not ready for it to end yet. The new warmth and easiness of their laughter, the straight way they all had looked at one another, had made the table a lovely place to be. And he liked the boy even better than he had before.

Tol began to talk then. He talked about his place and when he had bought it. He told what kind of year it had been. He spoke of the Proudfoots and their various connections, and wondered if maybe his guests had heard of any of them.

No, the man said, he had never known a Proudfoot until that day. He went so far as to say he knew he had missed something.

Tol then told about marrying Miss Minnie, and said that things had looked up around there on that happy day, which caused Miss Minnie to blush. Miss Minnie had come from a line of folks by the name of Quinch. Had their guests, by any chance, ever run into any Quinches?

But the man said no, there were no Quinches where he came from.

Which brought Tol to the brink of asking the man point-blank where he came from and where he was going. But then the man retrieved his hat from under his chair, and so put an end to all further questions forever, leaving Tol and Miss Minnie to wonder for the rest of their lives.

The man stood up. “We better be on our way,” he said. “We’re much obliged,” he said to Tol. “It was mighty fine,” he said to Miss Minnie.

“But wait!” Miss Minnie said. Suddenly she was all in a flutter. “Wait, wait!” she said. “Don’t go until I come back!”

She hurried away. All three of them stood now, saying nothing, for a kind of embarrassment had come over them. Now that the meal had ended, now that they had eaten and talked and laughed together for a moment, they saw how little there was that held them. They heard Miss Minnie’s footsteps hurry into the front of the house and up the stairs. And then they heard only the wind and the fire crackling quietly in the stove. And then they heard her footsteps coming back.

When she came into the kitchen again, she was carrying over her left arm an old work jacket of Tol’s, and holding open with both hands a winter coat of her own that she had kept for second best. She put it on the boy, who obediently put his arms into the sleeves, as if used to doing as a woman told him.

But when she offered the work jacket to the man, he shook his head. The jacket was much patched, worn and washed until it was nearly white.

“It’s old, but it’s warm,” Miss Minnie said.

“No, mam,” the man said. For himself, he had reached some unshakable limit of taking. “I can’t take the jacket, mam,” he said. “But for the boy, I thank you.”

He started toward the door then. Miss Minnie hurriedly buttoned the boy into the coat. Tol made as if to help her by prodding the coat here and there with his fingers, feeling between the weather and the boy’s skinny back and shoulders the reassuring intervention of so much cloth.

“It’s not a fit exactly, but maybe it’ll keep him warm,” Miss Minnie said as if only to herself. The coat hung nearly to the top of the boy’s shoes. “It’s good and long,” she said.

Her hands darted about nervously, turning the collar up, rolling up the sleeves so that they did not dangle and yet covered the boy’s hands. She tucked the boy into the coat as if she were putting him to bed. She snatched a paper bag from a shelf, dumped the remaining biscuits into it out of the pan, and at the last moment, before letting the boy go, shoved the sack into the right-hand pocket of the coat. “There!” she said.

And then they lifted their hands and allowed the boy to go with his father out the door. They followed. They went with the man and boy around the back of the house to the driveway.

The man stopped and turned to them. He raised his hand. “We’re mightily obliged,” he said. He turned to Miss Minnie, “We’re mightily obliged, mam.”

“You might as well leave that boy with us,” Tol said. He was joking, and yet he meant it with his whole heart. “We could use a boy like that.”

The man smiled. “He’s a good boy,” he said. “I can’t hardly get along without this boy.”

The two of them turned then and walked away. They went out to the road, through the wind and the gray afternoon and the flying snow, and out of sight.

Tol and Miss Minnie watched them go, and then they went back into the house. Tol put on the clean shirt and his jacket and cap and gloves. Miss Minnie began to clear the table. For the rest of that day, they did not look at each other.

Tol lived nine more years after that, and Miss Minnie twenty more. She was my grandmother’s friend, and one day Granddad left Granny and me at the Proudfoot house to visit while he went someplace else. The war was still going on, and Tol had not been dead a year. I sat and listened as the two women talked of the time and of other times. When they spoke of the Depression, Miss Minnie was reminded of the story of the solemn boy, and she told it again, stopping with Tol’s words, “We could use a boy like that.”

And I remember how she sat, looking down at her apron and smoothing it with her hands. “Mr. Proudfoot always wished we’d had some children,” she said. “He never said so, but I know he did.”

A Jonquil for Mary Penn (1940)

MARY PENN was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton get up and light the lamp and renew the fires. He dressed and went out with the lantern to milk and to feed and harness his team. It was early March, and she could hear the wind blowing, rattling things. She threw the covers off and sat up on the side of the bed, feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her head lean down onto her knees. But she got up, put on her dress and sweater, and went to the kitchen.

Nor did she mention it when Elton came back in, bringing the milk, with the smell of the barn cold in his clothes.

“How’re you this morning?” he asked her, giving her a pat as she strained the milk.

And she said, not looking at him, for she did not want him to know how she felt, “Just fine.”

He ate hungrily the eggs, sausage, and biscuits that she set in front of him, twice emptying the glass that he replenished from a large pitcher of milk. She loved to watch him eat—there was something curiously delicate in the way he used his large hands—but this morning she busied herself about the kitchen, not looking at him, for she knew he was watching her. She had not even set a place for herself.

“You’re not hungry?” he asked.

“Not very. I’ll eat something after while.”

He put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred rapidly with the spoon. Now he lingered a little. He did not indulge himself often, but this was one of his moments of leisure. He gave himself to his pleasures as concentratedly as to his work. He was never partial about anything; he never felt two ways at the same time. It was, she thought, a kind of childishness in him. When he was happy, he was entirely happy, and he could be as entirely sad or angry. His glooms were the darkest she had ever seen. He worked as a hungry dog ate, and yet he could play at croquet or cards with the self-forgetful exuberance of a boy. It was for his concentratedness, she supposed, if such a thing could be supposed about, that she loved him. That and her yen just to look at him, for it was wonderful to her the way he was himself in his slightest look or gesture. She did not understand him in everything he did, and yet she recognized him in everything he did. She had not been prepared—she was hardly prepared yet—for the assent she had given to him.

Though he might loiter a moment over his coffee, the day, she knew, had already possessed him; its momentum was on him. When he rose from bed in the morning, he stepped into the day’s work, impelled into it by the tension, never apart from him, between what he wanted to do and what he could do. The little hillside place that they had rented from his mother afforded him no proper scope for his ability and desire. They always needed money, but, day by day, they were getting by. Though the times were hard, they were not going to be in want. But she knew his need to surround her with a margin of pleasure and ease. This was his need, not hers; still, when he was not working at home, he would be working, or looking for work, for pay.

This morning, delaying his own plowing, he was going to help Walter Cotman plow his corn ground. She could feel the knowledge of what he had to do tightening in him like a spring. She thought of him and Walter plowing, starting in the early light, and the two teams leaning into the collars all day, while the men walked in the opening furrows, and the steady wind shivered the dry grass, shook the dead weeds, and rattled the treetops in the woods.

He stood and pushed in his chair. She came to be hugged as she knew he wanted her to.

“It’s mean out,” he said. “Stay in today. Take some care of yourself.”

“You, too,” she said. “Have you got on plenty of clothes?”

“When I get ’em all on, I will.” He was already wearing an extra shirt and a pair of overalls over his corduroys. Now he put on a sweater, his work jacket, his cap and gloves. He started out the door and then turned back. “Don’t worry about the chores. I’ll be back in time to do everything.”

“All right,” she said.

He shut the door. And now the kitchen was a cell of still lamplight under the long wind that passed without inflection over the ridges.

She cleared the table. She washed the few dishes he had dirtied and put them away. The kitchen contained the table and four chairs, and the small dish cabinet that they had bought, and the large iron cookstove that looked more permanent than the house. The stove, along with the bed and a few other sticks of furniture, had been there when they came.

She heard Elton go by with the team, heading out the lane. The daylight would be coming now, though the windowpanes still reflected the lamplight. She took the broom from its corner by the back door and swept and tidied up the room. They had been able to do nothing to improve the house, which had never been a good one and had seen hard use. The wallpaper, and probably the plaster behind, had cracked in places. The finish had worn off the linoleum rugs near the doorways and around the stoves. But she kept the house clean. She had made curtains. The curtains in the kitchen were of the same blue-and-white checkered gingham as the tablecloth. The bed stands were orange crates for which she had made skirts of the same cloth. Though the house was poor and hard to keep, she had made it neat and homey. It was her first house, and usually it made her happy. But not now.

She was sick. At first it was a consolation to her to have the whole day to herself to be sick in. But by the time she got the kitchen straightened up, even that small happiness had left her. She had a fever, she guessed, for every motion she made seemed to carry her uneasily beyond the vertical. She had a floaty feeling that made her unreal to herself. And finally, when she put the broom away, she let herself sag down into one of the chairs at the table. She ached. She was overpoweringly tired.

She had rarely been sick and never since she married. And now she did something else that was unlike her: she allowed herself to feel sorry for herself. She remembered that she and Elton had quarreled the night before—about what, she could not remember; perhaps it was not rememberable; perhaps she did not know. She remembered the heavy, mostly silent force of his anger. It had been only another of those tumultuous darknesses that came over him as suddenly and sometimes as unaccountably as a July storm. She was miserable, she told herself. She was sick and alone. And perhaps the sorrow that she felt for herself was not altogether unjustified.

She and Elton had married a year and a half earlier, when she was seventeen and he eighteen. She had never seen anybody like him. He had a wild way of rejoicing, like a healthy child, singing songs, joking, driving his old car as if he were drunk and the road not wide enough. He could make her weak with laughing at him. And yet he was already a man as few men were. He had been making his own living since he was fourteen, when he had quit school. His father had been dead by then for five years. He had hated his stepfather. When a neighbor had offered him crop ground, room, and wages, he had taken charge of himself and, though he was still a boy, he had become a man. He wanted, he said, to have to say thank you to nobody. Or to nobody but her. He would be glad, he said with a large grin, to say thank you to her. And he could do things. It was wonderful what he could accomplish with those enormous hands of his. She could have put her hand into his and walked right off the edge of the world. Which, in a way, is what she did.

She had grown up in a substantial house on a good upland farm. Her family was not wealthy, but it was an old family, proud of itself, always conscious of its position and of its responsibility to be itself. She had known from childhood that she would be sent to college. Almost from childhood she had understood that she was destined to be married to a solid professional man, a doctor perhaps, or (and this her mother particularly favored) perhaps a minister.

And so when she married Elton she did so without telling her family. She already knew their judgment of Elton: “He’s nothing.” She and Elton simply drove down to Hargrave late one October night, awakened a preacher, and got married, hoping that their marriage would be accepted as an accomplished fact. They were wrong. It was not acceptable, and it was never going to be. She no longer belonged in that house, her parents told her. She no longer belonged to that family. To them it would be as if she had never lived.

She was seventeen, she had attended a small denominational college for less than two months, and now her life as it had been had ended. The day would come when she would know herself to be a woman of faith. Now she merely loved and trusted. Nobody was living then on Elton’s mother’s little farm on Cotman Ridge, where Elton had lived for a while when he was a child. They rented the place and moved in, having just enough money to pay for the new dish cabinet and the table and four chairs. Elton, as it happened, already owned a milk cow in addition to his team and a few tools.

It was a different world, a new world to her, that she came into then—a world of poverty and community. They were in a neighborhood of six households, counting their own, all within half a mile of one another. Besides themselves there were Braymer and Josie Hardy and their children; Tom Hardy and his wife, also named Josie; Walter and Thelma Cotman and their daughter, Irene; Jonah and Daisy Hample and their children; and Uncle Isham and Aunt Frances Quail, who were Thelma Cotman’s and Daisy Hample’s parents. The two Josies, to save confusion, were called Josie Braymer and Josie Tom. Josie Tom was Walter Cotman’s sister. In the world that Mary Penn had given up, a place of far larger and richer farms, work was sometimes exchanged, but the families were conscious of themselves in a way that set them apart from one another. Here, in this new world, neighbors were always working together. “Many hands make light work,” Uncle Isham Quail loved to say, though his own old hands were no longer able to work much.

Some work only the men did together, like haying and harvesting the corn. Some work only the women did together: sewing or quilting or wallpapering or house-cleaning; and whenever the men were together working, the women would be together cooking. Some work the men and women did together: harvesting tobacco or killing hogs or any other job that needed many hands. It was an old community. They all had worked together a long time. They all knew what each one was good at. When they worked together, not much needed to be explained. When they went down to the little weather-boarded church at Goforth on Sunday morning, they were glad to see one another and had much to say, though they had seen each other almost daily during the week.

This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and took them in with a warmth that answered her parents’ rejection. The men, without asking or being asked, included Elton in whatever they were doing. They told him when and where they needed him. They came to him when he needed them. He was an apt and able hand, and they were glad to have his help. He learned from them all but liked best to work with Walter Cotman, who was a fine farmer. He and Walter were, up to a point, two of a kind; both were impatient of disorder—“I can’t stand a damned mess,” said Walter, and he made none—and both loved the employment of their minds in their work. They were unlike in that Walter was satisfied within the boundaries of his little farm, but Elton could not have been. Nonetheless, Elton loved his growing understanding of Walter’s character and his ways. Though he was a quiet man and gave neither instruction nor advice, Walter was Elton’s teacher, and Elton was consciously his student.

Once, when they had killed hogs and Elton and Mary had stayed at home to finish rendering their lard, the boiling fat had foamed up and begun to run over the sides of the kettle. Mary ran to the house and called Walter on the party line.

“Tell him to throw the fire to it,” Walter said. “Tell him to dip out some lard and throw it on the fire.”

Elton did so, unbelieving, but the fire flared, grew hotter, the foaming lard subsided in the kettle, and Elton’s face relaxed from anxiety and self-accusation into a grin. “Well,” he said, quoting Walter in Walter’s voice, “it’s all in knowing how.”

Mary, who had more to learn than Elton, became a daughter to every woman in the community. She came knowing little, barely enough to begin, and they taught her much. Thelma, Daisy, and the two Josies taught her their ways of cooking, cleaning, and sewing; they taught her to can, pickle, and preserve; they taught her to do the women’s jobs in the hog killing. They took her on their expeditions to one another’s houses to cook harvest meals or to houseclean or to gather corn from the fields and can it. One day they all walked down to Goforth to do some wallpapering for Josie Tom’s mother. They papered two rooms, had a good time, and Josie Tom’s mother fixed them a dinner of fried chicken, creamed new potatoes and peas, hot biscuits, and cherry cobbler.

In cold weather they sat all afternoon in one another’s houses, quilting or sewing or embroidering. Josie Tom was the best at needlework. Everything she made was a wonder. From spring to fall, for a Christmas present for someone, she always embroidered a long cloth that began with the earliest flowers of spring and ended with the last flowers of fall. She drew the flowers on the cloth with a pencil and worked them in with her needle and colored threads. She included the flowers of the woods and fields, the dooryards and gardens. She loved to point to the penciled outlines and name the flowers as if calling them up in their beauty into her imagination. “Look-a-there,” she would say. “I even put in a jimsonweed.” “And a bull thistle,” said Tom Hardy, who had his doubts about weeds and thistles but was proud of her for leaving nothing out.

Josie Tom was a plump, pretty, happy woman, childless but the mother of any child in reach. Mary Penn loved her the best, perhaps, but she loved them all. They were only in their late thirties or early forties, but to Mary they seemed to belong to the ageless, eternal generation of mothers, unimaginably older and more experienced than herself. She called them Miss Josie, Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma. They warmed and sheltered her. Sometimes she could just have tossed herself at them like a little girl to be hugged.

They were capable, unasking, generous, humorous women, and sometimes, among themselves, they were raucous and free, unlike the other women she had known. On their way home from picking blackberries one afternoon, they had to get through a new barbed wire fence. Josie Tom held two wires apart while the other four gathered their skirts, leaned down, and straddled through. Josie Tom handed their filled buckets over. And then Josie Braymer held the wires apart, and Josie Tom, stooping through, got the back of her dress hung on the top wire.

“I knew it!” she said, and she began to laugh.

They all laughed, and nobody laughed more than Josie Tom, who was standing spraddled and stooped, helpless to move without tearing her dress.

“Josie Braymer,” she said, “are you going to just stand there, or are you going to unhook me from this shitten fence?”

And there on the ridgetop in the low sunlight they danced the dance of women laughing, bending and straightening, raising and lowering their hands, swaying and stepping with their heads back.

Daylight was full in the windows now. Mary made herself get up and extinguish the lamp on the table. The lamps all needed to be cleaned and trimmed and refilled, and she had planned to do that today. The whole house needed to be dusted and swept. And she had mending to do. She tied a scarf around her head, put on her coat, and went out.

Only day before yesterday it had been spring—warm, sunny, and still. Elton said the wildflowers were starting up in the leafless woods, and she found a yellow crocus in the yard. And then this dry and bitter wind had come, driving down from the north as if it were as long and wide as time, and the sky was as gray as if the sun had never shone. The wind went through her coat, pressed her fluttering skirt tight against her legs, tore at her scarf. It chilled her to the bone. She went first to the privy in a back corner of the yard and then on to the henhouse, where she shelled corn for the hens and gave them fresh water.

On her way back to the house she stood a moment, looking off in the direction in which she knew Elton and Walter Cotman were plowing. By now they would have accepted even this day as it was; by now they might have shed their jackets. Later they would go in and wash and sit down in Thelma’s warm kitchen for their dinner, hungry, glad to be at rest for a little while before going back again to work through the long afternoon. Though they were not far away, though she could see them in her mind’s eye, their day and hers seemed estranged, divided by great distance and long time. She was cold, and the wind’s insistence wearied her; the wind was like a living creature, rearing and pressing against her so that she might have cried out to it in exasperation, “What do you want ?”

When she got back into the house, she was shivering, her teeth chattering. She unbuttoned her coat without taking it off and sat down close to the stove. They heated only two rooms, the kitchen and the front room where they slept. The stove in the front room might be warmer, she thought, and she could sit in the rocking chair by it; but having already sat down, she did not get up. She had much that she needed to be doing, she told herself. She ought at least to get up and make the bed. And she wanted to tend to the lamps; it always pleased her to have them clean. But she did not get up. The stove’s heat drove the cold out of her clothes, and gradually her shivering stopped.

They had had a hard enough time of it their first winter. They had no fuel, no food laid up. Elton had raised a crop but no garden. He borrowed against the crop to buy a meat hog. He cut and hauled in firewood. He worked for wages to buy groceries, but the times were hard and he could not always find work. Sometimes their meals consisted of biscuits and a gravy made of lard and flour.

And yet they were often happy. Often the world afforded them something to laugh about. Elton stayed alert for anything that was funny and brought the stories home. He told her how the tickle-ass grass got into Uncle Isham’s pants, and how Daisy Hample clucked to her nearsighted husband and children like a hen with half-grown chicks, and how Jonah Hample, missing the steps, walked off the edge of Braymer Hardy’s front porch, fell into a rosebush, and said, “Now, I didn’t go to do that!” Elton could make the funny things happen again in the dark as they lay in bed at night; sometimes they would laugh until their eyes were wet with tears. When they got snowed in that winter, they would drive the old car down the hill until it stalled in the drifts, drag it out with the team, and ram it into the drifts again, laughing until the horses looked at them in wonder.

When the next year came, they began at the beginning, and though the times had not improved, they improved themselves. They bought a few hens and a rooster from Josie Braymer. They bought a second cow. They put in a garden. They bought two shoats to raise for meat. Mary learned to preserve the food they would need for winter. When the cows freshened, she learned to milk. She took a small bucket of cream and a few eggs to Port William every Saturday night and used the money she made to buy groceries and to pay on their debts.

Slowly she learned to imagine where she was. The ridge named for Walter Cotman’s family is a long one, curving out toward the river between the two creek valleys of Willow Run and Katie’s Branch. As it comes near to the river valley it gets narrower, its sides steeper and more deeply incised by hollows. When Elton and Mary Penn were making their beginning there, the uplands were divided into many farms, few of which contained as much as a hundred acres. The hollows, the steeper hillsides, the bluffs along the sides of the two creek valleys were covered with thicket or woods. From where the hawks saw it, the ridge would have seemed a long, irregular promontory reaching out into a sea of trees. And it bore on its back crisscrossings of other trees along the stone or rail or wire fences, trees in thickets and groves, trees in the houseyards. And on rises of ground or tucked into folds were the gray, paintless buildings of the farmsteads, connected to one another by lanes and paths. Now she thought of herself as belonging there, not just because of her marriage to Elton but also because of the economy that the two of them had made around themselves and with their neighbors. She had learned to think of herself as living and working at the center of a wonderful provisioning: the kitchen and garden, hog pen and smokehouse, henhouse and cellar of her own household; the little commerce of giving and taking that spoked out along the paths connecting her household to the others; the two creeks in their valleys on either side; and all this at the heart of the weather and the world.

On a bright, still day in the late fall, after all the leaves were down, she had stood on the highest point and had seen the six smokes of the six houses rising straight up into the wide downfalling light. She knew which smoke came from which house. It was like watching the rising up of prayers or some less acknowledged communication between Earth and Heaven. She could not say to herself how it made her feel.

She loved her jars of vegetables and preserves on the cellar shelves, and the potato bin beneath, the cured hams and shoulders and bacons hanging in the smokehouse, the two hens already brooding their clutches of marked eggs, the egg basket and the cream bucket slowly filling, week after week. But today these things seemed precious and far away, as if remembered from another world or another life. Her sickness made things seem arbitrary and awry. Nothing had to be the way it was. As easily as she could see the house as it was, she could imagine it empty, windowless, the tin roof blowing away, the chimneys crumbling, the cellar caved in, weeds in the yard. She could imagine Elton and herself gone, and the rest of them—Hardy, Hample, Cotman, and Quail—gone too.

Elton could spend an hour telling her—and himself—how Walter Cotman went about his work. Elton was a man in love with farming, and she could see him picking his way into it with his understanding. He wanted to know the best ways of doing things. He wanted to see how a way of doing came out of a way of thinking and a way of living. He was interested in the ways people talked and wore their clothes.

The Hamples were another of his studies. Jonah Hample and his young ones were almost useless as farmers because, as Elton maintained, they could not see all the way to the ground. They did not own a car because they could not see well enough to drive—“They need to drive something with eyes,” Elton said—and yet they were all born mechanics. They could fix anything. While Daisy Hample stood on the porch clucking about the weeds in their crops, Jonah and his boys and sometimes his girls, too, would be busy with some machine that somebody had brought for them to fix. The Hample children went about the neighborhood in a drove, pushing a fairly usable old bicycle that they loved but could not ride.

Elton watched Braymer, too. Unlike his brother and Walter Cotman, Braymer liked to know what was going on in the world. Like the rest of them, Braymer had no cash to spare, but he liked to think about what he would do with money if he had it. He liked knowing where something could be bought for a good price. He liked to hear what somebody had done to make a little money and then to think about it and tell the others about it while they worked. “Braymer would be a trader if he had a chance,” Elton told Mary. “He’d like to try a little of this and a little of that, and see how he did with it. Walter and Tom like what they’ve got.”

“And you don’t like what you’ve got,” Mary said.

He grinned big at her, as he always did when she read his mind. “I like some of it,” he said.

At the end of the summer, when she and Elton were beginning their first tobacco harvest in the neighborhood, Tom Hardy said to Elton, “Now, Josie Braymer can outcut us all, Elton. If she gets ahead of you, just don’t pay it any mind.”

“Tom,” Elton said, “I’m going to leave here now and go to the other end of this row. If Josie Braymer’s there when I get there, I’m going home.”

When he got there Josie Braymer was not there, and neither were any of the men. It was not that he did not want to be bested by a woman; he did not want to be bested by anybody. One thing Mary would never have to do was wonder which way he was. She knew he would rather die than be beaten. It was maybe not the best way to be, she thought, but it was the way he was, and she loved him. It was both a trouble and a comfort to her to know that he would always require the most of himself. And he was beautiful, the way he moved in his work. It stirred her.

She could feel ambition constantly pressing in him. He could do more than he had done, and he was always looking for the way. He was like an axman at work in a tangled thicket, cutting and cutting at the brush and the vines and the low limbs, trying to make room for a full swing. For this year he had rented corn ground from Josie Tom’s mother down by Goforth, two miles away. When he went down with his team to work, he would have to take his dinner. It would mean more work for them both, but he was desperate for room to exert himself. They were poor as the times, they saw more obstacles than openings, and yet she believed without doubt that Elton was on his way.

It was not his ambition—his constant, tireless, often exhilarated preoccupation with work—that troubled her. She could stay with him in that. She had learned that she could do, and do well and gladly enough, whatever she would have to do. She had no fear. What troubled her were the dark and mostly silent angers that often settled upon him and estranged him from everything. At those times, she knew, he doubted himself, and he suffered and raged in his doubt. He may have been born with this doubt in him, she sometimes imagined; it was as though his soul were like a little moon that would be dark at times and bright at others. But she knew also that her parents’ rejection had cost him dearly. Even as he defied them to matter to him, they held a power over him that he could not shake off. In his inability to forgive them, he consented to this power, and their rejection stood by him and measured him day by day. Her parents’ pride was social, belonging, even in its extremity, to their kind and time. But Elton’s pride was merely creaturely, albeit that of an extraordinary creature; it was a creature’s naked claim on the right to respect itself, a claim that no creature’s life, of itself, could invariably support. At times he seemed to her a man in the light in daily struggle with a man in the dark, and sometimes the man in the dark had the upper hand.

Elton never felt that any mistake was affordable; he and Mary were living within margins that were too narrow. He required perfection of himself. When he failed, he was like the sun in a cloud, alone and burning, furious in his doubt, furious at her because she trusted in him though he doubted. How could she dare to love him, who did not love himself? And then, sometimes accountably, sometimes not, the cloud would move away, and he would light up everything around him. His own force and intelligence would be clear within him then; he would be skillful and joyful, passionate in his love of order, funny and tender.

At his best, Elton was a man in love—with her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house.

Walter Cotman always spoke of Mary as Elton’s “better half.” In spite of his sulks and silences, she would not go so far as “better.” That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half! When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.

But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt herself a part without counterpart, a mere fragment of something unknown, dark and broken off. The fire had burned low in the stove. Though she still wore her coat, she was chilled again and shaking. For a long time, perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now misery alerted her again to the room. The wind ranted and sucked at the house’s corners. She could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody off in the distance were shaking a great rug. She felt, not a draft, but the whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against her. She went into the other room, but the fire there also needed building up. She could not bring herself to do it. She was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying down. Standing near the stove, she undressed, put on her nightgown again, and got into the bed.

She lay chattering and shivering while the bedclothes warmed around her. It seemed to her that a time might come when sickness would be a great blessing, for she truly did not care if she died. She thought of Elton, caught up in the day’s wind, who could not even look at her and see that she was sick. If she had not been too miserable, she would have cried. But then her thoughts began to slip away, like dishes sliding along a table pitched as steeply as a roof. She went to sleep.

When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Though the wind was still blowing hard, the room was full of sunlight. The lamp on the narrow mantel shelf behind the stove was filled and clean, its chimney gleaming, and so was the one on the stand by the bed. Josie Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she had draped over her lap. She was bowed over her work, filling in with her needle and a length of yellow thread the bright corolla of a jonquil—or “Easter lily,” as she would have called it. She was humming the tune of an old hymn, something she often did while she was working, apparently without awareness that she was doing it. Her voice was resonant, low, and quiet, barely audible, as if it were coming out of the air and she, too, were merely listening to it. The yellow flower was nearly complete.

And so Mary knew all the story of her day. Elton, going by Josie Tom’s in the half-light, had stopped and called.

She could hear his voice, raised to carry through the wind: “Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over to Walter’s to plow.”

So he had known. He had thought of her. He had told Josie Tom.

Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom raised her head and smiled. “Well, are you awake? Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said. And she slept again.

Turn Back the Bed (1941)

TO SOME, it seemed that Ptolemy Proudfoot didn’t laugh like a Christian. He laughed too loud and too long, and his merriment seemed a little too self-sufficient—as if, had there been enough funny stories and enough breath to laugh at them with, he might not need to go to Heaven.

What tickled him as much as anything were his own stories about his grandfather, Mark Anthony Proudfoot, known as Ant’ny and later, of course, as Old Ant’ny. Old Ant’ny was, you might say, the Tol Proudfoot of his generation, with a few differences, the main one being that whereas Tol was childless, Old Ant’ny sired a nation of Proudfoots. Once his progeny had grown up and acquired in-laws and produced scions of their own, they seemed as numerous as the sand that is upon the seashore.

The great events of Tol’s boyhood were the family gatherings that took place three or four times a year at Old Ant’ny’s place above Goforth in the Katy’s Branch valley. By that time Ant’ny was in his old age. He had always been a big man, and now, with less activity and no loss of appetite, he had grown immense. He sat at these meetings, as massive and permanent-seeming almost as the old log house itself, holding a cane in his hand, seldom stirring from the chair that one of his sons had constructed for him out of poplar two-by-fours. He sat erect and mostly in silence, looking straight ahead, his white beard reaching down to his fourth shirt button. Now and then he would say something in a rolling deep voice that whoever was in the room would stop and listen to. And now and then he would reach out with his cane and hook a passing grandson or great-grandson, whose name and the name of whose parents he would demand to know. But for the most part he sat in silence, his patriarchal influence extending to a radius of about six feet, while round him the fruit of his loins revolved, battering floor and walls, like a storm.

Old Ant’ny was a provider, and he did provide. He saw to it that twelve hogs were slaughtered for his own use every fall—and twenty-four hams and twenty-four shoulders and twenty-four middlings were hung in his smokehouse. And his wife, Maw Proudfoot, kept a flock of turkeys and a flock of geese and a flock of guineas, and her henhouse was as populous as a county seat. And long after he was “too old to farm,” Old Ant’ny grew a garden as big as some people’s crop. He picked and dug and fetched, and Maw Proudfoot canned and preserved and pickled and cured as if they had an army to feed—which they more or less did, for there were not only the announced family gatherings but always somebody or some few happening by, and always somebody to give something to.

The Proudfoot family gatherings were famous. As feasts, as collections and concentrations of good things, they were unequaled. Especially in summer there was nothing like them, for then there would be old ham and fried chicken and gravy, and two or three kinds of fish, and hot biscuits and three kinds of cornbread, and potatoes and beans and roasting ears and carrots and beets and onions, and corn pudding and corn creamed and fried, and cabbage boiled and scalloped, and tomatoes stewed and sliced, and fresh cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and three or four kinds of pickles, and if it was late enough in the summer there would be watermelons and muskmelons, and there would be pies and cakes and cobblers and dumplings, and milk and coffee by the gallon. And there would be, too, half a dozen or so gallon or half-gallon stone jugs making their way from one adult male to another as surreptitious as moles. For in those days the Proudfoot homeplace, with its broad cornfields in the creek bottom, was famous also for the excellence of its whiskey.

So of course these affairs were numerously attended. When the word went out to family and in-laws it was bound to be overheard, and people came in whose veins Proudfoot blood ran extremely thin, if at all. And there would be babble and uproar all day, for every door stood open, and the old house was not ceiled; the upstairs floorboards were simply nailed to the naked joists, leaving cracks that you could not only hear through but in places see through. Whatever happened anywhere could be heard everywhere.

The storm of feet and voices would continue unabated from not long after sunup until after sundown when the voice of Old Ant’ny would rise abruptly over the multitude: “Well, Maw, turn back the bed. These folks want to be gettin’ on home.” And then, as if at the bidding of some Heavenly sign, the family sorted itself into its branches. Children and shoes and hats were found, identified, and claimed; horses were hitched; and the tribes of the children of Old Ant’ny Proudfoot set out in their various directions in the twilight.

In himself and in his life, Tol Proudfoot had come a considerable way from the frontier independence and uproariousness of Old Ant’ny’s household. He was a gentler, a more modest, perhaps a smarter man than his grandfather. And he had submitted, at least somewhat, to the quieting and ordering influence of Miss Minnie. But there was something in Tol, in his spirit as well as in his memory, that hung back there in the time of those great family feasts, which had been a godsend to every boy, at least, who ever attended one.

By the time I came to know him, Tol was well along in years. He had become an elder of the community, and had recognized his memories, the good ones anyhow, as gifts, to himself and to the rest of us. His stories of Old Ant’ny and the high old family times were much in demand, not just because they were good to listen to in their own right, but because certain people enjoyed hearing—and watching—Tol laugh at them. Once he got tickled enough, you could never tell what would happen. He had broken the backs off half a dozen chairs, rearing back in them to laugh. Once, at an ice cream supper, he fell backward onto a table full of cakes.

My grandparents took me to a picnic one Sunday at the Goforth church where Tol and Miss Minnie went. After the morning service, the women spread the food out on tables under the big old oak trees in the churchyard, and then we gathered around and sang “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,” and the minister gave thanks for the food, and we ate together, some finding places at the tables, some sitting in the shade of the trees, holding their plates on their laps.

Afterward the men drew off to themselves, carrying their chairs up to the edge of the graveyard. There was a good breeze there on the higher ground, and fine dark shade under the cedars. They took smokes and chews, and the talk started, first about crops and weather and then about other things. I don’t remember exactly how, but a little merriment started. Then somebody said, “Tol, tell that un about Old Ant’ny and the chamber pot.”

They were sitting more or less in a circle in the shade of two big cedars, and in the silences you could hear the breeze pulling through the branches. Tol was sitting with his back to the graveyard, his chair tilted back, the gravestones spread out behind him. He had outlived nearly everybody he would tell about, some of whom lay within the sound of his voice, and he was sitting not far from the spot where we would lay him to rest before two more years had passed.

Below us the women were sitting together near the tables, where they had finished straightening up. You could hear the sound of their voices but not what they said. I remember the colors of their dresses: white and pink and yellow, ginghams and flower prints; the widows all in dark blue or black, the dresses of the older women reaching to their ankles. And I remember how perfect it all seemed, so still and comfortable. The Second World War had started in Europe, but in my memory it seems that none of us yet knew it.

Tol had picked up a dead cedar branch to whittle. His knife was sharp, and the long, fine, fragrant shavings curled and fell backward over his wrists. He was smiling.

“Boys,” he said, “I couldn’t tell it all in a day.”

He laughed a little and said no more. Nobody else said anything either. After a minute he began to tell the story. I wasn’t anything but a boy then. I can’t tell it the way he told it, but this is the way he put it in my mind.

It was a fine, bright Sunday in October, the year Tol was five years old. The Proudfoots had gathered at Old Ant’ny’s. The family had drawn in its various branches, in-laws, and acquaintances. Old Ant’ny had turned out his own mules and horses to make stall room, and by midmorning the barn was full, and saddled horses and harnessed teams stood tied to fence posts.

All the wives had brought food and other necessaries to add to the bounty already laid in and prepared by Old Ant’ny and Maw Proudfoot, and the big kitchen and back porch were full of women and the older girls, setting out dishes and pitchers and glasses and bowls on tables spread with white cloths.

The Proudfoot men were gathered around the hearth in what was called “the front room,” where Old Ant’ny sat and where in the early morning there had been a fire. Later, as their numbers grew and the day warmed, some of them sat along the edge of the front porch and others in the open doorway of the barn.

The girls who were too little to help played or visited quietly enough with each other. They were well acquainted, happy to be together again, and possessed of a certain civility and dignity. There was never much trouble from them.

The trouble came from the boys, or, more exactly, from the boys between the ages of about five and about eleven, who did not come with any plans or expectations, and who therefore took their entertainment as a matter of adventure, making do with whatever came to hand. There were, Tol said, “a dozen, maybe twenty” of them.

Before dinner they were kept fairly well under control. They were getting hungry, for one thing, and that held them close to the house. For another thing, the parents were more alert before dinner than they would be afterward. Afterward, they would be full and comfortable and a little sleepy, and most of the men would be a little sleepier and more comfortable than the women, for by then they would have met with some stealthily wandering jug of Old Ant’ny’s whiskey.

That was the way it always worked. During the morning the boys were kept within eyesight of the grown-ups, and pretty well apart from each other. They fretted and jiggled and asked when dinner would be ready, and got corrected and fussed at and threatened. And then after dinner the range of grown-up eyesight shortened, and that was when the boys got together and began to run. This was their time of freedom, and to preserve it they ran. Whenever they were near the house, where they knew they might be seen and called down, they ran. They ran in a pack, the big ones in front, the little ones behind. Tol was the littlest one that year, and the farthest behind, but he kept the rest of them in sight. Most of them were Proudfoots, and they all looked more or less like Proudfoots. And as long as there were so many of them and they were all running, by the time one of them could be recognized and called to, they all would be gone.

They ran up the hill behind the barn and over into a wooded draw where their band raveled out into a game of tag, and then a game of hide-and-go-seek—a great crashing and scuffling in the fallen dry leaves. The biggest boy that year was Tol’s cousin Lester, whose hair, plastered down with water early that morning, now stuck up like the tail of a young rooster, and whose eyes were wide open in expectation.

Tag and hide-and-go-seek didn’t last long. Lester kept changing the rules until nobody wanted to play. Then Old Ant’ny’s hounds treed a groundhog in a little slippery elm, and Lester climbed up to shake him out. Lester took his jacket off so he could climb better. When he threw it down, the dogs, thinking it was the groundhog, piled on it and tore it up. While they were tearing up Lester’s jacket, the groundhog jumped out of the tree and ran into a hole. The big boys found a couple of sticks and helped the dogs dig until they came to a rock ledge and had to give up.

All that took a while. They had been missed by then, and Aunt Belle was on the back porch, calling, “Oh, Lester!” So they answered and went back, running, allowing themselves to be seen and forgotten again, and ran on across the cornfield to the creek.

They played follow-the-leader, which lasted a long time, because Lester was the leader. They went along the rocks at the edge of the creek and then waded a riffle and came back across walking a fallen tree trunk. And then Lester said, “Follow my tracks,” and started taking giant steps across a sand bar. It was a long straddle, and by the time Tol got there the tracks were a foot deep and full of water. He got stuck with his feet apart and fell over sideways.

“Come here, mud man,” Lester said. “Come here, mud boy.” And he soused Tol, clothes and all, down into the deep cold water and rinsed him off.

Tol started crying. He said a word he had learned from Uncle O.R. and threw a rock at Lester, and everybody laughed, and then Tol did.

Aunt Belle was on the front porch now, hollering again. She was a big woman with a strong voice. Lester answered and they all started running back toward the house, leaving Tol behind. He was getting tired, and so he walked on to the house. When he got there the other boys were gone again, out of sight. He went up on the back porch, taking care to avoid notice, and found a plate of biscuits under a cloth on the wash table and took two and went on toward the front door. The women were in the kitchen and in the parlor, talking. Old Ant’ny and Uncle O.R. and Uncle George Washington and Uncle Will and Uncle Fowler and some others were in the front room. A brown and white jug, stoppered with a corncob, was sitting by Uncle Fowler’s chair like a contented cat. They weren’t going to pay any attention to Tol, and he stepped inside the door to eat his biscuits. Uncle Fowler leaned forward in his chair to spit in the fireplace and fell headfirst into the ashes. Old Ant’ny never even looked. The others may have looked or they may not. They never said anything. But Uncle O.R. looked. He was standing on the corner of the hearth, leaning one shoulder against the mantel. He said, “Fowler, you’re putting a right smart effort into your spitting, seems like.”

Uncle Fowler got himself out of the ashes and into his chair again. “Whoo, Lordy, Lordy!” he said, and fanned himself with his hand, causing a few ashes to float out of his mustache.

Tol crammed the whole second biscuit into his mouth, and ran back through the house and out the back door, blowing crumbs ahead of him as he ran.

Lester was up on the roof. He had climbed up on the cellar, and then onto the cellar house roof, and then onto the back porch roof, and then onto the roof of the ell that held the kitchen and dining room, and now he was walking up the slope of the roof over the living room and the bedroom above it toward the chimney. Maw Proudfoot’s yellow tomcat was weaving in and out between Lester’s feet, stroking himself on Lester’s legs. The pack of boys had backed up as Lester climbed, keeping him in sight.

It was a big rock chimney built against the end of the house. Lester reached into it, and held up a black palm for the others to see. The yellow cat climbed up onto the chimney beside Lester. He walked back and forth along the copestones, rubbing himself against Lester’s shoulder, his tail stuck straight up, with a little crook on the end of it like a walking cane.

It was past sundown now. The light was going out of the sky, and it was turning cool. Except for the pack of boys, everybody was in the house. Nobody had started home. They would get home in the dark and still have the milking to do; maybe the thought of that had quieted them. The old house hovered over them now like a mother hen.

Lester backed away a step, and he and the yellow cat stood looking at each other, balanced across the foot or so of air that divided them. Some fascination grew upon them. The boys watching down in the yard felt it. And then Lester raised his hand and gave a little push.

When Lester pushed the cat, he said, “Wup!”

The cat disappeared, clean out of sight, as if the sky had bitten it off. They heard a fit of scratching inside the chimney, and then it ceased. Lester looked over into the chimney mouth. And then he looked around and down at his cousins. His eyes were as wide open as if he had never batted one of them once in his life.

“He didn’t go all the way down,” Lester said. “He ain’t going to make it back up.”

Lester looked down at his cousins, and they looked up at him. Nobody moved or spoke. For maybe as long as a minute, nobody had any idea what would happen next. And then Lester’s eye fell on Toby.

Several hounds were sitting alongside the pack of boys, watching too, with the same balked expectancy, and Toby was with them. Toby was Old Ant’ny’s feist, white with black ears and a black spot in front of his tail. He was a nervous little dog who had courage instead of brains. He would fight anything, would go unhesitatingly into a hole after a varmint, or anywhere after a cat.

“Send up old Tobe,” Lester said.

One of the older boys put Toby in the crook of his arm and carried him up onto the kitchen roof. Lester met him and took the dog. He went back up to the chimney and held Toby so he could look in. He might have intended just to show Toby to the cat so as maybe to scare the cat into going on down. Tol didn’t know. But whatever Lester intended to do turned out to be beside the point. When the cat saw Toby, he spit at him. They could hear it all the way down in the yard. Toby gave a little yelp, in horror probably at what he was about to do, and jumped out of Lester’s arms onto the lip of the chimney and down onto the cat.

The boys had already started running before Toby jumped. When they passed the chimney, they heard Toby and the cat inside, falling and fighting.

They went on around and through the front door and into the living room just in time to see the ashes in the fireplace rise up in a cloud. And then the cat, with Toby behind him, broke out and ran up Uncle Fowler’s leg and up his belly and up over the top of his head and off the back of his chair and through the crowd of boys and out into the hall. Old Ant’ny never looked, never turned his head. He just sat there like some people’s idea of God, as if having set this stir in motion, he would let it play itself out on its own, as if he despaired of any other way of stopping it. Uncle Fowler, who had been asleep, woke up, spitting ashes, just as Toby cleared the chair back.

“Pew!” Uncle Fowler said. He sighed and shut his eyes again in great weariness.

The only one with enough presence of mind to move at all was Uncle O.R., who started out, running after Toby, only to get tangled up in the crowd of boys standing in the door.

The cat treed under the chiffonier in the hall, but Toby brought him out of there, and by the time Uncle O.R. got free of the boys, the cat had run into the kitchen and down the middle of the table, with Toby still on his heels, and over Aunt Belle’s shoulder and out the window. They left a sooty streak down the middle of the cloth.

Aunt Belle was on her feet now. “Who the hell let that cat in? And that damn dog? Where are you, Lester?”

Uncle O.R. ran on out through the kitchen. The pack of boys, who had been following Uncle O.R., got to the dining room door just in time to run smack into Aunt Belle, who was coming out. She was red in the face and already puffing; she just bounced them all out of the way and ran on up the hall toward the front door. They fell in behind her, running as dutifully as if they were still playing follow-the-leader.

Aunt Belle ran out the front door and across the porch and down the porch steps and out in the yard just as Lester came around the corner of the house with Uncle O.R. gaining on him. Lester’s eyes were wider open than ever, his hair was sticking up stiff and straight.

Aunt Belle was still running, too. She was light on her feet for a big woman, and when Lester dodged she turned back quick as a turkey hen. The pack of boys was in the way, so Lester couldn’t run on past the porch steps; without intending to, they headed him, and Aunt Belle and Uncle O.R. drove him up onto the porch and through the front door. The women had all come out of the kitchen into the hall, and Uncle George Washington and Uncle Will were starting out of the living room. Lester took the only open route—up the stairs.

Aunt Belle had cut in ahead of Uncle O.R., and she started up, too. She had her skirts bundled in front of her like a load of laundry, and she was going as fast as Lester.

He got to the top of the stairs and ran into the room over the living room, flinging the door to behind him. But Aunt Belle was right there and caught it before it slammed. When Aunt Belle and Uncle O.R. and the rest of the boys went into the room there was nobody in sight, but they could hear the sound of breathing under the bed. And through the cracks between the floorboards they could hear Uncle Fowler snoring by the fire down in the living room.

Aunt Belle got down on her hands and knees and looked under.

“Uh huh !” she said. “Young mister, I been a-laying for you.”

She crawled partway under, caught Lester by the foot, and dragged him out spread-eagled, turning over a chamber pot that had been left unemptied under the edge of the bed.

The boys got downstairs again in time to see the golden shower spend its last drops upon the head and shoulders of Old Ant’ny, who sat unmoving as before, looking straight ahead, as though he had foreseen it all years ago and was resigned.

“Lor-dee!” Uncle O.R. said.

It was getting dark now. There was a lamp burning in the room, and you could no longer see out the windows. There was a moment that seemed to be the moment before anything else could happen.

And then Old Ant’ny’s hat brim jerked upward just a fraction of an inch. “Maw, turn back the bed. These folks want to be gettin’ on home.”

*

Little snorts of laughter had been leaking out of Tol for some time, and now he let himself laugh. It was a good laugh, broad and free and loud, including all of us as generously as the shade we sat in, and not only those of us who were living, but Old Ant’ny and Maw Proudfoot and Uncle O.R. and Uncle Fowler and Aunt Belle and Lester and the rest whose bodies lay in their darkness nearby.

And I will never forget the ones who were still alive that day and how they looked: old Tol with his hands at rest in his lap, laughing until tears ran down his face, and the others around him laughing with him. It was Tol’s benediction, as I grew to know, on that expectancy of good and surprising things that had kept Lester’s eyes, and Tol’s, too, wide open for so long.

And years later my grandmother would tell me that down among the women, hearing Tol laugh, Miss Minnie had smiled the prim, matronly smile with which she delighted in him. “Mr. Proudfoot,” she said. “Mr. Proudfoot is amused.”

A Burden (1882, 1907, 1941)

“ME AND Teddy Roosyvelt, we rode through hair, shit, blood, and corruption up to here.” Uncle Peach used the stick he was whittling to mark a level across his nose about an inch above his nostrils.

“You did not,” Wheeler said, but all the same he was laughing. He was seven years old, and sometimes just looking at Uncle Peach made him laugh.

“The hell you did,” said Andrew, who was Wheeler’s brother, five years older, because to Uncle Peach he could say anything he wanted to, and he did. Andrew, as Wheeler understood, was practicing to be a grownup. An ambitionless boy would not say “The hell you did” even to Uncle Peach.

The boys supposed, because everybody else appeared to suppose, that Uncle Peach had been somewhere in the Army during the war with Spain. But they knew from their own observation that Uncle Peach’s shotgun, “Old Deadeye,” was an instrument of mercy to all creatures that ran or flew as well as to some that were sitting still.

The three of them, the two boys and their Uncle Peach, who was their mother’s baby brother, were sitting in the shade of the tall cedar tree in front of the house. Uncle Peach was whittling a small cedar stick, releasing a fragrance. His knife was sharp, and he was making the shavings fine for fear he would use up the stick and have to go look for another. One of his rules for living was “Never stand up when you can set down,” and he often quoted himself.

None of the three of them wanted to get up, for the day was already hot, and the shade of the old tree was a happiness. It was happier for being a threatened happiness. A sort of suspense hung over them and over that whole moment among the old trees and the patches of shade in the long yard. Maybe that was why Wheeler never forgot it. They did not know where the boys’ father was. They did not know how come he had forgotten them. They knew only that if Marce Catlett came back from wherever he was and found them sitting there, they would all three be at work before they could say scat.

“Yeees sahhh,” Uncle Peach said, drawing out the words as if to make them last as long as his stick, “them was rough times, which was why we was called the Rough Riders. Hair, shit, blood, and corruption up to the horses’ bits, and you needed a high-headed horse to get through it atall. When it was all over and we was heroes, Teddy says to me, ‘Leonidas, looks like one of us is pret’ near bound to be the presi-dent of our great country, and if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon it would be me.’ And I says, ‘Why, Teddy, by all means! Go to it!’ ”

“The hell you did!” Andrew said again. “You couldn’t tell the truth if it shit on your hat.”

And that made Wheeler laugh so much he had to lie down in the grass.

At the age of seven, Wheeler was already aware of a division of his affection between his father and Uncle Peach that he could not resolve, and he felt the strain. He loved Uncle Peach because he was funny and was interesting in the manner of a man who would do or say about anything he thought of, and because Uncle Peach loved him back and treated him as an equal and was always kind to him. Uncle Peach’s trade was carpentry, which he was more or less good at, more or less worked at, and made more or less a living from. When he made more than a living from it, sooner or later he spent the surplus on whiskey and what he called “hoot-tootin” in Hargrave or Louisville or wherever he could get to before he got down and had to be fetched home.

Uncle Peach was in fact a drunk, which at the age of seven Wheeler pretty well knew and easily forgave. Once, thinking to change his life after a near-lethal celebration of the heroism he had shared with by-then President Roosevelt, Uncle Peach had gone so far as to plan a migration to Oklahoma, which he actually carried out, and had persevered there for one year, to which he ever afterward referred as “my years in the territory.” While there, he said, he had been adopted into a tribe of Indians with whom he had lived and hunted and fought, which Wheeler even at the age of seven knew he had not done. Uncle Peach called Indians Eenjins. His Eenjin name was “See-we-no-ho,” which in English meant “Friend of Great Chief.” Though Wheeler knew that Uncle Peach was just storying, he could see nevertheless in his mind’s eye Uncle Peach feathered and painted, riding his Indian pony named “Wa-su-ho-ha” which in English was “Runs Like Scared Rabbit.” Uncle Peach loved to tell how he had hunted buffalo with his Eenjin friends, how well he had ridden, how accurately he had shot with his bow.

And Andrew would say, “You got enough damn wind in you to blow up an onion sack.”

Uncle Peach had about him the ease of a man who had never come hard up against anything. All his life he had been drifting. All his life he had followed the inclination of flowing water toward the easiest way, and the lowest. Wheeler may always have known this, in the way an alert boy picks knowledge out of the air without asking. And with a boy’s love for even the appearance of freedom, he loved Uncle Peach for his drifting.

He loved his father, as eventually he would know, for precisely the opposite reason. Marce Catlett was a man who lived within limits that he had accepted. He did not drift. Year after year he had been hard up against the demands of farm and family, the weather and the bank. He had known more hard times than good ones. In the winter of the year Wheeler was six, his father had sold his tobacco crop for just enough to transport it to the market and to pay the commission on its sale.

But he was not a one-crop farmer. His rule was “Sell something every week.” This, as Wheeler would come to know, meant economic diversity; it required a complex formal intelligence; it was good sense. Marce was a man driven to small economies, which his artistry made elegant. He once built a new feed barn exactly on the site of the old one, tearing down the old one, reusing its usable lumber, as he built the new one, and his work mules never spent a night out of their own stalls. His precise fitting of force to work, his neat patches and splices, his quiet transactions with a saddle horse or a team of mules—Wheeler learned these things as a boy, and all the rest of his life he thought and dreamed of them, as of precious things lost.

As he grew in understanding, Wheeler more and more consciously chose his father over Uncle Peach. He chose, that is, his father’s example, not his life. For when the time came, and out of plain economic necessity, for there was not a living for him at home and he could not afford to buy a place, Wheeler went to school and became a lawyer. And yet he never abandoned his inheritance from his father. Marce Catlett’s love of farming lived on in his son, as later it would live on in his grandsons. And all his life Wheeler felt his father’s good ways aching in his bones, for he remembered them in palpable detail and loved them, though in his own life he had given most of them up for others less palpable.

Because after law school Wheeler did not go to any place offered him as “better,” but returned to set up his practice at home, he came into an inheritance that was, as he knew, in many ways desirable, but was also complex and in some ways difficult. That he had deliberately made himself heir to his father’s example did not prevent him also from inheriting Uncle Peach, as an amusement but also as a responsibility and a burden.

Uncle Peach was in truth amusing. He always had been—“in his way,” as his sister, Dorie Catlett, often felt called upon to add.

As a boy of seven, wanting to “do like the old mule” who drank directly from the water trough, he tried to drink buttermilk from a stone churn and got his head stuck. Dorie had to break the churn to get him loose.

“Damn him, I would have left his head right where he put it,” Marce would say. He would be growling, also laughing.

He would pause then, to allow her to say, “Yes, I reckon you would have let him drown.”

And then he would say, “Something gone, nothing lost.”

Once, exasperated by his daily resistance to washing and going to school, Dorie told her brother, “I ought to let you grow up in ignorance.”

And he replied, “That’s it, Dorie! Let me grow up in ignorance.”

As Wheeler would tell it much later, his Uncle Peach did grow up in ignorance. And even before he had finished growing up, he shifted from buttermilk to whiskey, which also he drank, while it lasted, as freely as the old mule drank water. He seldom had enough money to make it last very long, “And that,” Dorie would say, “was his only good fortune, poor fellow.”

But his sufficient surpluses of money, seldom as they were, gave him a sort of fame. His reputation as a drinker far exceeded his reputation as a carpenter, and stories of his exploits were still told in Port William and Hargrave half a century after the beginning of television.

One afternoon Burley Coulter came upon Uncle Peach in front of a roadhouse down by Hargrave. Uncle Peach had been drinking evidently a lot of whiskey and also eating evidently a lot of pickled food from the bar. He had just finished vomiting upon the body of a dead cat, at which he was now gazing in great astonishment.

“Well, what’s the matter, old Peach?”

“Why, Burley,” Uncle Peach said, “I remember them pigs’ feet and that baloney, but I got no recollection whatsoever of that cat.”

Sometimes Uncle Peach found drunkenness to be exceedingly hard work. Dancing to keep standing, he would pronounce solemnly, “Damn, I’m tard! My ass is draggin’ out my tracks.”

Sometimes he found himself in a moral landscape exceedingly difficult to get across: “I got a long way to go and a short time to get there in.”

Wheeler’s own favorite story was about, so far as he knew, Uncle Peach’s only actual fight.

Standing at the bar of a saloon in Louisville, Uncle Peach discovered, to his great disgust, that the man standing next to him was drunk.

“If they’s anything I can’t stand,” Uncle Peach confided to the man, “it’s a damn drunk.”

At which the man confided back to Uncle Peach: “You ain’t nothing but a damn drunk yourself.”

Upon which Uncle Peach, grievously offended, took a swing.

“It is generally understood,” Wheeler would say, “that when one man aims a violent blow at another, he had better hit him.”

But Uncle Peach missed. Whereupon the previously offended flew at Uncle Peach and thrashed him not hardly enough to kill him, but thoroughly even so.

When Wheeler came later to rescue Uncle Peach from the Stag Hotel where he lay, as he said, “bloodied but unbowed,” Uncle Peach was already referring to his opponent as “them gentlemens.”

“Them gentlemens sholy could fight. They sholy was science men.”

When Uncle Peach had decided to become a carpenter and showed some inclination to settle down, Marce Catlett helped him to find and buy a place with a few acres for pasture, a garden, and a little tobacco crop over by Floyd’s Station. It was ten miles away, a distance that ought to have kept Uncle Peach “weaned,” as Marce conceived it, from Dorie. But when Uncle Peach was on the downslope of a binge and in need of help, he would show up, intending to stay until he wore his welcome out—and longer, if he could.

On a certain night in Wheeler’s childhood, perhaps not long after their conversation under the cedar tree, Uncle Peach showed up and, to the immense happiness of Wheeler and Andrew, drank copiously from a pan of dirty dishwater, complaining all the while of the declining quality of Dorie’s soup. He proceeded to get sick, and then, shortly, to disappear. There must have been a passage of strict conversation between him and Marce at that time. Uncle Peach continued to show up now and again, but he never again showed up except sober.

Wheeler inherited Uncle Peach from his mother, who had inherited him from her mother, who had died soon after his birth. Dorie had pretty much had the raising of him, and it was she who named him “Peach,” because it was handier than “Leonidas Polk” and because as a little fellow he was so pretty and sweet. That this Peach may have been a born failure did not mitigate Dorie’s sense that he was her failure. With exactly the love that “hopeth all things,” she did not give up on him.

Marce, on the contrary, gave up on his brother-in-law as a condition of his tolerance of him. It was a tolerance that worked best at a distance. With Peach in view, it was limited. After he had met its limit, Uncle Peach was always sober when in view. For Peach Wheeler drunk there was no longer room within Marce Catlett’s horizon.

And so Wheeler inherited, along with Uncle Peach, two opposite attitudes toward him, and was never afterward free of either. As he grew into the necessary choice between his father and his uncle, and made the choice, Wheeler found that he had not merely chosen, but, by choosing his father, had acquired in addition his father’s indignation. Wheeler could at times look upon his uncle as an affront, as if Peach had at conception or birth decided to be a burden specifically to his as-yet-unborn nephew.

But as he grew in experience and self-knowledge, Wheeler also grew to recognize in himself a sort of replica of his mother’s love and compassion. He was never able quite to anticipate and prepare himself for the moment at which the apparition of Uncle Peach as nuisance would be replaced by the apparition of Uncle Peach as mortal sufferer. This change was not in Uncle Peach, who never changed except by becoming more and more as evidently he had been born to be. The change was in Wheeler. When the moment came, usually in the midst of some extremity of Uncle Peach’s drinking career, Wheeler would feel a sudden welling up of love, as if from his mother’s heart to his own, and then he would pity Uncle Peach and, against the entire weight of history and probability, wish him well. Sometimes after telling, and fully delighting in, one of his stories about Uncle Peach, Wheeler would fall silent, shake his head, and say, “Poor fellow.”

Andrew, the firstborn son and elder brother, despite all his early practicing to be a grownup, did not manage to grow much farther up, if any, than Uncle Peach. Andrew, as it turned out, did not inherit attitudes toward Uncle Peach so much as he inherited Uncle Peach’s failing. For Andrew in his turn became a drinker, and he too would say or do about anything he thought of. He would do so finally to the limit of life itself, and so beyond. As Andrew’s course of life declared itself more or less a reprise of Uncle Peach’s, that of course intensified and complicated the attitudes of the others toward Uncle Peach. Their stories all are added finally into one story. They were bound together in a many-stranded braid beyond the power of any awl to pick apart.

When Wheeler came home and started his law practice, he bought a car, for his practice involved him in distances that needed to be hurried over. But the automobile also was a fate which, as it included distance, also included Uncle Peach. The automobile made almost nothing of the ten miles from the Catletts’ house to Uncle Peach’s. Because of the automobile, Dorie could more frequently go over to housekeep and help out when Uncle Peach was on one of his rough ascents into sobriety, when, she said, he needed her most.

Uncle Peach most needed Wheeler when he was drunk and sick and helpless and broke and far from home. The automobile made this a reasonable need. No power that Wheeler had acquired in law school enabled him to argue against it, though he tried. Because he had the means of going, he had to go.

If Uncle Peach had the money to get there, his favorite place of resort was a Louisville establishment that called itself the Hotel Stag. From the time of Wheeler’s purchase of the automobile until the time of Uncle Peach’s death, Wheeler, who would not in any circumstances have taken Uncle Peach to the Stag Hotel, went there many a time to bring him home.

At the Stag Hotel and other places of refreshment Uncle Peach would encounter commercial ladies of great attractiveness and charm. Sometimes when Wheeler would be bringing him home, and despite his pain and exhaustion, Uncle Peach would still be enchanted, and he would confide as much to Wheeler: “Oh, them eyes!” he would say. “Oh, them eyes!”

Many a good and funny story came of Wheeler’s missions of mercy, and also many a story of real pain and suffering that moved Wheeler to real pity, and also many moments of utter exasperation at the waste of time and effort when Wheeler, mocking himself and yet meaning every word, would cry out against “the damned Hotel Stag and every damned thing involved therein and pertaining thereto.” Or he would say of Uncle Peach indignantly, “He’s got barely enough sense to swallow.” And then he would laugh. “Burley Coulter told me he’d seen Uncle Peach drink all he could hold and then fill his mouth for later.” He would laugh. And then, affection and hopelessness and sorrow coming over him, he would shake his head. “Poor fellow.”

In his turn, young Andy Catlett, namesake of his doomed Uncle Andrew, also inherited Uncle Peach from his grandmother’s lamentation and his father’s talk, from trips with his father to see that their then-failing Uncle Peach was alive and had enough to eat, and from various elders who remembered with care and delight Uncle Peach’s sayings and doings.

One Christmastime, when he was about six, Andy overheard his father tell Uncle Andrew, just home for the holidays, that Uncle Peach, “sleeping it off in his front yard,” had frozen several of his toes, which had then needed to be amputated.

“Toes!” Uncle Andrew said, laughing his big laugh. “Anybody can spare a few toes. He better be glad he didn’t freeze his pecker off.” In the midst of his sadness and exasperation Wheeler also laughed, and they went away, leaving Andy, whom they had not noticed, with a possibility he had never considered before.

Andy had gone with his father to visit Uncle Peach after the surgery. Uncle Peach was sitting by the drum stove in his bare, bad-smelling little house with his foot wrapped in a soiled white bandage. He was talking in his old, slow voice about the hospital in Louisville, which he pronounced “Louis-ville.” Though Andy, who had seen inside a hospital, could not picture him in one, Uncle Peach had enjoyed his stay. He had admired the nurses. “Damn pretty, some of ’em,” he said to Wheeler.

And then, studying Andy, he said, “This boy’ll be looking at ’em, ’fore you know it.”

When Uncle Peach died in Andy’s seventh year, and they all knew that he was dead, Andy overheard his father and mother saying what a story it had been. His father said with regret and sorrow and amusement and, instead of indignation, perhaps relief, for Uncle Peach had died sober in his sleep in bed at home: “Like Jehorum, poor fellow, he has departed without being desired.” Wheeler was capable of feeling some things simply, but he never spoke of Uncle Peach with unmixed feelings.

And then when they were all in Wheeler’s car, driving home from the graveyard on the hill outside Port William where they had laid Uncle Peach to rest, they were silent until Wheeler said, “Well!”

He let the silence come back, and then he said, “The preacher takes a very happy view of Uncle Peach’s prospects hereafter.”

Wheeler was lining out a text that would be clearly printed in his son’s memory, where it would wait a long time for interpretation.

When his father again let the silence come back, Andy understood that his mother wasn’t saying anything because she felt that the fate of Uncle Peach hereafter was none of her business, and his grandfather wasn’t saying anything because he didn’t want it to be his business, and his grandmother wasn’t saying anything because it was her business. It came to Andy then, for the first time, that his father was still relatively a young man.

The preacher had said Uncle Peach was going to Heaven, or was there already, because his soul had been saved when he gave his life to Jesus and was baptized at the age of twelve. His baptism, so many years ago, in another century, was still in force. Andy imagined that baptism had left on Uncle Peach’s soul a mark like a vaccination scar to show that he had been saved. When he got to Heaven he was to be let in.

Andy had stood in church beside his mother, had heard her singing with the others,

While I draw this fleeting breath,

When mine eyes shall close in death,

When I rise to worlds unknown,

And behold Thee on Thy throne,

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee,

and he had thought, “She? She will?” And so he knew that in the soul’s bewildering geography there was a Rock of Ages. In his mind it looked like the Rock of Gibraltar cleft like a cow’s foot, and you could hide in the cleft and be all right.

But from other songs they sang he knew that this geography had a shore too from which the dead departed to cross a wide river, and another shore beyond the river, a beautiful shore, that was Heaven. He had seen in his mind a picture of people on the far shore waving to people coming across in a boat who were waving back. They were calling each other’s names and they were happy.

But Wheeler wasn’t finished. He was always concerned with fittingness, which was maybe a kind of honesty. Those were words he used: “fitting” and “honest.” He was always trying to get the scattering pieces of their history to fit together in a pattern that made sense. He wanted to find the right words and to say things right. “Right” was another of his words, as was “sense.” His effort often made him impatient. This also Andy took in and remembered.

“If Uncle Peach is in Heaven,” Wheeler said, “and Lord knows I hope that’s where he is, then grace has lifted a mighty burden, and the preacher ought to have said so.”

And then he said, as if determined in his impatience to capture every straying piece, “And as an earthly burden it wasn’t only grace that lifted it”—meaning it was a burden he too had borne. Even at the time, Andy caught that.

So did his grandmother. She said one syllable then that Andy later would know had meant at least four things: that his father would have done better to be quiet, that she too had borne that earthly burden and would forever bear it, that Uncle Peach had borne it himself and was loved and forgiven at least by her, and that it was past time for Wheeler to hush.

She said, “Hmh!”

A Desirable Woman (1938–1941)

For Tanya and David Charlton

SHE WAS not beautiful according to the standards of the magazines and moving pictures of the time, and she knew it. But by any standard she was a desirable woman, and she also knew that. She knew it from what she had seen in the eyes of certain men, to which from time to time she had felt something like an echo in herself.

That she was desirable was acceptable to her as a part of the liveliness and also the goodness of the world. It was a gift. But that she was desirable and knew it and accepted it unfitted her somewhat for her role as a minister’s wife. It was not expected. She had not expected it herself until her own wits told her it was so. Part of her desirability was her look of knowing more than she was saying, and of being amused by the difference. That, and the utter frankness of her presence. There was in her, even in old age, a declarative force of being that was unhesitating and without disguise.

She was born Laura Stafe. She became Laura Milby. She was in love with her husband and would remain so. Another gift. This was not just because she knew she was desirable to him, as he to her—they had settled that soon enough—but from the beginning she had sensed a goodness in him that she knew she could trust. Later it seemed to her that she had not known such trust was in her until he called it from her and she gave it.

They met at a small denominational college where her parents had sent her because they thought it a safe place to send a girl, and where he had come, after an interval of employment in his father’s small lumberyard, to prepare for the ministry. His name was Williams Milby. When they were introduced, she laughed. “Oh! Do they call you Bills?”

His reply, the grin subtracted, she thought was elegant, even courtly: “Not yet, mam. But if you call me that, that’s my name.”

He was a good-looking young man, regular of feature and curly-haired, his countenance so open and unassuming that it might have passed for naïve except for a self-knowing good humor that sometimes lighted it. He attracted her also because the seriousness, even the solemnity, of his vocation already hung about him as a kind of obscurity, and she loved her own power of drawing him forth, in person, out of that shadow.

“What do you want? What do you want for your own self?” she asked. “Oh, that! Oh!” She looked straight at him then, and her laugh undisguised them both.

The day after they graduated they were married. That was 1938.

They went in the fall of the same year, not having known for a whole summer where they would go, to serve a small church known as The Little Flock at a place called Sycamore on the south side of the Ohio River. Sycamore had once been a river port of some note, but was by then merely a ferry landing, two general stores, two churches, a blacksmith shop, a bank, a loose assemblage of houses, and three shantyboats tied up to trees along the river.

The church paid in money “not much more than you could put in your eye,” as one of the members forthrightly told them. But it provided also a parsonage of three rooms, with a cistern and pump conveniently at the back door, a garden spot, and at the back of the garden a privy. Thus they were saved the necessity of living out the rest of the Depression on love alone.

They were neither passive nor incapable, neither careless nor low-spirited. They made the most of their garden. Their house was cooled by a huge elm that threw its shadow over it on summer afternoons; in winter it was snug. And the little they were paid in money was aboundingly supplemented in kind: a sack of fresh sausage or an old ham, a dressed chicken, jars of fruit or vegetables or pickles or preserves, baked goods or fresh fish or wild honey. These gifts were sometimes brought to them openly for their commendation and their pleased surprise, sometimes left on their back porch when they were not at home.

There was little enough of money at large in Sycamore at that time, but it was rich in the produce of its fields and woods and the river, and to their young preacher and his wife the church members in general were free-hearted to a fault.

The town accepted the arrival of the young strangers, “Brother Milby” and “Mrs. Milby,” without surprise. It had expected that they would come, as it expected that they would eventually go. It accepted them formally when the congregation of his church sat down on Sunday morning and listened respectfully to Williams Milby’s inaugural sermon. It accepted them less formally by helping them to settle into their house and by giving them things they needed. It accepted them in fact by admitting them into the flow of its talk, the unceasing meandering of its story of itself by which it diverted, amused, and consoled itself.

Small as it was, the town seemed to them to be inundated with self-knowledge. This knowledge moved over it in an unresting current, some of it in stories told openly that eddied with variations from teller to teller and place to place, some of it more darkly and quietly in an undertow of caution, sometimes fraught with the unacknowledged pleasure of malice, sometimes bearing a burden merely of anxiety or concern. It was to this subsurface current of gossip that Williams Milby learned to listen with greatest care, for it told him where needs were.

Needs were everywhere. Sycamore had suffered the depressed agricultural economy of the 1920s. It had been hit hard by the Depression of the 1930s, by the severe drouths of 1930 and 1936, and by the great flood of January 1937. But it was a community of farm people and of people related to farmers and dependent on farming. They had never expected to live independently of the weather or to be free of hardship and struggle. They suffered as they had to suffer and did as they had to do. They also knew of one another’s struggles, and as they could they helped.

Also, by their own modest standards and by their skills and thrift, they throve. Because none of them had ever been overly prosperous, their losses were never great. It was not the sort of place where people took large economic risks or contracted large debts. It says much for the hardiness of the place that its population increased during the Depression, as young Sycamoreans who had gone to the cities to prosper returned home to survive.

There were the Wallis twins, Goebel and Noble, elderly sons of an ancient mother, bachelors forevermore, good farmers, both independent and neighborly, who did according to their reasons, which often were both unexpectable and unobjectionable, and who drove into town every Saturday afternoon in their like-new Model A, in which they sat side by side, dressed in like-new tan work clothes starched and ironed as stiff almost as tin.

And there was Mrs. Etta Mae Berry, an elderly widow for whom the truth was ever too tame. One day, as she was scattering corn for her hens, a big airplane flew over so low that it blew her dress practically over her head and she could hear the passengers talking. And she was never sick because she always looked for germs in the dipper before she drank, and any she saw she skimmed them out with a spoon.

There was Uncle Lute Wisely, born a slave, who remembered everything, and now, too old to work, he moved, as he said, in winter from fire to fire and in summer from shade to shade. There had never been many of his race around Sycamore, and now, all the younger ones gone north, he was the last. If there was prejudice against his race in Sycamore, and there certainly had been and still was, by now it was not openly applied to solitary old Uncle Lute, whom the town treated more or less as a pet.

There was the family of Bernice and Red Callahan, who were sitting at dinner when a big snake fell through the ceiling onto the table, causing, but only indirectly, much breakage of chairs and other furniture and some bodily injury.

On one of the shantyboats lived the perhaps married couple, Lizard Eye and Zinnia Creed, joyfully Frenchified by the Sycamoreans as “Mr. and Mrs. Lizzard.” Zinnia Creed was widely esteemed for her language, which was purely her own. When she picked blackberries, the chiggers broke her out all over in whelps. Sometimes the summer apples got all swiveled up before they could be eaten. There was a famous day when she had come to town for a gallon of coal oil, and the lecrik went off and every light bug in Jones’s Merchandise went out all to-wunst. She had seen two cars meet in a headlong collusion. She loved, moreover, to refine her pronunciation by adding r’s to words such as “crush” and “crunch” and “push” so that they came out “crursh” and “crurnch” and “pursh.” Virtually everybody in Sycamore had learned Zinnian and spoke it on every appropriate occasion.

Of these and others, as church members or as not-members, the Milbys were given knowledge.

You could usefully think of the consciousness of Sycamore as the continual, continually wandering story that in one way or another included everybody, carrying them through time like the current of the river.

Or, usefully also, you could think of it as graduated depths in that flow. At the top was the convivial talk, open and unembarrassed. Below that, quieter and darker and less free, was the talk that issued from fear and envy, cherished grudges and resentments, meannesses, suspicions, unforgiven or unregretted wrongs. This was not so readily heard by newcomers, but the Milbys stayed long enough (they stayed until after the end of World War II) to hear most of it, if not all. It proved itself continually to be present, to be regrettable, and sometimes to be worried about.

Below that, much quieter and darker, and yet to the conscience of the young minister most present of all, was the depth at which the community suffered its mortality, error, pain, and grief. How many among the older wives or widows had buried a child struck down by a winter illness or an epidemic or a bullet in France, who now remembered in silence?

As the knowledge of this depth of suffering grew upon her, Laura understood, as she had not before, the gravity of her husband’s calling, for she saw that it was to this suffering that he was called. As he sank inevitably into it or as it rose inevitably out of its depth, its quietness and darkness, to meet him, she saw not only the gravity of his calling but its authenticity. For Williams Milby had the gift of comforting. He carried with him, not by his will, it seemed, but by the purest gift, the very presence of comfort. And yet even as it was a comfort to others, it could be a bafflement and a burden to him. His calling, and the respect accorded to it, admitted him into the presence of troubles he could not mend. When old Uncle Jones McKinney, who had been sick for a long time, finally died, and afterwards his old wife, Aunt Ruth, would hear him calling her in the night and would get up and go to his bed and again find it empty, what could any living mortal do for her that would be of any use at all? A living mortal could do only as Williams Milby did: go and sit with her while she mourned, and then leave her in her mourning, for no living mortal could sit with another time without end. It was plain to him—and Laura knew this—that he was always hopelessly in debt to his own ministry, for he could not give all that he wanted and longed to give. He was needed, even so, and what he had to give, and more, was continually asked of him. People were glad to see him coming. They called him to come. They were glad to have him around when they did not need him, just for the assurance that he would be at hand when they did need him.

And as Laura had earlier given him her trust that until then she did not know was hers, now she granted him a sort of honor that was not personal, not hers or his, but honor to his vocation that he had not surely known was his until he began to fulfill it.

At Sycamore, then, Laura grew with her husband into a life that probably neither of them had expected. She grew also into knowledge of the church’s function of iteration. The church house itself, she now saw, was a place consecrated to the proclamation over and over again of things in which most of the members more or less believed but in which they generally were not greatly interested, and which they helped to make uninteresting by their lack of interest. It was a place where nearly all of the women seemed to feel at home, and where many of the men clearly were not at home. In bearable weather the men were likely to stand outside before the service began, holding themselves until the last minute in one another’s company and the unconfined light and air of mere day.

And there was the rigid, humorless, never-forgiving piety of Old Man Elbert Stump who believed devoutly that all of whom he disapproved were destined to fry upon the griddles of Hell. How was Williams Milby to treat him kindly, how minister to him, without appearing to agree with him? How, more urgently, was the preacher’s wife, Mrs. Milby, to listen to Mr. Stump’s dooming and damning for two minutes in a row without disagreeing with him—without, in fact, flying into his face like a hen defending her chicks?

For nearly the whole congregation, or for all of them, and especially the men and children, there was a disconnection between the little white clapboard church with its steeple and bell, its observances and forms of worship, and the world’s daily life and work. It was as though the building itself, in its emptiness between services, contained along with its smells of old paper and stale perfume a solemnity that the people entered into and departed from, quickening it for a few hours a week with the stirrings and smells of living flesh, but could neither inflect with the tone of their daily preoccupations nor transpose into their actual lives. This was a disconnection perhaps exactly coextensive with the disconnection they felt between Heaven and Sycamore, eternity and time. Laura recognized these disconnections in the people because she felt them, and labored over them, in herself.

Thus she mapped in her mind the cracks and flaws in the lives of the church and the place. She had been a studious girl, and beyond that a thoughtful one. Since before she’d had much to ponder, she’d been in the habit of pondering. She was a conscious, thoughtful believer in the Gospel that her husband had bound himself to offer and defend, even to obey and enact—that is, to suffer. But the things that she struggled with he seemed to accept with a silence that included a measure of resignation. He could be quiet because in some depth of himself he was quiet. She recognized this as his strength, his very faith, at the same time that it fretted her.

Of the pair, hers was the mind that was restless and questing, enticed and disturbed by mysteries. That the world was as it was did not save it from her sense that it might in many ways be different and certainly better. It seemed to her both tentative and final, unshakeable and woefully fragile.

Her husband’s ministry, as he conceived it, was not only to the church but to the whole community, and this often involved a thanklessness hard for her to bear. Not only did he stand up week after week to say and to offer again what he and generations of ministers before him had said and offered before, with no dramatic amelioration of this world as a result, but also he made himself answerable to any and every sufferer within a radius of five or six miles. Any sufferer who was in need or want of him could summon him, even by the ringing of the telephone in the middle of a stormy or frozen night, and he would go.

And when, having done all he could do to help a family through a quarrel or an illness or a death, performing services he was not paid for and could not have been paid for, he might never hear from them again, let alone see their faces even for the courtesy of one Sunday among his hearers, Laura felt herself wounded with sorrow for him and anger at them for their ingratitude.

“It’s not right!” she cried to him once, breaking for that once into his silence about it. “It’s just not right !”

“No. It’s not right,” he said quietly, and he gave her his smile with which he sought to quiet her. “But it’s all right.”

And yet she knew his own need for comfort, for shelter, for her herself, and for the welcome it was her need, in turn, to offer to him. They did not fit together like the two halves of one apple. Sometimes they were flint and steel, and the sparks flew. But they needed to fit together, and they were trying to. Often they did. They were a good couple. Out of the sometimes far estrangement of their differences, their need to fit together would draw them back to each other again. That was their desire. And desire would then freely have its way with them.

And so desire, her own and his, was one of the subjects of her thoughts. She saw the danger of it. She saw the beauty and the preciousness of it. She saw even the necessity of it, for it imparted beauty and motion, life itself, to the whole world. The desire to be at one with another, the desire to be pleased in living together, seemed to her at times to infuse with light the bedrock of the earth.

To know this was a passion with her. She felt herself to be most alive when she felt it alight within herself. It was this light in herself that strangely made her self matter little in comparison. It had the power, in fact, to cause her self entirely to disappear. And so she was mortified, most deeply thwarted in her instinctive tenderness toward the life and light of this world, when she was confronted, as she often was, with the belief, at large among their church people and in Sycamore itself, that desire merely was lust. It was not an adequate mitigation that she knew surely that desire sometimes was lust, and that the dearest, pleasantest desire, especially for the women, sometimes led to suffering.

“But they think desire is no different from lust,” she said to her husband. “Think of the loneliness of that. Think of the terrible loneliness of it!”

“Where do they get that idea?” Williams asked, though he knew.

“They think Jesus said so. ‘Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery already in his heart.’ ”

That a history of shame and loneliness did surround that saying they then acknowledged in the look they gave each other.

Williams Milby laughed, and his laughter granted standing to this acknowledgment, and it made room for her dissent that he knew was coming. He said, “If he meant desire, he has caught us all. I speak of course only for us men.”

“Speak for us all!” she said. And now to her own surprise she felt her tears, for suddenly it was to her as if she were lifting from herself a nearly unbearable weight. “Speak for us all! If he meant desire, he has caught every one of us.”

When Williams spoke again he spoke quietly, but his voice had changed, borne upward and unsteadied in his throat by an emotion like hers, for now he felt his great love for her, his great desire for her, pressing like a wind at his back. “You don’t think then”—he was testing, teasing her, beckoning her forward—“you don’t think then that desire is necessarily the same as lust?”

“No! Lust is selfish. It seeketh its own. Desire without selfishness, with self-denial, is only praise. It is even love.”

She had more to learn of the cost of self-denying desire.

In those days, in Sycamore as in all the country around, there was an honored practice known as “feeding the preacher.” The housewives of the church, or most of them, held it as an unbreakable law, for they had never known it to be broken, that the preacher and his wife, and their children if any, would be fed dinner and supper in some household of the congregation every Sunday. It was as though the preacher’s lesson, which was never altogether learned, and his comforting, which could not sufficiently be given, were to be compensated by this hospitality in earnest of a tribute never adequately paid. Part of the organization of the church was the order in which the duty of feeding the preacher was passed around from household to household.

This ceremony of Sunday hospitality was a dear privilege to Williams and Laura, for it opened the countryside to them as it was opened otherwise only to the veterinarian. And the veterinarian certainly never received anything like the hospitality that was accorded the Milbys. It was as if they perhaps were angels who appeared in the guise of a young minister and his wife. Whatever their hostess had that was best was laid before these strangers, who would always be strangers to some extent because set apart by the minister’s calling, which required that he and his wife should be sheltered, so far as they could be, from whatever was harshest in the speech and thought and experience of their hosts. The same compunction withheld also knowledge of the extremer pleasures. The list of things the Sycamoreans did not do “in front of the preacher” granted to the preacher a front as wide as a three-horse team. It took the Milbys a long time to learn of the community’s music-making and its dancing, about which it was a mark at least of decorum to say nothing to the preacher.

Whatever was set on the table at those Sunday meals thus was offered somewhat in apology, but also with the unspoken confidence and pride that it was the best available, and the Milbys learned to expect with about the same confidence that whatever was set before them would deserve the praise they would give in return. The food was heaped on the table and they were urged to eat as if they were being fattened for slaughter, or as if it were the known practice of ministers and their wives to eat only on Sundays.

In the hours between the big dinner and the lighter supper after which they would return to church for the evening service, Williams and Laura discovered two difficulties that they had to exert their ingenuity to deal with. The first was the onset of drowsiness after the noon meal. The second was the possibility that in trying to fulfill their hosts’ expectation of a proper Sunday conversation they would run flat out of anything to say.

“I hate to say anything to keep from saying nothing,” Williams said. “I look at you for help, and you say for the tenth or twentieth time, ‘What a wonderful dinner!’ and I say for the tenth or twentieth time, ‘Oh, yes, it was wonderful!’ It’s funny now, Miz Milby, and you can laugh, but it wasn’t funny then.”

Both of these dangers they learned to avoid by the one expedient of asking to be shown something outside the house—and usually, since most of their congregation were farmers, they would ask to be shown something on the farm. For this they learned always to bring their overshoes. And it was this that brought them into the presence of the place, the country itself, and that taught them their people’s ways of belonging to it and living upon it. They found that the farmers generally were proud of their farms, whether justifiably or not, and were ready, often eager, to speak of what they knew. Williams and Laura asked questions and learned and remembered, for they realized that they were being taught where they were, and more profoundly than they had expected to know.

They were not city people exactly, but they both had come from big towns. They had never known before a whole community in which everybody knew everybody, and the life of which went all the way to the ground. The community or neighborhood known as “around Sycamore” was a small place divided into many smaller places—farms and fields and woodlands—each of which, if you asked or if you waited to hear, had its unique, inseparable attachment of memories and stories.

On those Sunday afternoons in their unending sequence, when the weather was fit and sometimes when it was not, the Milbys followed their guides through barns and lots, fields and woods, and along the wild streamsides. They were shown flower beds, gardens, crops, and animals in all the stages of the year. Within a year or two they came into the intimate geography and life and worklife of the place. On the Kentucky side of the Ohio there at Sycamore the bottomland was rather narrow, and the farms were not large. The primary intent of the farm families they visited was to live from their land. Every farm produced a few acres of tobacco. Almost every farm had a small herd of beef cattle, and many had a flock of sheep as well. But invariably, and primarily for their own use, the farmers had vegetable gardens, milk cows, hogs for meat and lard, and poultry flocks.

The Milbys’ interest in the place and its community fed upon their understanding and upon their failures to understand. Williams’s ministry carried him always along the seams of the community where the people were joined to one another and to the place, and he carried his realizations and his mystifications to Laura. There was always much that needed talking about. They began to know the farms they visited not only familiarly but also critically. From the comparisons that were inevitable, from comments overheard or casually made, they saw that some farms were more kindly and thriftily used than others. They learned to recognize bare ground as a danger. They began to see that the best farms were much grassed and little plowed. When Ernest Russet told them one day, finally breaking his rule against speaking critically in front of the preacher, “You can’t plow your way out of debt,” they knew what he meant.

Those Sunday afternoons afforded occasionally a benefit to Laura that she waited for and prized. When the after-dinner talk involved Williams in a way unusually needful or private, she gladly excused herself and went out alone. She was free then to walk at her own pace, following in silence her own direction and the line of her own thoughts. The only requirement was to get back on time, and for that she carried her husband’s watch.

Sometimes on these walks her direction would be one she prescribed to herself. Sometimes her direction seemed to be required by the place, and she went where it beckoned her to go. Sometimes she felt complete in herself and separate, walking in the place. Sometimes the place seemed to occupy her and to have its being within her, and she forgot herself.

At the end of a cloudy day in full spring the sun suddenly came out. Along the edge of the woods, the thrushes began to call. A mockingbird sang from a dead treetop nearby; a cardinal sang and a wren; in the distance a bobwhite whistled and was answered. Laura felt herself carried up into the freshened light where she seemed to have no life except that which now sang all around her.

On a rainy winter day, just at sunset, she saw the sky divided by the leftward stroke of a rainbow, the other side hidden by trees. Within the visible arc the sky glowed with a vibrant pinkish light, while outside it night was falling.

Walking one frozen afternoon in a wooded hollow of the valley side, she realized suddenly that her own steps made the only sound in that place. She stopped. And then absolute silence came over her, absolute stillness. Every tree, the wooded slope, the world itself, stood as if in the very nothing from which it had been called out.

At such times as these she felt that the great, mute creation was trying to speak to her. This disturbed her, it moved her almost to tears, for it seemed to intimate the nearness of some consolation—forever imminent and unreachable, almost knowable—for everything that was wrong.

As would be bound to happen, there came to be some farms, some couples, that they preferred above others. Of them all, Ernest and Naomi Russet were the most interesting and the most congenial.

Ernest Russet was in his late fifties, beginning to speak of growing old, but still straight and hard-fleshed. He was, as he said, a true-born farmer, who loved eagerly his well-husbanded farm. He loved the work and the care of it, and the abundance that by his passion and his skill he drew from it. He was a humorous man with a hearty, emphatic way of talking, a little too loud, as if his hearers were a little farther away than they actually were. He had only one eye, but a bluer, more intense, more seeing eye than that one never looked out of a man’s head. He quickly became an indispensable counselor to Williams Milby, for not only did his seniority and humor make his advice easy to hear, but Ernest Russet was a man of sound, practical judgment. He was likely to know what needed doing and how to do it.

Naomi, a famous cook at that time in that country where good cooks were commonplace, was an ample, round-cheeked, cheerful woman of great sweetness, who from the first always greeted Laura with her arms opened. Her energy and industry matched her husband’s. Together, they made their farm a place of abundance and generosity. They loved to eat the food they had grown, and they loved feeding it to others. They took delight, when it was their turn to do so, in feeding their young preacher and his wife. Sometimes, as their friendship grew, the Russets would invite the Milbys out for dinner on a weekday when they had something especially good to offer.

“Eat, now,” Ernest Russet would say as soon as Brother Milby had offered thanks. “Ask for what you can’t reach.”

The Russets understood that the minister’s vocation was in a way a hardship, a cross to bear, and they tried to ease the burden. The Milbys rarely left the Russet place without something good to eat stowed away in their old car. Laura came to depend on Naomi much as Williams depended on Ernest. The Russets became, in fact, the parents the young couple needed in a place unlike any other they had known. Sometimes when an extra hand was needed, Williams would work a day or a few days for Ernest Russet.

The Russet place, the Milbys thought, and not just because of their affection for its owners, was the most beautiful farm in all the country around Sycamore. It was in a valley tributary to that of the great river. The house, standing on a shady rise of the ground well back from the road, was white-painted, with steep gingerbreaded gables, a wide front porch, and a second porch of two stories running along the ell that contained the kitchen and a bedroom above.

Behind the house were the garden and henyard, henhouse, and privy. And then, joined by lots and pens for the handling of livestock, were two barns, a corncrib, a granary, and various other outbuildings, all in good repair and painted white like the house.

From this steading the fields spread away on three sides, the bottomland sloping gradually downward to a winding stream bordered with tall white-limbed sycamores. Beyond the stream the land rose gradually again, steepening to permanent pasture on the valley side, and from there, as it steepened more, wooded to the hilltop. On the pastures were Ernest’s four work mules, a small herd of beef cows, a larger flock of sheep, a few pigs, and three Jersey cows whose surplus cream went to the cream station in Sycamore and whose surplus milk went to the pigs. Because it was orderly and well-kept, this farm, even when Ernest was hard at work upon it, seemed somehow to rest within itself.

Always, as the Milbys’ knowledge grew or as Williams’s gift of sympathy apparently summoned it, the underlayer of suffering or sorrow would be revealed. The sorrow of the Russets was that they had had no child. Their expectation of a child had almost gently graduated into a wish for one, and thence into a doubt that there would be one, and later into the certain knowledge that there was never to be one, and then into resignation of a sort and an ever-deepening commiseration with one another, for never had a place been more lovingly made ready for an inheritor, of whose absence it itself was a daily reminder.

To this place in the spring of 1941 came a young man, hardly more than a boy in age, but to all intents and purposes and by reputation a man: Tom Coulter, from the next county down the river. Ernest Russet, as he said, was getting on in years. He and his place were needing a young man. Tom Coulter was available. He and the Russets had worked out a satisfactory “trade,” and Tom had come to them, moving with his few belongings into the room over the kitchen. The room opened onto the upper porch from which an outside stairway went down to the lower porch and the kitchen.

When Tom Coulter came to the Russets, he came with a story and a reputation both of which were well known to Ernest Russet. When he was sixteen years old Tom had left home after a fight with his father, and he had been on his own ever since. The fight had been over a small thing—a contest of work in a tobacco patch—but it had been a small thing in which everything was at stake. It could not be got over, and Tom had gone away.

“I’ve known Jarrat Coulter all his life, about,” Ernest Russet told the Milbys. “He was all right—hell for work, excuse me, but all right—until his wife took sick and died when Tom and his brother were just little, and then he sort of turned in on hisself. He got unreachable, you might say. Jarrat’s folks were on the adjoining farm, and they took the boys and raised them up. They and Jarrat’s brother, Burley. That Burley, now, he’s in a class by hisself. There’s stories about him that nobody’s going to tell you, Mrs. Milby, or anyhow I ain’t, but I wish you could know him. He done right by them boys, and he’s a good man.”

After he left home, Tom raised a little crop and worked by the day for some people by the name of Whitlow. He proved satisfactory, and things went well until Mr. Whitlow died in the summer of 1940. Tom stayed on, finishing the crop and his year’s work after the farm was sold and Mrs. Whitlow settled with her daughter in town. And then he got word that Ernest Russet, who was looking for a good young man, wanted to talk to him.

Tom had the reputation of a prime hand, and he was respected for his industry and honesty. He had come up under good teachers, his grandfather and father and uncle, who had taught him from before the time when he knew he was learning. By 1941, when he was nineteen, he was not only a good hand but also a good farmer, a young man with initiative and judgment, fully in charge of himself, needing and eager to know what Ernest Russet could teach him, yet needing no boss. To his elders he was a boy who had come to be honored as a man, and was said to be “promising.”

He had the benefit of a proper upbringing too, as Naomi Russet soon was pleased to say. He accommodated himself considerately and quietly to the Russets’ life and household. He quickly learned their ways and the ways of the farm. He needed less and less to be told what to do. Beyond his instructions and duties, he looked for ways to be useful, doing on his own various jobs the Russets had not yet thought to ask him to do, and some that they would not have asked him to do. He sometimes accompanied them on their trips to Sycamore or the county seat, and he was always with them when they came to church. Sometimes on Saturday nights he would find a ride to Hargrave, which was the seat and commercial center of his home county, and which was widely known as a “Saturday night town.” He could be fairly sure of seeing his brother there, and perhaps his uncle too. And though the Russets never asked, they assumed he knew girls whom he would see there. He did not go too often, and he did not stay too late. His handsomeness, which was considerable, involved not just his looks but also an emanation, an almost visible luster, of intelligent, exuberant strength.

There was a day in the late spring when his brother and uncle came to see him. They were invited to dinner on a Sunday when, as it happened, the Russets were feeding the preacher, and so Laura did meet the storied Burley Coulter, who was, as promised, in a class by himself. He was then in his forty-sixth year. The marks of time and weather were on him and his hair was gray, though he was still a man unusually attractive, which he seemed to know both frankly and modestly. Though he carried a much-abused felt hat in his hand and his blue suit shone with wear at points of stress, he had made himself presentable for what he clearly thought an important occasion. And on this occasion his obvious gift for sociability wore a sort of patina of formality. He was being conscientiously correct for the sake of his nephews. And yet when he was introduced to Laura he gave her an openly appraising look, which communicated both a compliment and his amusement that she had caught the compliment and liked it. She offered her hand. With fine discrimination he shook it almost too long, and she laughed.

Nathan Coulter, who had driven them over in his father’s much-muddied automobile, seemed younger than his brother by more than the two years between them. He was a nice boy, in looks a little dreamy perhaps, and by nature much quieter than Tom, though obviously a product of the same teaching and upbringing. To everybody’s relief, the group of them went together fine, as Ernest Russet later said. It was at first a pleasant and then a happy meal, at which much was eaten in verification of the many praises that were passed over the food. And afterward, to the Russets and the Milbys, it seemed that their acquaintance with Tom Coulter had been enlarged and even lengthened. They knew him better, from farther back, than before.

By the fall of that year two changes had come about that, in Laura’s mind, had assumed the standing of facts, and facts moreover that she pretty well understood: The Russets had come to love Tom Coulter as the son they had longed for but never had, and Tom Coulter had come to love Laura Milby as a young man loves a woman forever beyond his hope.

The first of these facts may not yet have come into speech between the two Russets, but Williams and Laura, who had watched it happening, had talked of it, and to them it was merely obvious. On the one hand there was an absence long unfilled, and on the other hand, now, a presence that might exactly fill it. They thought it only a matter of time, another year perhaps, until the beautiful farm would have its designated heir. “That Tom,” Ernest Russet said, “he’s a born stockman if ever there was one.”

The second fact was known only to Laura herself. If it was plain to her, it was in no general way obvious. Tom was not forward. In the presence of women, even of Naomi Russet, he was somewhat shy. But when he looked at Laura and looked away, his face was marked by a thought she recognized. That he wished to be near her she knew, because when it was possible for him to be near her he would be, though then he would hold himself a little apart and look away. And when, at the Russets’ or at church, there was something that could be done for her, something such as a load to be carried, he would be first to see it, for he would be watching, and he would do for her what needed to be done. But even without these visible signs, it seemed to Laura that she would have known his feeling for her by the mere force of it passing to her through the air.

And she knew fairly well what to make of it and how seriously to take it. She was then twenty-five years old and in the fourth year of her marriage. In her thoughtful way she had parsed out the kinds of love and its changes. There was love as mere attraction, mere feeling, not of which as a girl she had known enough of the power and the giddiness. By now she had seen how such love could gather knowledge to itself and become different, and how it was changed again, profoundly this time, when it made the solemn offer of trust and submitted to vows. Love and trust, that vow “until death,” had carried Laura and Williams into an abyss of sorts, lighted only by the light they could find within and between themselves. They were passing on and on into the unknown life of plighted love. Behind them, committed and unchangeable, was the history of their love, which was changing it and would change it.

She necessarily regarded this love of Tom’s as young, younger by far than any love of hers would ever be again. And yet, though she could not return it in kind, she was moved by it. She granted a certain respect to it. She saw moreover that, as it was unaskingly given, it was a gift to be honored, and she did honor it. She would not withhold from it even the name of love, for all love must begin without knowledge. Perhaps, as she thought, it is itself a kind of knowledge.

At that time there already was war in Europe and war in Asia. Though war had not, so to speak, yet shown itself above the horizon around Sycamore, neither was it any longer ignorable. To the ones who were living there in those days, war had become a thinkable possibility, a premonition, like a distant mutter of thunder on a clear day.

And then after the seventh of December 1941, war was present among them. Around Sycamore it was as if the people had turned away from the distant thunder, distracted from it by their workaday lives, and had turned back again to find a black cloud covering half the sky. As the magnitude of the opposing forces became manifest to her, it seemed to Laura that the whole sky darkened, and an unsourced light illuminated creatures and objects on all sides so that they stood out in sharp relief against the darkness. The young men in particular looked to her that way. Tom Coulter looked that way to her, as if a dark fate was gathering around him, and he was lighted, not by daylight at all, but by his own small life shining within him.

The realization grew upon them all that everything would be changed. No life would be immune. No life now would be changed merely by time and mortality. Now history was outrunning time.

January came. Though the lengthening of the days was hardly apparent so far, it was felt. The year was beginning. On the floor of Ernest Russet’s tobacco barn, now partitioned and bedded and furnished with mangers, the lambs of the new year were being born. Now the Russet household never completely slept. To give help to the laboring ewes when help was needed, to save a wet newborn lamb from the cold, Ernest or Tom would be going to the barn by turns all through the nights, sometimes staying for hours, busy with a difficult birth or a weak lamb, or just sitting and waiting, warming their hands over the lighted lantern between their feet.

At that time knowledge, fear, and sorrow were descending also upon the Russets. For them, the great fact of the war was coming to bear with a singular pointedness upon what was now their dearest hope. The war, as they had tried not to know but nonetheless knew, was going to require Tom Coulter. It would take him away. That it would destroy him they did not yet know, but they knew it could destroy him. Knowledge had begun to shudder in their hearts. The change that was coming had already begun to come, and they felt themselves impaired.

On a Sunday near the end of the month, when the Milbys again came for dinner, sorrow was in the air undeniably—partly because of the Russets’ palpable need to deny it. The effect of the presence of Williams Milby, the comforter, was to make grief evident. The Russets were smiling and genial as usual, but there came relentlessly a moment when Naomi lifted a corner of her apron to wipe an eye, and when Ernest, seeing her do that, stopped twice in the midst of a story to clear his throat.

As soon as the meal was over, according to her custom at such times, Laura excused herself and left the table. She put on her warm overcoat and scarf, her gloves and galoshes, and began one of her solitary walks, leaving the old ones in their sorrow, Tom in his embarrassment, Williams in his helpless standing by that was yet a comfort.

Her departure had its usual excuse of discretion; Williams was the needed one, not her. But today, as she knew and told herself, there was cowardice in it too. She did not want to bear what in that house that day was to be borne. The place, which normally would have seemed to welcome her, today seemed to exclude her. She felt its indifference to whatever might happen in it. Its quietness, as if waiting or expectant, which usually would have comforted her, she felt now as indifference.

Though it did not comfort her, she continued her walk for some distance, going as far as the little stream under the sycamores, which was flowing too full to cross by stepping stones, and then turning back toward the barns.

The tobacco barn, now the lambing barn, opened front and back into two pastures. In the pasture behind it were the ewes whose lambs were now safely born and strong; in the smaller pasture in front were the ewes still to lamb. Laura walked up the long slope among the ewes with their new lambs, and here she felt a kind of pleasure at last. Here was a small success, even a small triumph, of the kind the world most dependably allows. The ewes moved out of her way as she passed, their lambs following. She walked to the wide-open doorway and went into the barn.

When she had blinked away the outdoor brightness, she saw Tom busy by the row of lambing pens along one wall.

“Hello,” she said.

He answered, “Hello.”

The barn no doubt had needed to be visited, but no doubt also, like her, he had welcomed an excuse to leave the house. She felt then how strongly his life claimed him, how he needed for his place and being the whole outdoors.

She went to the row of pens. In the second one a ewe was nuzzling and muttering to a lamb as it stood unsteadily to nurse. Almost at her feet her suckling lamb’s twin lay on the straw, still slimed and bloody from its birth, marvelously formed to live, except that it was dead and now to the ewe a thing of no importance.

“I should have got that out of there,” Tom said.

“No,” she said. “It’s all right.”

He had lifted from a nearby pen an orphan lamb and was holding it, its long legs dangling, in one hand, a nippled bottle of cow’s milk in the other.

And suddenly she was filled with knowledge of him that was like love, or was love. In him, as he stood before her then, she saw the ancient unthanked care of shepherds. The sheep merely suffered what was to be suffered, living the given life, dying the given death. They did not ask for care or appreciate it when they received it. And yet the care was given. The flocks throve by no care commensurate with a price, but by an overplus of love, filling a known need in the shepherd, passionate and beyond memory old.

What Laura said then she said as if merely in answer: “You’re in love, aren’t you?”

He gave back her look. He grinned. She could see the boy in him then—the boy, anyhow, that he had been not long ago.

“I thought you knew it,” he said. “I didn’t look for you to say so.”

She said, “I would like to thank you.”

Their held gaze seemed then to be one thing to which their two beings were for the moment incidental. It was a moment that had to pass. And it did pass. Time carried them from the moment before to the moment after.

She smiled. “I don’t think we’ll talk of this again.”

He nodded, and the boy he had been was nowhere near him now. “No. We won’t again.”

There was in fact no more to say. Because they said no more, for the rest of his life, which would not be long, she shone in his mind as she had been that day: “I would like to thank you.” And to the end of her own long life she was grateful to him because with his young heart, never old, he had loved her.

Misery (1943)

THE HOUSE where my father’s parents, Dorie and Marce Catlett, spent their long marriage was not a happy one, though I was often happy in it. It was regulated by the seasonal order of all farmhouses of its time and shared in the comeliness of that order. Even so, it was not a happy house because my grandparents’ marriage had been so often a collision of wills. Opposites attract, but this can be so only within limits, and Grandma and Grandpa’s story had the contending themes of attraction and conflict.

To all of us younger ones in the family and some who were not in it, Grandpa in his old age referred to Grandma as “your mammy,” thus acknowledging their fundamental difference: She, and not he, had borne their two sons, a fact that he held in awe. This was the honest, insoluble awe of a livestockman and farmer who had been preoccupied all his life with the fecundity of the world. She had borne their children, had suffered their births—and how far this set her apart from him! But in telling of a time he went to see her during their courtship, a time he returned to often in his last years, he would conclude, “And your mammy came out to meet me—the prettiest formed little thing.” He would gaze away, seeing her again as she was, and again he would be moved. “Ay Lord!” Thus he acknowledged the attraction.

It had been mutual. She had thought him in those early days “the best-looking man on the back of a horse that ever I saw.” In the first years of their marriage she would hear him away in the distance, calling the cattle. His call was beautiful, and she would think, “Oh, that such a voice should ever cease!” He remained a good-looking man on the back of a horse almost to the end of his days. Grandma came to take that as much for granted as he did. That he was as he was she saw as a condition of her life, and their fundamental difference, the difference of dam and sire, grew between them.

There were other differences, some issuing from that primary one, some that were differences of character.

Grandpa, burdened as he was by things as they were, suffering as he had and did from the circumstances of this world, accepted them nevertheless with the finality of a tragedian. This was in no sense “stoical,” for he was a passionate man, but was simply a disposition to see the world as a matter of fact. The deity he most spoke of he called “Old Marster,” and this was a world-making, weather-making, fate-making deity, not effectively to be pled with, who revealed his purposes by what happened.

Though she faced with equal candor the things that were, Grandma resisted and protested. Some things that were should not have been. I don’t think Grandma ever reconciled herself to mortality—or, for that matter, to humanity. Her mourning of her losses, which were ever on her mind, always involved an unrelenting objection. She objected to growing old, which she felt as a wrong imposed upon her. “Oh, Andy,” she would say to me, “it’s awful to get old,” and she said this, I felt, pitying not only herself but also the old man that I would one day be. Of humanity in general she was skeptical. She had a few favorites, of whom I was one, but even of those she could be suddenly and peremptorily dismissive, unsurprised at any outrage they might commit.

And yet, going wide of Christian charity and forgiveness as she sometimes did, she adhered to her church and served it. She was one of the pillars of the little white clapboard Bird’s Branch Church, to which Grandpa did not adhere and of which he was not a pillar. Like, I believe, a good many others of his kind, who like him deferred to Old Marster in their ultimate unknowing, Grandpa felt excluded, and perhaps according to doctrines made to exclude him and his likes. And so religion had come between them. Grandpa told me once in the presence of Grandma, and for her benefit, that he was thinking of buying the church and tearing it down. This was a joke surely, and just as surely a provocation, a blow dealt in an established conflict.

Grandma replied, “Yes. I reckon you would.”

Her domain was the house and household, the domestic economy. The house, in the course of her time with Grandpa, had been under the influence of hard times from the depression of the 1890s to that of the 1930s, and it bore everywhere the signs and marks of economic constraint. Until well on in my childhood, when the electric lines and our brief heyday of cheap fossil fuels finally reached it, the most modern thing in it was the coal oil stove sometimes used for cooking in hot weather.

The matching set of furniture in the dining room was of oak and oak veneer, not fine. That room was heated only by a grated fireplace, was mostly unused, and smelled unforgettably of the spices and brown sugar that Grandma kept in the sideboard. The parlor, also rarely used, offered the luxuries of a sofa and easy chair identically upholstered, an upright piano, and a glass-fronted bookcase containing a collection mainly of old textbooks and old popular novels. Except for that in the dining room, all the furniture in the house—even in the parlor, with its air of determined and deserted refinement—had a way of being mismatched. There were a few truly fine old pieces, perhaps left over from the time of Grandpa’s parents, but those were odds and ends along with the rest, not so fine, that appeared to have been acquired randomly, a piece at a time, from hard telling where. Except in the parlor, the floor coverings were of linoleum, with a few worn scatter rugs. There was a general character of make-do. And yet the house afforded the common luxuries of deep feather beds that made for delicious sleeping on winter nights, and a wealth of good food, nearly all of which came from the place.

The household economy included a milk cow or two, meat hogs, a flock of chickens, a few turkeys, a big garden. There was a grape arbor, a pear tree, a cherry tree, a few scattered old apple trees, and wild berries for preserves and pies. The surpluses of cream and eggs provided Grandma a small money income of her own, of which she was watchful and proud. She deposited it in the bank and used it sparingly, except that once in a long while she would indulge herself by ordering from Sears, Roebuck something she didn’t really need. This often would be something that looked good in the catalogue but odd in reality. Once she ordered a pair of toeless white shoes that clearly, even to my eye, were made for a much younger woman. Once she ordered a small metal bed with a baked-on, imitation-wood finish. The bed, as pictured in the book and in her mind, was undoubtedly pleasant, but it could have matched nothing in the world but itself.

She was, on the contrary, an infallible cook. Her kitchen and pantry and smokehouse and cellar were places of abundance. One of the happinesses of the place, for me, was in observing her intricate housewifery, her economizings and small savings, her mendings and patching. But she was never stingy with food. She put meals on the table that were luxurious.

Grandpa belonged to the farm, the barns and fields, the pastures and crops, the animals. The farm had been his life, his passion and his trial. The economy of the farm, depending as it did on markets and the money economy, had been during most of his life far less stable and secure than the household economy that depended almost entirely on the place itself. Grandpa’s long effort to possess and thrive on a place whose economy he did not in the least control had been inevitably a trial. But insecurely as the farm had belonged to him, he had belonged absolutely to it. He had been ruled absolutely by his vision of pastures deep in grass, abundant crops, good animals well fed.

When the farm was handed on to him, one of the back fields was scarred by gullies. Working with a breaking plow and a slip scraper, Grandpa dug a pond in a swale of that field and used the extracted soil to fill the washes, and so he healed them. Driven by debt, he planted another field all to corn, plowing more than he knew he should, and it washed badly in a hard rain. He put it back in grass and never plowed it again, and he grieved to the end of his life over the hurt he had given it. And yet the farm, past all losses and griefs, called him to imagine it as good as it was, and better than it was.

He had been a man of notable hardiness and strength. A neighbor woman told me in her old age that she remembered him disking ground with a team of mules, wearing only a pair of pants. She was carrying water to her father on the adjoining farm. Grandpa called to her, “Sally Ann, when you bring your daddy another drink, would you bring me one?” Was he working a young team he could not leave? He was thirsty, anyhow, and he had not stopped to drink. He had come by then into responsibilities and lean times. He did not afford himself clothes he could do without.

Once he was leading a brood mare from home to the Forks of Elkhorn beyond Frankfort. He had arranged to breed the mare to a stallion at that place. She would have been a standardbred, not saddle broke, and he had set out to walk the forty or so miles, leading her. But she was not well broke even to lead, and she was wearing him out. Finally he stopped at a farm and borrowed a saddle, not doubting that if he could saddle her he could ride her. He saddled her, straddled her, and went his way. Presumably she was well broke by the end of the trip. This was told to my father, after Grandpa’s death, by the man who had loaned the saddle.

Late in his life, when he might have considered himself old, his teeth began to bother him. He got on his horse, rode the five miles to Smallwood on the railroad where Gib Holston, the atheist doctor, was then living. He told Doc Holston, “Pull ’em out! Ever’ damned one of ’em!” And Doc Holston did so, one after another. When all were pulled, Grandpa got on his horse again, rode home, and ate his supper. Teeth had become incidental to him, a bother gone, and he was toothless then until his death, which was still a long way off.

At some time before I came along he ceased entirely to wish to be anywhere but where he was. His mind belonged as entirely to the place as its rocks and trees. Grandma, though, remained always curious about distant places, treasuring the postcards she received from traveling friends and relatives. She went once to South Carolina to visit her eldest son, my Uncle Andrew, who was then working down there. She walked beside the ocean, and brought back a big seashell in which, holding it to my ear, I could hear the ocean for myself. She and some neighbors once made an excursion to the Cincinnati Zoo, from which her most persistent and delighted memory was of Uncle Eb Markman who, scouting ahead, had come rushing back in a state of near-death excitement: “They got a hippopotaymus!” She had gone also, with the ladies of the church, on a visit to Mammoth Cave, and had brought back as souvenirs from deep in the earth several crystalline rocks that she prized.

Grandpa was the creature, not only of his own place, but also pretty exclusively of its surface. His curiosity about the underground was fully satisfied at the depth of an end post hole. He did not aspire into the air beyond the height of a barn roof. On the only “trip” of his life, when my father coaxed him to the top of the overlook at Cumberland Gap, Grandpa took one look over the edge at the “view” and shrank backward—“like a dog,” said my father—and would not look again.

When I was a child I had not traveled as much even as Grandpa. For a long time I had not gone farther from home than Louisville. And so, like Grandma, I was enchanted by the thought of places I had not been. I could sit with her and be carried away by her collection of picture postcards. But I observed also Grandpa’s local travels on horseback, on some of which I rode with him behind his saddle, holding to his waist, or following along on Beauty the pony. Grandpa loved to eat, and sometimes it suited him to show up at a neighbor’s house at noon and get himself invited to dinner. He was perfectly convinced, at least by that stage of his life, that the highest compliment a man could pay a woman was to eat her cooking and praise it. Those fortunate women evidently thought so too, for they were kind to him. In hot weather he also would visit the good springs, which were scattered about the neighborhood, in order to know again the varying tastes that the cool waters bore up from the darkness.

Within the little world of the farm, Grandpa’s sense of the right kind and the right way was unshakeable. It amounted to a local propriety, complex and fierce, that determined his expectations of my brother, Henry, and me. He taught us, I think, much that we needed to know, but we didn’t learn it willingly or quickly. His standards were high, and his teaching, like our father’s, could be peremptory. If we backtalked him, he would say, “Shut your traps!” And if we were face to face with him, or in reach of his cane, we did shut our traps. When we were out of reach, we found ample room for impudence, also disobedience.

But there were forces from the greater world outside the farm that could shake him, and had, and did. The weather of course could shake him, but like all his kind he suffered the weather as a matter of fact. As large almost as the weather, and even less to be trusted, the money economy that limited the economy of the farm had shaken him for most of his life. That economy could not be suffered as a matter of fact, for it was less subject to expectation, more arbitrary, more surprising, than the weather. And entirely surprising to me, when finally it hit me, was the realization that the expectations of his grandchildren also had the power to shake him.

Christmas for our immediate family was a progress lasting several days, involving a big dinner, a Christmas tree, and presents at various houses, including the house of Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, my mother’s parents, and that of Grandma and Grandpa Catlett. Granny and Granddaddy Feltner’s house was a happy one. By various turns of fortune it had been a house less subject to economic hardship than that of the Catletts. But also, and unlike the Catletts, the Feltners were at one in their marriage. Their mutual consent to their life together had been generous. Christmas at the Feltners’ in my earliest years was a horn of plenty poured out, with no fear of emptying. In the parlor would be a beautiful Christmas tree that reached all the way to the ceiling, and presents would be heaped up among its lowest boughs. The table in the dining room would be stretched to its full length. It was Christmas to the limit of possibility.

And then there came a year when I saw beyond doubt that Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett’s was nothing like so fine. Their tree was small and spare, sitting, not in the parlor or the living room, but in the cold front hall, and with only a few presents under it. And I knew, as if I had seen her do it, that Grandma alone had fixed it there, and only for us children, according to an idea, not familiar or congenial to her, of what we children expected or would like. But what most touched me was the further realization that Grandpa had seen in my face, or in all our faces, some hint of judgment and disappointment. His attentiveness to us bore the tone of apology for what he felt was poor by a standard he did not know but nevertheless applied on our behalf.

They were growing old, he and Grandma, in their estrangement from each other and in a time that made them strange to themselves. Theirs was an afflicted marriage, and originally the affliction must have been sexual. In a time with little understanding of “birth control,” without a telephone or good roads, when a doctor might be hours away, pregnancy was something to fear. I know from enough that was said that Grandma learned by the hardest way to fear it. And so at the heart of their life together was a terrible paradox. They lived by the fertility of the world and the farm, but their own fertility had been “a cross to bear.”

“Your mammy said, ‘That’s all,’ and ay God I knew what she meant.”

Their marriage was unhappy, and that unhappiness was present in their house, just as happiness was present in the Feltner house. And yet the unhappiness of Grandma and Grandpa’s house was not exclusive or unqualified. Love was in it also, however balked and disappointed, however much it had been a cause of the unhappiness. But above all the household embodied and was sustained by an agricultural order, resting upon the order of time and nature, that was at once demanding and consoling. Because this order was the order of the house, a child could be happy in it. But the time was coming, was already arriving, when that order would be disvalued and taken apart piece by piece.

I had come along just in time to glimpse the old order when it was still somewhat intact. I had played or idled in blacksmith shops while the smiths shod horses or mules, and built from raw iron and wood many of the simple farming tools still in use. I had gone along with the crews of neighbors as they followed the binder in the grainfields, gathering the bound sheaves into shocks, stopping to catch the young rabbits that ran from the still-standing wheat or barley. I had watched as they fed load after load of sheaves into the threshing machine and sacked and hauled away the grain. And I had been on hand when the sweated crews washed on the back porch and sat down to harvest meals equal to Christmas dinners, even in wartime with no sugar for the iced tea.

And then there came a threshing day when Grandma, old and ill and without help, was not up to the task of cooking for the crew, and my father could see that she was not. He had taken time off from his law office to splice out Grandpa, who also was not equal to the day.

“It’s all right,” my father said, comforting Grandma. “I’ll take care of it.”

And he did take care of it, for he was a man who refused to be at a loss, and he was capable. He went and bought a great pile of ground beef and sacks-full of packaged buns. He fired up the kitchen stove and, overpowering Grandma’s attempts to help, fried hamburgers enough, and more than enough, to feed the crew of hungry men and their retinue of hungry boys. It was adequate. It was even admirable, in its way, I could see that. But I could see also that something old and good was turning, or had turned, profoundly wrong. An old propriety had been offended. I could not have said this at the time, but I felt it, I felt it entirely. There was my father in the kitchen, cooking, not like any cook I had ever seen, but like himself, all concentration and haste, going at a big job that had to be done, nothing lovely about it. And there was the crew sitting down, not to a proper harvest meal, but to hamburgers that I knew they associated, as I did, with town life, with hamburger joints.

Grandma and Grandpa had achieved their threescore years and ten and more; their strength had become labor and sorrow. The life they had lived, the old season-governed life of the country, was passing away as they watched. No threshing machine or threshing crew would come to their place again, and there would be no more big strawstacks for a boy to climb up and slide down. The combines had arrived, their service to be purchased by mere money.

It must have been at about the same time that Grandpa’s “misery” began to come upon him in the night. I would be asleep in that little metal bed in the corner of Grandma’s bedroom upstairs when suddenly the whole house would fill with Grandpa’s crying out from his folding bed down in the living room. His cries were the sounds, unmistakably, of misery: “Ohhhh! Ohhhh! Ohhhh!”

Grandma would get up. In her nightgown, barefooted, she would go out into the hall and down the stairs, turning on lights as she went, for by then the electric line had come. The cries would continue a while, after a while they would stop, and after a further while Grandma would come back up the stairs to bed, turning the lights out as she came.

I said nothing, but I never ceased to wonder: What was his misery? And how was it eased?

Only many years later, when my father was getting old, and maybe I wanted to ask while there was time, I asked him, “What was the matter with Grandpa that would have made him cry out at night?”

And my father said only, “I don’t know.” If he did know, it was hard knowledge and he did not want to talk about it. But maybe, in fact, he did not know. For the first time I realized that I may have known my father’s parents in their old age better than he did.

Still later, my brother, Henry, told me that he too had heard those outcries in the night, and had said nothing. And we wondered, as we often have, at our silence, our mere acceptance as boys of events and conditions that to our adult minds would have seemed urgent. Apparently it never occurred to us that the world, or any detail of it, might have been different. To us, as boys, as if we too deferred to Old Marster, things were as they were. Grandpa was as he was.

What was his misery? That question has been one of the themes of my life, and for most of my life I had not a glimmer of an answer. But now maybe I do. Maybe I have aged at last into the knowledge I lacked before, for now I have heard in my own heart in the deep night that outcry of misery. “What is it?” I have asked myself. And I believe I know.

Time is said to flow like a river. I have said so myself, and perhaps it does. But time is a great mystery, not to be declared by one simile, or by several. It flows also like molten metal, cooling and solidifying even as it passes. The past is as it was. As it was it is forever. It cannot be changed, not by us, not by God. No doubt it is forgettable. We do surely forget some of it, and surely all of it in time will be forgotten. Maybe we can forgive ourselves, or be forgiven, for our wrongs that we remember, but they remain nonetheless wrong. This is the true rigor mortis, this rigidification of all that is past. Under the rule of time, the past is as it was.

And so Grandpa, reduced to himself alone in the darkness, dwelt upon wrongs done and forever undoable, of limits met and unsurpassed, of understanding come too late. His strength had become labor and sorrow, and from his bed lonely as a grave he cried out.

When I think now of his cries, I think also of the scientific braggadocio of human longevity, and of the selfishness, or the deficiency of experience, of those who wish to live forever in time. Did we, as some improbably would say, invent eternity? If so, we invented it because we needed it as the air we breathe. So for mercy. So for grace.

Grandpa’s misery, great as it surely was, belonged entirely to the darkness and to his sole self within it. When daylight returned, he was delivered out of the dark confinement of himself. After the night’s displacement, he became again a living soul, familiar to himself. His place, lighted, again laid before him its infinite promise and demand. And again he recognized it, anciently made and still being made, partly by him who had been made by it, who was still in his moment alive upon it. He ate his breakfast, went to the barn, saddled his horse, and rode out into the fields. Or, increasingly as he aged, he sat on an inverted bucket in the barn door and went to sleep again, secure in the light.

And yet the return of light was not what ended his nighttime misery. When he cried out Grandma heard him and got up and went to him. She was his opposite, the other side of his life, so prettily formed and so lost, that had attracted him and fended him away. But when she heard him in his misery, crying out, she went to him, and after a while he was quiet.

What did she do? I can only give my father’s answer: I don’t know. Having been carried back now all the way into the perfect darkness of ignorance, I can only form the vague outline of a wish.

I will begin by stepping back a little into the light of what I know. I know that Grandpa enjoyed a drink of whiskey. He especially enjoyed a drink, as I have been told, if he had not paid for it himself. He saw nothing wrong with it in terms of his own thirst for it, which was limited. He could stop. He did not need to drink it all, as a friend of mine once said of himself, just to get rid of it.

But Grandma—and this, I think, was another critical opposition—Grandma was a principled teetotaler. She belonged to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and by “temperance” she meant abstinence—not a drop, none. And for this she had substantial reasons: her brother whom we knew as Uncle Peach, Grandpa’s older brother Will, and my Uncle Andrew who was her own first born son—drinkers all, who could not stop, or who did not know when to stop, or who did not want to stop. Uncle Peach, who managed to be an epical nuisance to everybody, including himself, capped his career one winter night with an impromptu nap in his front yard, from which several of his toes never woke.

I suppose, had she been less intelligent or less inclined to doubt, Grandma might have been fanatical on the subject of liquor. But she was no fanatic, and she could make do with what the world afforded. And so I can imagine her bringing the problem of Grandpa’s misery to Doc Holston, who by then had the house next door to my parents’ house in Hargrave.

To do this, she would have had to face the scandal of Doc’s boastful atheism. Doc was a small man who aspired to higher standing by looking down upon God. He would have been astonished to know that his blasphemy did not offend her nearly so much as his absurdity.

“Marce is having a terrible misery in the night. What can I do?”

“Does he have the misery in the daytime?”

“No.”

“Why, damn it to hell, woman, when he wakes up that way, give him a drink!”

“A drink?”

“Of whiskey, damn it! Put a little water in it. Sweeten it a little if you want to.”

And I can imagine her asking my father—who else could she have asked?—to get her a bottle of whiskey. She would have blushed.

He would have laughed. “An old white-ribboner like you? What do you want it for?”

Such impudence would have made her secretive. “In case I get a cold.”

So then I can see her, on the nights of Grandpa’s misery, going down the stairs and straight back to the kitchen, where she had hidden the bottle. For I know she would have hidden it. Grandpa, she said, could smell out candy and find it, no matter how well she hid it. But he could not have smelled whiskey in a stoppered bottle wiped clean, even though he would know she had hidden it somewhere.

She would have poured the whiskey into a table glass with some water, perhaps a little sugar. And then, holding it well away from her for the harm in it, determined to do good with it, she would have carried it to his bedside.

“Sit up, Marce. Drink this.”

He would not have needed to be invited twice.

I can see her standing and watching as he drinks. After the first swallow, he says, “Ah! Ay Lord!” He drinks slowly, with pleasure. When he has finished she takes the glass. He lies down, and she draws the cover over him. She sits down in the rocking chair by the bed. Holding the empty glass, gazing away into her thoughts as she would often do, she sits by Grandpa, patting his arm, as she would have sat by a wakeful child, until he goes to sleep.

That is my vision. I would like to think it might have happened so, and maybe it did. It is probable enough, credible enough. But what is the good of it? Perhaps none at all. But on my own now, from my imagination and my sorrow for them, I offer them nevertheless, out of time, this wish.

Andy Catlett: Early Education (1943)

IN GRADES one and two I was a sweet, tractable child who caused no trouble. I was “little Andy Catlett,” the second of that name, the first being my Uncle Andrew who had raised more than his share of hell and mowed a wide swath among the ladies. My own public reputation so far was clean as a whistle. But in grade three I learned of the damage that could be done to a strict disciplinary harmony by a small discord, and I was never the same afterwards.

In grade four, Miss Heartsease, abandoning her premature hope that I might be educable, brought stacks of National Geographics to keep me quiet. In one of them I found several pictures of a chemistry laboratory, and I fell into what I can only call an infatuation. I had no idea what was done in a chemistry laboratory. What captivated me was the intricate plumbing of glass pipes, some of them in coils; the vials, tubes, beakers, and retorts; the neat rows of bottled powders and fluids; the bunsen burners. The thought of working in such a room with such equipment sent me into urgent fantasies. I would be a chemist when I grew up. I would be a chemist before I grew up. I entertained seriously the possibility of becoming a child prodigy. I could see a picture of myself in my white coat in my laboratory in National Geographic, pouring a fuming green liquid from one container into another.

My scientific bent led me in that same year to the discovery of afterimages. One of the bare lightbulbs in the ceiling of our classroom was of clear glass and much larger than the others. Inside it was a filament in the shape of a horseshoe that glowed with a white incandescence. I learned that I could stare at that lightbulb for a while, and then, by blinking, send a flock of brightly colored horseshoes flying all over the room. But my experimental looking around and blinking proved too violent for Miss Heartsease, and she soon forced me back into my chemical fantasies.

I asked for a chemistry set for Christmas, and got one. But it was a disappointment. It was deficient in apparatus and drama, and too obviously intended to be “educational.” I mixed up a concoction that smelled bad but was otherwise uninteresting, and gave up chemistry.

I went instead into the business of candle-making. Since it was not long after Christmas, candles were on my mind and the makings readily findable. I made a colorful collection of candle drippings and butt-ends. For good measure I added one whole candle that didn’t match any of the others in the pantry, and I knew my mother wouldn’t want it if it didn’t match. I had read in a book about pioneer days that you could make a candle by dipping a string into melted tallow, and I knew from looking at lighted candles how to go about melting them.

And so I waited until I was at home by myself, to avoid disturbing others, before I started my candle-making business. It was in fact going to be a business, for I fully intended to sell my candles at a profit, and I thought I could count on my grandmothers to buy at least two apiece.

I put my drips and fragments into a small pot, cutting up the nonmatching whole one so it would fit, measured a piece of string to about the right length, and turned on the burner. How what happened next happened I can’t say, for I soon found that I didn’t have time just to stand around watching a pot, but it did happen that a fairly spectacular tall flame was standing on top of the stove. Pretty quickly it burnt up all my wax and went out, and I soon got the kitchen back to rights and no harm done. There was no sign of fire except for the faintest little cloudy smoke stain on the ceiling that you wouldn’t see if you didn’t look close. If my parents ever looked close they must have wondered, but they never asked me.

So I went out of the candle business with no profit, but also with no loss except for the burnt wax, which I no longer needed.

My parents were very much afraid that my brother, Henry, and I would not live to be grown. This fear, when it manifested itself, could be oppressive. But we were fortunate, Henry and I, in having a father who was often busy at his office and a mother whose attention was often required by our two younger sisters. This state of things bestowed upon us boys a latitude of freedom that we knew exactly what to do with.

As a result, a secondary fear haunted particularly our mother—namely that the behavior of her sons would deviate so far beyond the known human range that an apocalyptic embarrassment would fall upon the family. This too could be oppressive. When my mother said to me, “I don’t know what’s going to become of you!” I could hear the squeak of the hinges of the jailhouse door. In her worst moments, I fear my mother too could hear those hinges, and she also could see in her mind’s eye the raw opening of an early grave for a boy drowned or burned or run over by a car or kicked in the head by a mule.

To save us from ourselves—and herself from the anguish she knew she would feel at the shutting of that iron door or the opening of that grave, if she had not done all she could have done by way of prevention—at certain extremities of our self-education and of her tolerance, she resorted to the use of a switch. The switch would be one of the sprouts that grew up from the roots of our lilac bush, and it would be keen, lithe, and durable. Our mother’s use of it was fiercely honest. She dispensed the “good whipping” she had promised, no fun for the recipient, though the pain was soon over. What was not soon over was my sense of her own reluctance and regret, which stayed with me and made me sympathize with her as maybe nothing else could have done.

I sympathized with her; in my sympathy, as I can see now, I greatly loved her, and yet her punishments wrought no significant change in my behavior. Her influence over me at that time did not extend many feet beyond the end of her lilac switch, whereas my quest for knowledge extended limitlessly round about.

Probably because of my early gift for science, I was eager to learn in school. But I was not intellectually stimulated by the schoolbooks or the established curriculum. What I wanted to learn was the precise line between what my teachers would put up with and what they would not put up with. And to draw a line of this sort required much experimentation. My curiosity about the limits of, for instance, Miss Heartsease was extraordinarily keen. I probed the coastlines of her patience and sounded its estuaries like an early navigator mapping the New World. When school let out, I shifted my interest to other continents as handily as an astronaut.

It may have been in the fall of my year of Miss Heartsease that I applied myself to a critical textual examination, and ultimately to the scientific debunking, of The Night Before Christmas.

At that time my sisters’ upstairs bedroom still had an open fireplace with a grate that, before our time, had been used for burning coal. I had never paid it much attention until one night after supper, when I was loitering in that room, enjoying maybe the strangeness of its feminine prettiness, one of my earliest quandaries attached itself to that fireplace as if by magnetic attraction. It was far yet from Christmas, still warm. And by then I’m sure I “knew about Santa Claus.” But my quandary was a Christmas quandary of long standing, and it had to do specifically with Santa Claus.

I knew from my close observation of falling bodies, and from having been a number of times a falling body myself, perhaps as much as one needs to know about gravity. And so I saw no great problem in the alleged descent of chimneys on the part of Santa Claus. If the chimneys had been big enough, and if he had no more graceful way of doing so, he could have got down them by falling.

How he got back up them again was my question. I was going, you see, by the book. As a critic, from the beginning I held the text in great honor, and the text did not say that he came down the chimney, left the toys for the children, and let himself out by the door. The text said in plain English: “up the chimney he rose.”

In those days I was a true pure scientist. If the subject of my inquiry had been the nature of gravity itself, I would not have minded whether the falling body had been an apple or a bomb, or upon what or whom it might have fallen. I was hard driven in my quest for truth.

And so, being alone, and having therefore full intellectual freedom, I stooped into the fireplace, inserted my head and shoulders into the chimney, and did a passable job of standing up. Such was my objectivity in regard to the chimney that I would not have been surprised if I had been able to go right up it.

But it was not a roomy chimney. I could not raise my arms to feel for a handhold, and except for the grate there was no foothold. And so I absolutely knew something: If I couldn’t get up it, Santa Claus couldn’t get up it. I wasn’t entirely objective at this point, for I was truly sorry. It would have been extraordinarily pleasant to go up the chimney and climb out onto the peak of the roof. From there I could have gone down onto the roof of the back porch, from there into the branches of our big old apple tree, and from there to the ground.

But I accepted disappointment, shrank out of the dark chimney, and stood up again in the lighted room. And that, I think, must have been the occasion upon which I discovered soot. Coal soot is exceedingly black and exceedingly light. I was covered with it, which I only found out by using one of the curtains to wipe what felt like cobweb out of my eyes. I was a living pencil, for on everything I touched I left a mark.

And then I saw that the soot, in addition to being on me, was coming off. It was drifting loose in chunks and flakes and floating to the floor, where it broke into pieces that fled away on tiny currents of the air, insidious little breezes which I also discovered at that time.

The Christmas quandary I had started with, despite its scientific interest and the seriousness with which I had taken it up, began to look like a pleasant sort of ignorance. I would gladly have gone back to it, except that it had now evolved into an insistently present problem for which there was no present solution. In fact, every attempt I made at a solution reliably worsened the problem. Even when I merely rubbed my head the better to study the situation, I loosened more soot. I saw a flake of soot levitate from the top of my head and land on a bedspread, white to match the curtains. When I took a swipe at it to knock it to the floor, I made a broad dark streak. It began to seem to me that I needed to be going.

I started to the door and only then saw that my mother was standing in it, having just arrived. We paused and looked each other over. I saw from her stance and demeanor that the situation was not as she would have preferred it to be.

I managed to dodge past her, maybe because she was dazed, not having as quick an eye for the truth as I did, or maybe she was reluctant to touch me. She hadn’t even thought of anything to say.

Once I was safely past her, I ran to one of the windows at the back of the hall, “threw up the sash” (as The Night Before Christmas says), and flung myself out onto the porch roof. Thereupon, displaying a presence of mind I had never given her credit for, my mother shut the window. I heard her lock it. I heard her go to the window on the other side of the hall and lock that one.

Laying low seemed to be called for, and like Brer Rabbit I laid low. For a long time I didn’t make a sound, and I didn’t hear a sound. I thought hard, and I didn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion. I was safe as long as I stayed on the roof. My mother, I knew, would not climb onto the roof. But then there was a limit to how long I could stay there. There was no bed or blanket on the roof, and there would be no breakfast. I could go down by the apple tree, but where would I go then? I didn’t know where everybody else was, but I knew my mother was at home. Sooner or later my father would come home, and that did not brighten my prospects.

The idea of running away from home in case of need had been ready-made in my mind for a good while, but to do that I would have to be on the ground. Once on the ground and safely gone, I would maybe think of a place to go, some place an orphan boy might find welcome and shelter. So I got up ever so quietly, and slowly so as not to make a sound I eased down the slope of the roof. I went so far as to step from the roof into the apple tree before I looked down and saw my mother.

She was sitting on the ground with her back against one of the tree’s three trunks. She looked comfortable. A lengthy switch was lying across her lap beneath her folded hands.

She looked strange. I had never before seen her or anybody else look as she did then. It took a long time for my education to catch up with the vision of her I had then, for though she was a Christian woman she was sitting down there looking positively Buddhist. She was sitting perfectly still. She was not going to move in so much as I could imagine of the future. She was not looking left or right, let alone up into the tree where I was. But I knew she knew where I was. I felt illuminated as if by omniscience. She was at peace down there. She was using up all the peace there was. There was none at all up in the apple tree where I was.

Without making a sound I eased back out of the tree and onto the roof again. Though I knew she was not looking at me and was not going to look at me, I moved back out of her line of sight, where at least I was relieved of looking at her.

My mind was breaking new ground and was working hard. It was working so hard I could spare no energy for standing up. I sat down. For quite a while I thought methodically and strenuously. I saw that I did not have many options. I had, in truth, only three options: I could climb down that tree, which, with precise reason, I was afraid to do; or I could kick the glass out of one of the hall windows and go back into the house, which, on second thought, did not seem to be an option; or I could jump off the roof, and then, if able, run.

To avoid thinking again of the tree, I gave a lot of thought to jumping off the roof. If I did that successfully, with no damage to myself, the option of running away would be renewed. But if I jumped it would be a long way to the ground, and I would have a fair chance of breaking a leg. This was a possibility not entirely unattractive, for if I broke a leg my mother surely would feel sorry for me and forget to whip me. On the other hand, I might kill myself, in which case I would lose the benefit.

And so I was driven back by my thoughts to the first option of climbing down the tree. But I lingered on a while to give my mother a reasonable opportunity to depart, an opportunity which she did not receive with favor. When I got up and eased back again to look for her, there she was. She had not moved. She looked exactly as she had before.

I was really getting to know my mother. I am many years older now than she was then, and I can easily imagine how knowingly she was amused. But I could imagine then, for I saw, how perfectly she was determined. It was getting dark. It was time to bring this story to an end.

Making no longer an effort to be quiet, I stepped back into the tree, slid down, and stood in front of my mother. I felt as if I were presenting myself to a bolt of lightning. It was somewhat like that: swift, illuminating, and soon over.

ANDY CATLETT:
EARLY TRAVELS

To the grandchildren, mine and everybody’s

Part One

IT WAS STILL way in the night, as it seemed to me, when my father woke me by gently shaking my shoulder with his hand.

I said aloud, “No. Wait!” in a dream I was having, and then, “What?”

“Get up, honey. I’ve about got your breakfast ready.”

Ordinarily the news that my father was cooking my breakfast would have made me cover my head. He cooked with what I thought an unseemly haste and show of force, like a man putting out a fire. You wouldn’t have been surprised to see him lean over and blow on the coils of our then fairly new electric stove.

But he was in one of his finer moods, as I could tell by the touch of his hand, and I promptly remembered that this was the day of my trip to Port William.

“Be quiet, now. The others are still asleep,” he said, and he went out so quietly he seemed almost not to have been there.

“Maybe I’m dreaming,” I thought, but by the light coming in from the hall I could see my brother, Henry, curled up beneath the covers, deeply asleep in his bed. And then a thrill of pleasure came upon me. I felt in the shadow of my own bed to make sure of my small grip, packed with my clothes, toothbrush, and my new copy of Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur, imbued already with the voice of my mother, raptly reading it to me. It was still there. I got up then, dressed in a hurry in the shadowy room, picked up my grip, and went quietly out the door.

It was the fourth day after Christmas, 1943, and I was nine years old. Port William, the native community of both my parents, was all of ten miles from our house in Hargrave. It was in fact my own native community. I had been born there, had been there hundreds of times, sometimes to stay weeks at a stretch with my Feltner grandparents, my mother’s parents, in the town of Port William itself, or with my Catlett grandparents out on the Bird’s Branch road. But this time it was going to be different. This time I was going on the bus by myself, alone. It was going to be an adventure, as my parents saw it, a new experience that I would greatly enjoy. As I saw it, it was nothing less than my first step into manhood.

How this had come about I no longer remember and cannot guess. It may have been that my parents were giving a New Year’s Eve party at our house, or were going to one elsewhere, and were distributing us children here and there ahead of time, starting with me, the oldest. But the sympathy that comes with age causes me to consider also the possibility that they were shipping me off for a few days just to give themselves a taste of freedom. For I had not grown, as I preferred to think, into the vaguest semblance of adulthood, but rather into a serious and lasting form of nuisancehood. As even I had noticed, I could not be good at home and at school at the same time, which meant that I was a worry to my parents all the time. At school I had become a fourth-grade Thomas Paine, striking blows for liberty, which of course earned me in return blows of yardsticks, rulers, and other pedagogical weapons, which I welcomed as distractions from the established order. At home I was actuated, like Daniel Boone, by a desire for elbow room, and our house seemed to me to be growing smaller by the day, as densely crowded by the other five members of our family as if it had been no bigger than a phone booth. And so I can’t think now that my parents were grieving over my departure or that they were going to miss me much.

On the other hand, I was good, a model boy, at least when I was in sight, on my visits to both sets of my grandparents. In their houses, for me, peace reigned, and I could even count on being spoiled a little as a just compensation for my goodness. And so of course I loved those visits, especially when I could go alone.

When I got downstairs my father had my breakfast on the table: orange juice, eggs, bacon, and toast. The bacon fat had not been fried quite crisp. The eggs were done “over easy,” as I liked them, but were rather crunchy around the edges because he had had the skillet too hot. And he had smeared the butter on the toast after he had toasted it. He certainly was not as good a cook as my mother, but I wisely made no comment.

I only said, “Where’s the jelly?”

“You don’t need any jelly,” he said in perfect good humor, meaning, I judged, that he had not been able to find it.

“I don’t reckon I do,” I said.

He said, “Have you washed your face?”

“No,” I said, “but I’m going to directly.”

He had cleaned up his own plate and was sipping his coffee and reading the paper. He evidently had plans of his own for that early morning. He was dressed for the office and was already wearing his hat.

When I had finished eating he said, “Put your dishes in the sink.”

I carried my dishes away, and when I came back he said, still reading the paper, “Go to the toilet.”

I did, and when I was finished I went to the further trouble of washing my face and of wetting my hair and combing it both front and back. I didn’t brush my teeth because I had packed my toothbrush the night before.

When he was ready, my father put on his overcoat and handed me my mackinaw and toboggan.

“It’ll be cold out there,” he said. “Have you got enough clothes?”

“Long underwear and sweater. Extra clothes in the grip.”

“Where are your gloves?”

“In my coat pocket.”

“Well, put on your overshoes.”

I did, while he watched. He picked up the grip, and we started for the door.

“Be quiet,” he said.

He had things on his mind. At the start of the morning you could feel him aiming himself into the day. We drove down into town, to Front Street, without talking. I was wide awake, and it was good to feel the earliness of the morning, the town dark yet and mostly quiet. People were just up, or still waking up, or still asleep. We passed through the pools of light from the streetlights, one after another. The sound of the car’s engine was loud and then quiet, quiet and then again loud, as we went by the other cars parked here and there along the still street.

My father parked the car in front of the Poppy Shop, just a few doors down from his office. The Poppy Shop liked to call itself a “luncheonette.” It opened early in the morning for breakfast, served coffee, sandwiches, ice cream, and such all day, and did duty besides as our bus station. As we got out of the car, I was quick to take charge of the grip myself. I didn’t want to be seen allowing my father to carry it for me, and I didn’t want there to be any mistaking who the traveler was.

When we went in, my father stepped up to where Miss Angela Davis was standing behind the cash register. Miss Angela was the proprietress of the Poppy Shop. Behind her back some of the men called her “Ample Angela.” To my mother she was known as a “sweet person.”

“A ticket to Port William, Miss Angela, if you please,” my father said.

“Why, Wheeler, is Andy leaving home?” Miss Angela said, peeping around my father at me and my grip.

“He’s pulling out,” my father said.

“I know you’re going to miss that boy.”

“It’s the truth,” my father said. “Make that a round trip.”

Miss Angela laughed. She handed him the ticket. He turned to me. “Here. Put this ticket in your pocket now, so you won’t lose it.”

“Yes, sir.”

He still had his wallet in his hand. He took out a dollar bill and gave it to me. “Put this in your pocket too.” And he stuck out his hand.

I understood something then: He wanted to hug me—if we had been alone he would have—but he didn’t want to embarrass me.

We shook hands. “Put that money in your pocket,” he said. “Be careful with it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, being conscientiously polite there in public, and wishing suddenly that he would hug me.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. And then, turning to Miss Angela, he said, “He’ll want to get off at the upper end of the Bird’s Branch road, the Port William end.”

Miss Angela, looking past him at me and smiling, said, “He won’t need to worry.”

And then with the instant haste that was his way, my father strode out the door.

The Poppy Shop was a small place, with a few booths and a few small tables. The chairs at the tables had round seats with backs and legs of twisted wire. There were several customers, eating breakfast or drinking coffee, getting ready to go to work.

One of the tables was empty. I put my grip on one of the chairs and sat in another.

My Uncle Andrew had given me a dollar at Christmas, and so now I had two. I laid the two together, folded them up, and put them into the little coin purse I had in my pocket. I also had a nickel and a dime.

Miss Angela came over to my table. “You’ve got a little while to wait, honey. Do you want a cup of coffee or something?”

I said, “No, mam,” but that sounded impolite. It sounded somehow ungrateful, and so I said, “Yes, mam.”

“Coffee?” she said.

I said, “Yes, mam.”

Though of course I had seen other people drink it, I had never tasted coffee in my life. My mother did not think it healthful for children to drink coffee. Privately, I thought coffee had an excellent smell, and I had looked forward to being old enough to drink it. And now, just because I was unaccustomed to the ways of the world and was embarrassed and wished to be polite to an older person, which would have pleased my mother, I was going to drink some coffee without being old enough.

Miss Angela set a full steaming cup in front of me. I stirred it a little, as the coffee drinkers I knew usually did, and then I took a sip from the spoon and was amazed that anything could taste so little like it smelled. The bitterness of it puckered my mouth. Miss Angela, who had been watching me, laughed in such a hearty, friendly way that I wasn’t embarrassed but was merely grateful to be the cause of her amusement. Sugar was rationed because of the war, and people were encouraged to drink their coffee without it. Miss Angela, a patriot, did not supply sugar until specifically asked. But she went to the kitchen and brought back a sugar bowl, which she set down in front of me. She put two spoonsful of sugar into my cup and a generous dollop of cream.

“Now stir it,” she said, “and see if it don’t taste better.”

I stirred it and tasted it again, and she was right. The sugar and cream made it taste more like it smelled. It only needed to be a little sweeter, and when she went away I added two more spoonsful of sugar. It went down very pleasantly after that, though I was already wondering how much my extravagance with the sugar might have hurt “the war effort.” My conscience was not always alert, but when alerted it went eagerly about its duty.

When Miss Angela passed by again, she said, “How’s your coffee, hon?”

“Just fine,” I said. “How much do I owe you for it, please, mam?”

“You’re such a nice, polite young man, I think I’ll just charge it to your daddy. He’s a generous fellow, isn’t he?”

I couldn’t have disagreed more, even though he had just given me a dollar, even though I would eventually know him as a generous man. In fact, my father had learned the lessons of the thirties pretty thoroughly, though of course I was incapable of any such insight at the age of nine. He didn’t like to see money thrown away on such things as I was always needing nickels for, and so he was not especially generous with nickels. He was apt to burden me by asking, “What do you want with it?” or “What do you need it for?” or “Do you think nickels grow on trees?” Perhaps as a result, I too grew up under the shadow of the Depression, and it is still with me. I still suspect, like many of my predecessors here in Port William, that it will come back again, and that it taught lessons that needed to be learned.

And so I didn’t know what to say to Miss Angela, who proceeded to give me a small prompt: “He wouldn’t mind buying a boy a cup of coffee, would he?”

I knew perfectly well that he would mind. Embarrassed again, I gave her the first grown up–sounding answer I could think of: “If it suits him, it’ll tickle the hell out of me.” And then I slapped my hand over my mouth.

Too late, of course. I had spoken loudly, and the place was suddenly full of laughter. For a few seconds I had a sort of vision of myself sitting there red-faced and grinning, embarrassed, scared, and proud.

The episode gave me a sort of fame, and of course my father heard of it. Two or three weeks later I happened to encounter him on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. He was standing with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, talking to his friend Charlie Hardy.

I gave them a wave and said, “Hi.”

“That’s Miss Angela’s buddy, ain’t it?” Mr. Hardy said.

My father snorted. “That’s him.” He reached into his pants pocket, drew out a nickel, and handed it to me. “Here. Go buy yourself a cup of coffee.”

The war changed things. It was changing the world, and it was changing us. I didn’t know it then, but sugar rationing was changing the way we would live after the war. Businesses and restaurants were given larger rations of sugar than households, and this helped to shift the dependence of households from their own kitchens to commercial bakeries. Betty Crocker was the “homemaker” who got the most sugar, and she did more and more of the baking.

Because of the war we certainly knew that history was happening to us, but it was happening to us more than we knew. History and conscience, however, did not stop me from enjoying my over-sweetened cup of coffee. I drank it to the last slow trickle.

The arrival of the bus was an event, heralding itself by the sound of brakes out in the dark street, the blast of a horn, and the rumbling of a big motor. I was already on my feet, grip in hand, when the uniformed driver threw open the door of the bus and stepped nimbly down onto the pavement. He was a smallish, neat man who was going to no trouble to disguise his good looks. When I presented myself to him, feeling in the pocket where I thought I had put my ticket and not finding it and then feeling in the pocket where I actually had put it and finding it, he looked me up and down with a grin.

“Now I wonder whose daddy this boy is,” he said.

While he held out his hand for my ticket, I wasted some of his valuable time in wondering if that question had an answer—though, by now, it has been answered, for years ago I did become somebody’s daddy, and in the course of time somebody’s granddaddy also.

“Hush up and get on out of here,” Miss Angela said from behind me. “He needs to get off at the upper end of Bird’s Branch.”

He took my ticket, said “Yowzum!” to Miss Angela, and I stepped up into the dim interior of the bus, followed by three or four other passengers. I took a seat by the window just behind the driver and put my grip on the seat beside me. The driver leapt heroically into his seat, closed the door, sealing us within the inward rumble of the motor while he put the gathered tickets into their proper place and readjusted his handsome cap, and then we were off.

Hargrave was a stop on the Greyhound route from Louisville to Cincinnati, but this bus was not one of the Greyhound line. It lacked the insignia of the running hound, which I admired excessively, and it made its humble journey from Hargrave to Louisville by way of the back roads, gathering eventually a pretty full load of shoppers and people whom I believe we had not yet learned to call “commuters.” It was a lesser dog than a greyhound, but I had never ridden in such a vehicle before and I was duly impressed by its size and power and by the height of my plush seat, which permitted me to look down upon the tops of mere automobiles. We rolled out of Hargrave and over the bridge into Ellville, there turning away from the valley of the Ohio into the valley of what we, who still belonged more to Port William than to Hargrave, called “our river.”

I could look back then at the lights of Hargrave disappearing behind us. Soon even the glow of them was out of sight, and the bus was enclosed in the darkness of the night-bound countryside, broken only by its own headlights and those of a car or two, and here and there by the lighted kitchen windows of the farmhouses. So I remember the nighttimes of my childhood, when the darkness enclosed separately our scattered human lights.

Only now and again we met a car. The cars, like our bus, were going slowly, observing the wartime speed limit. There were limits of all kinds in those days, enough of them to keep even a child reminded that over across the oceans people were fighting and being hurt or killed every hour of every day and night. When I thought of the war I thought of my Uncle Virgil, who was in the army. He had not yet been sent overseas. He was safe so far. But as it would turn out he would, as we feared, be sent overseas and into the fighting. He would, as we feared, be killed, though for a long time we knew for sure only that he was “missing.”

“Missing,” my mother said, “means that we don’t know, but we must hope. We must hope and pray.” She would say that, smiling, and then look away to hide the tears that I knew were in her eyes. Uncle Virgil was her brother, seven years younger than she was, and I had some idea how much she loved him. I understood her tears better than I understood hope and prayer.

Uncle Virgil’s wife was Hannah, who lived now with my Feltner grandparents. Hannah was beautiful and very kind. Sometimes we had long conversations together in which she told me how things had been with her when she was a girl. I was deeply and sweetly in love with her, as only a small boy can be in love with a young woman who is beautiful and kind. I wanted to marry somebody just like her as soon as I would be grown up. I had picked up a good deal of hearsay about what happens between men and women when they are married, some of it outlandish enough, but I was having trouble applying it to any of the married people I actually knew. In the secrecy of my heart I imagined my own marriage as a sort of official permit to adore some lady as beautiful and kind as Hannah, perhaps in the manner of one of the knights of the Round Table, and to do daring deeds that would cause her to adore me.

While the bus plodded along at thirty or so miles an hour, which was maybe fast enough on that crooked road, my mind, under the influence of my first cup of coffee and four spoonsful of sugar, seemed to be going at the speed of light. I seemed to be thinking of everything at once, my mind darting about in midair like a dragonfly. I was sitting straight up on the edge of the seat, my eyes as wide open as possible, looking past the driver at the lighted road and then into the darkness outside my window and then around at the other passengers, in some danger of twisting my head off. The darkness was growing lighter. I began to see the trees and houses along the road. As we passed through the open bottomlands I could see way off on the far side of the river the hills dark against the brightening sky. We made two or three stops for new passengers who hailed us from the roadside. They stepped aboard, paid their fare, and found seats.

And then I recalled in a flash of panic that the Bird’s Branch road had two ends, a lower end and an upper end. I got up, holding to the post at the head of the aisle, and tapped the driver on the shoulder. I said, “I need to get off at the upper end of the Bird’s Branch road.”

The driver nodded a big nod without looking away from the road. He said, “Never fear, Mr. Catlett. I will set you down on the spot.”

As good as his word, and to my relief, since I had had time once again to poison my jittering mind with distrust and panic, he let me off right at the designated spot. The bus stopped with a great hiss, the door clapped open, I stepped down and out, and the door clapped shut behind me. The gargle of its idling motor rose into a kind of resolve. The sound of it accelerated and diminished, and then it was gathered into silence. And I was standing in the cold wind at the opening of the Bird’s Branch road, the upper end, where my grandfather, Marce Catlett, and his colored hired hand, Dick Watson, were waiting for me.

They had come with the team and wagon, the grain box still on the running gear from the corn harvest, the two old men sitting side by side on the spring seat, Dick handling the mules and my grandfather sitting with his hands at rest on the crook of his cane. The good pair of black mare mules had not expected the bus. It was new to their experience, and it had not met their approval. Though it had passed out of hearing by the time I raised my hand in greeting, the mules were still leaning back into their britchings with their ears pointed anxiously forward, and Dick was saying, “Whoa, Beck! Whoa, Cathern! Whoa, girls!” and Grandpa Catlett, having been as distrustful of the bus nearly as the mules, was saying for the second time, “Ay God, Dick, there he is!”

I waited to approach the wagon until the team had quieted, and then I handed my grip up to Dick, who lifted it over onto the floor behind the seat. And then, reaching down, he helped me to climb up and onto the seat between them.

He turned the wagon around and we headed home. We could no longer hear any noise from the bigger road at all. The only sounds now were the rattling of the breast chains and traces, the footsteps of the mules, and the rumble of the turning wheels. The Bird’s Branch road in those days was still just a two-track graveled lane, wide enough in most places for two vehicles to meet and pass. It was snug sitting there between Grandpa and Dick, and I no longer minded the wind. Before long my caffeinated thoughts had eased from the speed of the bus to the perhaps four-mile-an-hour gait of the mules, which seemed to allow the country to come to rest around me. The mules too had relaxed. They were striding along at a brisk walk, their ears, now that they had abandoned themselves to their work, swaying back and forth as they stepped.

My grandfather, who had been watching them with eager attention, said, “Ay Lord, they’re good ones, Dick!” And then, without waiting for Dick to reply, he shook his head in solemn agreement with himself.

It was as though a curtain had fallen on a stage and the credulous audience (I, that is to say) was now in a different world from the one I had waked up in only a short time ago. The world I was in now was an older one that had been in existence a long time, though it would last only a few more years. The time was about over when a boy traveling into the Port William community might be met by a team of mules and a wagon. Dick Watson would die in the fall of 1945 and Grandpa Catlett in the late winter of 1946. By 1950 or so most of the horse and mule teams would have departed from the country. The men and women who had known only the old ways were departing fast. I knew well at that time that the two worlds existed and that I lived in both. During the school year I lived mostly in Hargrave, the county seat at the confluence of the rivers. Hargrave, though it seemed large to me, was a small town that loved its connections with the greater world, had always aspired to be bigger, richer, and grander than it was, and had always apologized to itself for being only what it was. When school was out, I lived mostly in the orbit of the tiny village of Port William, which, so long as it remained at the center of its own attention, was entirely satisfied to be what it was.

That those two worlds were in mortal contention had never occurred to me. When in a few years one had entirely consumed the other, so that no place anywhere would ever again be satisfied to be what it was, I was surprised, and I am more surprised now by the rapidity of the change than I was then. In only a few years the world of pavement, speed, and universal dissatisfaction had extended itself into nearly every place and nearly every mind, and the old world of the mule team and wagon was simply gone, leaving behind it a scatter of less and less intelligible relics.

But on that morning in 1943 I had no premonition of such an ending. In my innocence, I thought only that the world the mules were drawing us into was a truer world than the world of Hargrave, and I liked it better. It was a world placed unforgettably within the weather, in the unqualified daylight and darkness. I thought it had always been and would always be pretty much as it was.

And on that morning of my journey I was happy to be sitting scrunched on the wagon seat between the two old men, one black and one white, both of whom I loved. Dick I loved for his never-failing kindness to me, his ready companionship, his lore of horses and mules and fox hounds. My love for Grandpa was more complicated, varyingly mixed with awe and sometimes with fear, for he was a monument and a force.

Though bent a little at the hips from age and wear, he was tall and lean, straight-backed even then. He sat upright on the wagon seat as a man would sit who was mounted assuredly on a good horse, as he had been on many days of his life and as he would be still for another year or two. He carried a heavy stockman’s cane that he sometimes leaned on but when walking seldom touched to the ground; at times he did without it altogether. He had been at one time a horse trainer; for a longer time he had been a trader in livestock, riding to court days in the nearby county seats to buy weanling calves or mules and in all weather driving them home; and always and above all he had been a farmer. He was born during the Civil War in the place where he lived all his life, and where he would die. For much of his life times had been hard, and he had struggled just to hold onto the farm. At the time when my father came home with his law degree and by his earnings reinforced the family’s hold on the place, it had been in danger of being sold for taxes.

And so my brother Henry and I, born just soon enough to know him a little, were not merely the descendants of his blood; as he saw us, we belonged to a line of succession that had maintained itself in that place by struggle, and we therefore had to be prepared to continue the struggle. His love for us therefore was rarely indulgent, and it could be extremely demanding, burdened as it was by a fearful tenderness and an expectation that was and would be difficult to bear.

He would, for instance, halt in front of us the team he was working and demand to know which mule was in the lead, which was the best in conformation, and if they were hitched right. And how many inches made a hand? And did we know gee from haw?

If our answers were good, he would snort with approval. “Ay God, that’s right!”

If we were wrong, he would revert to his opinion that we were still unfit to be weaned. “You ought to be at the house sucking your mammy!” And then, to the team, “Come up!”

I have in mind a vision of him that must come from near the end of his working life. He is bareheaded, wearing a pair of bib overalls, a blue shirt, a pair of leather leggings. It is a bright, windy day. He is walking rapidly, leading a young mule from the barn to the pasture behind the barn. His shirt is billowing in the wind. The mule, excited by the wind’s commotion and by the imminence of freedom, is dancing sideways on the lead rein. My grandfather, paying the mule no mind whatever, is holding the rein in his right hand but leaning leftward away from the mule. With his left hand he is pinching shut first one nostril and then the other, blowing his nose freely into the air. And so they disappear around the corner of the barn, the mule capering to the right, snot flying to the left, and that blue shirt fluttering in the wind.

I loved him first of all, I think, in a sort of homage that I did not consciously give and he did not consciously require. Something in his aspect and his bearing called love from me, as if love were not so much a common bond as a common condition of both our lives. I loved him also because I knew that he loved me, and because, when he was pleased with me, he could be intently gentle, as my father could be also.

I love him now more than I did then, for now, sixty-some years later, I understand that his life had been lived in devotion to our place here and its creatures, as my own life, in its way, also has been lived. And I know now how to value his passion for good crops, good animals, and good work, and how to appreciate his grief when he failed to live up to his passion. For he had known failure, as he would acknowledge bluntly, as he acknowledged everything else. He had too rarely been free of the stress of debt, and therefore of haste and overwork. He had been compelled by the urgencies of debt to put his land too much at risk, and he and it had paid the inevitable costs. His life, his very flesh, had been shaped by weather, work, and the struggle to keep what he had and what he loved.

The town of Port William stands less than a mile from the river on an upland deeply grooved by branching valleys and hollows. The human geography of the countryside around it is inscribed by roads winding out along open ridges that give way at their edges to wooded bluffs, and by roads winding through the valleys of the larger streams.

The road we were following that morning lies, widened and paved now, along one of the ridges, bending this way and that, rising and falling, according to various compromises between topography and property lines and its own inclination toward the level and the straight. In the swags the road dipped down almost to touch the thickets at the upper ends of the wooded hollows. On the rises of the ground we could see ahead of us, at varying angles and ever closer, the house and barns and other outbuildings of what we still call “the home place.” It is where my brother Henry now lives.

From the next-to-last rise we could see also the bare woods below the house, and the small house at the woods’ corner where Dick lived. We could see the smoke rising from the chimneys of the two houses, and smoke also from the corner of the tobacco barn where Jess and Rufus Brightleaf and whoever was helping them were at work in the stripping room, preparing the crop for market. We could see Rufus’s run-down old car parked in the lot in front of the feed barn. These signs gave the place a look of coherence and calm, all its purposes clear and intact. Before long the kitchens would begin to fill with the smells of dinner cooking. The sense of the place came to me, the whole of it. The place, the season, the weather, the work going on—how I loved it!

The weather too felt relatively calm in the draws, but on the rises, where the long wind drove unobstructed across the distances, we felt the cold, for the night’s frost still lay on the fields. It was cloudy. The days since Christmas had been, not bitterly cold, but merely windy and raw with spats of drizzle, freezing rain, or snow, just enough to keep the bare ground muddy when it thawed. Now a few snowflakes were again in the air, drifting down laggardly in the sheltered places but on the high ground flying straight across so that they did not seem to fall.

When we had driven up past the woods and the pasture above it and the mailbox, and turned finally through the front gate and started up the drive toward the house, I had begun to look forward to Grandma’s kitchen and the warmth of the stove and maybe a leftover biscuit or batter cake to tide me over until dinnertime.

Turning into that gate was not, for me, merely the entrance into a place. I was also entering my sense, almost my memory, of my father’s childhood; of his pet coon; of his pony; of his friend, the white hired hand, John Penley, who played the banjo and took him hunting; of his friend, the black hired hand, Saul Demint, who could play his own head like a musical instrument; of the day my father’s fingers were caught by the falling lid of the flour bin and Grandma walked the yard with him while he suffered and cried; of the family’s sometime economic despair; of his going away to school. And I had at least one memory, vividly colored in my imagination, of Grandpa’s childhood: the night the old brick house where he was born caught fire. He was six years old. He had saved his money and bought a saddle, which he kept under his bed, and he saved his saddle from the fire. Before that I had a memory, dark and indistinct, only a feeling really, of the Civil War and some soldiers coming in the night to take away my great-grandfather, in an attempt to make a soldier of him, and his rescue by my great-grandmother—all this while Grandpa was “just a little bit of a baby laying up yonder in the bed.”

Dick stopped the team as we drew even with the back of the house, gave me a hand to get down, and handed me my grip.

I gave him a wave and said, “Thank you, Dick.”

He grinned at me, his teeth tobacco-stained under his mustache, raised his hand, and said, “You’re welcome, buddy.”

Henry and I called Dick Watson “Dick” in defiance of good manners and the instructions of my white elders who wanted us to call him “Uncle Dick,” and who finally, unprevailing, gave up. Dick called me, as he called my brother, “buddy.” However consciously it was done, and at least on Henry’s and my part it was not done very consciously, our so naming one another put our friendship at an angle to the custom of the time and place in which Dick and my grandfather were to each other “Dick” and “Boss.” As far as I was concerned, I called Dick “Dick” and he called me “buddy” because we were buddies and that was that. My love for him, which the years have not diminished, was not, in my own mind, affected at all by considerations of race. To me, he was merely himself. And perhaps, in his affection for me, I was merely myself: a young boy, a listener, not too much trouble, sometimes useful, good sometimes for company, and manifestly devoted to him. Our friendship was a small reality within a larger reality that granted little importance to it.

Whereas my grandfather’s life had been shaped by the effort to keep what he had, Dick’s had been shaped by the effort implied in not-having. Dick owned nothing but a few clothes, a few sticks of furniture, a few chickens varying in number according to the success of the foxes and the hawks, and a cheap insurance policy that provided him in the end a decent burial but not a permanent marker for his grave. Never in his life had he owned more than that.

Much earlier in his life Dick had been married to a woman named Etta, of whom he would occasionally speak with affection and sorrow. They had no children. Now he lived with Aunt Sarah Jane, also childless, and they had each other for support in their declining years. I spent a lot of time with them, separately and together, and I never heard them utter an unpleasant word about each other or to each other.

Dick would be felled by a stroke one morning as he stepped out the door to go to work, and he would die that evening before dark. Jess and Rufus Brightleaf, who were already at the barn, helped Aunt Sarah Jane to get him out of the open doorway where he had been lying in the cold and into bed. As soon as she heard, my grandmother went to give what help she could, which was not much. She told me that when she went into the room Dick looked at her, in his terrible stillness, as though he had something he longed to say, but he could not speak. And in all the years since, that look, which I did not see, has stayed in my memory. He never moved or spoke again. After his burial in the “colored graveyard” at Port William, his grave had for a while a metal marker that finally rusted away or was lost, and then a few people remembered, until they died, where his grave was, and now nobody knows.

When the sunlight came through clouds in visible shafts, he would say, “Sun’s drawing water.”

When it was dry and the crescent moon lay on her back, he would say, “Moon’s holding water in her lap.”

Of a fine saddle mare he had known once he would say, “You be standing half a mile off, you’d hear her hit the pike: racka-tacka racka-tacka racka-tacka!”

Time and history being as they are, it is not possible now to think of that long gone aging couple and their household down at the corner of the woods without thinking also of the history of racism. But the history of racism, for anybody involved in it, is a difficulty, for it is a history that exists only as it has been interfused with the life and work of particular times and places and people. Moreover, it is a history with two sides, involving nobody who has experienced both. And now, when the two races are more divided than ever, this history has acquired a conventional oversimplification, implying that what we came to call “segregation” was a highly generalized circumstance in which the two races disliked or hated each other, and which assured the happiness of one race and the misery of the other. And so perhaps I offend current political etiquette, as I offend the racism to which it is opposed, by saying that, in and in spite of the old racial arrangement into which we both were born, I loved Dick Watson, and he treated me with affection and with perfect and unfailing kindness.

In and in spite of that old arrangement with all its implied costs and demands, Dick Watson was a man of consummate dignity. I heard him, one time, ventriloquize rather bitterly a dialogue between “Sambo” and “Massa.” I remember this, I think, mainly because of my puzzlement. I didn’t know the immediate cause, and I was too little adept in the history of racism to know clearly what he was talking about. I associated the name “Sambo” only with “little black Sambo,” whom I regarded as a sort of hero. And as I had not heard the word “Massa” before—the related term that I knew was “Old Marster,” by which Grandpa and others of his kind referred to God—I could gather only the vaguest sense of what it meant. But there was no mistaking Dick’s tone or Aunt Sarah Jane’s wish to hush him, and so I was properly disturbed. I am sure that he must have had other moments of bitterness, but I did not know him as a bitter man. I knew him as a man who had achieved an authentic gentleness.

Owning little, living day to day from his small daily wage, such provender as the farm by agreement furnished, and what he and Aunt Sarah Jane grew or found for themselves, he lived a life that was in some ways less dragged upon by past and future than my grandfather’s. He did not live upon accumulations. It seems to me that he was capable, often enough, of life as contemporary as the daily sunlight. Both he and Aunt Sarah Jane loved questing at large in the woods and fields, she for greens and herbs and mushrooms, he for a fox or to see what he could see. Following them about on these travels, I learned to see our country without the stress of requirement or judgment or worry, with only the expectation that at any moment it might reveal something of interest. And so I include them in the ancestry of my mind. My grandfather could not have taught me to see the country as they saw it, for his own history in it pressed too heavily upon him, though I learned also to see it in his way, and his way also has stayed with me and is dear and necessary.

Dick Watson’s life would be as unimaginable to most people, black or white, in the present world, as would my grandfather’s. As unimaginable and, I am saddened to say, as little honored. Different as they were, they were in significant ways alike. They both belonged entirely to the older world, the world of the team and wagon. They both were born farmers, utterly reconciled to the demands of weather and work. Neither of them expected life to be easy or to get easier, or thought it was supposed to get easier. Both lived and died in a society that depreciated their work, took it for granted, and increasingly held them and others like them in contempt for doing it.

As it would happen, I grew up with a prejudice in favor of what I learned from the two of them. Like my grandfather Catlett, I needed land to hold on to, even if only just a little farm, marginal and rough, here in our home country. And I have needed to do the work that such a place requires. I have held to the land and kept at the work, and the work has kept me reminded of those two old men whose ways I learned when I was a boy. I knew Grandpa only when he was old; I recognize him in myself now that I am old. And when I bend to my work now and feel the protest in my back and hips, I think, “Dick!”

Part Two

NOW AS, looking back, I see myself standing with my grip in my hand, watching the wagon pull away toward the lot gate and the barns and sheds beyond, the little fluster of snow having sped away over the horizon, I feel again the wind’s suddenly surrounding chill, and I know that I once huddled between Dick and Grandpa in the joy of trust and warmth.

The unobstructed wind bit my face and fingers, rattling everything loose, and I ran, wagging the grip, around the back of the house, up the two steps into the screened back porch, letting the door bang behind me, and then through the kitchen door into the dimmer indoor light. I set down my grip and said, “Whoo! It’s windy out!”

My grandmother turned from the stove and hurried over to hug me.

“Oh lord, child, you’re frozen to death!” she said, feeling the cold in my clothes.

Suddenly hurrying, she snatched off my gloves and chafed my hands between both of hers. She flung down one of my hands and with the other led me over close to the stove. She shoved two new sticks of wood into the firebox and opened the draft, whereupon the fire fairly bellowed with exuberance, and I caught a fragrant whiff of the fresh locust wood starting to burn. She dragged a chair out from the table, made me sit down, took off my toboggan, attempted to make my hair lie down, and then began unbuttoning my mackinaw, interfering with my efforts to do the same. Her manner was utterly proprietary, as if I were perhaps a dog or a doll. It was a performance that somewhat embarrassed me, even when none of my friends was around to see it, though now, from a distance of so many years, I watch with amusement, and also with gratitude.

“Take those overshoes off,” she said, “so your feet can get warm.”

When I was too slow in taking them off she yanked them off herself and put them under the stove.

“Are you hungry?” she asked and, without giving me time to answer, thrust a cold biscuit into each of my hands.

And then, as I knew she was going to do, she swooped upon me again and felt of my arms and legs to see if I was getting warm, discovering in the process that I was still the skinny boy I had always been.

“You don’t have enough fat on you for a frying-size chicken,” she said. “You’d have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow.”

But then, satisfied at last that I was getting warm, and that in spite of my skinniness I was all right and likely to survive, Grandma fitted herself back into her morning’s work. She sat down and resumed peeling potatoes for dinner. She picked up the potatoes one at a time from an old wash pan on a chair facing hers, peeling them rapidly, letting the peelings drop all in one piece onto a newspaper spread open in her lap, and placed the peeled potatoes in a stewpot of water on the table beside her. While she worked I was content to sit in the warmth and watch, pleased that just the two of us were there.

I loved that old kitchen with its rude furnishings, and I love the memory of it. Just inside the door I had come in there was a washstand with a water bucket and dipper, a wash pan, and a soap dish. The towel hanging above it from a nail in the door facing was half a flour sack, hemmed up, with a worked buttonhole in each end so that when one end got dirty the clean end could then be used. There was a large iron cooking stove, a cabinet with shelves, a large table bearing many coats of paint and a green-and-white-checkered oilcloth, and eight matching chairs, also deeply encrusted with paint. Four of the chairs were at the table, the others placed conveniently elsewhere. There were two large bins, one for flour, one for stove wood. They were painted like the table and chairs, and a boy could slide down their slanting tops. From a nail in the blistered wainscoting behind the stove hung a turkey wing broom that was used to sweep up ashes and such. Close by would be a gallon paint bucket of coal oil with corncobs soaking in it, to make quick work of starting a fire in the morning. The linoleum carpet was footworn and wet-mopped until it was black and tattery at the edges.

My father, who was anxious that Grandma should have help with her housework now that she was old, was always hiring somebody, some woman, white or black, to come and live in the room over the kitchen and help Grandma, but those women never lasted long. Grandma had her inviolable ways and opinions, and she could not keep herself at peace for very long with anybody. Her antipathies, like her affections, readily mounted to flood stage and flowed with a strong current. But she was full of memories and stories too, that went back to the Civil War and before. I loved to be with her when she was at peace and talkative, and I loved to watch her cook.

Rural electrification was on its way, I suppose, for it would soon arrive, but it had not arrived yet. On the back porch there was a large icebox that, when ice was available, preserved leftovers and cooled the milk in the summer. That and the battery-powered radio and the telephone were the only modern devices in the house. Its old economy of the farm household was still intact. The supply lines ran to the kitchen from the henhouse and garden, cellar and smokehouse, cropland and pasture. On the kitchen table were two quart jars of green beans, a quart jar of applesauce, and a pint jar of what I knew to be the wild black raspberries that abounded in the thickets and woods edges of that time. I thought, “Pie!”

“Are you going to make a pie?” I asked.

“Hmh!” she said. “Maybe. Would you like to have a pie?”

And I said, with my best manners, “Yes, mam.”

She was soon done with the potatoes. She shut the draft on the stove, taming the fire, changed the water on the potatoes, clapped a lid onto the pot, and set it on the stove to boil. She got out another pot, emptied the beans into it, added salt, some pepper, and a fine piece of fat pork. She was talking at large, commenting on her work, telling what she had learned from relatives’ letters and Christmas cards and from listening in on the party line. I was up and following her around by then, to make sure I got the benefit of everything.

She washed her hands at the washstand by the back door and dried them. I followed her into the cool pantry and watched as she measured out flour and lard and the other ingredients and began making the dough for a pie crust. She rolled out the dough to the right thickness, pressed it into a pie pan, and, holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand, passed a knife around its edge to carve off the surplus dough.

As it would happen, the two of us would be standing in the same place in the same way on a late afternoon in the coming July, she making, I believe, a pie and I watching, after we had been told that my Uncle Andrew, my father’s older brother, her firstborn son, had been shot and before we learned that he was dead. And now in my mind this earlier memory seems invested somehow with foreknowledge of the later one. While Dorie Catlett was making her grandson a pie on that day near the end of 1943, granting him the pleasure of watching her make it and then of eating it, they were coming to grief, as she had come before but he had not.

As she went about her preparations for dinner, she was commenting to herself, with grunts of determination or approval, on her progress. I knew even then that it was a wonder to see her at her work, and I know it more completely now. Her kitchen would be counted a poor thing by modern standards. There was of course no electrical equipment at all. The cooking utensils, excepting the invincible iron skillet and griddle, were chipped or dented or patched. The kitchen knives were worn lean with sharpening. Everything was signed with the wear of a lifetime or more. She was a fine cook. She did not do much in the way of exact measurement. She seasoned to taste. She mixed by experience and to the right consistency. The dough for a pie crust or biscuits, for instance, had to be neither too flabby nor too stiff; it was right when it felt right. She did not own a cookbook or a written recipe.

Meanwhile, she had prepared the raspberries, adding flour and sugar to the juice and heating it in a saucepan. Now she poured berries and juice into the dough-lined pan. She balled up the surplus dough, worked it briskly with her hands on the broken marble dresser top that she used for such work, sprinkled flour over it, rolled it flat, and then she sliced it rapidly into strips, which she laid in a beautiful lattice over the filling. As a final touch she sprinkled over the top a thin layer of sugar that in the heat of the oven would turn crisp and brown. And then she slid the pie into the oven.

She was being extravagant with the sugar for my sake, as I was more or less aware, and as I took for granted. But knowledge grows with age, and gratitude grows with knowledge. Now I am as grateful to her as I should have been then, and I am troubled with love for her, knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I wonder now if she had ever read Paradise Lost. That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly.

Once the pie was out of the way, she went ahead and made biscuit dough, flattened it with her rolling pin, cut out the biscuits, and laid them into the pans ready for the oven when the time would come.

She had cooked breakfast, strained the morning milk, made the beds, set the house to rights, washed the breakfast dishes, and cleaned up the kitchen before I got there. Now she let me help her, and we carried the crocks of morning milk from the back porch down into the cellar, and brought the crocks of last night’s milk up from the cellar to the kitchen for skimming.

I enjoyed watching her skim the milk and so I stayed until she had passed the skimmer over the crocks, with a lovely discrimination gathering the thick yellow cream off the white milk, and then I said, “Well, I’m going to the barn.”

“Oh,” she said, “don’t go back into the cold. Stay here with Grandma where it’s warm.”

“It’ll be warm in the stripping room,” I said. “That’s where I’m going.”

She laughed her laugh of resignation. “Well, if you’re bound to go, go,” she said. “Go to the mailbox before you come back and bring the mail.”

“I will,” I said. “I will I will I will.”

I put on my overshoes, mackinaw, toboggan, and gloves, and went out. It was a little past the middle of the morning, but it was still cold, close to freezing, and the wind was still blowing. To face the weather again after the warm kitchen required a moment of courage, but I was soon glad to be out in the big daylight, looking around. I went into the barn lot and past the woodpile, and Grandma’s dog, old Ring, came out to meet me from the feed barn where he had been holed up. I spoke to him and gave him a pat or two and went on into the barn to see what was going on there. Except for Beck and Catherine, all the stock had been turned out. The place felt deserted. In the quiet I could hear the two mules eating hay from their mangers. They were tied in their stalls, unbridled but still wearing their harness in case they would be needed.

From the feed barn, I went through the two gates of the loading chute lot into the small field in front of the tobacco barn. The two milk cows and a Hereford bull were in that field, and where they had stood in front of the barn to be out of the wind the ground was deeply tracked. A little snow had collected in the bottom of the tracks. The sliding doors of the barn were shut, but a broken board in one of them made a crack just wide enough for me to squeeze through. As soon as I was inside and out of the wind, I could hear voices I knew coming from the stripping room.

Along one side of the driveway there was a large “bulk” of unstripped tobacco, walled around with standing bundles of sorghum and covered with old rugs to keep the tobacco moist and handleable. On the other side next to the stripping room, which occupied one of the front corners of the barn, was the tobacco that had been stripped, graded, tied in “hands,” pressed, and laid into a second “bulk,” this one as carefully composed as a made bed. In the driveway itself was a hay wagon on which they were piling the stripped stalks to be hauled out and scattered.

The voices in the stripping room sound settled and quiet. I let myself stand and listen a minute to the voices and to the wind shoving and shuddering along the eaves of the barn. As I expected, the stripping room door was fastened on the inside. I pounded on it four times with my fist. The voices stopped and there were footsteps. The door opened, and there was Rufus Brightleaf beaming largely down at me with his toothless grin.

“Yaaah!” he said. “Come in here, fart blossom.” And I stepped into the warmth. He grinned at me until I grinned back, and then he said, “Ha-hahhh!” and gave me a big handshake. In his large, hard hand my own felt small and soft.

Jess Brightleaf said, “Hello, Andy,” and Dick Watson said, “Howdy, buddy.” The one known as Old Man Hawk neither turned to look at me nor spoke. Rufus fastened the door and went back to work.

They were standing at the bench under the row of north windows in an order I knew, first Rufus then Jess then Dick then Old Man Hawk, each man stripping the leaves that belonged to his grade and passing the stalks on to the next man, from Rufus finally to Old Man Hawk, who was stripping the least valuable grade known as “tips” and carrying the stripped stalks out to the wagon. Above each man’s section of the bench was hung a strip of pork fat on which from time to time he greased his hands to relieve the stickiness of the tobacco gum.

The Brightleafs were Grandpa’s tenants, growing his tobacco crop on the shares. They had come at the beginning of a rare time of good farm prices, and before it ended Jess Brightleaf and his family would save enough money to buy a farm of their own. The departure of the Brightleafs would be another of the changes that brought to an end what had seemed the stable old world of my childhood.

Jess Brightleaf was the master workman of that place and time. He held the honored title of “tobacco man,” and he was as meticulous in his work, as watchful of the work of the others, as difficult to please, as if he were practicing a fine art, which in fact he was.

Rufus, Jess’s brother, was a man perhaps equally capable but less mindful, less caring, for Rufus was a man prone, during any letup of work, to drink and stray. His wife, Miss Ida, whom he called “the Madam,” had been called upon for more in the way of patience than was good for her. He had a gift for amusing himself, and in the process amusing others, with an obscene repertory of tales, rhymes, and songs most certainly unfit for the ears of the Madam. To hear him you would have thought he had not a care in the world, but I knew that he did have. I knew that he and Miss Ida had had two daughters and a son, and that the son was dead. He had been killed by a falling tree when they were cutting sawlogs. Rufus had told me this (I must have asked him where was his son) when we were alone together the summer before, and he had not looked or sounded like himself when he told it. “Poor fellow,” he said. “Broke all to hell, and nothing we could do.” And perhaps it was because of that boy of his, dead, that Rufus had at times played with me as if he had been another child. I admired Jess and was in awe of him, but I loved Rufus.

Dick Watson was as I have said: cheerful and gentle and steady at his work. He would come to the stripping room after finishing his morning chores at the barn and at Grandpa’s house and at his own, and then he would leave early enough to finish his evening chores mostly before dark.

Old Man Hawk worked on with nothing to say. He had a reputation for various acts of dishonesty and violence, a dangerous man, and he was the father of several young men with reputations as terrible as his own. He would work, he was available, and so, in that time of scarce help, he was there. Jess and Mrs. Brightleaf would house and feed and pay him until the work was done, and they would do it with a good-humored deference to necessity. It was his pride, when working, to acknowledge the existence of nothing but work. And yet it was clear to me that he passed his harsh judgment, his utter contempt in fact, upon other people by paying them no mind at all, as if a known chicken thief might regard the world from an exalted standpoint of indifference. His last name, officially, was Hackman, but, since Port William did not pronounce names it had not heard before, from the time of his appearance there from no known origin, he had been called “Hawkman”—“Hawk” to his face and, in his latter years, to his back, “Old Man Hawk.”

I was sorry to see him there, for I was afraid of him. One day Dick Watson had confided to me: “Buddy, don’t never let him hear you say ‘Hawk got a chicken and gone to the stack.’ He’ll kill you.” Because it was Dick who told me this, I believed it. And every time I had to be in his presence, the feeling would come over me that I was about to say “Hawk got a chicken and gone to the stack.” I feared him because of that, and also because of the look of him. In contrast to Jess’s face, which, at work, was contemplative, and Rufus’s, which was florid and as variable as a baby’s, and Dick’s, which was gentle and patient, Old Man Hawk’s was blank and hard and somehow pinched, as if it had been frostbitten or burnt.

Grandpa was sitting close to the stove on an upturned five-gallon bucket. He was too old to be much good for work anymore, but he needed to stay close to it. He turned a bucket up for me beside him. “Here, baby. Sit down and keep out of the way.”

I sat down and let myself come to rest in the warmth and in the fragrance of the tobacco. Dick would have built the fire first thing that morning on his way up to the barn to feed and milk, and the thin-walled room, constructed of odds and ends of old lumber and corrugated roofing, by now was thoroughly warm. The men at the bench were working rapidly, but their talk was leisurely. I leaned back against the wall, making myself comfortable, for I loved their talk.

“Well, Dick,” Jess Brightleaf said, “looks like you all met that bus all right. I reckon you got there in plenty of time.”

Dick laughed his laugh—“Ho-ho-ho!”—that meant he wasn’t going to tell all that he might. “Yessir, Mr. Jessie. We was out at the pike wasn’t even day yet.”

He would tell me later that Grandpa had been talking about meeting the bus for two or three days. That I would be coming by myself was a matter that he had taken very seriously. That my father would have entrusted me alone to such a contraption as a bus had not met Grandpa’s approval. He did not understand internal combustion as a motive force, and he regarded it with a mixture of deference and awe and deep suspicion.

“Ay Lord,” Grandpa said, “there was the little thing with his satchel, come all that way by himself.” He spoke as if he had witnessed an event of great pathos and wonder, never mind that at my age he would have ridden so far on horseback alone and thought nothing of it.

Jess Brightleaf looked around at us, amused, and said, “Uncle Marce, looks like the boy has fattened up right sharply.”

“Aw,” Rufus said, “he swells up that way ever’ winter.” He turned around and, grinning, squeezed experimentally my thigh above the knee. “Ain’t that right, Andy?”

“A many a good biscuit has gone down that boy,” Jess said. “He eats so much it makes him poor to carry it.”

“Yaaa-hahaaa!” Rufus said. “That boy traded legs with a grasshopper and got cheated out of a ass.”

“Well,” Jess said considerately, “he’ll grow. He’ll fill out. We’ll get him up here with us next summer and work him hard and put some of that fried chicken and a few biscuits into him, you won’t know him by fall.”

So they greeted me, made much of me, gave me very astutely my credit rating, and so reminded me how much, how much more than they knew, I wished to grow and fill out and do work worthy of my dinner. When all their backs were turned again, I felt for myself the place where Rufus’s hard handprint still lay on my thigh, and I had to acknowledge that it was sure enough a rather grasshopperly appendage.

Jess’s allusion to the coming summer, which by the last of December would have been already on his mind, started Rufus into an elaborate prophecy of the coming hot weather, and so they were done with me for a while. Rufus said that when the weather got hot, this time around, he would have a few bottles of beer soaking in a tub of ice under a shade tree at the edge of the tobacco patch. “And then when we go down one of them long rows and the old sun’s cracking down and the sweat’s running in our eyes and we’re dry as a popcorn fart, we’ll rear back in that shade and turn up one of them good old cold ones. Ain’t that right, Uncle Marce?” He let go his big yell of a laugh, and Grandpa snorted and said, “Ay Lord, Rufus!”

Everybody knew, even I knew, so well that he would do no such thing, that Jess Brightleaf would have tolerated no such thing, that there was no further need for comment.

They worked on in silence a while and then, introducing the subject with a little laugh, Jess told how Rufus, well filled with beer in his younger days, had stretched out to sleep it off in the shade of a big oak tree in a pasture. After a while the shade moved off, and Rufus began to sweat in the hot sun. The cows came up, as cows are apt to do at any curious sight, and, smelling the salt in Rufus’s sweat, they ate his shirt off of him while he slept.

The Brightleaf brothers, like many farmers of our region who belonged to that old world that ended with mechanization in the aftermath of the war, were men who talked for pleasure. They talked to keep their minds employed, to entertain themselves, to lighten their weariness, for companionship. No silence could last very long before one of them would need to have something to say. While they talked Grandpa would chime in from time to time with a comment or a word of confirmation or commendation; from time to time their stories would remind him of a story he remembered and he would tell it. He had begun to ponder the days of his youth, as old men do, and the stories he told were of a time nobody else remembered. Dick Watson mostly listened, laughing or nodding or shaking his head. Old Man Hawk paid so little regard that he might as well have been deaf, or not there at all.

They talked about the weather and what it had done and might do. They talked about the quality of this crop, and of last year’s, and of the crops of other years. They talked of the tobacco market and prices and of the time, coming soon, when the present crop would be taken to the warehouse and sold.

Rufus said, “When we sell this crop, Uncle Marce, let’s me and you go to Louisville and rent one of them penthouses. We’ll lay in a good stock of that bottled-in-bond and plenty to eat. We’ll get us a couple of old women about eighteen or twenty years old to cook for us and see to our every need.” He was half hollering to make sure Grandpa got the full benefit of this vision, another that even I knew would never be realized. “How ’bout it, old boss?”

Grandpa snorted and laughed. “Ay Lord, Rufus, we’ll do that.”

And then, after a silence that had stretched somewhat thin, Rufus sang a song about Old Aunt Dinah who was “a good old soul,” in which it was revealed that the word “soul” had the misfortune to rhyme with “hole.”

Presently they spoke of the man they called “Mr. Roosyvelt” and of the war. They marveled at the terrible destructions that had been accomplished, at what bombs could do, at how far the big guns were able to shoot. The war frightened them as it did me, and in our fear we all clung to the thought of President Roosevelt, who consoled us, maybe just by the jaunty way he held his cigarette holder in his teeth, and gave us hope. The Brightleafs, like most of the farming people, pronounced the o’s in the first syllable of the president’s name as they pronounced the o’s in “roof,” for it was a name they frequently read in the newspaper but seldom heard.

In that stripping room the next winter, I heard Rufus Brightleaf speaking in awe of “rowboat bombs.” He meant “robot bombs,” the V-2 rockets that were then flying across the English Channel to fall upon London. But I was still perfectly gullible, still able to believe almost anything I was told by a grownup, and from Rufus’s talk of “rowboat bombs” that could “fly clean across the water” I derived a vision at once horrible and absurd. In 1943 the V weapons were a horror as yet unrevealed. The war had many horrors still to be revealed.

Thoughts of the war led them to speak of Tom Coulter, Jarrat Coulter’s boy, who had been killed in the fighting in Italy. I was a little kin, on my father’s side, to Tom Coulter. His name, as they spoke it in that little room within the barn within the wind within the story of the world, seemed to me to enter the day like a bell stroke. They spoke his name perhaps with the awareness that now his name would be spoken less and less until it would be spoken no more, for they were silent again afterwards.

And then Rufus said quietly, “Boys, he’ll be a long time gone from here.” As he spoke he had again that look on his face that I had seen before, that did not look like him, and he did not sound like himself. In my brief knowledge, I thought I knew what he meant. And now, in my long knowledge, I know what he meant.

Soon after that we heard a car drive past the house and stop in front of the feed barn. I was afraid for a minute that it was my father. All through this visit of mine, and especially during my stay at the Catlett home place, I was dogged by the thought that my father or my Uncle Andrew would show up, as I reckoned they were likely to do. This thought was merely a trouble in my mind then, for I could not have explained it to myself, but of course if one of them had shown up, driving the ten or so miles from Hargrave as they routinely did, then the charm of my solitary bus trip would have been dispelled; my great adventure would have been revealed to be as trivial as in fact it was. If they did not show up, as fortunately they did not, then I would take the bus home late on New Year’s Day, and my myth of my first journey alone would complete itself and remain intact in my mind from then on.

I need not have worried, for the car was only Jess Brightleaf ’s, and, hearing it, he took out his watch, looked at it, and said with much satisfaction, “Bean time.” He stepped to the door and opened the latch.

And soon Jess’s wife, Ruth, came into the room, carrying dinner and the necessary tableware in two large handbaskets. She was followed by their boy, Fred, who was a year older than I, and Fred was carrying another basket and a large coffeepot. Daylight was precious then, in the shortest days, and Jess was seeing to it that nobody went home for dinner. They were eating where they worked and stopping work only to eat.

Ruth Brightleaf was a stout, hearty woman, capable at any work of farm or household. “Why, it’s Andy! Hello, Andy honey!” she said. “Look, Fred! Andy’s here!”

Fred and I were friends and glad enough to see each other, but we couldn’t rise to whatever her enthusiasm required of us, and so we just said hello.

Fred was the only child I knew of about my own age who had been gravely ill. He had spent weeks in the hospital, had been operated on by surgeons, and had a long scar to show for it. They were afraid for a while that he would die. And so there was this knowledge about Fred that qualified everything else you knew about him: He had been to death’s door and had come back. He had come all the way back, for he was a lively boy, always ready for fun, and he had the hearty way of talking and the big laugh that belonged to all the Brightleafs.

A bucket of water for handwashing had been sitting on the drum stove. Mrs. Brightleaf set it on the floor and in its place put the coffeepot and the several vessels of food. The men, meanwhile, were clearing as much of the bench as they would need for a sort of table or sideboard. The smells of food had begun almost to overpower the smell of tobacco. Mrs. Brightleaf was a good cook, “as good as a man ever ate after,” as Grandpa said and I well knew, and she loved to feed boys. I longed to stay and eat and talk with Fred, but Grandpa was already going out, praising Mrs. Brightleaf and her cooking as he went, and I followed as I knew I had to do.

“Come back soon as you eat, Andy,” Fred said. “I got a BB gun.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said as I followed Grandpa out the door.

I followed Grandpa through the gates up into the barn lot, and old Ring came out of his hole again to see if he could be of any help. So then the three of us walked in a line across the lot and through the third gate into the backyard.

“Grandma told me to go get the mail,” I said.

“That’s right, baby,” Grandpa said. “Go get it.”

And so Ring and I went down through the long yard to the mailbox. There was nothing in it but the newspaper, and I knew Grandma would be disappointed, for the arrival of a letter or postcard from one of our far-away relatives was a great event to her, but I anyhow would have the funnies.

I went around the house and in at the kitchen door, pried off my overshoes, handed the paper to Grandma, took off my wraps, and washed my hands.

“Try combing that hair of yours,” Grandma said. “Nobody ever saw the like. It’s a regular straw stack.”

Knowing it would do no good, I took the comb from the shelf where the water bucket sat and passed it several times through my hair.

Grandma watched me, and then she laughed. “You are the limit!” Her laugh was affectionate and indulgent, and yet it was a laugh with a history, conveying her perfected assurance that some things were hopeless. “Well, give up,” she finally said. “Come and eat.”

She had made a splendid dinner, a feast, little affected by wartime stringencies, which, except for the rationing of coffee and sugar, were little felt in such households. It hadn’t been long since hog-killing, and so there was not only a platter of fresh sausage but also a bowl of souse soaking in vinegar. There was a bowl of sausage gravy, another of mashed potatoes, another of green beans, another of apple sauce. There was a pan of hot biscuits, to be buttered or gravied, and another in the oven. There was a handsome cake of freshly churned butter, the top marked in squares neatly carved with the edge of the butter paddle. There was a pitcher of buttermilk and one of sweet milk. And finally there was the pie, still warm, the top crust crisp and sugary and brown.

Oh, I ate as one eats who has not eaten for days, as if my legs were hollow, as if I were bigger inside than outside, and Grandma urged me on as if I were her champion in a tournament of eating.

Grandpa began the meal protesting that he was not hungry, but he ate, as Grandma said, “with a coming appetite,” and when it came it came in force. Before my time he had ridden horseback the five miles to Smallwood where his friend the atheist doctor Gib Holston had pulled all his teeth, but he “gummed it” as fast as I could chew with teeth, and he had more capacity.

We ate and said little, for all of us were hungry. The food, as I see now but did not then, looked beautiful laid out before us on the table. And never then did I know that it was laid out in such profusion in honor of me. It was offered to me out of the loneliness of Grandma’s life, out of her disappointments, her craving for small comforts and pleasures beyond her reach, to which Grandpa was indifferent. When I had washed down the last bite of my second piece of pie with a final swallow of milk, my stomach was as tight as a tick. I am sure I said “That was good.” I may even have said “Thank you,” for I was ever conscious that I was traveling alone and therefore in need of my manners. But time has taught me greater thanks.

Grandpa, whose mind was on the stripping room, had eaten without even taking off his coat, his cap and cane hanging from the chairback. The instant he laid down his fork he stood, put on his cap, picked up his cane, and started for the door. That put me in a panic, for I too was thinking of the stripping room and of Fred and of Fred’s new BB gun.

“I got to go,” I said. And as soon as I could get wrapped up again, I too headed to the door.

Grandma said only “Hmh!” by which she signified to herself and to me that I was doing exactly as she had known I would do, which was exactly as Grandpa had done, which was exactly what she had known he would do.

The stripping room was almost mysteriously the same as it had been through the morning. All signs of dinner were gone, and Mrs. Brightleaf was gone. The men standing at the bench had resumed the preoccupation and the rhythm of their work, which continued as if it had not been interrupted by dinner, or by anything else, perhaps for years. Behind them, unnoticed, Grandpa was dozing on his bucket by the stove and Fred was sighting his BB gun through the window.

“Look a here,” he said as I came in, and he held the gun out to show me.

“Boy!” I said, for I was longing for a BB gun of my own, and all the more keenly because I was forbidden to have one. BB guns were infamous with my mother for shooting boys in the eye.

Fred aimed the gun out the window between Rufus and Dick and said, “Pow!”

“Don’t point that thing at anybody,” Jess said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Fred didn’t answer. He raised the barrel toward the ceiling.

“Didn’t I?” Jess said.

“Yes,” Fred said.

Rufus said: “Santy brought me one of them things when I was a boy. First thing I did with it was shoot the old man in the ass while he was bent over tying his shoe. That was when the bobbling pin flew off the wobbling shaft. He snatched the gun away from me and I thought he was going to hit me with it. I thought ‘Katy bar the door,’ but he just hit it on a tree, which didn’t do anything to it but cock it again, and went on in the house. I climbed the tree for fear he still might whip me and looked in through the window, and there the old man was with his britchies down, showing my mother a black streak where that BB had sort of scooted.”

We all laughed.

Fred sighted the gun up at the ceiling. “You reckon it would shoot through that tin?”

“Try it and see,” I said.

Without looking at us or stopping work, Jess said, “You boys get out of here with that damned gun.”

He meant it, and so we went. We went down the hill to the woods. Old Ring, who had been lying in the barn, got up and came along.

Having a gun, we were going hunting, of course. We thought old Ring might tree a squirrel, which he had sometimes done when we were not armed. And he did tree a squirrel as we were going into the woods, and the squirrel took his stand in the very top of a tall hickory. We wasted a good many BBs in shooting at him, but the squirrel understood the effective range of our weapon better than we did, for he did not move and we did not hit him; if we had hit him with a BB at that height, he would have laughed at us.

We were, in truth, not good hunters. We were bloodthirsty enough, for we shot at every living thing we saw, and we had the firepower to have killed at least a bird if we could have got close enough, but we made too much noise, talked too much, played too much, were too distracted. Intending slaughter, we delivered only the poor mercy of our incompetence. And so when we had shot up all of Fred’s BBs, it was a sort of relief. The woods, down there under the hill out of the wind, was quiet and inviting. When we had quit hunting, we spent a while just wandering about. We went to our tree that branched low enough to the ground so we could climb it, and we climbed it right to the top where the trunk was limber and we could feel the wind bending it, and we swung it, making it bend farther. We said we were riding the wind.

At the very back of the woods there was an enormous old white oak that had stood there, as Grandma said a little wistfully, “Oh, since the times of old.” Near it, the summer before, Fred and Henry and I had built a sort of tepee by leaning a lot of old fence rails against a young hickory. The farm had once been fenced entirely with rock fences and rail fences. But in the time of my memory they all were gone, replaced with woven wire, except for a short stretch of rail fence on the other side of the ridge below the feed barn. The old rails had been ricked up beside the woods to be out of the way and for use mostly as fuel. Our tepee, anyhow, had been a mighty work, an ample room within the larger enclosure of the woods. When we covered it with leafy branches it gave a fine feeling of shelter, an inside neatly divided from the outside. But now, on that bare wintry day, the sheltery feeling and the charm were gone. Our tepee was just a bunch of old rails leaning against a tree. And that disillusionment ended our adventure in the woods for the day.

We went back up the hill into the barn lot. In those days there was a long building on one side of the lot that incorporated the corncrib, the wagon shed, what we still called the buggy shed though there was no longer a buggy, and the stall where Dick milked the cows. Over the cowstall was a loft where hay could have been stored, but it was now only a catchall for useless things too good to throw away. Disregarded by the grownups, it was an excellent place to be out of sight and out of mind.

Fred and I went up the ladder on the wall of the building and into the loft. The main attraction up there was an old trunk filled with books. The books were a numbered set, all alike, thick and heavy and filled with big words, charts, graphs, and tables. Neither of us could read those books, and yet they fascinated us. We called them “the New Orleens books” because their covers were of the same light brown as the cane syrup that we knew as “New Orleens molasses,” and because “New Orleens” sounded exotic and important. What they were remains a mystery to this day, for long before we ever read even the titles on their spines, they disappeared. But to open that trunk and to take those books out one by one and look into them made us feel like archaeologists unearthing a tomb inscribed in an unknown language.

Fred and I opened the trunk, withdrew the ice-cold volumes, and looked into them, letting the mystery of them come upon us, and then put them back and closed the lid. And then, without the least sense of incongruity, we chanted a poem we had learned from Rufus which seemed to us both extraordinarily funny and deeply mysterious, and which revealed that “truck” was another English word with a misfortunate rhyme.

By then we were cold. Even in the shelter of the little loft, inactivity had let the weather seep into our clothes. We became conscious of our visible breath and of the numbness of our toes and fingers.

“Let’s go.”

We hurried down the ladder and back to the stripping room, where we took off our gloves and overshoes and got close to the stove.

As soon as we were warm again, Jess sent Fred home across the fields to help his mother with the evening chores. Not long after that, Dick Watson left to do his own chores, and I went with him.

I walked beside him, holding his hand. As we came up to the first gate an airplane came over, and we stopped and watched it.

I said, “Dick, do you reckon an airplane could fly all the way to Heaven?”

“Can’t do it, buddy,” he said.

“Why?”

“After a ways it gets tough up there. They can’t make it.”

That was a relief to me. I thought, “Good!”

Dick and I went to the feed barn first. He unharnessed Beck and Catherine, led them out to drink at the well, and gave them the corn that he had let me carry in from the crib. As often as he could, Dick gave me work to do, because I was always begging to help, but also, I think now, to keep me out of his way or out of danger. When not in the company of other boys, I was inclined to be dreamy. I could slide right out of the present world, right out of the dangers of the present world, into the world of Robin Hood or the Swiss Family Robinson or King Arthur and his knights. Or, on the contrary, I could be recklessly eager to help. And so I was rather often in danger without knowing it, especially around large animals. My reveries and enthusiasms were accustomed to be intruded upon by voices from the responsible world: “Look out, Andy!” “Wake up, Andy!” “Mind now, baby!” “Get out of the way!” My father once went so far as to hit me on the shoulder with his fist in imitation of a mule’s kick: “That’s how it’ll feel, only harder!”

Dick was never so emphatic, but he too was obliged again and again to remind me where I was: “Wait now, buddy!” “Watch out, buddy!” “Buddy, get back!” But he was more patient than my father and grandfather, and I tried hard to be alert when I was with him.

Dick, as I have just said again, was kind to me. But of course my saying this raises the question of what to make of a servant’s kindness. There obviously can be no doubt that, if there had been an occasion for such an expectation, my elders would have expected Dick to be kind to me. But there are qualities and degrees of kindness, and a boy is as good a judge of them as anybody. I don’t think Dick was kind in response to expecta-tion. He was kind because it was in his character to be so, just as it was in my character to love him for it. We were living in the history of “race relations,” to be sure, but, like everybody else, we were living as ourselves in it.

And so when Dick led Beck out of her stall and I was standing too close, he said, “Stand back, buddy,” because, like any adult, he did not want to be responsible for getting me hurt, but also he did not want me to get hurt.

I knew both what he meant and how he meant it, and I stood back.

I should have been so tractable in school—but, though I did not yet know it, that barn was a school.

We stabled the two other mules and Grandpa’s saddle mare and Henry’s and my pony that had been out on pasture for the day, and I brought corn for them. We drove Grandpa’s coming-yearling steers into the pen in the back of the barn and fastened them up for the night. We climbed up into the loft, and Dick forked down hay for the mules and the mare and the pony and the steers. When we went out at last and drew the sliding doors shut behind us, the barn work was done until morning. The barn then seemed quieted and complete in itself, the animals sheltered for the night. We could still hear them eating after we closed the doors. We went to the cowstall, put in hay and corn for the cows, and while I brought the milk bucket from the house Dick chained them in their places. We got our milking stools, and I sat on mine and watched while Dick sat on his and milked the cows.

I would have carried the milk to the house, but Dick said, “Next year maybe,” and so I walked with him and held his hand while he carried the bucket. He set the bucket inside the door of the kitchen where Grandma had the milk crocks and the strainer ready.

And then we went to the woodpile where for a little time again I could really help—or at least where Dick’s charity allowed me to believe I was really helping. He brought the crosscut saw from its place under the eave of the wagon shed. And then, he lifting the heavy end and I the light, we laid a long locust pole on the sawbuck. Dick laid the saw across the pole. We each took a handle and began sawing the pole into stove-lengths.

Dick said, “Don’t ride the saw, buddy. Don’t push, just pull. All right.”

When we had sawed enough, Dick picked up his axe and split the thicker lengths at the chopping block. By then the Brightleafs and Old Man Hawk had gone home, and it was getting dark. We gathered armloads of wood as big as we could manage and carried them to the kitchen where we dumped them into the woodbox beside the stove.

I wanted to go down and help Dick at his own woodpile, but Grandma said no to that, and so for me the day was over. Night had come. Grandma had a lighted lamp on the kitchen table.

I took off my wraps and washed my hands and face.

“Go in the living room where your grandpa is and get warm,” Grandma said. “We’ll have some supper before long.”

I went through the cold hall to the living room. Grandpa was sitting in his rocking chair on the dark side of the stove. He didn’t say anything. I went around to the other side to Grandma’s chair by her stand table where her best lamp was lighted. My grip was on the floor by the table legs. I opened it and got out The Boy’s King Arthur and sat down.

Seeing me open the book on my lap, Grandpa said, “Ay God, that’s right, baby. Go to your book. That’s the thing.”

I am perfectly sure, now, that he would not have seen a nickel’s worth of good in King Arthur and his knights, if he had known of their existence. But he seemed to me then to have extended a great deal of credit to reading about them, and I merely assumed he was right.

He returned to what he called “studying.” He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about.

He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life’s burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever to him when he was a boy, now seemed hardly any time at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. Looking at me, he must have remembered that his own grandfather had been the first of our name to come into this place, in a time that had seemed ancient to him once, that he now knew to have been almost recent, and that the time from his grandfather to his grandson had been short. He thought of the living and of how they would appear to the dead, until the dead lived again in his thoughts, and the presently living appeared as ghosts of a future yet to come. He thought of the history of his hands. He laid them in his lap and studied them, and he saw that they were hard-used and now almost useless. This was a study he could not have remembered beginning, and surely he knew that it could not be finished, by him or by anybody.

As he studied his memories and thoughts, I studied him, so that I have not forgotten him. And then I opened my book and studied it. I looked at the print, but my mind, like a dull blade, glanced off. It would not bite in, for the English of those pages was old-fashioned; it was strange to everything I knew. When my mother had started reading it to me on Christmas night and the nights following, I had understood it and been charmed by it, but hearing received it more readily than sight, and she had given me the explanations I needed. And so when I opened the book, unable as I felt to read it for myself, I let into the quiet of the room the memory of my mother’s voice reading, which was a comfort to me then as it is now. Besides, the book contained full-page illustrations in which the knights wore armor made of metal as brilliant almost as sunlight and the horses were as fierce and beautiful as dream horses come alive. These were to me then almost endlessly worthy of study. And from the opened pages rose then as now, for I still have the book, the sound of my mother’s voice reading quietly and yet urgently, as if anticipating all that was to follow: “It befell in the days of the noble Utherpendragon, when he was King of England, that there was born to him a son who in after time was King Arthur.” This might have made me homesick, except for the sound of Grandma’s footsteps in the hall and the hall door opening.

“Supper’s ready, Marce. Come on, Andy.”

We ate our supper in the lamplight that glowed over the table and left much of the kitchen shadowy and dim. Grandma had warmed the beans and potatoes from dinner, but instead of sausage, we had slices of her Christmas ham and turkey, and instead of biscuits she had corn battercakes that she kept putting on our plates hot from the griddle and that we also ate with sorghum molasses for dessert.

I stayed after supper to dry the dishes just to be in the kitchen with her, and then we went into the living room, she carrying the lighted lamp, which she set on the mantelpiece above Grandpa’s chair, where again he sat quietly studying his thoughts and scratching his head. She went to her own chair, took her sewing basket and darning onto her lap, and began to thread a needle, which was more of a job now, she said, than it used to be.

At home at night, when we didn’t have homework to do, we played the radio, but that had not yet become a habit of this house. The radio sat on the stand table by the front window, its batteries on the floor beneath, waiting to be turned on when there was something especially good to hear: Renfro Valley on Saturday night, maybe, or Wings over Jordan on Sunday morning. Batteries cost money and they were not to be wasted. Grandma would have turned it on for me if I had asked, but I didn’t ask, for there was no shortage of things to do.

I went to the closet—“press” was her term for it—behind Grandma’s chair and took out her button box. Every house I visited as a child had a button box. It has disappeared now from every house I know, but then it was a necessary part of household economy. No worn-out garment then was simply thrown away. When it was worn past wearing and patching, all its buttons were snipped off and put into the button box. And then when something old needed a new button, or when something newly made needed a set of buttons, the button box provided. Grandma’s was an old shoe box better than half full of buttons of all sorts. It was a pleasure just to run your fingers through, like running your fingers through a bucket of shelled corn. My old game with it was to paw through it in search of matching sets of buttons, especially the intensely colored glass buttons that had come off dresses. I sat on the floor by Grandma’s chair with the box in my lap and fished out a set of shapely black buttons and lined them up on the linoleum beside me.

And then it came to me that I was no longer interested in button boxes. Maybe it was because I was now traveling away from home by bus, by myself, but I knew suddenly and finally that my time of playing with buttons was past, just as one summer evening a year or two later, when I had found a perfect slingshot fork in the top of a tree, it came to me that I was no longer interested in slingshots, and I climbed down and left the perfect fork uncut.

I got out the catalogue and looked at the farm equipment, especially the work harness, for I wanted above all things to own my own mule and my own harness. And then I got the paper and read the funnies. But my new knowledge that I had grown beyond playing with buttons had disturbed me, and I was restless.

Seeing that I was, Grandma said, “Why don’t you get your horse book and look at it with Grandpa?”

I went and got the book and climbed with it onto Grandpa’s lap, something else I was not going to permit myself to do much longer. The book was The Trotting and Pacing Horse in America by Hamilton Busby, published in 1904. My father, when he was away at law school, had bought the book and sent it home to Grandpa. I doubt that it had ever mattered much to him, for he was not a man who went much to books for anything, but it mattered a great deal to me. Though the passages on breeders, breeding, and pedigrees meant little to me and I skipped them, by then I was familiar with its many photographs, which I had looked at again and again, and I had practically memorized a few stories of great horses and great races.

It was a book about a kind of glory: the glory of preeminent horses. A horse hitched to any kind of horse-drawn vehicle, by now, is to most people the veriest symbol of obsolescence, and so it comes a little hard to think of the standardbred horse as a phenomenon of the modern world, but that is what he was. His great era was that between the development for general use of smooth-surfaced roads, over which a harness horse could travel at speed, and the mass production of affordable automobiles. At the time of Grandpa’s youth and on into his middle years, fast trotters and pacers were in demand. Dan Patch, a bay horse who paced a mile in one minute and fifty-five seconds in 1905, had the reputation of a hero. For a while in his younger days, Grandpa had trained standardbred horses and had even driven in races in Lexington. He was in Lexington the night they brought the great Dan Patch into the lobby of the Phoenix Hotel. Grandpa did not speak much of these things even to my father, for his own effort ended in disappointment. Hard times came, and he had to give it up. But the passion of it had stayed with him, for it rested upon a passion for good livestock, chiefly horses and mules, that never left him.

There is such a thing as lovesickness for good horses and mules, and for this there is no cure. People who operate machines know nothing like it. This creaturely love can keep one interested all day long in every motion of a good team or a good saddle horse. And not only all day long, but all year round and all life long. Grandpa’s life, I think, was shaped around this passion. To him the difference between a good horse or mule and one not so good was paramount, as was the question of how one drove or how one rode.

And so when I climbed into his lap and opened that book, which I believe was the only book that ever had actually belonged to him, and which he probably had not opened for years before I came along and found it and again opened it, I opened a part of his own history that undoubtedly had disappointment in it and pain, and yet I called forth his old passion too, and so he indulged me. Without his small-lensed glasses that he rarely used and probably could not have found, he could not see to read. But I turned through the book from picture to picture, and as his finger came to rest under each one I read off the name of the horse: Lou Dillon, Major Delmar, Dan Patch, Prince Alert, Flora Temple, Dexter, Goldsmith Maid, Nancy Hanks. At that point, for reasons unknown to me then and now, he would exclaim, “Good God A’mighty! Is that Nancy Hanks?” Whatever his reasons, he was moved by his memory of the brown mare who then stood before us, her lead rein held by a man with a mustache wearing a felt hat cocked over his eyes and suspenders over, apparently, a long-sleeved undershirt.

When we had looked at all the pictures, Grandpa put on his coat and cap and overshoes, and, though Grandma said, “Oh, don’t go out in that old cold wind,” I put on mine. We went out to the barn, Grandpa carrying a lighted lantern in one hand and his cane in the other, I walking behind him in the lantern’s glow. Our long shadows strode with us, while the starless dark pressed in around us as though to extinguish our light. In the barn we went from stall to stall and into the pen of steers. We looked at every animal. Any one that was lying down Grandpa prodded with the cane, and it got up and stretched and looked at us wide-eyed through the cloud of its breath.

“You want to see them stretch when they get up,” Grandpa said. “Then you know they’re feeling good. You know they’re all right.”

This was his requirement for sleep. Knowing that all was well at the barn, he could rest.

On the way back to the house we stood facing away from the wind and took our bedtime pee.

Back in the living room, Grandpa built up the fire for the night, and while I stood close to the stove to get warm again he let down his folding bed and set his chamber pot, his “chamber” as he called it, underneath in its accustomed place. It was bedtime, and he addressed himself to that occasion without any ceremony whatsoever. He stripped off his clothes down to his long underwear and shirt, laid down on his side beneath the covers, rested his head on his turned-back forearm, and closed his eyes. If President and Mrs. Roosevelt had been there, Grandma said, Grandpa would have done the same thing exactly. Long before daylight he would be up again, even if now, in his old age, it would be only to dress, renew the fire, and go to sleep again in his rocking chair.

Grandma blew out one of the lamps and picked up the other. We went through the shadows out into the cold front hall, up the stairs, and into the room over the living room. Grandma set the lamp on the washstand. I put down my grip and, standing over the register that let some heat come up from the stove, I began to take off my clothes.

That reminded Grandma and she said, “Did you brush your teeth, Andy?”

I said, “I don’t need to, I don’t reckon.”

We both knew that was a fib, but the pitcher on the washstand was empty and it was a long way to the kitchen, and so we both pretended that I didn’t need to.

I didn’t tell her that my pajamas were in my grip. The room was cold and it would be colder in the morning, and so I left on my shirt and long underwear, like Grandpa.

Grandma turned back the covers, I sank into the feather bed, and she covered me up, adding another quilt from the closet. I was so pressed upon from all sides that I didn’t think I could move.

Grandma said, “You’re snug as a bug in a rug.” She said, “Go to sleep, now.” And that reminded her of a scrap of eloquence she loved, and she repeated it: “Sleep is nature’s sweet restorer.” I was a long time learning that she was quoting from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. But where had she learned it?

She kissed me goodnight then, picked up the lamp, and went out. She closed the door, perfecting the dark, and I heard her footsteps cross the hall.

We had made little enough of a stir all the evening, but now as we settled for the night the quiet of the empty rooms began to seep into the occupied ones. The old house clicked and ticked in the nighttime cold, and the wind, I thought, was trying to wrap all the way around the walls. In that house, especially in winter, you never forgot the weather. There was no insulation in those days, no double-glazed windows. Only the two rooms were heated. The others, except for hearth fires at special times, stayed cold. And you could hear the wind. My earliest dreams that I remember were dreams of the wind, dreamed in that house.

At first the bed was ice-cold. But I began, gradually and deliciously, to get warm. When I was fully warm, I slept.

I slept the sort of sleep that seems not to have happened. It seemed that I shut my eyes in the room unwalled by darkness and at one with the great night, and promptly opened them again to bright daylight, sunlight beyond the windows, and Grandpa’s forefinger prodding me through the covers. He was wearing his cap and his sheepskin coat.

“Wake up, baby,” he said in a tone of grief, for I was in violation of his fundamental law. “It’s daylight, and you laying there with the sun shining in your eyes!”

His accusation and the broad light did fill me with a sort of panic, for I had not meant to lose a minute of this day, and I had already lost what I knew he considered the best part of it.

All of a sudden I felt ashamed. I knew he was right. I threw off the covers and got up. As I stood over the register again, putting on my clothes, I heard him going down the stairs and back through the house. He had a determined, final way of walking, as if he were leaving his footprints in the floors. He made things rattle.

Dressing didn’t take me long. Grandma, I think, had not wanted me to be waked up, and she and Grandpa had exchanged some words on the matter. When I came into the kitchen Grandma was saying, “Yes, I reckon you would,” but he was already out the door.

Since I was up and there was no helping it, she set about my breakfast.

“Wash up,” she said. “It’ll be ready in a minute.”

It wasn’t long until I was eating fried eggs, a fried slice of the Christmas ham, hot biscuits and peach preserves, and a glass of milk that Grandma kept refilling before I had emptied it.

“Could I have one more egg and two more biscuits?”

“You can have all you want,” she said.

When I was finished, she struck a blow for civilization by making me brush my teeth. And then she made me go out to the privy, though I would have preferred constipation to that cold seat. And then she made me go through the motions of combing my hair.

As soon as I had met all her requirements, I went straight to the stripping room. The work was continuing as before, but Fred, who I had hoped would be there, was not. His mother must have needed him at home.

Who was there was Uncle Jack Beechum, my great-great-uncle on my mother’s side and Grandpa’s neighbor. Uncle Jack—or “Old Jack,” as he had come to call himself and as he was called—was four years older than Grandpa and would survive him by six years. But they were contemporaries, old friends, and they knew the same things. The presence of the two of them together had an influence on the room and made it quieter. While they talked, even Rufus Brightleaf listened and said not much. Uncle Jack was as tall as Grandpa, but whereas Grandpa was lean and hard-fleshed, Uncle Jack, though by no means fat, was stoutly built—“a draft horse of a man,” Grandpa called him. And whereas Grandpa’s voice was edged as though he spoke determinedly on his own authority, Uncle Jack’s voice came rumbling up out of his big chest as though he pronounced on behalf of a deliberative body. He had walked over that morning to learn how the work was going, which he had promptly seen for himself, and he lingered now to talk.

Uncle Jack was a widower, keeping house for himself in the manner of an old man not much interested in keeping house. Like Grandpa, he had become dependent on other people to keep his place going. Because he was not easily satisfied, he was never satisfied with the tenants who so far had come one year and, not satisfying, gone the next. Because he respected the Brightleafs, he wanted to know if they knew of anybody who was “the right kind.” The right kind, never plentiful, were scarcer than ever. Jess and Rufus could only say that they would be on the lookout.

Uncle Jack forsook his present worries, and the conversation, belonging then to him and Grandpa, took up the burden of times only they had known. They spoke of horses and mules and men and days. Now I can wish that I had stayed and listened and tried to remember. Now I can wish I had foreseen then what I would want to know now, and had asked the questions I now wish I had asked. What did their elders remember of the Civil War, and of the time before that? What did they tell about slavery? After the war, how were things rearranged between the races? Was the Klan active here? What did it do? Who was in it? What was it like here before the railroad came, or all-weather roads, when the only dependable transportation to and from Port William was by the river? What did they remember of the then still-standing ancient forests? How did they make it through the depression of the 1890s? The drouth of 1908? But a boy’s mind is different from an old man’s by precisely a lifetime. And so the talk of that day went out into that day’s air and light and the silence beyond, and the silence has kept it.

Grandpa and Uncle Jack were sitting on the only two five-gallon buckets in the room, leaving me no place to sit, or even stand, where I would be out of the way. If Jess Brightleaf had only given me some little bit of work to do, some way of helping, I would gladly have paid him both my dollars. But it was not to be, and I knew it. And so I had nothing to do, no part in the talk, and no place to stand where I would not be told to move.

Pitching my voice low so as not to seem to interrupt my elders, I said, “Where’s Fred?”

“He went to shit and the hogs eat him,” said Rufus Brightleaf. It was not an unfriendly remark, but it did not encourage further conversation on my part.

Outside the sun was shining, and I went out.

The stripping room was the wrong place for me that day, but it has stayed luminous in my mind as it was then: a place of order, of fine work, of the fragrance of cured tobacco, of the beautiful browns of the graded leaves in the discriminate north light. And I can see its population of that morning as clearly as if I were still standing at the door, ready to leave: Jess Brightleaf, whose mind made the order and set the standard of the work, less by any word than by the mere force of his presence; Rufus Brightleaf palavering loosely of the sins and pleasures of the flesh but in fact caring and capable enough to satisfy even his brother; Dick Watson patiently doing as he needed to do; Old Man Hawk, who had the power of silence and of not caring; and the two old neighbors dreaming and talking of times long gone. And all around, beyond the happenstance of that quiet place, was the whole world at war, forgettable from moment to moment, but recallable at any instant by somebody’s naming of one of the absent or one of the dead.

In my memory all who were there, except for Old Man Hawk, seem now to be gathered into a love that is at once a boy’s and an aging man’s—and also, I think, into a love older and larger that is grieved, amused, grateful, and merciful. Only Old Man Hawk seems to belong to nobody’s love. He stood alone on his own small dignity that did not condescend even to work as well as he could have. He did not give a damn. He took what he wanted of what was available. He would in fact steal a chicken, and had done so. He would in fact kill a man, and had done so. The only reason he was not a liar was that he didn’t talk enough.

I went out and Rufus came after me, grinning, to see that I didn’t do what I had done before and was likely to do again.

“Andy, don’t fasten that damned door on the outside, now.”

I didn’t. As I left I heard him fasten it on the inside.

The day was bright and cold, the ground hard frozen. I went down the hill, crossing a swag, and a little ways up again to where Dick and Aunt Sarah Jane’s house sat at the corner of the woods. I let myself through the yard gate by the water maple Dick had planted, that was getting almost big enough to cast a useful shade, and went up to the door and knocked. Dick’s old foxhound, Waxy, had come out from under the house to be petted and now she waited with me at the door, though she would not be let in.

Aunt Sarah Jane greeted me, made me welcome, and asked me to take a chair, all with some ceremony. She was a woman of impeccable manners, in her fashion a lady of the old school. She was affable, talkative, always ready to cut loose with a big laugh, but with a reserve of dignity too that kept me conscious of my own manners. I never let her see the impudence I sometimes displayed to Grandma.

We sat in rocking chairs on either side of the drum stove. The house was warm and full of the morning sunlight. It was a small house, only two rooms, but tightly built, ceiled on the inside with tongue and groove. One of the rooms was the kitchen. The one we were sitting in was both bedroom and living room. This room, like the other, was crowded with furniture, including a quilting frame with a quilt on it. In spite of her arthritic hands and aging eyes, Aunt Sarah Jane was a seamstress and was always at work with needle and thimble, repairing or patching or making something useful and pretty.

She reckoned I had had a nice Christmas. She spoke of the birth of the baby Jesus with such immediacy of imagination that it might have happened only five nights ago in our own barn. She required me to tell her how I was and how all of my family were. And then she told me her news, nearly all of which had taken place within the radius of eyesight from her windows and yard, or within her mind. It concerned the doings of weather, animals, and people, and also several biblical characters, remembered people, and ghosts. All the creatures she knew, living and dead, natural and supernatural, were to her immediately present. Her mind was yeasty, full of knowledge, and always at work. Some of the things she knew would have seemed exceedingly doubtful to a skeptic, which I was not. The world, as she knew it, was not fenced around with facts or proofs or conventions of “objective truth.” She told of what she had seen. She had seen ghosts. She had seen the devil. She had seen people dancing in the street at the end of World War I with the Kaiser’s head on a pole. She had seen snakes of kinds, sizes, colors, and habits that astounded me, and would have astounded a herpetologist too.

For my part, I was then not so much superstitious as merely and totally gullible, able to believe without a grain of doubt anything whatever that was told me by anybody older than I was. And my imagination was capable of ratifying the wildest errors and my own most extravagant misunderstandings. When I was in the first grade, the doctor who served as the county’s “health officer” entered our classroom and announced that he had come to look for head lice. He then went up and down the rows of desks, parting the students’ hair with his fingers and looking. But I had misheard him; I thought he said he had come to look for headlights. And it seemed all at once credible and wonderful to me that some of us might have lights in the tops of our heads, hidden by our hair. Another time, I heard my father tell my mother at breakfast, “I heard wild geese flying over last night,” but I thought he said he had heard wild beasts flying over. I had a book of pictures of African animals, and my misunderstanding gave me a vision of winged zebras, giraffes, and lions flying over our house in the night. Their wings stroked the air with a stately motion, and their eyes were fixed upon the distance with a solemnity that seemed heroic and holy. They seemed perfectly believable to me, for I could see them. I can see them yet.

And so in those days my mind was perfectly compatible with Aunt Sarah Jane’s. Everything that was vivid and wondrously true to her was vivid and wondrously true to me. Everything she told me fell upon my consciousness like seeds upon fertile ground.

But not everything she told me came from the realm of wonder. She also spoke that day, as she often did, of the rights that her people had been promised but had never been given. She was my first preceptor in the matters of race and civil rights. Because I always listened attentively to her, everything she said struck in. She made me feel responsible, for I knew, as she required me to know, that I was a product of my culture; but I felt it vaguely, for I could not precisely locate in myself the cause of the injury. I had no ill will toward her or Dick, or in fact toward any of the black people I knew, and besides, if I were greatly to blame, why was she so nice to me?

Both the sense of responsibility and the perhaps necessary vagueness have stayed with me until now. Starting probably with those conversations so long ago with Aunt Sarah Jane, I have learned to understand the old structure of racism as a malevolent convention, the malevolence of which is hard to locate in the conscious intentions of most people. It was a circumstance that was mostly taken for granted. It was inexcusable, and yet we had the formidable excuse of being used to it. It was an injustice both accommodated and varyingly obscured not only by daily custom, but also by the exigencies and preoccupations of daily life. We left the issue alone, not exactly by ignoring it, but by observing an elaborate etiquette that permitted us to ignore it. White people who wished to think well of themselves did not use the language of racial insult in front of black people. But the problem for us white people, as we had finally to understand, was that we could not be selectively complicit. To be complicit at all, even thoughtlessly by custom, was to be complicit in the whole extent and reach of the injustice. It is hard for a customary indifference to unstick itself from the abominations to which it tacitly consents. But we were used to it. What is hardest to get used to maybe, once you are aware, is the range of things humans are able to get used to. I was more used to this once than I am now.

Aunt Sarah Jane’s plain talk of racial injustice as she knew it, thereby introducing the fester of it into the conscience of a small boy, who knew it only as the accepted way and a mandatory etiquette, was by the measure of that time remarkable. To the extent that her talk was a discomfort and an instruction, it was a service. To the extent that it was interesting and a part of conversation, it was hospitality. Her conversation could sometimes be the wildest mixture of sense and what I still regret to call superstition. I listened to her with the keenest interest, sometimes with a kind of awe, and sometimes with a fearful eagerness, trying to penetrate even a little some mystery that she spoke of or from.

By her charity, good cheer, and love of company, it was eminently pleasant to sit with her in that warm room, mindful of the cold outside, mostly listening and asking questions while she followed her thoughts along their wandering paths, now and then renewing the bolus of snuff that she kept inside her lower lip, or making use of her “spit can.”

She sang me a song in which a young man, plowing corn, dreams of Saturday night:

Diddle-um, diddle-um, di-de-o,

Gon’ take Sal to the party-o.

Haw, Lige!

“But, Aunt Sarah Jane, who’s Lige?”

“Why honey, Lige was his mule!”

I would gladly go back to sit with her again. She too I loved.She too is a knot in the net that has gathered me up and kept me alive until now.

From Aunt Sarah Jane’s I went straight out to the mailbox and then to Grandma’s kitchen. I didn’t go by the stripping room even to see if Fred had come with his mother to bring dinner. The stripping room part of my visit seemed to be over, and I didn’t want to go back.

Grandpa was already at the table when I came into the kitchen with the mail. We had another good dinner, pretty much like the one of the day before, ending with the rest of the raspberry pie. Afterwards, instead of going back outside, I stayed with Grandma. I helped her to do the dishes and tidy up the kitchen, and I brought in a fresh bucket of water from the well.

When we got everything put to rights, we went into the living room. She took up her needlework. I read the funnies, and then returned to The Boy’s King Arthur. I opened it to the beginning. I looked at the words and I could hear my mother’s voice reading them, and so as I looked from word to word I too was reading them:

And when the first mass was done there was seen in the churchyard, against the high altar, a great stone four-square, like to a marble stone, and in the midst thereof was an anvil of steel, a foot of height, and therein stuck a fair sword naked by the point, and letters of gold were written about the sword that said thus: Who so pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is right-wise king born of England.

I didn’t know what a mass was, but it didn’t seem to matter much. I knew very well what an anvil was, but I couldn’t figure out the need for an anvil and a stone. I thought either one would have been plenty.

But I was reading, and it was my mother’s voice that was sounding in my mind as I read. Since I had learned so far no respect for sequence, and anyhow we had already got well into the book, I skipped over to the quarrel between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever, and still my mother’s voice continued, and still I read:

“Alas!” said Sir Bors, “that ever Sir Launcelot’s kin saw you. For now have ye lost the best knight of our blood, and he that was all our leader and our succor. And I dare say and make it good, that all kings, Christian nor heathen, may not find such a knight, for to speak of his nobleness and courtesy with his beauty and his gentleness. “Alas,” said Sir Bors, “what shall we do that be of his blood?”

“Alas!” said Sir Ector de Maris.

“Alas!” said Sir Lionel.

When I was behaving myself and out of trouble more or less everywhere, my mother was a refuge to me. She understood the not always manifest quietness I had inside me that made me dislike gatherings and want to be alone. Even when it put her at her wit’s end, she understood it. She understood my times of introspection and silence, my susceptibility of being carried away by a book or a thought or something vividly seen in my mind. She encouraged my intermittent bookishness. She approved of what she called my “long thoughts.” She was often only amused at my weakness for drifting away from whatever I was supposed to be doing—except when I was supposed to be doing my homework. When I drifted away—mentally or (as I preferred) physically—from that, I “drove her crazy” and made her wonder what was going to become of me. There were times when I sat helplessly not-thinking about my math while she stood over me as helplessly, and perhaps hopelessly too, with a shingle or a switch. At my best, I hope, I deserved her sympathy, for I greatly needed it and took shelter in it. She was, and her memory is, a comfort to me.

Though the thought of him is a comfort to me now, my father then seemed to me an eminence, a distant height, even when he was holding me by the hand or in his lap. That he also was and would be a refuge I never doubted. But his love was proprietary, like Grandma’s; it was magisterial, fierce, and demanding. When he hugged me, he hugged me tight, with an urgency just short of violence, as if foreseeing the times when he would be unable to decide for me or protect me, as if it were an immediate, almost a maternal, grief to him that we were not one flesh. Whereas I was slow in my thoughts, dreamy, and clumsy, he was all concentrated energy and attention, competent, purposeful, efficient in act and speech. When I would be gaping at some vision or actual sight while the sheep I should have headed bolted and the others followed, he would say, “There you stand, Andy, looking out your mouth!” His hands were strong, capable, and utterly direct. When he would catch me using awkwardly a broom or a shovel, he would take hold of me and it and correct my stance and movements, as if under some irresistible compulsion to remold the too-watery clay of which I was made.

And so on this solitary journey of mine, I was experiencing my absence from my father with a relish that I could not then have defined, and I was beginning to miss my mother and the sound of my mother’s voice a little more than I would have cared to admit.

My mother I believe I knew fairly well from a fairly early age. Looking back, I love her simply as I knew her to be. And I wonder, too, at what she came to be as she grew older and the trials of motherhood and other early difficulties fell away from her. In her old age she seemed to me to become almost purely generous and wise. Unlike my father, for whom love was always involved with fear and exasperation and who felt personally affronted by any unremedied flaw, she accepted what she could not help and came finally to a quietness within herself that signified great faith, and no fear at all.

But I had to grow and age into knowledge of my father, and I am afraid to say yet that I know him fairly well. Insofar as he was a critic of the people and places he loved, he was as much a visionary all his life as ever I was to be at any age—though at the age of nine I could not have envisioned that. He bore the burden of his certainty that some things could be improved, and of his vision of how to improve them. And over and over again he suffered enormous frustration at his or anybody’s inability to make the needed correction.

Both he and my mother were motivated by great love, but hers abounded quietly, and his was instant and ungraduated, always at full flow.

One morning as I was watching him shave, I asked experimentally, “Daddy, what would you do if I died?”

His reply was shocking, for it came while the sound of my voice seemed still in the air, and with a force of passion that I had not until then imagined: “I would cry my eyes out!”

“Well, you’re a great one for a book,” my father’s mother said to me as we sat long ago by the stove in her living room. Like my father, she was rarely satisfied with things as they were. If I was reading, she recognized that as a good thing, but then she would be obliged to suspect that I might be reading too much, or the wrong kind of book, or that there might be something else I ought to be doing. For she too was a critic, though a companionable one when you were on her safe side.

She called me back, it seemed, from far away, as it seems she can still call me back from so far in time. I looked up from the book and was happy to see that I was there with her.

“You go upstairs and get your grip,” she said, “and put all your things in it. So you’ll be ready when your granddaddy comes to get you. He’ll be here before long.”

I had forgotten about that. I was still a traveler. I was going to stay the next two nights with my mother’s parents, Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, in Port William. The happiness of traveling by myself came upon me again. There was more to look forward to.

I brought down my grip, stuck my book in on top of my clothes, found my toothbrush and stuck it in. Except for putting on my wraps, I was ready.

“I guess I’m ready,” I said.

“Well, your old grandma hates to see you go,” Grandma said. “We’ll miss you when you’re gone.”

That made me realize that I hated to go. I would miss them when I was gone. To make a journey, especially alone, always carries a metaphorical power, and I felt the sorrow of it pass over me. We come to a place we love, we meet loved ones there, and we go. The thought of leaving made me realize how much I liked being there with her. I looked around for something more to do, something she and I could do, before I would have to go.

I took down from the top of Grandpa’s folding bed the pretty candy box filled with picture postcards and photographs that were Grandma’s precious keepsakes. There weren’t many of either, of course. She had never owned a camera, and so the photographs all had been sent to her. And the people we were kin to did not often make trips from which they sent postcards. But all the pictures and cards had names and brought forth stories. This place had been home to kinfolk and others who had moved away, and who wrote back, trying to maintain a connection that over the years grew weaker. Grandma was a faithful keeper of their memories. We spoke then of the absent and the dead. Our talk took on the charm of distance and history almost like the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. But this was our history and these were our people. Their names and stories and pictures had a worth to us that was timely and bodily and never to be put in a book.

After a while we saw Granddaddy Feltner’s old green Plymouth turn in at the gate and come up the driveway and past the house. He would leave the car in the barn lot and come to the back door, and so I picked up my grip and we went out to the kitchen to meet him.

I was still getting into my wraps when Grandma opened the kitchen door and Granddaddy came in smiling and asking if they had a boy there who needed a ride to Port William. He said the boy was a traveler by the name of Andy Catlett.

I laughed and ran to hug him, and he said, “Hello, son.”

He and Grandma exchanged greetings and a little news. And then, in spite of all I could do, Grandma buttoned up my mackinaw for me and pulled my toboggan well down over my ears. She hugged me and kissed me and said, “Come back soon,” as if I might never return.

I said, “I’ll be back.”

And then Granddaddy picked up my grip and took my hand, and we went out.

Part Three

GRANDDADDY FELTNER was younger by nineteen years than Grandpa Catlett, and this difference made other differences. Granddaddy owned a car and could drive it, and thus, unlike Grandpa, he had come consciously into the era of internal combustion. Though I was a conservative child, whose heart was given more finally than I knew to the creaturely world of Grandpa Catlett, it seemed perfectly normal to me also to be driving back along the ridges toward Port William with Granddaddy Feltner in his car. The car was older than I was, and the war would have to end before it could be replaced with a new one. Like the team and wagon, it seemed to belong to the world that I belonged to.

And yet the world that I belonged to was already divided, as I have said, into two opposing worlds, the sun-powered world of horse and mule teams, and the petroleum-powered world of cars and trucks and tractors. As I look back into my memory, where hindsight now seems strangely mixed with foreknowledge, I can see doom clearly written upon the older world, though I believe that the whole cost of that doom is still unpaid.

Granddaddy’s old car would seem crude to us now in “the new millennium.” It was crude in comparison even to my father’s car, which was newer. But on that day, having returned to motor travel from my trip with Dick and Grandpa in the wagon, and after nearly two days of getting about on foot, I felt the car’s ease and speed. We were effortlessly and in just minutes covering a distance that had seemed long to me the morning before.

And I noticed something else. The car was not only easier and faster than the team and wagon. It gave a new aspect and a new motion to the world. The wagon passed through the country at a speed that allowed your eyes to come to rest. Whatever you wanted to look at in the road ditch or the fencerow or the field beyond, your sight could dwell on and you could see it. But from the side window of Granddaddy’s car where I was looking out, the country seemed to be turning by like a great wheel. The rim of the wheel, at the roadside, was turning so fast that everything was a blur. To pick out a detail—one fencepost, one rock, one tree trunk—was impossible. The effort to do so made me feel cross-eyed and kind of sick. Farther away, the wheel turned more slowly and you could look at things, you could stop them in your eyes, but the smaller details were getting lost. Even farther away, as if near the wheel’s hub, things seemed hardly to be moving, but there were no details at all, just the vague blue ridges way off there as if in a different world. And that, as I now know, would be the new world, the “world of the future,” which to most people in it would be hazy and without detail, way off in the distance.

By fortune of birth and history, I know the world of horses and mules that lived on a while into my time. I know also the world of the automobile, which excluded the older world by means of speed, comfort, and ease, and which oddly “made the world smaller” by increasing the distances between ourselves and the things we need. And like many others in this rational modern age, I have sat in airplanes going five hundred miles an hour and wished they would hurry up.

Granddaddy would often carry on a little foolishness to amuse himself or me, but he was not a jabberer.

When we started out, he said, “Hon, have you got everything you brought? You didn’t forget anything?”

And I replied with my best manners, “No, sir.”

And then, when we came into Port William: “Well, here we are. Home again.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Feltner house, where Uncle Virgil and my mother and Granddaddy too had been raised, stood both at the corner of the little town and at the corner of the farm that had been the Feltner home place time out of mind. The electric lines had come to Port William before I was born, and so Granny and Granddaddy’s house had electric lights. It also had bathrooms, and it had “central heating” from a big coal furnace in the basement. It was a brick house of ten rooms, built right on the street in the fashion of all the old town houses in our part of the country, though, unlike most, this one had a large front porch and an ample, tree-shaded yard on each side.

Of all the houses I knew as a child, this one was the most welcoming, not because of its conveniences, which were unusual for the time and place, but because of the generosity of Granny and Granddaddy. I think it had always been a welcoming house. I know it had been so at least as far back as the time of Ben and Nancy Feltner, Granddaddy’s parents, long dead but known familiarly still, even to me, as Pa and Ma Feltner. Granny and Granddaddy seem to have inherited the welcoming along with the house. The house, you might say, had the habit of hospitality. In the time of my boyhood, Granny and Granddaddy were always “having company”: visiting preachers, relatives, friends of relatives, sometimes utter strangers who were friends of friends of relatives. This custom had survived, pretty well intact, from the time of bad roads when anybody who arrived at mealtime expected, and was expected, to eat, and anybody who came in the evening spent the night.

And so when I came, I came as a grandson, more or less a member of the household, but I came also as company. Company in fact was already there when I came. Granny’s sister-in-law, Ora Finley, known to my mother and so to us children as “Auntie,” was there with her sister Lizzie Lord, who had been Granny’s best friend all their lives, and who, though no kin to us, was known to us as “Aunt Lizzie.” They had been there since Christmas Eve. Both were widows by then, both childless, and they were living together in Auntie’s house at Hargrave. Aunt Lizzie had been Auntie’s baby sister. She was still girlish, and had not altogether ceased to think of herself as a girl. Time and age and loss, I think, had remained surprising to her. She was a jolly companion to us children. Auntie, on the contrary, was strict, stoic, forthright, without a grain of nonsense, and she had a fine comic sense of the ridiculous. You would know in an instant that she was a woman who would put up only with so much, and you would not be eager to find out how much. Her own childlessness had freed her to assume certain responsibilities for the upbringing of my mother and Uncle Virgil. She was a lover of books, and she had encouraged that love in my mother and in me.

And Hannah was there. She had lived there with Uncle Virgil after they married, and she would continue to live there, after Uncle Virgil’s death in the war and the birth of their daughter, until she married again in 1948.

When Granddaddy took me in, like company, through the front door, there they were, lined up in the hall like a welcoming committee: Granny and Auntie and Aunt Lizzie and Hannah.

“Well, look who’s here!” Granny said, opening her arms. “Come here and hug your granny!”

I went down the line, getting hugged and kissed and exclaimed over until I was as spoiled already as I would be when I got home and would overhear my mother saying to Granny on the telephone, “Oh, yes, I’m glad to have him back, even if you have spoiled him rotten.”

When I got to Hannah she gave me a smile and a hug without saying anything, for she was not an exclaiming woman. And she put a kiss on my cheek that stayed there until she gave me another one just as good at bedtime that night.

Though the Feltner house was far more modern in its appliances than that of my Catlett grandparents, the same household economy of home production and diligent thrift prevailed there also. Everything that the place could provide, it did provide, and in abundance. Like Grandma Catlett, Granny Feltner still made her own lye soap for the washing of dishes and clothes.

I think often now of that old economy, which was essentially the same from a farm household that was fairly well-to-do, like that of Granny and Granddaddy Feltner, to the household of Dick Watson and Aunt Sarah Jane, which would be classified as poor. For many years now that way of living has been scorned, and over the last forty or fifty years it has nearly disappeared. Even so, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an economy directly founded on the land, on the power of the sun, on thrift and skill, and on the people’s competence to take care of themselves. They had become dependent, to some extent, on manufactured goods, but as long as they stayed on their farms and made use of the great knowledge that they possessed, they could have survived foreseeable calamities that their less resourceful descendants could not survive. Now that we have come to the end of the era of cheap petroleum, which fostered so great a forgetfulness, I see that we could have continued that thrifty old life fairly comfortably—could even have improved it. Now we will have to return to it, or to a life necessarily as careful, and we will do so only uncomfortably and with much distress.

Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it.

The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.

While I was preoccupied with being greeted and then with sitting in the living room with the women, who wanted to be told how everybody was at home when I left and how I had enjoyed my trip and what all I had done out at Grandma and Grandpa’s, Granddaddy had disappeared. As I replied to the women’s questions, much apparently to their pleasure and much therefore to my own, my mind nevertheless was increasingly troubled by the feeling that I was missing something.

I knew where Granddaddy had gone. He was out amongst the farm buildings and the livestock, helping his lifelong hired hand and friend from boyhood, Joe Banion, do up the evening chores. And finally I needed to get out of the center of attention. I didn’t want to hear myself say any more about where I had been and what I had done. It is the responsibility of a traveler to tell stories, but enough is enough.

I said, “I think I ought to go see where Granddaddy is.”

“Don’t do that now,” Granny said. “It’s not long till supper. No use tracking around in the mud and manure for nothing.”

That gave me another thought. “Can I go tell Uncle Ernest supper’s about ready?”

“May I go,” Auntie said, standing in for my mother and my teacher.

I almost said “Sure.” I got right to the edge of that cliff before I caught myself. I said, “May I go tell Uncle Ernest?”

“He’ll know when it’s supper time,” Granny said. “But you can go to the shop and walk back with him if you want to.”

Once I was outdoors in the quiet, I recovered the sense of myself as a solitary traveler. It came to me that, starting from the tracks I stood in, there in front of the old house, I could have gone anywhere. But I was going to Uncle Ernest’s shop because that was where Granny was expecting me to go, and it was where I wanted to go. Uncle Ernest was Granny’s youngest brother, a man fascinating to Henry and me because of his work and because of the long stories he would tell us, lasting, some of them, through the bedtimes of two weeks.

I crossed the road and turned into the alley between the hotel and the post office. Uncle Ernest’s shop was back at the end of the alley, sort of unlooked-at, out on the edge of things. His old pickup truck was parked in front, where it stayed most of the time in the winter. Smoke was coming out of the chimney. I opened the door and stepped into the warmth and the good smells.

Uncle Ernest was working at the bench, his crutches propped against the wall out of the way. When he heard me come in, he looked around and said, “Hello, Andy.”

“Uncle Ernest,” I said, “it won’t be long till supper.”

“I figured it was getting about that time.”

He had a way of talking to boys as if they were grown men. He only treated you like a child if you were being childish, and then it was awful. You knew without being told that there were limits to what he would put up with. He was like Auntie in that way.

He had been badly hurt in the First World War. Being crippled had changed him and changed his life, but there were limits also to his acceptance of his handicap. He would work mostly back there in his shop during the winter, repairing things, making things, refinishing furniture. He was handy. He could do anything he set his hands to. He kept everybody’s clocks running. He could fix the electrical household gadgets that were coming more and more into use. But his great gift and his passion were for wood, and the shop was filled with the smells of newly worked lumber, of shellac, varnish, paint, and glue. It was as fragrant in its way, as inviting and tempting, as a kitchen. It gave forth also the sounds of hammers, hatchets, drawknives, spokeshaves, saws, augers, planes, rasps, sandpaper. It was full of tools curious and beautiful to the eye, the metal polished and the handles lustrous from use. They were beautiful in themselves, in use, and in Uncle Ernest’s mastery of them.

The smells and sounds and sights of the place summoned a boy to come close, to take part, to help. But the shop was above all orderly, clean as a pin, and everything he wasn’t using would be in its place. There were rules also, three of them, that applied to boys: Don’t touch, Stand back, Be quiet. They were good rules, for they set the terms of Uncle Ernest’s welcome to boys that was genuine and generous. If you asked him, “What’re you making?” he would answer without looking at you, “Layos to catch meddlers.” But if you kept quiet and watched, you would see what he was making. If after a while you couldn’t figure it out, he would know it. He would say, “Do you know what I’m making?” and you would say, “No.” And then he would explain patiently and clearly. Sometimes he would say, “Do you want to try your hand at this?” and you would say, “Yes.” And then he would show you how.

From the time the weather got good in the spring until it turned cold again, he worked outdoors. And the shop also contained, in their places against the wall, the ladders, jacks, and other equipment that he would need then. Some work was too heavy for him, but people generally knew what he was capable of, and he seldom had to refuse a job. It was surprising what he could do. He used the crutches when he had any distance to walk. But when he started to work he put them aside, though he did look horribly crippled then, and he did not like people to watch him. He worked mainly alone. But if he thought of himself as a cripple, he was too proud to let you know it, even though nearly all the Port William men called him “Crip” and he answered to the name. His arms and upper body were powerful, as you would expect, and he made perhaps merciless demands upon his poor legs. He could carry a considerable load up a ladder. He could replace the siding on a barn. One time Martin Rowanberry came upon him sitting flat on the ground, cutting down a big tree with an axe. Mart himself told me this long after Uncle Ernest was dead. Mart said he was a good axeman. He never wasted a lick. The big chips were flying.

I stood at the appointed distance and watched him, neither of us saying anything more. He was replacing a leg on somebody’s table. It was a ticklish job, involving mortises, tenons, and pegs.

After a while, still attentive to his work, he said, “I don’t reckon you’re looking forward to supper.”

And I said, as I was supposed to, “I don’t reckon so.”

He worked on a few moments more, and then he put his tools away. He brushed the accumulated dust and shavings off the bench and swept them into a neat pile on the floor. They would help the stove to get hot early the next morning. Finished, then, he turned to me and smiled.

“Well, you may not be hungry, but I am. Let’s go.”

He got his crutches and I went ahead of him out the door.

Supper at Granny Feltner’s was a sort of indoor picnic of cold leftovers and sandwich makings. Nettie Banion, Granny’s cook, would have gone down through the field to her own house after the dinner dishes were done, and supper was meant to be an easy meal that did not heat up the kitchen in the summertime or leave cooking utensils to be washed. Under the bright electric light, that evening of my arrival, Granny and Hannah had laid out the rest of the Christmas ham and turkey on their platters, and mayonnaise and cranberry sauce, and a plate of cold biscuits and a loaf of Granny’s salt-rising bread to make sandwiches with, and a pitcher of milk. There was a pot of coffee hot on the stove for whoever wanted it. For dessert there was fruit cake and jam cake and custard with whipped cream. And in the refrigerator, especially for me, was a tray of ice cream made with cream from the Jersey cows. “Save room,” Granny said when she told me about it.

To me, the kitchen always bespoke the presence of Nettie Banion, even when she was absent from it, as it bespoke also the presence of Aunt Fanny, who had been there when my mother was young, and of Aunt Cass, who had been there when Granddaddy was young. All three in their times had married Banion men, Smoke and Samp and Joe, and all three had come up the hill to this house in the early mornings to cook breakfast and dinner, to help with the housework, and then had gone back home to keep house and fix supper in that other life that we white people knew existed but did not know.

When I was staying in Port William and Granny had something to say to me that was especially important, she would make me a little speech. This was because of my mind’s bad reputation for wandering. That night, after we had eaten our supper and were dawdling at the table, Granny said:

“Andy, listen to Granny for a minute. I know you want to go downtown to see if any of your friends are there. And that’s all right. But I want you to be back here at eight o’clock. Now, what did I say?”

I said, “I can go downtown, but I have to be back by eight o’clock. Well, I would like to. But how am I going to know when it’s eight o’clock?”

“There’ll be people down there who’ll know,” she said. “Just tell somebody to tell you when it’s time.”

“Yes, mam.”

And so she freed me and bound me at the same time, something she was good at.

I set forth again into the town of Port William, the nucleus, the navel, of the country that was most intimately home to me then and has been home to me all my life, even in the years when I did not live in it. It is my motherland, the mold I was cast in. As it has held and shaped me, so I have kept and contained it. Though I may have been thousands of miles away, it has been as present to me as my own flesh.

The town of Hargrave, where I was living then, had been infected perhaps from the beginning with the modern ambition to be what it was not. It longed, as people say now, to realize its full potential, whatever that might be. But Port William was eagerly interested in itself, interminably telling itself its own stories.

Of Port William proper, the center, there never has been much: a scattering of houses along the road, a church, a school, a graveyard, and what in a bigger town would have been the “business district,” which was my destination. In those days Port William’s business district consisted of two general stores, Milton Burgess’s and Jasper Lathrop’s, Jasper’s being closed at the time because Jasper was in the army; a still-working blacksmith shop; a garage and car dealership, the life of which coincided just about exactly with the working life of Mr. Milo Settle; Dolph Courtney’s “drug store,” which sold patent medicines, ice cream, “notions and sundries,” and comic books; the Port William branch of The Independent Farmer’s Bank; Uncle Ernest’s woodworking shop; Jayber Crow’s barbershop; a pool room; the paintless hotel, which now offered room and board mainly to old people; and the post office. Now we have perhaps a few more houses than then, but only one general store, an “antique and junque” store, the bank, and the post office. The Port William School of eight grades, which was going strong in 1943, has been shut now for forty years.

I knew several Port William boys about my age, with whom I played or rambled when I visited Granny and Granddaddy, and I was on the lookout for them. When I went out, all that was left of the day was just a little afterlight in the west. I crossed the street and went by the post office, which was dark; and by the hotel, which was showing a light way in the back where Mrs. Hendrick was serving supper to her boarders; by the blacksmith shop, where there was a basketball goal in the cindery lot in front; and by Jasper Lathrop’s store, which was shut and dark. Dolph Courtney’s store was showing a little light, but nobody was in there, and so Dolph had turned off all the lights except one naked bulb over the ice cream counter, on which Dolph was leaning, reading the paper. It was too dark to make out the covers of the comic books he had on display in the front window.

When I got to the poolroom, I stood and thought awhile about going in, which I had done a time or two when I was rambling about with Danny Branch and Orvie Galingale. I might have gone in if I had been with them, but I was alone, and moreover I was traveling alone and so was unusually mindful of my responsibility. Things went on in that poolroom, according to Granny, that she did not recommend to boys my age. I was, in fact, strictly forbidden to go in there.

Next was Dr. Markman’s little office of two white-painted, board-walled rooms. He was still busy, for there was a light on in the back room and his old car was parked in front. It was a coupe of some kind, black by the manufacturer’s intention, but in fact mostly the color of mud: of dried mud until it rained, and then the color of wet mud. Sometimes his patients visited him in his office. More often he called upon them, driving the creek roads and the farm tracks at all hours, carrying a few instruments and bottles of pills in a leather satchel that was as professionally black as it was meant to be. I did not dislike Dr. Markman, but my few encounters with him had not been entirely pleasant, for he came where sickness was. Once, when I got the flu at Granny’s house, she called Dr. Markman. He was a good-humored man, and he made us all feel better just by coming into the room with the air of the harsh winter night emanating like an aura from his clothes. But when he applied his cold, hairy ear to my back to listen to my lungs, it felt as big as a dinner plate.

I went on down to the barbershop at the bottom of the swag in the middle of town. Nobody at all was in there. Even Jayber was gone. He had left a light on to show that he was open for business, but everybody probably had got their hair cut right before Christmas, and so he had given up and gone off somewhere. I crossed over to Mr. Settle’s garage and went back up the hill to Milton Burgess’s store. The lights were on there, and I could see through the window that people were inside, if not customers at least loafers. I went in to see who was there and what there was to see.

The first sight, of course, was Mr. Burgess smiling at me from behind the counter. “Good evening, Mr. Catlett,” he said in his official-greeting voice while everybody looked at me. “What can I do for you this evening?”

He sounded ready, if I had only said the word, to stand on his head or jump through a hoop. Nothing could have been more embarrassing. I said, “Not anything, I don’t reckon.”

“Not anything it will be then,” said Mr. Burgess, grinning at me through his spectacles and rapping a little tattoo on the counter with his fingers.

Somebody laughed.

Now, as if through a hole in the ceiling, I can see myself, small for my age, too skinny, thoroughly embarrassed. By now I had seen that none of my friends were there, and among the several men who had come in to loaf until bedtime I was the one boy. I was sorry I had come in, but I was too embarrassed to leave. If some of the women had been there it would have been better, for they would have been openly kind to a small boy, and being there among the men had made me aware again that I was a small boy. The men would not have been impressed to know that I had come alone by bus from Hargrave to Port William. The women would have been there if it had been Saturday night, for on Saturdays whole families came to town to shop and visit. Weeknights you would find only the men, and only certain men, loafing about in the places of business and spending usually not enough money to pay the proprietors to keep a fire going and the lights on.

The conversation that these loafers kept going, night after night, was Port William’s sole indigenous public institution. By it, the manhood at least of the town reminded itself of itself, preserved its history to the extent that it was preserved, entertained and comforted itself, and in some measure even governed itself. And though I could not have been aware of it then, there was kindness in it too, inadvertent as it may have been. For Port William always had its fair allotment of widowers and aging bachelors, lonely men who used these nighttime gatherings to fend off between darkfall and bedtime the thoughts that come to the lonely and are hard to suffer alone.

This kindness, however, lived below or beyond the masculine hardness and even the sometimes cruelty of laughter at somebody else’s discomfort, or the ironies of Milton Burgess’s mercantile manners, which for a moment or two had kept me paralyzed in my shyness. But then the bunch began to clarify itself and sort itself into individual people, most of whom I knew.

Before I came in, Mr. Athey Keith had been talking to Mr. Burgess, holding a paper bag of something and ready to leave. Mr. Keith did not loaf. He spoke to me and shook my hand—he was a friend of my grandfathers’ and my father’s—and this seemed to undo Mr. Burgess’s officious silliness. Mr. Keith said, “How are you, young man?” thus, it seemed, both paying his respects to my family and telling me what he expected of me. He then went straight out the door, giving exactly as much heed to the loafers as if they had not been there at all.

Gathered in the back of the room to talk around the stove, seated on an assortment of chairs, crates, and kegs, were, among others, Grover Gibbs, Maze Tickburn, drunk, Fee Berlew, unusually sober, and, the youngest of them, Troy Chatham, who was Mr. Keith’s son-in-law. It was Troy who had laughed. Jayber Crow, the barber, was leaning against a rank of shelved canned goods, his hands in his pockets, mainly listening as usual. Jayber was always good to me, as he was to everybody, and I went and stood beside him as I would have gone to shelter in a storm. He looked down at me and smiled, gave me two pats on the shoulder, and said, “How you doing, Andy?”

Grover Gibbs was sitting by Jayber on a nail keg. He stuck his big fist out at me and said, “Calf’s head. Hit her a good one.”

I had been onto that since I was about five. It would have been like hitting an anvil, and the harder you hit the worse it would hurt.

And so I just slapped his fist with my open hand. He jerked his fist back, rubbing it, and said in falsetto, “Oh! You hurt me, boy.” The laughter that came from everybody then was friendly, and so I was all right.

Maze Tickburn was sitting in a rocking chair behind the stove, holding forth. He seemed to be in a fashion the host of the gathering, and certainly its chief entertainer. Maze was Port William’s stonemason, its digger and waller-up of cisterns and wells, its builder of foundations and cellars. He lived with his wife, India, on a scrap of hillside, two acres maybe, below the road just after it started down the hill toward Dawes Landing and eventually Hargrave. On their perch above the river valley, Maze and India had a small house, a smaller barn, a pen for the hog that ate their scraps, and the cistern, dug and walled and plastered by Maze, that caught the rainwater from their roof. On their stony slope they raised a garden and a little patch of tobacco, but lived mostly on Maze’s daily wage of perhaps two dollars.

When he had steady work, Maze was a sober man. When he didn’t, usually in winter when the ground was too wet or too hard-frozen to dig, idleness and the long nights would wear on his nerves, and then he would drink and spend a good deal of time in town. He especially endeared himself to his fellow loafers at these times because, when drunk, he sang whatever he said. He made the music of his words principally by drawing out certain sounds until their gravity was fully disclosed:

Ohhhh, there’s nothing so to warrrrm

The heart like a droooop of whiskey

On a coooold day.

Or he would brag:

Ohhhh, I am the beeeest stone waaaaller

What they iiiis in Porrrrt William

On account of I aaaam the oooonliest one.

But a feeeew moooore years

And I’m a loooong time gone,

And wheeeen I’m goooone

They woooon’t be noooone.

At such times Maze’s thoughts dwelt upon mortality, and he would sing of Petey Tacker, the Hargrave undertaker:

Ollll’ Petey Tacker, heeee’s the boy

Aaaalways shoooore of a job,

Laaaast feller we’ll eeeever meet.

And wheeeen I meet him

I’ll doooone be done.

I’ll be a loooong time gone.

I don’t know if I’m remembering now from that night in 1943, or just remembering. Maze was a principal character in Port William, one of its stars, you might say, for a good many years after that, and he was remembered for a good many years more, is still remembered by a few who cherish such memories. If all the stories of Maze and their related songs had been remembered, they would make a sort of happenstance opera of Port William. For instance:

One day Mrs. Preston, wife of Brother Preston the young preacher, was driving home from Hargrave. She came around a curve and there was Maze wobbling in his derelict truck from one side of the road to the other. Mrs. Preston very considerately applied the brakes, and so she hit him just hard enough to pop him out and send him flying into a big briar patch. Maze took the shock limberly enough, and so sustained no serious injuries but only a multitude of scratches. When he landed he just sat there with his back against a stump, bleeding profusely from his head, face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, and perhaps other parts.

Mrs. Preston crept on hands and knees through the tunnel Maze had bored going in, and when she saw him she sang a tremulous little aria of her own:

Ohhhh, Mr. Tickburn!

Are you allll riiiight?

Can I heeeelp you?

And Maze sang back:

Ohhhh, Mizriz Piston,

Caaaall Petey Tacker,

Gaaaather dog fennel,

And siiiing “Blue Eyes.”

I’m a loooong time gone.

I do remember that on that night in Burgess’s store Maze presently sang:

Ooool’ Milton Burgess,

Most honestest maaaan ever lived!

Buy twoooo pound of bloney,

Get oooone pound and a haaaalf

And haaaalf a pound of thuuuumb.

Sellll you a load of coallll

Eighteen huuuunderd to the toooon.

Milton Burgess, I think, was not a humorless man. If he was not highly entertained all his life, he missed a wonderful opportunity. But he understood too that he had his part to play in the ongoing drama. He responded in recitative: “Get him out of here!”

“I’m a loooong time gone,” sang Maze over his shoulder as he helped himself to the door and out into the dark.

And perhaps I knew even then that Maze would make his way along the road to where the path to his house branched off and went steeply down the slope. And there he would stop, afraid to go farther alone, and sing that evening’s closing song:

Ohhhhhh, Indy!

Ohhhhhh, Indy!

Come get ollll’ Maze!

Ollll’ somabitch

Is druuuunk agin!

And India would come up the path to help him home.

When Maze had gone and the conversation had resumed, I began to feel again the way I had felt that morning in the stripping room. I felt it was a good place in which I did not belong. Not yet. I was nine years old, going on ten, with the ambition of growing up to be a man good at work. I had even begun to learn to be such a man, as I can see now, but I was a long time and many difficulties short of my aim. Though I didn’t want to know it, I knew that nobody could mistake me for anything but what I was: a small boy unaccomplished at much of anything except causing trouble.

I said, “What time is it, Jayber?”

He looked at his watch. “Quarter after seven.”

“Well,” I said, “I got to go.”

As I went to the door, Mr. Burgess said, “Goodnight, Mr. Catlett. Call again, please.”

Some of the older boys at school sometimes said to one another, “Kiss my ass.” That expression came to my mind then and I recognized its excellence. But I was too near the door by then to say anything, even assuming I would have dared to say anything. If Granny heard I had told Mr. Burgess to kiss my ass, she would have used all the soap in Port William to wash out my mouth.

Outside it was cold and just about perfectly black. It had clouded up again, not a star in the whole sky. I stood still a minute, just to feel the relief of being out of the store and out of sight. Lighted windows here and there shone through the dark without brightening it.

Granny had turned on the porch light for me. I headed for that, and was soon back again where everybody was glad to see me. They were all sitting in the living room, talking. I hung up my wraps on the hall tree and went in and sat on the sofa between Hannah and Aunt Lizzie. Uncle Ernest had gone up to his room over the kitchen. All the rest were there.

They were talking about Uncle Virgil. They all had written to him at Christmas, had sent him presents, and by then had received his letters in reply. Now they were repeating what he had said. Since he had gone, an insistent dread had dwelt in that house, never spoken of, not at least in my hearing. I did not think of it all the time, but when I did think of it, there it would be. Perhaps it never departed from Hannah and my grandparents. I think of them now, of Hannah then scarcely more than a girl, hardly more conversant with the death she dreaded than I was, and of my grandparents, to whom that death when it came would be one of a series to which they knew their own belonged. It was as though their talk of Uncle Virgil that night, talk that was humorous and bright and hopeful, was yet overlaid by a shadow; and my memory of it, as I look back with knowledge, is overlaid by grief.

But the talk then drifted on from Uncle Virgil to other things, to common memories, old stories told again, and to the ever-returning questions of history and kinship: long discussions, sometimes contentious, beginning “Whatever happened to their daughter?” or “Who did he marry?” or “Who was she before she married?” And again I wish I had listened.

My own mind too drifted away from the subject of Uncle Virgil, but it followed its own course of thought. For me, in addition to its present foreboding, that house contained my mother’s memories of her girlhood and growing up, which I had so sharply imagined as to make them almost my own: stories of walking down to the river to swim; of skating parties at Grover’s Pond; of how Aunt Cass had let her fall onto the stove top, blistering the palms of her hands; of how she rode on her pony out the Coulter lane at dusk and was sent flying home by the moaning of pigeons in a barn; of putting on a circus in which so many Port Williamites performed that hardly enough were left for an audience.

The sense of a longer, older history that came to me in my ancestral houses came mostly from my grandmothers, both of whom had lived in the early years of their marriages with their mothers-in-law, my grandfathers’ mothers. Both of my grandmothers, despite their remarkable differences of character, never complained of that state of things, but they seemed to have done a great deal of listening. Their own memories included the memories of the older women, and they spoke familiarly of lifetimes not their own. And so in both houses I knew, before I knew what to think of it, a history that seemed to me ancient and that included much sorrow: memories of hard births, hard work, epidemics, deaths of children, debt and worry. And always back there in the mists of time, hardly imaginable and yet immediate as an odor, was the Civil War and the violence and personal vengeances, tawdry and deadly, that it had perpetrated in the little towns and farm neighborhoods of our part of the country.

In one of the corners of that room were glass-fronted shelves of books. Some of them still would be considered good books: books by Scott and Dickens and Hawthorne and Mark Twain. They had belonged to Granddaddy’s mother, and in a good many of them her name was written on the flyleaf in a pretty hand: “Nancy Beechum Feltner.” There were some books in those cases that I knew Ma Feltner had read to my mother when she was a girl. I had not read any of those books yet, though I imagined that eventually I would. But one of them especially attracted me. This was an early edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the illustrations of E. W. Kemble. It was the copy I would read in another year or two, and I have it yet, the pages now so fragile they will hardly bear touching. But in those days, in 1943, I was taking it out only to look at the pictures. I thought of going to get it, and then I thought of The Boy’s King Arthur in which would be the sound of my mother’s voice. I loved the sound of her voice reading, I think, above all the other sounds I knew. I rested in it. Among my most estimable experiences was that of being sick in the wintertime, free from school, alone at home with my mother. Those days brought precious exceptions and variances. I could spend the day downstairs in my parents’ bed. I could have poached eggs and toast and tea. And my mother would read to me: The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Little Men, the stories of Robin Hood and Little John and Friar Tuck and Much the Miller’s Son, A Christmas Carol. In this house that had once been hers I felt both separated from her and close to the thought of her.

I got the book out of my suitcase in the hall and went back to my place on the sofa. I turned to the illustration that I liked maybe best of any, a picture of Sir Launcelot gone mad in the woods after Queen Guenever had so mistakenly told him to stay out of her sight. Except for Sir Launcelot’s eyes, which were rather too bugged-out with his madness, it is an inviting picture: a wilderness of old trees and big rocks and a little falling stream. And on the facing page I read, hearing my mother’s voice quietly bespeaking the strangeness and wonderfulness of the words as she pronounced them:

And now leave we a little of Sir Ector and Sir Percival, and speak we of Sir Launcelot, that suffered and endured many sharp showers, which ever ran wild wood, from place to place, and lived by fruit and such as he could get, and drank water, two years; and other clothing had he but little, save his shirt and his breeches.

It didn’t sound like such a bad life. Much as I admired Sir Launcelot, I was disappointed in him for allowing himself to be driven crazy by Queen Guenever. If she had forbidden me to come into her sight, I would not have minded much.

It pleased me thoroughly to know that back in those old days the word for crazy was “wood.” But this was going to get me in trouble in a few weeks, when we fourth graders started learning about synonyms. Our teacher, Miss Heartsease, sent a number of us to the blackboard to write down a word, any word, and a synonym. I wrote “crazy—wood.” This was my first performance as a cutting-edge scholar, and I am sure I was too obviously proud of it. Maybe I expected to be asked to address the class on the subject of Arthurian synonyms. But Miss Heartsease, who no doubt had been denied the benefits of The Boy’s King Arthur, was not impressed. She thought I was merely striking another blow for the emancipation of fourth graders, and she sent me back to my seat in disgrace. This gave so much pleasure to my classmates that they had to be called to order, which gave me even more pleasure than the rarity of my synonym. Thus, though it was not in the curriculum, I was learning at an early age one of the laws of compensation: cutting-edge scholarship, even when unappreciated, is effective as entertainment.

I turned in the book past the place where my mother had stopped reading to me, and a wonderful thing happened. The sound of my mother’s voice reading that strange English continued in my mind, and I realized that I was reading it for myself, but in her voice. I read how Sir Tristram went mad for love of the queen, la Belle Isolda, so that she did not recognize him:

But ever she said unto Dame Bragwaine, “Me seemeth I should have seen him heretofore in many places.”

But as soon as Sir Tristram saw her he knew her well enough, and then he turned away his visage and wept. Then the queen had always a little brachet with her, that Sir Tristram gave her the first time that ever she came into Cornwall . . . And anon as this little brachet felt a savor of Sir Tristram, she leaped upon him, and licked his learis and his ears, and then she whined and quested, and she smelled at his feet and at his hands, and on all parts of his body that she might come to.

So then I knew what a brachet was. But Sir Tristram was the second knight I had read about who had gone mad for love of a woman. This seemed to me to be happening too often, even if the women were queens. I didn’t think I would ever fall in love with an actual queen, but it did trouble me to wonder if ever I would be driven out of my mind by love for a woman. Because I would soon write my age in two numerals, I was afraid something like that might happen to me pretty soon. But by now life has pretty much had its way with me, and I can say with relief that I have never gone mad for love. Not completely.

It was becoming clear to me that this book needed to have an end, and I turned a lot farther over, and read a little about the death of King Arthur, how the King when he was dying sent Sir Bedivere to throw his beautiful sword Excalibur into the water, and how Sir Bedivere disobeyed twice but finally obeyed:

Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water’s side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword into the water as far as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water, and met it and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished.

And then the hand vanished away with the sword in the water.

I could just see that, and what I saw was a knight in beautiful armor walking down through the woods to the rockbar at the mouth of Coulter Branch on our own river. He carried reverently in both hands a beautiful sword. He went out to the very edge of the rockbar and threw the sword as far as he could into the river, and just as I was ready for the splash it was going to make, a hand rose up out of the water and caught it!

“I think I see a sleepy boy,” Granny said, and I sat up straight to try not to look sleepy.

“Well, Granny,” Granddaddy said, looking serious, “we haven’t got a bed for him. I reckon we’ll have to hang him on a nail.”

He said that every time I came to spend the night, and I laughed. I said, “Where’s the nail?”

But Granny, who was not always sure herself when Granddaddy was teasing, said, “Granddaddy’s teasing you.” She got up. “You just come with Granny. Nobody’s going to have to hang on a nail around here. Tell everybody goodnight.”

That meant I got to let Hannah kiss me again. I made the rounds to get and give my goodnight hugs:

“Goodnight, Auntie. Goodnight, Granddaddy. Goodnight, Aunt Lizzie. Goodnight, Hannah.”

And Hannah did give me another excellent kiss on the cheek.

I picked up my grip and my book, and Granny and I went up the stairs. We went to the bedroom in the back of the house that had been Ma Feltner’s room in her last years and then my mother’s when she was growing up. It was a small, comfortable room on the south side. The sun shone in through the window in the winter, making a warm print of light on the rug, and often in the summer a breeze would sway the curtains as it blew in through the shade of the old maples in the yard.

Granny turned back the bed for me and plumped the pillow and turned on the lamp on the nightstand. There was a little radio on the nightstand.

“You can listen to the radio if you want to,” Granny said, “but don’t turn it up loud.”

She knew I would like to listen awhile, for Henry and I didn’t have a radio in our room at home.

She said, “Now, you brought your pajamas?”

“Yes, mam.”

“And you’ve got your toothbrush?”

“Yes, mam.”

“Well, take a bath and brush your teeth. I know I can depend on you to do that.”

I said, “Yes, mam, you can.” I had been afraid she might wash my ears herself, just to make sure. She was a gentle, truly good woman whose chief pleasure was in the happiness of other people, but when she went at one of your ears it felt like her finger was going to bore clean through your head and come out the other side.

“Don’t be too long,” she said. “Other people will be wanting to get in there. And don’t use too much water. Now come here and kiss your granny goodnight.”

I gave her a hug and a kiss and she left me. Feeling on my own again and responsible, I got my pajamas and my toothbrush out of my grip and went into the bathroom. I ran some water, but not too much, into the tub, and proceeded in pretty much of a hurry through all the before-bed requirements. I even did a thorough job on my ears, in them and behind them, and I brushed my teeth.

When I was in bed and the lovely feeling of that house and my welcome in it had come over me, I turned the radio on just loud enough to hear and turned out the light.

The radio brought the great world into that dark small room. It was the next-to-last night of the year, and the people on the radio were talking on the theme of time, of the old year that was passing away and the new year that was about to begin. The year of 1943, they said, had been a bloody and a murderous one. Many people had died, many had been hurt. Time and history had passed heavily over our poor world and had left it wounded and grieving. And what of the next year, 1944? Well, we would hope and pray for peace. We would hope and pray that our loved ones would come safely home. That would be our offering to that new year: a prayer for peace. Let the killing stop. Let the blood and the tears cease to flow. Let Uncle Virgil come home and never again have to go away.

The actual year of 1944 would be as bloody, in fact, as the one before and the one after. And in that year, shortly before my tenth birthday, Uncle Andrew, my father’s brother, would be shot and killed, not overseas in the war but here at home. And his began a series of deaths and losses that in the coming years would change the world as I had known it, and would change me: Dick Watson’s, Uncle Virgil’s, Uncle Ernest’s, Grandpa’s. The losses and griefs that are passing always over the world would come to us, breaking like waves upon the family houses. After Dick’s death Aunt Sarah Jane moved to Louisville, never to be heard from again. In a few more years the Brightleafs would be gone. At the Feltner place, Joe Banion would die, and Nettie and Aunt Fanny would move away, like Aunt Sarah Jane, to be near relatives who had gone to the city. And so that year of 1943 was in a sense my last year of innocence, of the illusion of permanence and peace. I was about to enter the time that is told by change, by death and loss, by the absence of the past and its members. By now, of all the people I have been remembering from those days in Port William, I alone am still alive. I am, as Maze Tickburn used to say, the onliest one.

Lying in bed that night, in the midst of my journey alone to my home places, still free of all that was to come, I felt even so the current of time flowing over me and over the house and through all the dark night outside. For a longish while, before sleep finally overtook my thoughts, I would have given a lot to see my mother.

Time is told by death, who doubts it? But time is always halved—for all we know, it is halved—by the eye blink, the synapse, the immeasurable moment of the present. Time is only the past and maybe the future; the present moment, dividing and connecting them, is eternal. The time of the past is there, somewhat, but only somewhat, to be remembered and examined. We believe that the future is there too, for it keeps arriving, though we know nothing about it. But try to stop the present for your patient scrutiny, or to measure its length with your most advanced chronometer. It exists, so far as I can tell, only as a leak in time, through which, if we are quiet enough, eternity falls upon us and makes its claim. And here I am, an old man, traveling as a child among the dead.

We measure time by its deaths, yes, and by its births. For time is told also by life. As some depart, others come. The hand opened in farewell remains open in welcome. I, who once had grandparents and parents, now have children and grandchildren. Like the flowing river that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. And time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love, which is always present. Time, then, is told by love’s losses, and by the coming of love, and by love continuing in gratitude for what is lost. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever, the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying, I think, is not if they have loved and been loved enough, but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given, however much. No one who has gratitude is the onliest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.

I woke to the sound of Granny’s rapping on a pipe in the kitchen to tell Uncle Ernest in the room above that breakfast would be ready before long. She did that every morning, and it was a good sort of telegraph, for the plumbing carried her signal all over the house. It was still dark. Had Granny turned off the radio after I went to sleep? It was silent, and I didn’t remember turning it off. I switched on the light and dressed and ran down to the kitchen.

Though the daylight would not come for a while yet, the night was finished. Auntie and Aunt Lizzie were stirring in their room, Uncle Ernest in his, Hannah in hers. Granddaddy had made his and Granny’s bed and gone to the barn. Granny and Nettie Banion were busy in the kitchen, which was full of the smells of coffee and frying bacon.

“Here he is,” Granny said when I came into the kitchen. “Hungry too, I expect.”

And Nettie turned away from the stove and said, “Good morning to you, Andy Catlett.”

I said, “Hello, Nettie. How’re you?”

She said, “Just fine!”

And Granny said, “Did you wash? You didn’t. Go do it.”

I went and washed my hands and face and even wet my hair and combed it.

Granddaddy soon came in with the milk and went to wash up. And then it wasn’t long until we all were there. All of us sat down, except for Granny and Nettie, who were putting the food on the table. And then Granny sat down, leaving Nettie to pour coffee for the grownups and milk for me, and to see that everybody had enough of everything. There were eggs and bacon and hot biscuits and two kinds of jam. And of course there was no end of talk, for the night seemed to have filled everybody’s mind with new subjects.

When we had finished, Granny and Hannah cleaned the table and started washing the dishes. Nettie fixed breakfast for herself and Joe, and set their places at the table. Joe came in from the barn, and the two of them sat down to eat. I sat on at the table with Nettie and Joe while they ate, for I was glad to see them.

Whereas the hired help out at my Catlett grandparents’ came and went, the Banions had worked for the Feltners since way back. I am not quite up to explaining this. Whether or not the Banions had once been slaves of the Feltners, I don’t know. That is something else I should have asked before it was too late. I know only that the two families had been together at least since the time of Ma and Pa Feltner, the time of Smoke and Cass, who were Joe’s grandparents, and who, if they were not on the place during slavery, had come soon after. And the two families had belonged there together ever since.

Of the two of us, I think my brother Henry was Joe’s favorite. When our whole family would come to visit, Joe’s biggest greeting would be to Henry. He would begin to laugh just at the sight of Henry, who had the look of being ready to “put the cat in the churn,” as Uncle Jack Beechum said.

“Look out, Henry!” Joe would say and put up his fists, and he and Henry would spar a round while everybody laughed.

But Joe was good to me too. Now that I was getting bigger, he would sometimes let me follow him into the woods. He was a squirrel hunter, and on those jaunts he would be much stricter with me than Dick Watson ever was. More than anybody, Joe Banion taught me how to be quiet, and how to look until I saw. When he would turn on me with a peremptory motion of his hand and say “Hersh!” I would hush in mid-word without the further commotion even of shutting my mouth. And when, creeping along silently and seeing, I believed, all there was to see, he would turn to me—“All right. Where’s he at?”—I would feel under tremendous pressure to pick out the squirrel in his stillness among all the deceptions of leaves and shadows.

Seeing Joe had put hunting on my mind and started me into the very jabber from which, in the woods, he would have required me to “hersh.” About as much as I wanted a mule of my own, and much more than I wanted a BB gun, I wanted to have my own .22 rifle. I knew that for a boy of nine going on ten, in my family, this was a wish without hope, but I started telling Joe Banion how careful I would be with my rifle, if I had one. Partly, this was for Granny to overhear and tell my mother.

Joe knew what I was up to, and to egg me on he obliged me by agreeing with me. “Oh, yes!” he said. “Oh, I imagine!”

Joe, who had been up and busy a long time, made short work of a large breakfast, saving his coffee until last to prolong his leisure. With a grace surprising in hands so work-stiffened, he saucered the coffee, blew upon it, and supped it up in savorous whiffs.

And then, the day having established its pattern and its claim upon him, he got up and put on his cap and jacket and gloves. He hunched his shoulders in anticipation of the cold wind. “Airish out,” he said. He complimented the breakfast, “Mighty fine,” and went out.

Daylight had come strong enough now to see out the windows even with the light on in the kitchen. From where I sat at the table, I could look out across the ridges and the wooded hollows on our side of the river and on to the ridgetops and the tiny barns and houses on the far side. The limbs of the trees in the yard were swaying in the wind. After the one sunny day, it was cloudy again, and when Joe and Granddaddy had opened the back door, I had felt the cold. Every time that door had opened and shut again the warmth of the house had felt better.

I went upstairs and made my bed without waiting for Granny to tell me, in the process remembering that I had not made my bed out at Grandma’s. I had not given it a thought since I had got out of it the morning before. And that made me remember to brush my teeth without being told. Out the window of my room I could see the church and the post office and the hotel and some of the storefronts of the town. Port William had been awake and about its business for a long time. Several men were already standing in a row, leaning against Jasper Lathrop’s store, talking. One of Uncle Ernest’s fictions for Henry and me, when we were little, was that the stores in Port William would fall down if several men didn’t lean against them all the time. It still seemed strange and wonderful to me that the night could pass, so great an event of darkness, and there Port William would be again, just as it was before.

I went back down to the living room—the room that Granny always referred to from the kitchen as “in yonder”—and took Ma Feltner’s old green edition of Huckleberry Finn out of the bookcase and sat down on the sofa. I looked at Ma Feltner’s signature on the fly leaf and the date under it, “1886.” I turned through it, looking for the pictures of the river, the greatest river, that bore in its currents the waters of every stream and river I knew. I loved the scenes of boats or rafts on the wide flatness of the water. I read the captions as I went along. And then I got to the one of a forest on the riverbank somewhere way down south, in which a tree in the foreground has its branches all hung with Spanish moss. My mother had explained to me about Spanish moss, and I had looked at the picture so much and thought so much about it that it had become a sort of dream to me. It looked so strange and far away that I still shivered when I looked at it.

I closed the book on that faraway place and sat still to let the familiar house take shape around me again. Presently the clock on the mantel chimed the quarter-hour. Of all the things I loved in that house, I loved that clock maybe the most, for the sound of it signaled the presence of everything else. It played in stately measure a quarter of its tune at a quarter past the hour, half at half past, three-quarters at a quarter till, and the whole again to announce the hour. That tune, when I ring it over in my mind now, calls back into presence the house as it was, all its rooms and furnishings, its sounds and smells.

At the sound of the clock that morning I got up and wandered about the house to see what people were doing. Using a little foreknowledge, I pretty soon found Hannah sitting by herself at a window in the dining room. She had made this her workplace, out of the way of the regular work of the household and yet near enough to keep her available to help when she was needed. She was doing needlepoint, making covers for the seats of chairs that would be in the house that she and Uncle Virgil were going to build and live in when the war would be over and he would come home. She came alone to this task for a little while every day, and I understood, as all the others did, that this was her enactment of her hope. It was a hope doomed to lie in all our minds like a ruined nest, but then it was a hope merely bright that lent its distinction to the love I felt for her.

She looked up and smiled when I came in and spread her work so I could see its nearly completed floral design.

“It’s really pretty,” I said, for it really was.

I sat down and she resumed her work. The window looked out toward the opening of the river valley and the uplands on the far side. Hannah had been born and raised over in that country.

“Can you see your old house from here?” I asked. I didn’t think you could, but I wanted to hear her tell about her girlhood in her grandmother’s decaying old house.

“No,” she said, “you can’t see it from here, but it’s still over there.”

“When you were a girl over there, did you ever think someday you’d be living over here?” I asked because the question seemed to require thinking about. I had begun to be surprised by the extent to which life consists of surprises. I didn’t know but what it consisted mostly of surprises.

“Not an idea in this world,” she said. “I didn’t even know that ‘over here’ was over here.”

“So all this is a surprise?”

“Yep. Every bit of it.”

“Well, do you like it over here better than over there?”

“Some things over there I miss. My grandmother, I miss her. But there are a lot of things over here I like.” She gave me a pat to let me know I was one of the things over here that she liked. “And some things over there I don’t miss.”

She spoke then of her stepmother, Ivy, and of her two mean stepbrothers, Ivy’s boys Elvin and Allen.

Usually I was grateful for Elvin and Allen, who made me feel superior, for I was sure that I would never have been mean to Hannah if I had been her stepbrother. But her mention of their names that morning reminded me of a recent event that I had succeeded in forgetting entirely for the past two days and would just as soon have kept forgotten.

Just before school let out for Christmas, I had had a fight, an actual bodily fight, with a girl. I no longer remember the incidental details, but I am sure that I cannot have been innocent in this matter. I am in fact sure that I had given a grievous insult to my memorable classmate, Agnes Lee Lilly, but I did not know beforehand how grievous an insult it was, nor was I prepared for Agnes Lee’s response.

We boys fought each other with some frequency in those days, during recess or after school, and I had done my share of this. But when boys fought boys, as I was about to learn from Agnes Lee, there were certain commonly respected limits. There were certain things we did not do to one another. For instance, we did not try to kill each other; we were not yet mature enough for that. But when Agnes Lee sought vengeance against me, she did so with the apparent intent to kill. She opened the proceedings without warning by hitting me on the head with her entire armload of schoolbooks. She then flung down the books and went at me with tooth and claw. She hit, bit, scratched, kicked, and pulled hair. I fought back, not because of any difference of opinion I may have had with her, but because I wished to stay alive.

Our teacher, Miss Heartsease, who had witnessed all this from her classroom window at a distance of about a hundred yards, raised the sash and cried out, “Stop that! Stop that! Stop this instant!”

I was glad enough to stop, even at the command of Miss Heartsease. And I was grateful to Agnes Lee for being similarly obedient.

When we had stopped, Miss Heartsease instructed Agnes Lee to go straight home and me to return to the classroom, where she kept me under arrest and under further instruction for a longish while. She deduced, from preceding evidence too freely supplied by me, that I was altogether at fault, having so far lowered myself as to strike a young lady.

She did not need to tell me never to do so again, for I had learned that lesson for myself; the next time I insulted a girl I would have a running start. But Miss Heartsease did tell me at length never to do so again. As she spoke, her eyes were moistly shining with righteous indignation and the satisfaction of fulfilled prophecy. She didn’t allow me to open my mouth in my own defense, and the awfulness of her indictment was itself a punishment.

Well, may Heaven bless her corky old heart, for against my will and her intention she taught me valuable lessons—about, for example, the limits of self-defense.

At that time, however, I did not feel so charitable toward her. Her righteous vehemence and certainty had put me in much uncertainty, for I was fairly assured of my guilt and yet I did not feel guilty. I felt, in fact, somewhat more than adequately punished.

Even so, as I listened to Hannah’s stories of those villains Elvin and Allen, I was fervently supposing that she hadn’t heard about my recent dispute with Agnes Lee, and I was carefully keeping my mouth shut.

Granddaddy had gone down into town after breakfast, I didn’t know what for. But I knew he was on the bank board and was trusted, and people depended on him for things. When he got back to the house, he came on to the dining room door and looked in.

“Come on, son. Time to go to work.”

I knew he wanted me to go with him, and I sort of wanted to, but I knew too that it was a bitter morning outside, and mostly I didn’t want to go. The weather made it lovely to imagine a whole morning snug in the house, listening to the sounds of housekeeping and cooking and the women talking.

“Well,” I said, “I think I’d rather just stay here.”

I have reason to believe that he would not have accepted that reply from my mother or Uncle Virgil when they were young. But I was different. I was his grandson, more my parents’ responsibility than his, and, after all, still a boy.

He just laughed a little to himself and said, “Well. All right.” I heard him go through the house and out the back door.

But it was not long until Granny came in. She said in her gentle way, “Andy, your granddaddy has some work that he needs you to help him with,” and I knew I had to go.

She had a promptitude of goodness that could be just fierce. She knew in an instant when I was dishonest or thoughtless or wrong. Much of my growing up, it seems to me now, was quietly required of me by her. She would correct me—“Listen to Granny. I expected something better from you”—and it would be as if in my mind a pawl had dropped into a notch; there was to be no going back.

I went and got my outdoor things, put them on, and went out the back door. It was cold, and to make things worse a few freezing raindrops were coming down in a slant along the raw wind. I walked through the chicken yard where a few of Granddaddy’s old hens were standing around with their tails drooped, looking miserable. They looked like I felt. I was full of reluctance and embarrassment and shrunken in my clothes from the cold. Where Granddaddy was I had no idea, for I had not asked. I went through the gate on the far end of the chicken yard and into the field behind the barn, listening all the time.

And then I heard Joe Banion speak in the driveway of the barn: “Come up.” And he came out, standing on a hay wagon drawn by his team of mules, old Mary and old Jim. “Whoa-ho!” he said when he saw me. “I reckon you just as well get on.”

“I reckon I just as well,” I said, and I got on.

Joe drove up to the tobacco barn on the highest part of the ridge. When we came even with the front of the barn Joe stopped the team again. “They inside,” he told me. I jumped down and he drove on.

I didn’t know who “they” would be, but when I went through the front door, standing wide open to let in the light, I saw that they were Granddaddy and Burley Coulter.

The Coulters, Burley and his brother, Jarrat, had housed tobacco in that barn, but now they had emptied it. What Granddaddy and Burley were doing that morning was preparing the barn for the lambing that was due to begin in just a few days. Because they had used the barn, this was partly the Coulters’ responsibility, and Burley had come to help. I was still feeling ashamed and a little odd because of my refusal, and so when I had stepped through the door I just stopped.

There was a large rick of baled alfalfa in one corner of the barn, put there to be handy to feed the lambing ewes. Granddaddy and Burley were building a low partition around it to keep the ewes from ruining it before they could eat it. Granddaddy was starting to nail up a board, and Burley was sorting through a stack of old lumber.

The first to notice me was Granddaddy. He said, “Hello, son.”

And then Burley turned to look and said, “Well! If it ain’t Andy!”

It was a moment not possible to forget. Tom Coulter, who not long ago had been killed in the fighting in Italy, was Burley’s nephew. Part of the blood that had been shed in that bad year of 1943 had been Tom Coulter’s. I had not seen Burley since the news of Tom’s death had come. I didn’t have grown-up manners, and I didn’t know what to say. When Burley spoke to me, it was as if he was not just greeting or welcoming me, but receiving me into his tenderness for Tom. It put a lump in my throat. He came over, taking off his right glove, and shook my hand.

He said, “How you making it, old boy?”

I just nodded, afraid if I said “Fine” I would cry.

Granddaddy said, “Andy, pick up the other end of this board, honey.”

I picked it up and held it while he nailed his end. And then he came over and nailed my end. We did the same with the next board. And so I was helping. All through the morning they kept finding ways for me to help. They let me belong there at work with them. They kept me busy. And I experienced a beautiful change that was still new to me then but is old and familiar now. I went from reluctance and dread to interest in what we were doing, and then to pleasure in it. I got warm.

We finished the barrier around the hay rick. We picked up everything that was out of place or in the way. We made the barn neat. Joe returned with a load of straw from the straw stack. And then we bedded the barn, carrying forkloads of straw from the wagon and shaking it out level and deep over the whole floor, replacing the old fragrance of tobacco with the new fragrance of clean straw. Granddaddy had some long panels that would be used, as soon as needed, to portion the barn between the ewes with lambs and those still to lamb. We repaired the panels and propped them against the walls where they would be handy. We unstacked the mangers and lined them up in a row down the center of the driveway. Along one wall we set up the four-by-four-foot lambing pens where the ewes with new lambs would be confined and watched over until the lambs were well-started and strong—“the maternity ward,” Granddaddy called it.

The men were letting me help sometimes even when I could see I was slowing them down. We transformed the barn from a tobacco barn recalling last summer’s crop to a sheep barn expecting next year’s lambs. In our work we could feel the new year coming, the days lengthening, the time of birth and growth returning, and this seemed to bring a happiness to everybody, in spite of the war and people’s griefs and fears. The last thing we did was clean up the stripping room. It would be a sort of hospital, where Granddaddy, when he would be watching in the cold nights, could build a fire and help with a difficult birth, or pen a ewe with weak lambs until the lambs had sucked and were well dried, or keep orphan lambs until they got a good start.

When we were done at last, Granddaddy looked at his watch and then at me. “Well,” he said, “could you eat a little something?”

The whole morning had gone by already, and I had not thought of hunger, but now when I thought of it I was hungry. I said, “I could eat a lot of something.”

We laughed, and Burley said, “His belly thinks his throat’s been cut.”

“Burley,” Granddaddy said, “won’t you come have a bite of dinner with us?”

And Burley said, “Naw, Mat. Thank you. I left some dinner on the stove at home. I better go see about it.”

Joe took the team and wagon back to the feed barn then, and I went with Granddaddy to drive Burley out to his house.

By the time we got back and washed, everybody was in the kitchen. Nettie was finishing up at the stove and Granny and Hannah were putting the food on the table. The smell of it seemed fairly to hollow me out inside. We had sausage and gravy and mashed potatoes, just like at Grandma’s. Granny’s sausage was seasoned differently but was just as good. And we had, besides, hominy and creamed butter beans and, instead of biscuits, hoecake—one already on the table, sliced, another on the griddle—a pitcher of fresh milk, coffee for the grown-ups, and again all the Christmas desserts, and again, for me, ice cream.

“Save room,” Granny said again.

And I said, “I’m going to have plenty of room.”

I had more room even than I thought.

Hannah said, “Do you think he’ll leave us anything to eat tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” Granddaddy said. “We may have to skip a day or two.”

“Granddaddy,” I said, “what are we going to do this afternoon?”

“Oh, not much,” Granddaddy said. “We’ve got things in pretty good shape.”

When we were finished, Joe came in, and he and Nettie sat down to their dinner. I lost track of Granddaddy. He had gone, I imagine, to look at his ewes, as he had done the first thing that morning and would again before dark.

“Andy,” Granny said, rewarding me now, “your book is still in yonder on the sofa. Why don’t you go in there a while?”

I felt wonderfully at peace. Except for that little slipup in the morning, I had been good. I seemed to have got back safely within the approval of everybody. In fact, I had been pretty good going on three days. School seemed hardly rememberable. The difficulty of being good at home and at school both at once seemed far away.

I picked up the old copy of Huckleberry Finn and lay down on the sofa. And then I truly fell under the influence of peace and warmth and my morning’s work and a full stomach. I was asleep before I could open the book.

I slept soundly and long, dreamlessly except I dreamed I was there asleep. And then my eyes opened. That, it seemed, was what woke me. Otherwise, I did not move. I lay there a long time without moving. My body was a still, comfortable place where I lay asleep. The house too was still. I could hear the quiet in every one of its rooms. It was breathing in a sort of waking sleep, like mine.

I could not move until the quiet ended. And then the clock on the mantel chimed the half-hour. The quiet returned, as if at the final “dong” time had stopped.

I got up. Walking so as not to make a sound, I went back to the kitchen. Granny was sitting by one of the windows with her sewing basket and button box and a heap of Granddaddy’s and Uncle Ernest’s work shirts beside her on the table. She was patching torn places and replacing buttons, making the shirts last. She too was not making a sound. She was under the spell of her own quietness in the quiet house, and was enjoying being alone.

When I came in, she looked up and smiled. “Well, old sleepyhead, are you awake?”

I came over to stand beside her where I could watch her. “I’m awake,” I said. We were talking quietly so that the greater quiet of the house and the afternoon stayed intact around us. “Where is everybody?”

“Auntie and Aunt Lizzie have gone visiting. Hannah took them in the car.”

I stood and watched her for a while. She was putting on a patch, stabbing the needle in, helping it with her thimble, and drawing it out, all in one fluent motion that she repeated again and again rapidly. I knew her mastery at her work, for in all my own attempts at sewing my motions were awkward and slow, my stitches unlike and irregular.

“I don’t know how you do that,” I said.

“I don’t either,” she said. “I forgot how to do this a long time ago. I just do it.”

The patch, finished, looked prettier to me than the cloth that was unpatched. She whipped in a knot and cut the thread, and then she held up the shirt and looked it over.

I said, “Where’s Granddaddy?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was getting ready to rethread her needle. “But if I wanted to find him, I know where I’d go look.”

“Where?”

“Well, you know that little room in Jasper’s store that he used for an office?”

“Yes, mam.”

“That’s where I’d look.”

When I was out of the house, standing on the walk in front, the quiet seemed still to be unbroken. I had come out of a smaller quiet into the larger one that contained it. The wind had laid. Every tree was standing still. The overcast had thinned, and under it the light had brightened. Down in town the road was empty. There was not a soul in sight. The fronts of all the buildings looked permanently shut.

In the other direction, out toward the river valley, the country was as quiet, as still, as the town. One trance held everything. Under the gray sky, the light was strong. Every detail, every fencepost and tree, every door and window in every building, was steady and clear, luminous, as if the things of the earth had absorbed the light of the sky. On the farthest ridge, this side of the valley, I could see Uncle Virgil’s cattle lying down. The whole country seemed to be meditating on itself, as if consciously submitted to whatever was to come. I remembered it was New Year’s Eve. It was only another day, though already a little longer than yesterday, but I felt as if a great page was about to turn.

Suspended in that rapt light at the edge of time, so that my footfalls made no sound, I crossed the road and went down to Jasper Lathrop’s store. In spite of Granny’s assurance, I was a little surprised when the latch gave and the door opened. I went in and shut the door as carefully as I had opened it.

And then I had to stop and look. I had not been in there since Jasper got his call and went off to the army. I had not, I think, even looked in the windows. I remembered it fully stocked with groceries and hardware, all the varied merchandise of a general store in those days, and occupied by shoppers and loafers and Jasper himself. Now it was empty. Completely empty. Every shelf and bin and counter was as bare of goods as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. The store contained only its share of the surrounding stillness, and the light starkly shaped and shadowed by the deserted furnishings.

From the back, presently, came the sound of a voice saying something too quietly for me to understand. The voice, like Granny’s and mine a while ago in the kitchen, spoke as if under a spell. After it spoke the quiet remained.

With the same strict observance I walked back one of the aisles of the large room toward the smaller room in the back.

I heard another voice and then another one, quiet as before.

I felt I should knock and I did, lightly.

“Come in,” one of the voices said, only a little louder. The door was not even latched. I pushed and it opened.

They were sitting around Jasper’s meat block, playing rummy: Granddaddy, Frank Lathrop who was Jasper’s father, Grover Gibbs, Burley Coulter, Jayber Crow. When I opened the door they greeted me with nods, smiles, lifted hands.

“Come in, Andy,” Jayber said.

There were empty chairs here and there, and so evidently the game sometimes had onlookers or more players. I stepped in, shut the door, and sat down in the nearest chair. The quiet went on. The players were concentrating on their game and took no more notice of me.

They had a good coal fire going in the stove, and the room was warm. It was full of tobacco smoke, which hazed the cold light flowing in from the two westward windows. At the end of the room opposite the stove was a roll-top desk with its top shut. Above the desk, lined up, were several boxes with labels, and a radio, turned on but hardly audible. Tacked to the wall by the door was a large sheet of brown paper with maybe a dozen names written across the top and under each name a column of figures. Years later, when I had grown old enough to wonder and to ask, Jayber told me that they never declared a winner, never totaled the scores, but just let the numbers accumulate on that brown sheet until the war ended, when they ceased to pay it any mind. Jayber guessed that when Jasper came home and re-started his business he must have wadded up the scores and burnt them in the stove.

Out the windows the lot behind the store was scrawled over with dead weed stalks. More or less in the middle of it was a bunch of old wooden crates, boxes, baskets, and such, all cluttered together in a pile. Drawing a straight edge to that zone of neglect was a woven wire fence, and beyond that a large pasture that rose gently up to a barn on the horizon. A flock of sheep were lying at rest far up the slope on the dormant grass.

It was a comfortable place. I made myself at home. The cardplayers played on, intent upon their game, saying almost nothing. Only now and again somebody would mutter under the silence, “Well, I was wondering who had that ace” or “I can give that trey a good home.” I watched not just them but everything. I was as wide awake as when I had drunk that coffee two days ago, except now I was quiet. I sat without moving.

The next evening Granddaddy would go with me to catch the bus on its daily trip to Hargrave, and I would complete my trip, alone as I had started, back to our house in the new year. It was going to be a year that would teach me something about loss that I had not learned in all the years before: It could happen to me. But there in that little room at the end of the old year, I was already learning something that I have never stopped learning and will never learn completely.

As I watched, it came to me that they were waiting: Granddaddy and Frank Lathrop, each with a son in the army; Grover Gibbs, whose son, Billy, was in the air force; Burley Coulter, whose nephews, Tom and Nathan, had gone off to the army, and who now could hope that Nathan only might return; Jayber Crow, whose calling seems to have been to wait with the others. They were suffering and enduring and waiting, waiting together, joined in their unending game, submitted as the countryside around them was submitted. We had come into the silence that is deeper than any other—the silence of what is yet to come, the silence of one who is waiting for what is yet to come.

And now, as often before, I am reminded how grateful I am to have been there, in that time, with these I have remembered. I was there with them; they remain here with me. For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.

Drouth (1944)

EARLY IN my childhood when the adult world and sometimes my own experience easily assumed the bright timelessness of myth, I overheard my father’s friend Charlie Hardy telling about the drouth of 1908. I liked hearing the grownups talk, and when I wanted to I could be quiet. By being more or less unnoticeable, I heard a lot. Some of the adult conversations I listened to ended with a question: “How long have you been here, Andy?”

Charlie Hardy, anyhow, grew up on a rough little farm on Bird’s Branch. Charlie, as he said, “came up hard,” though that phrase, by now, has lost much of the meaning it still would have had in the early 1940s. At the time of Charlie’s boyhood, except for the railroad and the little packets that still carried passengers and freight up and down the river, there were no machines in the country around Port William, no electricity, no “modern conveniences” or not many. Now, when electricity, indoor plumbing, and many personal machines have become normal, people generally assume that a hundred years ago life was “hard” for almost everybody, though few still have the experience needed for a just comparison. It is perhaps impossible for a person living unhappily with a flush toilet to imagine a person living happily without one.

Like every child of his time and in his circumstances, Charlie grew up working. One of his jobs was to carry water for the household from a spring at the bottom of the hill. It was a good spring, with a reputation for never going dry. It was known as the Hardy Spring, and people spoke of its “deep vein,” and of its fine-tasting water that ran cool through the hot weather. It didn’t go dry in 1908, but it came close. In 1908 Charlie was big enough to carry two ten-quart buckets of water from the spring to the house. He made many trips.

In tolerable weather the spring was a good place to go. The water issued from a cleft in the ledgerock down near the creek. The place was always in deep shade. The spring itself and the little basin where the water collected had been enclosed with a rock wall and roof, and fitted with a door, to keep the livestock out. The water striders and the round-and-about bugs conducted their daily business in the pools downstream, and the shikepokes came and fished. But for Charlie, in the drouth of 1908, it became a place of suffering. He would come down with his buckets, dip one full from the basin, and then wait a long time for the basin to fill again so that he could dip the second.

The drouth, the withering foliage, the heat, and the diminished flow of the spring filled Charlie with misery, and his misery was made worse by his longing for rain. Until it finally rained again, something fundamental seemed to have gone wrong with the world. In the secrecy of his thoughts, after the way of boys, he mourned and he was afraid.

Noticing his misery, his father gave him an instruction that Charlie always remembered when he needed to. “You think it’s awful. And it is. But I’ll tell you something. You can’t believe it now, but times will come when this won’t be on your mind. You won’t think of it.”

And that, Charlie said, was true. There had been times when he had not thought of it.

But hearing him tell about it put it on my mind. I thought about it. And so when the first drouth of my own experience and memory came to our part of the country during the war year of 1944, I already knew one thing about it: It was not the first.

In addition to the drouth and the war, and the absence of my Uncle Virgil, my mother’s brother, who had gone off to fight, the summer of 1944 was the summer of the death of my namesake and hero, Uncle Andrew, my father’s brother. For me, it was a summer of need—of more need, probably, than I was capable of recognizing or feeling. That one may be grieved and in need and all the while living one’s life, often enough with interest and even pleasure, was an ordinary oddity far beyond my years and understanding. Grief, great as it might be, did not consume all the world, but now, for me, it had taken its place among the world’s other things.

I was staying that summer with my father’s parents, Dorie and Marce Catlett. As the days without rain accumulated until the word “drouth” took its place in our daily vocabulary, I learned of two other drouths that were still new in the memory of my elders. One had come in 1930. Another, a worse one, had come in my own lifetime, in 1936 when I was two years old, though I did not remember it.

A drouth is an event of the atmosphere of the earth. It is also an event of the atmosphere of the human mind, which suffers a disturbance that affects everything. It affects the meanings of memory and history. It affects one’s sense of the future. Everybody on the place old enough to remember the 1930s regarded our present drouth with a fearful respect that could be described as primeval: It had been felt by country people since the beginning of time. It was not qualified by youth or innocence. I felt it, I think, as fully as my elders, for I had quickly caught their memories and their awe.

Grandpa Catlett showed me a rewired place in the line fence where in 1936 a gap had been cut, allowing the neighbors to drive their cows to our spring that had kept flowing. He and his black hired hand Dick Watson remembered how they and others had hauled water to the livestock in barrels dipped full one bucket at a time. They told of people who drove their cattle miles through the heat to drink at the river, and the cattle would be as thirsty when they got home as they had been when they left. Who could not see the misery of that? And how, having seen it, could you keep it from filling your mind?

We looked at the parching ground and at the drying creek whose pools got smaller every day, we suffered the heat, and we watched the sky. We expected, or at least I did, the end of the world. I was much under the influence, in those days, of Grandma Catlett and Dick Watson’s wife, Aunt Sarah Jane, to whom about equally the end of the world was a scheduled event, though nobody knew the schedule. The end of the world was not as exactly predictable but was just as expectable as Christmas or the Fourth of July. And of course they were right.

Grandpa, I think, did not give much thought to the end of the world. It was the continuance of the world that worried him. Of the theologies then available on the place, Grandpa’s was probably the simplest: Old Marster is in charge, and we are not; Old Marster knows, and we don’t. But Grandma had pondered a good deal about the end of the world. It was fearful to her, and in times of unusual weather she dwelt upon it. If, for instance, there would come a spell of cold weather in late spring, she would say to me, perhaps wishing not to, to spare me, but unable to contain her thought, “Oh, Andy, they speak of a time when we’ll not know the summer from the winter but by the budding of the trees.”

I would sit with her in a bay of one of the upstairs rooms whose windows looked out to the north. She would have her lap full of sewing or mending, we would talk, and we would watch the clouds that passed, stately and aloof, in their procession from west to east. According to her, they followed the great river to the north of us, leaving us dry. Around here, you still sometimes hear that thought—“The rain follows the river,” meaning the Ohio—but with the support, I think, of little evidence.

In the minds of us humans, weather draws superstition as molasses draws flies. It draws also a sort of supernatural mystification that is a cut or two above superstition. Aunt Sarah Jane was full of the spaciousness, and the enchantment too, of mystery, and in the network of attractions that ruled me in those days I would be drawn down to listen to her in the two-room house where she and Dick lived at the corner of the woods. Like Grandma, Aunt Sarah Jane was thoughtful of the end of the world. But whereas Grandma regarded it with some deep disturbance of temporality and dread, Aunt Sarah Jane, who held it sufficiently in fear, also looked upon it with some approval as the time when justice would rain down at last. I think she anticipated with a certain pleasure the look on some people’s faces when suddenly they would hear behind them the “great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.”

So to Aunt Sarah Jane, the weather and all things of the realm of the sky were heavy with portent. From the sky, news of eternity irrupted into the daily world. To her, the events of the sky—rain, no-rain, clouds, rainbows, winds, the phases and attitudes of the moon—all were signs. The significance of the signs might not be discernable then or ever, but they were never merely what they appeared to be. They were signs.

Aunt Sarah Jane had a whole curriculum of fascinating subjects. She was precisely a spellbinder. I listened to her, as Grandpa would sometimes say, with all the ears I had. And yet her spells had their limits. Her unrelenting sense of the convergences of worlds, of the hereafter with the here, finally would so unsteady me that I would have to leave and walk the solid footpath back up to the barn.

For comfort in that season of my first knowledge of loss and cosmic dread, I spent as much time as I could with Dick Watson. If he loved me as I loved him, I was indeed blessed, but of course I will never know. He seemed ancient to me then, ancient perhaps in knowledge, though now I believe that he was younger than Grandma, and that by now I have outlived him in years.

In my hearing at least Dick did not pay much attention to the great mysteries and mystifications, nor was he much preoccupied with doubts. He did not dwell with regret upon the past. He looked forward to small pleasures and relished them when they came. He lived, he pleased himself as he was able, he endured. Small amusements lasted him a long time. He had a cheerful heart and a sympathetic one. I think he suffered the drouth as the plants and animals suffered it. He believed that it finally would rain, for finally it always had, but he did not know when.

With Dick too I watched the sky, watched the clouds pass over us one after another without shedding a single drop of rain, watched the signs. Dick’s weather signs, unlike Aunt Sarah Jane’s, were merely practical, and he observed them with appropriate humor. If the sun rose red in the morning, if it set behind clouds, if the chickens lay on their sides to sun their feet, if the raincrow called, all those were signs of rain. And all those signs were subject to a higher truth that even Dick spoke with a certain solemnity but also with a certain amusement: “All signs fail in a dry time.” For the sun did rise hot and red in the morning, it set behind clouds, the chickens sunned their feet, the raincrow called, and it did not rain. Dick said, “All signs fail in a dry time, buddy,” and he apparently felt some reassurance in the certainty of that.

There was work to be done every day. Sometimes I would walk to the back of the place to find my friend Fred Brightleaf, or he would come to find me, and we would slip away to the pond for a swim. But often I would be at work with Grandpa and Dick, hoping to find something manly that a boy could do, often failing, sometimes having to be tolerated as I blundered at men’s work while shirking the boy’s jobs that would actually have been useful, sometimes needing to be warned out of the way, but always glad to be at large in the great open world that, even dry, was better than the house and far, far better than school.

When quitting time came and we drove the mules to the barn, and Dick had unharnessed and watered and fed them, the three of us would sometimes rest for a while together, sitting on upturned five-gallon buckets in the big doorway of the barn, watching the evening changes in the sky. We watched it not rain. Sometimes we spoke hardly a word. Sometimes, the drouth weighing on his mind, Grandpa would speak of previous dry times, and Dick would confirm him, speaking his own memories. Dick would sit perfectly still, relishing his stillness as rest came upon him. Grandpa too sat still, gazing out under the brim of his straw hat, one hand on his cane, the fingers of the other worrying at the sore on his shin that would not heal.

He had fallen out of the barn loft several years before, and so had by his carelessness, Grandma said, made the wound. It would not heal perhaps because of his absent-minded prodding and picking, perhaps because otherwise he ignored it, forgetting or refusing to use the special soap and salve that Grandma had sent off for. He spoke of the hardships of other years, never exclaiming, never lamenting, allowing the remembered and uttered facts simply to stand on their own. Of all my elders, his sense of difficulty was probably the keenest. It called forth his memories and established the tone of his voice. To live from the farm and preserve it had been difficult. To stay solvent at the bank had been difficult. His experience was summed in a single sentence that he repeated often: “I know what a man can do in a day.” At times this bore the sense of tragedy, for what a man can do in the little light of a day, with his little knowledge, with his little strength, is rarely enough. But sometimes he spoke it in exultation: What a good man, a good hand, could do in a good day could sometimes be a wonder.

But I was happiest, I think, when Dick and I would be out somewhere together, just us two. Maybe we would go on an errand to Port William or a neighboring farm, Dick riding Grandpa’s saddle mare Rose and I on Beauty the pony, or we would go on foot to salt the steers or clean the spring. At such times we found much to talk about.

The great theme of our conversation, in that summer and others, was an event that Dick and his people called “The Big Day.” When Dick and I talked about it, I too called it The Big Day. The Big Day came every year on a Saturday in August. It was attended by the black people in Hargrave and from the farms for miles around. For the ones who had moved to the northern cities, it was a homecoming. It was for its participants the greatest, grandest event of the year. On that day the black people of our part of the country were the absolute center of their own attention. The white people, if they wished, might observe the public display, but they were observers merely. They observed, moreover, from a polite distance.

The Big Day began with a parade through Hargrave, led by the only marching band to be heard there all year. The men of the lodge marched in white gloves, badges, and sashes, carrying a variety of medieval weapons. The women of the churches marched in white dresses, badges, and sashes. The parade ended at the tree-shaded lawn of a grand old farmhouse just beyond the outskirts of town, where for the rest of the day there would be eating and drinking and talking. There would be many excellent things to eat, and Dick recited again and again the list of them. There would be joyful greetings, mourning over the newly departed, many memories retold and renewed. And then that night, at the Lodge Hall, the marching band would transform itself into a dance band, and there would be dancing.

Dick Watson looked forward to The Big Day with all his mind and heart. He had to talk about it, and because I often was the only available listener he talked about it to me. Probably he could not have found a better listener, for I identified utterly with him in his anticipation. I fully shared his enthusiasm. I held excitedly to every word he said about it, and my ears were not filled with hearing. But this realizable reality of Dick’s was for me only a vision, a sort of inward ritual of the intensest comradeship and love. Though we were living in the great tremor of the drouth and its betokening of the end of time, we also foresaw the coming of this merely local event that caused Dick’s mind, and therefore my own, to tremble with a presentiment of joy. For a while I took part in these conversations about The Big Day as if I would be going to it myself, hand-in-hand with Dick, for as we tramped about together we often would be holding hands. And then as we approached the great event, we would arrive finally, inevitably, at the racial division. Dick would be going without me. He would be part of it, party to the joy of it, and I would not.

I still feel the disappointment and sorrow of that parting of ways, and I feel the strangeness of it. Thanks to Grandma Catlett and Aunt Sarah Jane, the end of the world was not strange to me. I did not greatly like the thought, but I knew then, as I know now, that some day will be the last. But categorical divisions among people still seem to me to be strange. I understand them, I believe, and I have felt their attraction. But it matters to me that as a small boy in Kentucky sixty-odd years ago I could have had a vision in which for a while the racial difference simply disappeared. I suppose—though I suppose I should say I may be wrong—that such divisions are best mended outdoors, unobserved by crowds, and in some mutuality of needs, if only those of speaker and listener. I have the feeling that all this means and matters more than I can understand. I do understand now, having learned well my ingrained distaste for great public events, that if I had been allowed to attend The Big Day I would have enjoyed it less in fact than I had supposed.

We talked also, Dick and I, of foxes and fox hounds, of horses and mules, and of the nature of things. I remember a day when, walking along the road, our attention was captured by the humming of the telephone wires. We stopped and stood still, the better to listen. The humming, we thought, was the sound of people’s voices passing through the wires. To get through the wires, voices had to become hums, and then mysterious small machines inside the telephones had the power to change the hums back into voices. This may have been Dick’s explanation, but I myself was a dauntless scientific theorist in those days. It seems lovely to me now that we could speak freely of mysteries of all kinds, not burdened in the least either by doubts or facts. We imagined the world as we were passing through it. We saw it all in pictures and visions.

I was with Dick, standing in the barn lot, watching and listening, when at last the rain came. Grandpa was sitting by himself on his bucket in the barn door, but Dick and I had got up because there was a change in the sky and a change in the air, and we could no longer sit still. All across the south and the west a great smooth-looking cloud was rising and darkening over the horizon of ridgelines and woodlands and open fields. Presently we could hear, far and faint, the thunder grumbling in the cloud, as though it was possessed and inhabited by some great living creature. And then we could see the lightning playing in it, and the thunder grew louder.

“It’s raining at Goforth right now,” Dick said.

We watched and listened again, and then a freshening wind reached us, smelling of rain.

“It’s raining on Port William now,” Dick said. “It’s about to the graveyard.”

And then the Alpha and Omega of all the world seemed to break upon us from directly overhead. BLAM! Thunder and lightning came all at once—and we ran, scared and laughing, into the barn. It came again, that simultaneous lightning and thunder, and what appeared to be a large round ball of electrical fire burst in the lot, just outside the barn door. Beauty the pony, who had been standing tied in the driveway, made a violent lunge and snorted as if to expel something terrible from her nostrils.

“She breathed that lightning,” Grandpa said.

I remember how solemnly he said that, and how inadequate it sounded. Also palpably inadequate were Dick’s and my efforts, later, to discuss the ball of fire. For a minute there, reality had got way ahead of us. We couldn’t even decide what color the fire had been. We thought maybe it had been all colors, all at the same time.

With that second thunderclap, anyhow, the rain was suddenly with us, falling in spouts and sheets as if it had never started and would never stop. None of us said another word. Dick and I had returned to our own buckets. We sat with Grandpa in a row there in the doorway and watched.

Before too long the rain slacked off. Dick went to get the milk buckets, and I got on the pony and went to bring in the cows. Soon enough we had done the night work, Grandpa and I had washed at the washstand on the back porch and come in to our places at the supper table. It was getting dark. We were then on what we would come to call “the old time,” and night came two hours earlier than it does now.

The rain, the steady dizz-dozzle, had not stopped. It had set in for the night. The storm having deprived us of electricity, we ate by the light of an oil lamp and listened through the open door to the fall of the rain on the back porch roof. We said nothing. It was as though we were being told something that we had forever longed to hear.

Finally, raising his head to listen, Grandpa said, “This breaks the drouth.”

It was the voice of a sufferer. I didn’t know much, but I knew that. And in my mind or heart, or whatever the affected organ was, I felt the breaking of the drouths of 1936, 1930, 1908, and all the other drouths backward and forward to both ends of time.

Stand By Me (1921–1944)

WHEN JARRAT married Lettie in 1921 and bought the little place across the draw from our home place and started to paying for it, in that time that was already hard, years before the Depression, he had a life ahead of him, it seemed like, that was a lot different from the life he in fact was going to live. Jarrat was my brother, four years older than me, and I reckon I knew him as well as anybody did, which is not to say that what I knew was equal to what I didn’t know.

But as long as Lettie lived, Jarrat was a happy man. As far as I could see, not that I was trying to see or in those days cared much, he and Lettie made a good couple. They were a pretty couple, I’ll say that, before this world and its trouble had marked them. And they laid into the work together, going early and late, scraping and saving and paying on their debt.

Tom was born the next year after they married, Nathan two years later. And it seemed that Tom hadn’t hardly begun to walk about on his own until Nathan was coming along in his tracks, just a step or two behind. They had pretty much the run of the world, Lettie and Jarrat being too busy for much in the way of parental supervision, at least between meals.

The hollow that lays between the two places, that most people call Coulter Branch, before long was crisscrossed with boy-paths that went back and forth like shoestrings between the boys’ house on one ridge and the old house on the other where I lived with Mam and Pap. The boys lived at both houses, you might as well say. They’d drop down through the pasture and into the woods on one side, and down through the woods to the branch, and then up through the woods and the pasture on the other side, and they’d be in another place with a different house and kitchen and something different to eat. They had maybe half a dozen paths they’d worn across there, and all of them had names: the Dead Tree Path, I remember, and the Spring Path and the Rock Fence Path.

And then, right in the midst of things going on the way they ought to have gone on forever, Lettie got sick and began to waste away. It was as serious as it could be, we could see that. And then instead of belonging just to Jarrat to pay attention to, she began to belong to all of us. Dr. Markman was doing all he could for her, and then Mam and the other women around were cooking things to take to her and helping with her housework, and us others were hoping or praying or whatever we did, trying to help her to live really just by wishing for her to. And then, without waiting for us to get ready, she died, and the boys all of a sudden, instead of belonging just to her and Jarrat, belonged to us all. Nathan was five years old, and Tom was seven.

And I was one of the ones that they belonged to. They belonged to me because I belonged to them. They thought so, and that made it so. The morning of their mother’s funeral, to get them moved and out of the house before more sadness could take place, I put a team to the wagon and drove around the head of the hollow to get them. Mam had packed up their clothes and everything that was theirs. We loaded it all and them too onto the wagon, and I brought them home to the old house.

Jarrat wasn’t going to be able to take care of them and farm too, and they didn’t need to be over there in that loneliness with him. But Pap and Mam were getting on in years then. Pap, just by the nature of him, wasn’t going to be a lot of help. And Mam, I could see, had her doubts.

Finally she just out with it. “Burley, I can be a grandmother, but I don’t know if I can be a mother again or not. You’re going to have to help me.”

She had her doubts about that too. But it didn’t prove too hard to bring about. I belonged to them because they needed me. From the time I brought them home with me, they stuck to me like burrs. A lot of the time we were a regular procession—me in front, and then Tom in my tracks just as close as he could get, and then Nathan in Tom’s the same way. The year Lettie died I was thirty-four years old, still a young man in my thoughts and all, and I had places I needed to go by myself. But for a long time getting away from those boys was a job. I’d have to hide and slip away or bribe them to let me go or wait till they were asleep. When I wanted to hunt or fish the best way to be free of them was just to take them with me. By the time they got big enough to go on their own, we had traveled a many a mile together, day and night, after the hounds, and had spent a many an hour on the river.

The grass and weeds overgrew the paths across the hollow. The boys somehow knew better than to go over there where their mother was gone and their daddy was living by himself. It took them a while to go back there even with me.

Jarrat did a fair job of batching. He kept the house clean, and he didn’t change anything. He sort of religiously kept everything the way Lettie had fixed it. But as time went on, things changed in spite of him. He got busy and forgot to water the potted plants, and they died. And then gradually the other little things that had made it a woman’s house wore out or got lost or broke. Finally it took on the bare, accidental look of the house of a man who would rather be outdoors, and then only Jarrat’s thoughts and memories were there to remind him of Lettie.

Or so I guess. As I say, there was a lot about Jarrat that nobody in this world was ever going to know. I was worrying about him, which I hadn’t ever done before, and I was going to worry about him for the rest of his life. I began to feel a little guilty about him too. I had a lady friend, and by and by we began to come to an understanding. When I wanted company, I had friends. When I didn’t want company, I had the woods and the creeks and the river. I had a good johnboat for fishing, and always a good hound or two or three.

Jarrat didn’t have any of those things, not that he wanted them. In his dealings with other people he was strictly honest, I was always proud of him for that, and he was friendly enough. But he didn’t deal with other people except when he had to. He was freer than you might have thought with acts of kindness when he knew somebody needed help. But he didn’t want kindness for himself, though of course he needed it. He didn’t want to be caught needing it.

After Lettie died, he wasn’t the man he was before. He got like an old terrapin. He might come out of his shell now and again to say something beyond what the day’s work required: “Hello,” maybe, or he would compliment the weather. But if you got too close, he’d draw in again. Only sometimes, when he thought he was by himself, you’d catch him standing still, gazing nowhere.

What I know for sure he had in his life were sorrow, stubbornness, silence, and work. Work was his consolation, surely, just because it was always there to do and because he was so good at it. He had, I reckon, a gift for it. He loved the problems and the difficulties. He never hesitated about what to do. He never mislaid a lick. And half of his gift, if that was what it was, was endurance. He was swift and tough. When you tied in with him for a day’s work, you had better have your ass in gear. Work was a fever with him. Anybody loved it as much as he did didn’t need to fish.

So when Tom and Nathan needed him the most, their daddy didn’t have much to offer. He wanted them around, he would watch over them when they were with us at work, he would correct and caution them when they needed it, but how could he console them when he couldn’t console himself?

They were just little old boys. They needed their mother, was who they needed. But they didn’t have her, and so they needed me. Sometimes I’d find one or the other of them off somewhere by himself, all sorrowful and little and lost, and there’d be nothing to do but try to mother him, just pick him up and hold him tight and carry him around a while. Their daddy couldn’t do it, and it was up to me.

I would make them laugh. It usually wasn’t too hard. Nathan thought I was the funniest thing on record anyhow, and sometimes he would laugh at me even when I was serious. But I would sing,

Turkey in the straw settin’ on a log

All pooched out like a big bullfrog.

Poked him in the ass with a number nine wire

And down he went like an old flat tire.

I would sing,

Stuck my toe in a woodpecker hole,

In a woodpecker hole, in a woodpecker hole.

Woodpecker he said, “Damn your soul,

Take it out, take it out, take it out!”

I would sing one of them or some other one, and dance a few steps, raising a dust, and Nathan would get so tickled he couldn’t stand up. Tom would try to hold his dignity, like an older brother, but he would be ready to bust. All you had to do was poke him in the short ribs, and down he would go too.

What raising they got, they got mainly from their grandma and me. It was ours to do if anybody was going to do it, and somehow we got them raised.

To spare Grandma, and when they were out of school, we kept the boys at work with us. That way they learned to work. They played at it, and while they were playing at it they were doing it. And they were helping too. We generally had a use for them, and so from that time on they knew we needed them, and they were proud to be helping us to make a living.

Jarrat nor Pap wouldn’t have paid them anything. Jarrat said they were working for themselves, if they worked. And Pap, poking them in the ribs to see if they would argue, and they did, said they ate more than they were worth. But I paid them ten cents a day, adjusted to the time they actually worked. Sometimes they’d get three cents, sometimes seven. I’d figure up and pay off every Saturday. One time when I paid him all in pennies, Nathan said, “Haven’t you got any of them big white ones?”

They worked us too. They didn’t have minds for nothing. Sometimes, if the notion hit them, they’d fartle around and pick at each other and get in the way until their daddy or grandpa would run them off. “Get the hell out of here! Go to the house!”

But they wouldn’t go to the house. They’d slip away into the woods, or go to Port William or down to the river. And since they were careful to get back to the house by dinnertime or suppertime, nobody would ask where they’d been. Unless they got in trouble, which they sometimes did.

I worried about them. I’d say, “Boys, go to the river if you have to, but don’t go in it.” Or I’d say, “Stay out of that damned river, now. We ain’t got time to go to your funeral.”

But of course they did go in the river. They were swimming, I think, from frost to frost, just like I would have at their age. Just like I in fact did at their age.

Or they would wander over to Big Ellis and Annie May’s, which was the one place they could be sure of being spoiled. Big would never be busy at any job he wouldn’t be happy to quit if company came. Annie May always had cookies in a jar or a pie or cold biscuits and jam to feed them when they showed up, and so they showed up pretty often.

Annie May and Big weren’t scared of much of anything except lightning. They could be careless and fearless when they ought to have been scared. They would drive to Hargrave in their old car, calm as dead people, while Big drove all over the road and looked in every direction but ahead. But let a thunderstorm come up and they’d quiver like gun-shy dogs. They’d get into the bed then, because they slept on a feather-tick and they believed lightning wouldn’t strike a bird.

I went in over there one day just ahead of a big black storm, and there were Big and Annie May and Tom and Nathan all four piled up in the bed together, all four smoking cigarettes to calm their fear.

One day when we were in the woods we saw a big owl, and I pointed out how an owl can turn his head square around to look at you. I said if you came upon an owl sitting, for instance, on a tree stump, you could walk round and round him, and he would turn his head round and round to watch you, until finally he would twist his neck in two and his head would fall off. I said that was the way we killed owls all the time when I was a boy.

I told them just about any bird would let you catch him if you crept up and put a little salt on his tail.

“Why?”

“He just will.”

“But why will he?”

“You’ll have to ask somebody smarter than me.”

I told them how when I was a boy, back in the olden times, you could hear the wangdoodles of a night, squalling and screeching and fighting way off in the woods.

“Do they still do that?”

“Naw, you don’t hear ’em so much anymore.”

At first they believed everything I said, and then they didn’t believe anything I said, and then they believed some of the things I said. That was the best of their education right there, and they got it from me.

When they were little, you could always see right through Nathan. He didn’t have any more false faces than a glass of water. Tom you couldn’t always tell about. Maybe because Nathan was coming along so close behind him, Tom needed to keep some things to himself. It did him good to think he knew some things you didn’t know. He wanted to call his life his own. He wasn’t dishonest. If you could get him to look straight at you, then you had him.

As long as they were little, there would be times when they would be needing their mother, and who would be in the gap but only me? One or the other or both of them would be sitting close to me in the evening while it was getting dark, snuggled up like chickens to the old hen, and I would be doing all I could, and falling short. They changed me. Before, I was oftentimes just on the loose, carefree as a dog fox, head as empty as a gourd. Afterwards, it seemed like my heart was bigger inside than outside.

We got them grown up to where they weren’t needy little boys anymore. They were still boys. They were going to be boys a while yet, but they were feeling their strength. They were beginning to find in their selves what before they had needed from us. Tom was maybe a little slower at it than he might have been, Nathan a little faster; Nathan was coming behind and was in a hurry.

It was a wonderful thing to watch that Tom grow up. For a while there, after he was getting to be really useful, he was still an awkward, kind of weedy, mind-wandery boy who needed some watching. To him, young as he was, it must have seemed he stayed that way a long time. But before long, as it seemed to me, he had gathered his forces together, body and mind. He got to be some account on his own. He could see what needed to be done, and go ahead and do it. He got graceful, and he was a good-looking boy too.

And then, the year he was sixteen, a little edge crept up between him and his daddy. It wasn’t very much in the open at first, wasn’t admitted really, but there it was. I thought, “Uh-oh,” for I hated to see it, and I knew there wasn’t much to be done about it. Tom was feeling his strength, he was coming in to his own, and Jarrat that year was forty-seven years old. When he looked at Tom he got the message—from where he was, the only way was down—and he didn’t like it.

Well, one afternoon when we were well along in the tobacco cutting, Tom took it in his head he was going to try the old man. Jarrat was cutting in the lead, as he was used to doing, and Tom got into the next row and lit out after him. He stayed with him too, for a while. He put the pressure on. He made his dad quiet down and work for his keep.

But Tom had misestimated. The job was still above his breakfast. Jarrat wasn’t young anymore, but he was hard and long-practiced. He kept his head and rattled Tom, and he beat him clean. And then he couldn’t stop himself from drawing the fact to Tom’s attention.

Tom went for him then, making fight. They were off a little way from the rest of us, and both of them thoroughly mad. Before we could get there and get them apart, Jarrat had just purely whipped the hell out of Tom. He ought to’ve quit before he did, but once he was mad he didn’t have it in him to give an inch. It was awful. Ten minutes after it was over, even Jarrat knew it was awful, but then it was too late.

It was a day, one of several, I’m glad I won’t have to live again. Tom was too much a boy yet to get in front where he wanted to be but too much a man to stay and be licked. He had to get out from under his daddy’s feet and onto his own. And so he bundled his clothes and went away. Afterwards, because the old ones were so grieved, me too, Nathan too, the house was like a house where somebody had died.

Because he didn’t need much and asked little, Tom found a place right away with an old couple by the name of Whitlow over on the other side of the county, far enough away to be separate from us. I knew he would do all right, and he did. He knew how to work; and the use of his head, that was already coming to him, came fast once he got out on his own. He began to make a name for himself: a good boy, a good hand.

When we had found out where he was, Nathan and I would catch a ride on a rainy day or a Sunday and go over to see him, or we’d see him occasionally in town. After he got his feet under him and was feeling sure of himself, he would come over on a Sunday afternoon now and again to see his grandma and grandpa. In all our minds, he had come into a life of his own that wasn’t any longer part of ours. To the old ones, who had given up their ownership of him by then and their right to expect things from him, every one of those visits was a lovely gift, and they made over him and honored him as a guest.

He stayed at the Whitlows’ through the crop year of 1940. Mr. Whitlow died that summer. After the place was sold and Mrs. Whitlow settled in town, Tom struck a deal with Ernest Russet from up about Sycamore. Ernest and Naomi Russet were good people, we had known them a long time, and they had a good farm. Going there was a step up in the world for Tom. He soon found favor with the Russets, which not everybody could have done, and before long, having no children of their own, they’d made practically a son of him.

After Tom had been with them a while, the Russets invited us to come for Sunday dinner. Jarrat wouldn’t go, of course, but Nathan and I did. The Russets’ preacher, Brother Milby, and his wife were there too, a spunky couple. I took a great liking to Mrs. Milby. It was a good dinner and we had a good time. Ernest Russet was the right man for Tom, no mistake about that. He was a fine farmer. The right young man could learn plenty from him.

By the time he went to the Russets, Tom was probably as near to the right young man as the country had in it. He had got his growth and filled out, and confidence had come into his eyes. He was a joy to look at.

One Sunday afternoon after the weather was warm and the spring work well started, he paid us a visit. Grandpa had died the summer before, so now it was just Grandma and Nathan and me still at home, and it was a sadder place. But we were glad to see Tom and to be together; we sat out on the porch and talked a long time.

Tom got up finally as if to start his hitchhike back to the Russets’, and so I wasn’t quite ready when he said he thought he’d go over to see his dad.

That fell into me with sort of a jolt. I hadn’t been invited, but I said, “Well, I’ll go with you.”

So we went. We crossed the hollow, and clattered up onto the back porch, and Tom knocked on the kitchen door. Jarrat must have been in the kitchen, for it wasn’t but seconds until there he was, his left hand still on the door knob and a surprised look on his face. Myself, I wasn’t surprised yet, but I was expecting to be. I could feel my hair trying to rise up under my hat. I took a glance at Tom’s face, and he was grinning at Jarrat. My hair relaxed and laid down peacefully again when Tom stuck out his hand. It was a big hand he stuck out, bigger than mine, bigger than Jarrat’s. Jarrat looked down at that hand like it was an unusual thing to see on the end of a man’s arm. He looked up at Tom again and grinned back. And then he reached out and took Tom’s hand and shook it.

So they made it all right. And so when the war broke out and Tom was called to the army and had to go, he could come and say freely a proper good-bye to his dad.

It wasn’t long after Tom got drafted until Nathan turned eighteen, and damned if he didn’t go volunteer. I was surprised, but I ought not to’ve been. Nathan probably could have got deferred, since his brother was already gone and farmers were needed at home, and I reckon I was counting on that. But he had reasons to go, too, that were plain enough.

Nathan and Jarrat never came to an actual fight. Nathan, I think, had Tom’s example in mind, and he didn’t want to follow it. He was quieter turned than Tom, less apt to give offense. But Jarrat was hard for his boys to get along with. He just naturally took up too much of the room they needed to grow in. He was the man in the lead, the man going away while everybody else was still coming. His way was the right way, which in fact it pret’ near always was, but he didn’t have the patience of a henhawk.

“Let’s go!” he’d say. If you were at it with him and you hesitated a minute: “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

When we were young and he would say that, I’d say back to him,

“Les Go’s dead and his wife’s a widder.

You be right good and you might get her.”

But nobody was going to say that back to him anymore, not me, much less Nathan.

After Jarrat’s fight with Tom, I would now and again try to put in a word for Nathan. “Why don’t you let him alone? Give him a little head room. Give him time to be ready.”

And Jarrat would say, “Be ready, hell! Let him be started.”

It didn’t take much of that, I knew, to be a plenty. When Nathan came back from the war his own man, Jarrat did get out of his way, and they could work together, but for the time being Nathan needed to be gone. Of course he got a bellyful of bossing in the army, but it at least didn’t come from his dad. He also had a brotherly feeling that he ought to go where Tom had gone. Grandma was dead by then. There was nothing holding him. So I reckon he went because he thought he had to, but I didn’t want him to. For one thing, it would leave us short-handed. For another, I would miss him. For another, I was afraid.

As it turned out, Nathan never saw Tom again. They kept Nathan on this side till nearly the end of the war, but they gave Tom some training and taught him to drive a bulldozer and shipped him straight on across the waters into the fight. He was killed the next year. I know a few little details of how it happened, but they don’t matter.

It came about, anyhow, that in just a couple of years the old house was emptied of everybody but me. It took me a while to get used to being there by myself. When I would go in to fix my dinner or at night, there wouldn’t be a sound. I could hear the quiet. And however quiet I tried to be, it seemed to me I rattled. I didn’t like the quiet, for it made me sad, and so did the little noises I made in it. For a while I couldn’t hardly bring myself to trap the mice, I so needed to have something stirring there besides me. All my life I’ve hunted and fished alone, even worked alone. I never minded being by myself outdoors. But to be alone in the house, a place you might say is used to talk and the sounds of somebody stirring about in it all day, that was lonesome. As I reckon Jarrat must have found out a long time ago and, like himself, just left himself alone to get used to it. I’ve been, all in all, a lucky man, for the time would be again when the old house would be full of people, but that was long a-coming. For a while there it was just Jarrat and me living alone together, he in his house on one side of the hollow, me in mine on the other. I could see his house from my house, and he could see mine from his. But we didn’t meet in either house, his or mine. We met in a barn or a field, wherever the day’s work was going to start. When quitting time came we went our ways separately home. Of course by living apart we were keeping two houses more or less alive, and maybe there was some good in that.

The difference between us was that I wasn’t at home all the time. When the work would let up, or on Saturday evenings and Sundays, for I just flat refused to work late on Saturday or much at all on Sunday, I’d be off to what passed with me for social life or to the woods or the river. But Jarrat was at home every day. Every day. He never went as far as Port William except to buy something he needed.

If you work about every day with somebody you’ve worked with all your life, you’d be surprised how little you need to talk. Oh, we swapped work with various ones—Big Ellis, the Rowanberrys, and others—and that made for some sociable times along, and there would be good talk then. But when it was just Jarrat and me, we would sometimes work without talking a whole day, or maybe two together. And so when he got the government’s letter about Tom, he didn’t say but two words. We were working here at my place. After dinner, when he walked into the barn, carrying the letter in his hand, he said, “Sit down.”

I sat down. He handed me the letter, and it felt heavy in my hands as a stone. After I read it—“killed in action”—and handed it back, the whole damned English language just flew away in the air like a flock of blackbirds.

For a long time neither one of us moved. The daily sounds of the world went on, sparrows in the barn lot, somebody’s bull way off, the wind in the eaves, but around us was this awful, awful silence that didn’t have one word in it.

I looked at Jarrat finally. He was standing there blind as a statue. He had Tom’s life all inside him now, as once it had been all inside Lettie. Now it was complete. Now it was finished.

And then, for the first and last time I said it to him, I said, “Let’s go.” The day’s work was only half finished. Having nothing else we could do, we finished it.

What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap, that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you think of that you ought to’ve asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don’t.

And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You can’t see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It’s with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

It’s our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two. Back when Tom got killed and the word came, I had never thought of such things. That time would have been hard enough, even if I had thought of them. Because I hadn’t, it was harder.

That night after supper I lit the lantern and walked over to Jarrat’s and sat with him in the kitchen until bedtime. I wasn’t invited. I was a volunteer, I reckon, like Nathan. If it had been just me and I needed company, which I did, I could have walked to town and sat with the talkers in the pool room or the barber shop. But except that I would go to sit with him, Jarrat would have sat there in his sorrow entirely by himself and stared at the wall or the floor. I anyhow denied him that.

I went back every night for a long time. There was nothing else to do. There wasn’t a body to be spoken over and buried to bring people together, and to give Tom’s life a proper conclusion in Port William. His body was never going to be in Port William again. It was buried in some passed-over battlefield in Italy, somewhere none of us had ever been and would never go. The word was passed around, of course. People were sorry, and they told us. The neighbor women brought food, as they do. But mainly there was just the grieving, and mainly nobody here to do it but Jarrat and me.

*

There was a woman lived here, just out the road, a good many years ago. She married a man quite a bit older—well, he was an old man, you just as well say—and things went along and they had a little boy. In four or five years the old man died. After that, you can imagine, the little boy was all in all to his mother. He was her little man of the house, as she called him, and in fact he was the world to her. And then, when he wasn’t but nine or ten years old, the boy took awfully sick one winter, and he died, and we buried him out there on the hill at Port William beside his old daddy.

We knew that the woman was grieved to death, as we say, and everybody did for her as they could. What we didn’t know was that she really was grieving herself to death. It’s maybe a little hard to believe that people can die of grief, but they do.

After she died, the place had to be sold. I went out there with Big Ellis and several others to set the place to rights and get the tools and the household stuff set out for the auction. When we got to the room that had been the little boy’s, it was like opening a grave. It had been kept just the way it was when he died, except she had gathered up and put there everything she’d found that reminded her of him: all his play pretties, every broom handle he rode for a stick horse, every rock or feather or string she knew he had played with. I still remember the dread we felt just going into that room, let alone moving the things, or throwing them away. Some of them we had to throw away.

I understood her then. I understood her better after Tom was dead. When a young man your heart knows and loves is all of a sudden gone, never to come back, the whole place reminds you of him everywhere you look. You dread to touch anything for fear of changing it. You fear the time you know is bound to come, when the look of the place will be changed entirely, and if the dead came back they would hardly know it, or not recognize it at all.

Even so, this place is not a keepsake just to look at and remember. You can’t stop just because you’re carrying a load of grief and would like to stop, or don’t care if you go on or not. Jarrat nor I either didn’t stop. This world was still asking things of us that we had to give.

It was maybe the animals most of all that kept us going, the good animals we depended on, that depended on us: our work mules, the cattle, the sheep, the hogs, even the chickens. They were a help to us because they didn’t know our grief but just quietly lived on, suffering what they suffered, enjoying what they enjoyed, day by day. We took care of them, we did what had to be done, we went on.

A WORLD LOST

The dead rise and walk about
The timeless fields of thought

Chapter 1

IT WAS early July, bright and hot; I was staying with my grandmother and grandfather Catlett. My brother, Henry—who might have been there with me; we often made our family visits together—was at home at our house down at Hargrave. For several good and selfish reasons, I did not regret his absence. When we were apart we did not fight, we did not have to decide who would get what we both wanted, we did not have to trump up disagreements just to keep from agreeing. The day would come when there would be harmony between us and we would be allies, but we had many a trifle to quarrel over before then.

Uncle Andrew, who often ate dinner at Grandma Catlett’s, was at work up on the river at Stoneport, as he had been for a week already. He had refused to take me with him. This was in the summer of 1944, when I was nine, nearly ten. The war had made building materials scarce. My father and Uncle Andrew, along with Uncle Andrew’s buddies, Yeager Stump and Buster Simms, had bought the buildings of a defunct lead mine at Stoneport with the idea of salvaging the lumber and sheet metal to build some barns. The work was heavy and somewhat dangerous; it was going to take a long time. I could not go because I was too short in the push-up. I felt a little blemished by Uncle Andrew’s refusal, and I missed him. Now and again I experienced the tremor of my belief that the adventure of Stoneport had been subtracted from me forever. But I was reconciled. As I was well aware, there were advantages to my solitude.

No day at Grandma and Grandpa’s was ever the same as any other, but there were certain usages that I tried to follow, especially when I was there alone. That afternoon, as soon as I could escape attention, I knew I would go across the field to Fred Brightleaf’s. Fred and I would catch Rufus Brightleaf ’s past-work old draft horse, Prince, and ride him over to the pond for a swim. And after supper, when Grandma and Grandpa would be content just to sit on the front porch in the dark, and you could feel the place growing lonesome for other times, I would drift away down to the little house beside the woods where Dick Watson and Aunt Sarah Jane lived. While the light drained from the sky and night fell I would sit with Dick on the rock steps in front of the door and listen to him tell of the horses and mules and foxhounds he remembered, while Aunt Sarah Jane spoke biblical admonitions from the lamplit room behind us; to her, Judgment Day was as much a matter of fact, and as visible, as the Fourth of July.

I was comfortable with the two of them as I was with nobody else, and I am unsure why. It was not because, as a white child, I was free or privileged with them, for they expected and sometimes required decent behavior of me, like the other grown-ups I knew. They had not many possessions, and the simplicity in that may have appealed to me; they did not spend much time in anxiety about things. They had too a quietness that was not passive but profound. Dick especially had the gift of meditativeness. Because he was getting old, what he meditated on was the past. In his talk he dreamed us back into the presence of a supreme work mule named Fanny, a preeminent foxhound by the name of Strive, a long-running and uncatchable fox.

There had been, anyhow, only three of us at the table in Grandma’s kitchen that noon: Grandma and Grandpa and me. After dinner, Grandpa got up and went straight back to the barn. I sat on at the table, liking the stillness that filled the old house at such times. The whole world seemed stopped and quiet, as if the sun stood still a moment between its rising up and its going down; you could hear the emptiness of the rooms where nobody was. And then Grandma set the dishpan on the stove and started scraping up our dishes. She had her mind on her work then, and I headed for the door.

“Where are you off to, Andy, old traveler?”

“Just out,” I said.

She let me go without even a warning. The good old kitchen sounds were rising up around her. As I went out across the porch I heard her start humming “Rock of Ages.” When she was young she had been a good singer, but her voice was cracked now and she could not sustain the notes.

I went down through the field we still called the Orchard, though only one old apple tree was left, and then into the Lower Field, across the part of it that had been cut for hay, and then followed the dusty two-track road around the edge of a field of corn. I saw the groundhog that I planned to shoot as soon as I got old enough to have a .22 rifle. Grandma always put dinner on the table at eleven-thirty, and so it was still close to noon. My shadow was almost underfoot, and I amused myself by stepping on its head as I went along. I was wearing a coarse-woven straw hat that Uncle Andrew had bought for me, calling it “a two-gallon hat, plenty good for a half-pint.” The sun shone through holes in the brim in a few places, making little stars in the shadow. I walked fast, telling myself the story of myself: “The boy is walking across the farm. He is by himself. Nobody knows where he is going. It is a pretty day.”

On the far side of the cornfield I went through a gate into the creek road and then through another gate into the lane that went up to the Brightleafs’ house. There was a row of tall Lombardy poplars that somebody had planted along the little stream that flowed from the Chatham Spring. When I got into the shadow of the first poplar I stopped and called, “Oh, Fred!”

Nobody answered. All around it was quiet. I walked the stepping-stones across the stream and went up to the house, knowing already that nobody was home but not wanting to believe it. I went all the way up to the yard fence and called again. It was a fact. Nobody was there, except for Jess Brightleaf ’s old bird dog, Fern, who had a litter of pups under the front porch, and Mrs. Brightleaf ’s old hens who looked at me from their dust holes under the snowball bush and did not get up. It was hot and sweaty, the kind of afternoon that makes you think of water.

Everybody was gone, and for a minute or two I felt disappointed and lonesome. But then the quiet changed, and I ceased to mind. All at once the countryside felt big and easy around me, and I was glad to be alone in it.

I looked at the sugar pear tree, but no pears were ripe yet, and I went on down to the spring. Some of the Chathams had lived there once and had left their name with the good vein of water that flowed from the bedrock at the foot of the hill. But the Chathams probably had not called it the Chatham Spring; probably they had called it after somebody who had been there before—maybe after an Indian, I thought. People named springs after other people, not themselves.

The Chatham Spring was cunningly walled and roofed with rock. There was a wooden door that you opened into a little room, moist and dark, where the vein flowed out of the hill into a pool deep enough for the Brightleafs to dip their buckets. The water flowed out of the pool under a large foot-worn rock that was the threshold of the door. The Brightleafs carried all their household water from the spring.

I opened the door. When my eyes had accepted the dimness I could see the water striders’ feet dimpling the surface of the pool and a green frog on a glistening ledge just above the water. I fastened the door and lay down outside at the place I liked best to drink, which was just below the threshold stone where the water was flowing and yet so smooth that it held a piece of the sky in it as still and bright as a set in a ring. The water was so clear you could look down through the reflection of the sky or your face and see maybe a crawfish. I took my hat off and drank big swallows, relishing the coldness of the water and the taste it carried up from the deep rock and the darkness inside the hill. As I drank, the light lay warm on my back like a hand, and I could smell the mint that grew along the stream. When I had drunk all I could hold I put my nose into the water, and then my whole face.

The Chatham Spring had never been dry, not even in the terrible summers of 1908 and 1930 and 1936. People spoke of it as “an everlasting spring.” There was a line of such springs lying across that part of the country, and all of them had been cared for a long time and bore the names of families: Chatham and Beechum and Branch and Bower and Coulter. There were days, I knew, when my Grandfather Catlett would ride horseback from one to the other, arriving at each one thirsty, to drink, savor, and reflect on the different tastes of the different waters, those thirsts and quenchings, tastes and differences being signs of something he profoundly knew. And I, as I drank and wetted my face, thought of the springs and of him, my mind leaning back out of the light and into time.

From the spring I went back to the creek road and across and through another gate and up the long slope of an unclipped pasture. I could see my grandfather’s steers gone to shade in a grove of locust trees on up the creek. I walked a while through the ripened bluegrass stems and the clover and Queen Anne’s lace, and then I came to a path that led up to a gate at the top of the ridge. There was a fairly fresh manure pile in the path, and I stopped to watch two tumblebugs at work. They shaped their ball, rolled it onto the path, and started down the hill with it, the one in front walking on its forelegs and tugging the ball along with its hind legs, the one in the back walking on its hind legs and pushing the ball with its forelegs. For a while I lost myself in poking around on my hands and knees, looking at the other small creatures who lived in the grass: the ants, the beetles, the worms, the butterflies who sought the manure piles or the flowers, the bees that were working in the clover. Snakes lived in the field too, and rabbits and mice and meadowlarks and sparrows and bobwhites, but I wasn’t so likely to come upon those by crawling around and parting the grass with my hands.

After a while I went on up to the gate, and through it, and across the ridge to the pond. That field was the one we called the Pond Field. Grandpa said that when he took over the farm as a young man, that field had been ill used and there were many gullies in it. He had made the pond by working back and forth across a big sinkhole, first with a breaking plow, and then with a slip-scraper in which he hauled the loosened earth to the gullies and filled them. And thus he restored the field at the same time that he dug the pond. A breeze was moving over the pond, covering the surface with little shards and splinters of blue sky. I shucked off my sweaty clothes and laid them in the grass.

Fred Brightleaf and Henry and I were absolutely forbidden to swim in the pond, or anyplace else, without a grown-up along. We were absolutely, absolutely forbidden to go swimming alone, without at least another boy on hand to tell where we had drowned. My poor mother, terrified by my transgressions, attempted to keep me alive until grown by a remedy known in our family as “peach tree tea”—a peach (or lilac) switch applied vigorously to the shanks of the legs. This caustic medication inflicted great suffering on me and on her, and produced not the slightest correction in my behavior. If she had been able to whip me while I was swimming, then the pain might have overridden the pleasure and destroyed my willfulness. But since her punishment was necessarily distant from my immersions, the pleasure outweighed the pain and lasted longer. Back there at the pond by myself I could maintain for at least a while the illusion that I was no more than myself, Andy Catlett, as ancestorless as the first creature, neither the son of Bess and Wheeler Catlett nor the grandson of Dorie and Marce Catlett and Mat and Margaret Feltner.

I crossed the rim of deep cattle tracks at the edge of the pond and waded in, feeling the muddy bottom grow soft and miry underfoot. When I was in knee-deep I launched myself flat out, smacked down, went under, came up, and swam my best overhand stroke out toward the middle. If Fred and Henry had been there we would have raced. Being alone, I took my time. When I got out to the deep place I sucked in a big breath and dived. Way down where the water was black and cold it was revealed to me that if I drowned before I lived to be grown I would be sorry, and I kicked and stroked at the dark, watching the water brighten until my head broke out into daylight and air again.

I swam back into shallow water. This partial concession to my mother’s fears made me feel absolved without confession, forgiven without regret. I turned over on my back and floated for a long time. Looked at from so near the surface of the pond, the sky was huge, the world almost nothing at all, and I apparently absent altogether. The sky seemed a great gape of vision, without the complication of so much as an eye. Now and then a butterfly or a snake doctor or a bird would fly across and I would watch it. But what really fascinated and satisfied me were the birds high up that, after you had looked into the sky a while, just appeared or were just there: a hawk soaring, maybe, or a swift or a swallow darting about.

There were three joys of swimming. The first was going down out of the hot air into the cooling water. The second was being in the water. The third was coming out again. After I was cooled and quiet, a little tired, and had begun to dislike the way my fingertips had wrinkled, I waded out into the breeze that was chilly now on my wet skin. I stood in the grass and let the breeze dry me, shivering a little until I felt the warmth of the sun. And maybe the best joy of all, a fourth, was the familiar feeling of my clothes when I put them on again.

For a long time then I just sat in the grass, feeling clean and content, thinking perhaps of nothing at all. I was nine years old, going on ten; having never needed to ask, I knew exactly where I was; I did not want to be anyplace else.

Chapter 2

WHAT MOVED me finally was hunger. I thought of the bowl of cold biscuits that Grandma kept covered with a plate in the dish cabinet. If she was in the kitchen when I got there, she would butter me two and fill them with jam. If she was not in the kitchen, I would just take two or three from the bowl and eat them as they were, and that would be good enough.

When I came over the ridge behind the house and barns and started down toward the lot gate, I was pretending to be a show horse. Our father had taken Henry and me to the Shelby County Fair not long before. We had watched the horse show in the old round wooden arena, and I had brought home a program that I read over and over to savor the fine names of the horses. And often when I was out by myself I did the gaits.

It was not apparent to me how a two-legged creature could perform the slow gait or rack, but I could do very credible versions, I thought, of the walk, trot, and canter. And so I was a three-gaited horse, light sorrel, very fine in my conformation and motion and style. And I was the rider of the horse I was. And I was the announcer who said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please ask your horses to canter.”

I saw my grandfather then. He was on Rose, his bay mare, coming around the corner of the barn toward the lot gate. He let himself through the gate and shut it again without dismounting, and started up the rise toward me. He was eighty that summer; his walking cane hung by its crook from his right forearm. He had the mare in a brisk running walk. From where I watched, except for the cane, you would have thought him no older than my father. Afoot, he was clearly an old man; on horseback he recovered something of the force and grace of his younger days, and you could see what he had been. He rode as a man rides who has forgotten he is on a horse.

As we drew near to each other, I slowed to a walk and then changed to a trot, which I thought my best gait, wanting him to be pleased. But his countenance, set and stern as it often was, did not change. He reined the mare in only a little.

“Baby, go yonder to the house. Your daddy wants you.”

“Why?” I knew he wouldn’t tell me, but I asked anyhow.

“Ne’ mind! He wants to talk to you.”

He put his heel to the mare and went by and on up toward the ridgetop. He rode looking straight ahead. The wind carried the mare’s tail out a little to the side and snatched puffs of dust from her footfalls. I watched until first the mare and then he went out of sight over the ridge.

I did not enjoy transactions that began “Your daddy wants to talk to you.” I did not cherish the solemn precincts of the grown-up world in which such transactions took place. But I had no choice now, having heard, and I went on to the house. In my guilt I supposed my father had somehow learned of my trip to the pond.

There was nobody in the kitchen; it was quiet; a cloth was spread over the dishes on the table; the afternoon sunlight came into the room through the open pantry door. I went through the back hall to the front of the house. When I came into the living room I was surprised to see Cousin Thelma there, dressed up. She was Grandma’s sister’s child, about my father’s age, forty-five or so. She and my father were sitting in rocking chairs, talking quietly. I do not know where my grandmother was.

When I opened the door my father and Cousin Thelma quit talking. Cousin Thelma smiled at me and said, “Hello, Andy, my sweet.”

My father smiled at me too, but he did not say anything. He stood, held out his hand to me, and I took it. He led me out into the hall and up the stairs.

And I remember how terribly I did not want to go. I had come in out of the great free outdoor world of my childhood—the world in which, in my childish fantasies, I hoped someday to be a man. But my father, even more than my mother with her peach switch, was the messenger of another world, in which, as I unwillingly knew, I was already involved in expectation and obligation, difficulty and sorrow. It was as if I knew this even from my father’s smile, from the very touch of his hand. Later I would understand how surely even then he had begun to lead me to some of the world’s truest pleasures, but I was far from such understanding then.

We went back to the room over the dining room. My father shut the door soundlessly and sat down on the bed. I stood in front of him. He was still holding my hand, as though it were something he had picked up and forgotten to put down.

“Andy,” he said, “Uncle Andrew was badly hurt this afternoon. A fellow shot him. I want you to understand. It may be he won’t be able to live.”

He was looking straight at me, and I saw something in his eyes I never had seen there before: fear—fear and grief. For what I felt then I had, and have, no name. It was something like embarrassment, as if I had blundered into knowledge that was forbidden to small boys. I knew the disturbance my father had felt in imparting it to me; this made me feel that something was required of me, and I did not know what. That Uncle Andrew was a man who could be shot had not occurred to me before, but I could not say that.

What I said sounded to me as odd and inane, probably, as anything else I might have said: “Where did he get shot?”

“Down at Stoneport.”

“I mean where did he get hit?”

“Once above the belt and once below.” And my father touched his own belly in the places of Uncle Andrew’s wounds. Now, when I remember, it sometimes seems to me that he touched those places on my own belly—certainly, in the years to come, I would touch them myself—and perhaps he did. “Here,” he said, “and here.”

“Did you see him?”

“Yes. I’ve been to the hospital, and I saw him.”

“What did he say?” I was trying, I think, to call him back, not from death, but from strangeness, the terrible distinction of his hurt, into which he was now withdrawn.

“He said a fellow shot him.”

And I did then have at least the glimpse of a vision of Uncle Andrew lying on a bed, saying such words to my father who stood beside him.

What more we said and how we left that room I do not remember.

Now I know that my father led me away to keep me, in my first knowledge of what had happened, away from Grandma in her first knowledge of it—as if to reduce grief by dividing it. Also I think he was moved by a hopeless instinct to protect me, to shield me from the very thing he had to tell me, before which he was himself helpless and unprotected.

Somehow I got out of the house again. As I stepped around the corner of the back porch, Jarrat Coulter and Dick Watson drove up to the barn lot gate in Cousin Jarrat’s scratched and dusty car. They had been to town to get Grandpa’s broken hay rope spliced; there was hay to be put up the next day.

I ran to greet them. Both of them were my friends, and I was happy to see them. I needed something ordinary to happen.

They were looking out at me, smiling. Ordinarily Cousin Jarrat would have said, “Andy, how about opening the gate, old bud?”

But I violated my own wish for the ordinary by stepping up on the running board and announcing, “Uncle Andrew got shot.”

They had already heard—I could see that they had—but in their confusion they pretended that they had not.

Dick said nothing, and Cousin Jarrat said, “Aw! Is that a fact? Well!”

And then the day seemed to collapse around me into what it had become. There was no place where what had happened had not happened.

Later, I remember, I was standing in the little pantry off the kitchen, watching my grandmother at work. In the pantry was the table covered by a broken marble dresser-top where she rolled out the dough for biscuits or pie crusts, and so she must have been making biscuits or a pie, though it is not clear to me why she should have been doing that at such a time. I suppose that, in her trouble, she had needed to put herself to work. Perhaps she thought she was distracting or comforting me. She knew at least how I loved to watch her at work there, especially when she made pies: rolling out the dough for the bottom crust and pressing it into the pan, pouring in the filling, crisscrossing the long strips of dough over the top, and then holding the pan on the fingertips of her left hand while she stroked a knife around the edge, cutting off the overhanging bits of dough.

The sun, getting low, shone in at the one window of the pantry, and everything it touched gleamed a rich reddish gold. I stood at her elbow, as I had done many times, and watched and we talked, about what I cannot imagine. My father must have been gone for some time. Cousin Thelma, if she was still there, was in the living room. My grandfather had not returned.

And then my other grandfather, Mat Feltner, rapped at the kitchen door and came in. He had come, he said, to take me home. I remember him and Grandma smiling, speaking pleasantly, looking down at me.

I followed my grandfather out to his car. We got in and started down toward Hargrave. We had gone maybe two miles when Granddaddy, who had driven so far in silence, laid his hand on my knee, as he would do sometimes, and said, “Hon, your Uncle Andrew is dead. He died about five o’clock.”

I did not reply, and he said no more. He was a comforting man to be with. Perhaps that was enough.

The sun was down by the time we got to Hargrave. Granddaddy pulled up in front of our house, and I got out. Where he went then, I do not know.

Henry and our friends Tim and Bubby Kentfield and Noah Burk were standing in the front yard. They gathered around me.

“Uncle Andrew got killed,” Henry said.

I said I knew it. They were all looking at me, solemn-faced and excited at the same time.

“I know it,” I said. “Granddaddy told me.”

There we were, all of us together as we often were, and yet changed, and none of us knew what to do.

“Well. What are we going to do?” Henry said.

“The man that killed him’s name’s Carp Harmon,” Noah Burk said. “He shot him with a .38 pistol.”

“Carp Harmon,” I said.

“They got him in the jail right now.”

I went on into the house—looking, I suppose, for something that was the same as before. But neither of my parents was in the house. Nor were my sisters. The kitchen was full of women who had come to help or bring food. They were putting things away, sort of taking over, the way they would do.

“Hello, Andy hon,” they said. They gave me hugs. They were treating me like somebody special, which made them seem strange. And their presence in the house without at least my mother there made it seem strange.

Miss Iris Flynn said, “Honey, I loved your Uncle Andrew. We’ll miss him, won’t we?” She bit her underlip and looked away.

Some of the others said things too. It was a little as though they wanted to ensure that their love would last by telling it to somebody young.

I wanted to be able to think of something proper to say. It came to me that if I had been a grown man I probably could have thought of something. I would have comforted them.

“Well, good-bye,” I said. “I reckon I’m going outdoors.” And I went out.

“Come on,” Henry said. He was the youngest one of us, but nobody held back to argue. We all went out to the street and started down into town.

I don’t know where any of our grown-ups were. They were somewhere else, struck down or disappeared. The streets were empty. It was late in the evening, a weekday, and everybody was at home, eating supper maybe, or getting ready for bed, or sitting on porches or in backyards, cooling off. But to us, to me at least, it seemed that the life of the town had drawn back and hushed in wonder and sorrow that Uncle Andrew was dead. It was as if the people withdrew and hid themselves in deference to us boys who used to devil Uncle Andrew to take us swimming, which he had sometimes done. In the warm, slowly dimming twilight, nothing was abroad in the town except the pigeons clapping their wings about the courthouse tower and our little band walking bunched together to the jail. Nobody saw us. It seems to me that, for the time being, not even a car passed. The river flowed solemnly by as if strictly minding its own business.

The jail adjoined the back of the courthouse, its tall stone-barred facade set back a little behind an iron fence. When we got there we just stopped and looked at it, as though at that moment an immense reality, that we would not be done with for a long time, first laid hold on us. Uncle Andrew had been killed. Somewhere inside the jail, only a few feet from us, was the man who had killed him. For a long time there was nothing to be done but stand there in the large silence and the failing light, and know and know the thing we knew.

And then, filling his eight-year-old voice with a bravado that astonished me and perhaps astonished him, Henry called out at the front of the jail and its padlocked iron door: “Carp Harmon, you son of a bitch, come out of there!”

Chapter 3

AFTER DARK that night somebody took Henry and me to Granny and Granddaddy Feltner’s house up at Port William. I do not know which of the grown-ups had decided that we would be better off there, but I am sure they were right. On the way to Port William we stopped at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett’s, I suppose to let me get my extra clothes and whatever else I had left.

While we were there one of the grown-ups said to me, “Don’t you think you ought to go speak to your grandma?” It would have been like my father to say that, and he may have been there, but I don’t remember. It could have been Aunt Lizzie, Grandma’s sister. This was fifty years ago, and I have forgotten some things. But I must have been too filled with astonishment and alarm even to have noticed some things that I wish now I could remember.

I remember climbing the stairs again, by myself this time, and going into the bedroom where my grandmother was. She was in the dark, alone. I could barely see her lying motionless on the old iron bed. Her stillness touches me yet. She seemed to lie beneath the violence that had, in striking Uncle Andrew, struck her and struck us all, and now she merely submitted to it, signifying to herself by her stillness that there was nothing at all that could be done.

What had happened to us could only be suffered now, and we would be suffering it a long time; I knew that as soon as I entered the room. I had been sent perhaps with the hope that seeing me might be of some comfort to her, but I remember how swiftly I knew that she could not be comforted. Comfortlessness had come and occupied the house. She had been felled, struck down, and there she was, greatly needing comfort where there was no comfort. I walked over to the bed and stood beside it.

She must have recognized my footsteps, for she said in a voice that I would not have recognized as hers if it had not come from her, “Oh, honey, we’ll never see your Uncle Andrew again. We never will see him anymore.”

*

Perhaps it was the next day that Henry and I, dressed in our Sunday clothes this time, were taken back to Hargrave, stopping again at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett’s, why I do not know. It was a sunny morning. The hushed old house was occupied by the usual population of neighbors come to do what they could. I remember only my Grandfather Catlett sitting in the swing on the back porch, wearing his straw hat as he was apt to do even in the house, forgetting to take it off, his hands clasped over the crook of his cane. Cousin Thelma was sitting beside him. She was smiling, speaking to him with a wonderful attentiveness. He was trying, I remember, to respond in kind, and yet he could not free himself of his thoughts; you could tell it by his eyes.

When we got to our house at Hargrave we did not see our father and we did not see Aunt Judith, Uncle Andrew’s wife. The house was full of flowers and quiet people, who got even quieter when they saw us. Our mother, smiling, met us at the door and welcomed us, almost as if we were guests, into the front room, which had been utterly changed to make way for the coffin that stood on its trestle against the wall farthest from the door.

Our mother led us over to the coffin and stood with us while we looked. Lying in the coffin, dressed up, his eyes shut and his hands still with the stillness of death, was Uncle Andrew. And so I knew for sure.

Henry and I seemed to be like people walking in what had been a forest after a terrific storm. Our grown-ups, who until then had stood protectingly over us, had fallen, or they were diminished by the simple, sudden presence of calamity. We seemed all at once to have become tall; it was not a pleasant distinction.

We stayed at Port William in the care of Nettie Banion, Granny Feltner’s cook, while Granny and Granddaddy and our aunt Hannah went to Hargrave for Uncle Andrew’s funeral. When we heard the car returning into the driveway, we went around the house to meet them. Granny and Granddaddy greeted us as if it were just an ordinary day and we were there on an ordinary visit. It was a kind pretense that became almost a reality, something they were good at.

But Hannah, who was young and not yet skilled in grief, could not belie the actual day that it was. Tears came into her eyes when she saw us. Forcing herself to smile, she said, “Boys, he looked just like he was asleep.”

Hannah was married to our Uncle Virgil, who was away in the war. She was beautiful, I thought, and I imagined that someday I might marry a woman just like her. She was always nice to Henry and me, and it was not just because she loved Uncle Virgil who loved us; she was nice to us because she loved us herself. I was far from seeing any comfort in what she said to us about Uncle Andrew; I knew he was in no ordinary sleep. But it was good of her to say it, and I knew that as well.

When all this happened I was younger almost than I can imagine now. It is hard for me to recall exactly what I felt. I think that I did not grieve in the knowing and somewhat theoretical way of grown people, who say to themselves, for example, that a death of some sort awaits us all, and who may have understood in part how the order of time is shaped and held within the order of eternity. I had no way of generalizing or conceptualizing my feelings. It seems to me now that I had no sympathy for myself.

Only once do I remember attempting in any outward or verbal way to own my loss. I admired a girl named Marian Davis who was in my room at school. One afternoon in the fall of the year of Uncle Andrew’s death, we were walking home in the crowd of boys and girls that straggled out along the street. Marian was walking slightly in front of me. All at once it came to me that I might enlarge myself in her eyes by attaching to myself the tragedy that had befallen my family. I stepped up beside her and said, “Marian, I reckon you heard about Uncle Andrew.” Perhaps she had not heard—that did not occur to me. I thought that she had heard but was dumbfounded by my clumsy attempt to squander my feelings; perhaps she even sensed that I was falsifying them in order to squander them. She pretended not to hear. She did not look at me. In her silence a fierce shame came upon me that did not wear away for years. I did not try again to speak of Uncle Andrew’s death to anyone until I was grown.

Perhaps I did not grieve in the usual sense at all. The world that I knew had changed into a world that I knew only in part; perhaps I understood that I would not be able ever again to think of it as a known world. My awareness of my loss must have been beyond summary. It must have been exactly commensurate with what I had lost, and what I had lost was Uncle Andrew as I had known him, my life with Uncle Andrew. I had lost what I remembered.

Chapter 4

I WAS Uncle Andrew’s namesake, and I had come to be his buddy. “My boy,” he would call me when he was under the influence not only of the considerable tenderness that was in him but of what I now know to have been bourbon whiskey.

When I first remember him, Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith were living in Columbia, South Carolina, where Uncle Andrew was a traveling salesman for a hardware company. They came home usually once in the summer and again at Christmas. They would come by train, and my father would take Henry and me and go to meet them. When Aunt Judith came early and Uncle Andrew made the trip alone, he would not always arrive on the train we met. I remember standing with Henry on the station platform while our father hurriedly searched through the train on which Uncle Andrew was supposed to have arrived. I remember our disappointment, and our father’s too brief explanation that Uncle Andrew must have missed the train, leaving us to suppose that when he missed it Uncle Andrew had been breathlessly trying to catch it. In fact, he may have missed it by a very comfortable margin; he may have been in circumstances in which he did not remember that he had a train to catch.

His and Aunt Judith’s arrival, anyhow, certainly made life more interesting for Henry and me. Aunt Judith, who was childless, was affectionate and indulgent—in need of our affection, as she was of everybody’s, and willing to spoil us for it. Uncle Andrew was so unlike anybody else we knew as to seem a species of one. He was capable of adapting his speech and manners to present company if he wanted to, but he did not often want to. He talked to us boys as he talked to everybody else, and in that way he charmed us. To us, he seemed to exist always at the center of his own uproar, carrying on in a way that was restless, reckless, humorous, and loud. One Christmas—it must have been 1939—Henry and I conceived the idea of giving him a cigarette tin filled with rusty nails. Our mother wrapped it prettily for us and put his name on it. A perfect actor, he received it with a large display first of gratitude and affection, and then, as he opened it, of curiosity, anticipation, surprise, indignation, and outrage. He administered a burlesque spanking and stomping to each of our “bee-hinds,” as he called them, uttering throughout the performance a commentary of grunts, raspberries, and various profane exclamations. Thus he granted success to our trick.

At about that time his drinking seems to have become a problem again. My father, who could not rest in the presence of a problem—who in fact was possessed by visions of solutions—decided that Uncle Andrew should come home and farm. Borrowing the money, my father bought two farms, one that we continued to call the Mack Crayton Place about five miles from Hargrave, and another, the Will Bower Place, adjoining Grandma and Grandpa Catlett’s place nearer to Port William. Uncle Andrew, according to the plan they made, would look after the farms while my father concentrated on his law practice. My father sent Uncle Andrew enough money to buy a 1940 Chevrolet, and Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith came home. Uncle Andrew was then forty-five years old, five years older than my father.

That homecoming gave me a new calling and a new career. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith rented a small apartment in a house belonging to an old doctor in Hargrave. Uncle Andrew began his daily trips to the farms, and I began wanting to go with him. I was six years old, and going with him became virtually the ruling purpose of my life. When I was not in school or under some parental bondage, I was likely to be with him. On the days I went with him, the phone would ring at our house before anybody was up. I would run down the stairs, put the receiver to my ear, and Uncle Andrew’s voice would say, “Come around, baby.”

I would hang up without replying, get into my clothes as fast as I could, and hurry through the backstreets to the apartment, where Aunt Judith would have breakfast ready. She made wonderful plum jelly and she knew I liked it; often she would have it on the table for me. Uncle Andrew called coffee “java,” and when Aunt Judith asked him how he wanted his eggs, he would say, “Two lookin’ atcha!” singing it out, as he did all his jazzy slang.

To me, there was something exotic about the two of them and their apartment. I had never known anybody before who lived in an apartment; the idea had a flavor of urbanity that was new and strange to me. Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith had lived in distant places, in cities, that they sometimes talked about. They had been to the South Carolina seashore, and Uncle Andrew had fished in Charleston Harbor. I had never seen the ocean and I loved to quiz them about it. Could you actually ride the waves? How did you do it? If you looked straight out over the ocean, how far could you see? I could not get enough of the thought that you could not see across it. Besides all that, Aunt Judith was the only woman I knew who smoked cigarettes, and this complicated the smell of her perfume in a way I rather liked.

We would eat breakfast and talk while the early morning brightened outside the kitchen window, and they would smoke, and Uncle Andrew would say, “Gimme one mo’ cup of that java, Miss Judy-pooty.”

Finally we would leave, and then began what always seemed to me the day’s adventure; I knew more or less what to expect at breakfast, but when you were loose in the world with Uncle Andrew you did not know what to expect.

The Chevrolet was inclined to balk at the start, and Uncle Andrew would stomp the accelerator and stab the engine furiously with the choke. “That’s right! Cough,” he would say, stomping and stabbing, “you one-lunged son of a bitch!” And the car would buck out of the driveway and up the low rise like a young horse. He treated all machines as if they were recalcitrant and uncommonly stupid draft animals. When the car, under his abuse, finally learned its lesson and began to run smoothly, he would look over at me, screwing his face up and talking through his nose—in the style, probably, of some cabdriver he remembered: “Where to, college?”

“Oh,” I would say, laughing, “up to the Crayton Place, I reckon.”

Of the two farms, Uncle Andrew much preferred the Crayton Place, where Jake and Minnie Branch lived—and so, of course, I preferred it too. The Bower Place was perhaps a little too close to Grandpa Catlett’s; also the tenant there, Jake Branch’s brother, was a quiet, rather solitary man who thought mostly of keeping his two boys at work and of staying at work himself. But at the Crayton Place, what with Jake’s children and Minnie’s children and Jake’s and Minnie’s children and whichever two or three of Minnie’s six brothers Jake had managed to lure in (or bail out of jail) as hired hands, together with the constant passing in and out of more distant relations, neighbors, and friends, there was always commotion, always the opportunity for talk and laughter and carrying on. Some rowdy joke or tale could get started there and go on for two or three days, retold and elaborated for every newcomer, restlessly egged on—over the noisy objections and denials of whoever was the butt of it—by pretended casual comments or questions asked in mock innocence. Minnie never knew the number she would feed at a meal. I have seen her put biscuits on the table in a wash pan, three dozen at a time.

Perhaps Uncle Andrew had some affection for farming. He had, after all, been raised to it—or Grandpa, anyhow, had tried to raise him to it. But he was unlike his father and my father, for whom farming was a devotion and a longing; it was not a necessity of life to him. He saw to things, purchased harness and machine parts, did whatever was needed to keep men and teams and implements in working order, and helped out where help was needed. But what he really loved was company, talk, some kind of to-do, something to laugh at.

When our association began, I appointed myself his hired hand at a wage of a quarter a day. Since I was not big enough to do most of the jobs I wanted to do, I tended to spend the days in an uneasy search for something I could do to justify my pay. I served him mostly as a sort of page, running errands, carrying water, opening gates, handing him things. Occasionally he or Jake Branch would dignify me with a real job, sending me to the tobacco patch with a hoe or letting me drive a team on the hayrake. But Uncle Andrew never let my wages become a settled issue. Sometimes he paid me willingly enough. Sometimes I would have to argue, beg, and bully to get him even to acknowledge that he had ever heard of the idea of paying me. When the subject came up in front of a third party, he would say, “It’s worth a quarter a day just to have him with me.” That confused me, for I treasured the compliment and yet felt that it devalued my “work.”

One day when he and I were helping Jake Branch set tobacco on a stumpy hillside, a terrific downpour came upon us. R.T. and Ester Purlin, two of Minnie’s children from her first marriage, and I were dropping the plants into previously marked rows, and the men were coming behind us, rapidly setting them in the rain-wet ground, all of us working barefoot to save our shoes. When the new hard shower suddenly began, we all ran to the shelter of the trees that grew along the hollow at the foot of the slope. Uncle Andrew and I stood beneath a sort of arbor made by a wild grapevine whose leaves had grown densely over the top of a small tree. For a while it was an almost perfect umbrella. And then, as the rain fell harder, the foliage began to leak. The day was chilly as well as wet, and Uncle Andrew was wearing a canvas hunting coat, which he now opened and spread like a hen’s wing. “Here, baby,” he said. I ducked under and he closed me in. For a long time I stood there, dark and dry in his warmth, in his mingled smell of sweat and pipe tobacco, while the rain fell hard around us and splattered on the ground at our feet.

In the winter when nightfall came early, he would often stop by our house as he was going home. He would come in and sit down. My father would lay aside the evening paper, and they would talk quietly and companionably, going over the stages of work on the farms, saying what had been done and what needed doing. Uncle Andrew would have on his winter clothes: an old felt hat, corduroys, the tan canvas hunting coat, and under that a lined suede jacket with a zipper. He would not take off his outdoor clothes because he was on his way to supper and did not intend to stay long. I would climb into his lap and make myself comfortable. Perhaps I appeared to be listening, but what I was really doing was smelling. There was the smell of Uncle Andrew himself, which was a constant and always both comforting and exciting, but on those evenings his clothes gave off also the cold smells of barns and animals, hay and tobacco, ground grain, wood smoke. Those smells charmed me utterly and saddened me, for they told me what I had missed by being in school.

“Take me with you in the morning,” I would say.

And he would say, “Can’t do it, college.” Or, in another mood, he would give me a hug and a pat. “I wish I could, baby, but you got to go to school.”

For children his term of endearment, which also was Grandpa’s, was “baby.” He called me that when he felt tender toward me, as he often did, nearly always when he was drinking but often too when he was not.

He might have wanted a boy of his own, I sometimes thought, and maybe I was the kind of boy he wanted. At school I took to signing myself “Andrew Catlett, Jr.” Sometimes it seemed unfair to me that I was not his son. I wanted to be a man just like him.

I liked his rough way of joking and carrying on. Often when I showed up at his apartment, he would say in his nasal slang, “Hello, bozo! Gimme five!” And we would do a big handshake.

His term of emphatic agreement was “Yowza!” Or he would say, “Aw yeah!”—pronounced as one word: “Aw’eah!”—which was both affirmative and derisive. He could make one word perform lots of functions.

Anybody dead and buried, especially any of Aunt Judith’s relatives, was “planted in the skull orchard.”

Anybody licked or done in had been “nailed to the cross.”

His threats to Henry and me, even when somewhat meant, were delivered with a burlesque of ferocity that made us laugh: “I’m going to stomp your bee-hind!” he would say. “I’m going to rap on your ding-dong! I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you! I’m going to get you down and work on you!”

He would sometimes put on Henry’s or my straw hat, much too small for him, insert an old magnifying lens in his eye as a monocle, look at us, and say, “Redwood fer dittos, college!” What that meant I do not know; I don’t know even if those are the right words. That was what it sounded like. Wearing the “monocle” and tiny-looking hat, speaking sentences imitated, I suppose, from somebody he had run across somewhere away, he could transform himself, sometimes a little scarily, into somebody we had never seen before. Leering and mouthing, carrying on an outrageous blather of profanity and nonsense, he could make us laugh until we were lying on the floor, purged, exhausted, aching, and still laughing.

We had a mongrel bull terrier bitch named Nosey that he did not especially care for. Somebody told us we ought to bob her tail. As we did with all out-of-the-way propositions, we laid this one before Uncle Andrew.

“Uncle Andrew, do you know how to cut off Nosey’s tail?”

“Why, hell yes!” he said, opening his pocketknife, “I’ll cut it off right behind her ears.”

And then he mimed the whole procedure, whooping and making raspberries, laughing at himself, until it was funny even to us.

Sometimes, for reasons unclear to us then, he would feel bad and need to sleep. In Jake Branch’s yard under the big white oak, or in the woods at the Bower Place, or on the shady side of one or another of the barns, he would open both doors of the car, stretch out on the front seat, and sleep an hour or two, or all afternoon. I would be utterly mystified and even offended. How could anybody sleep when there were so many things to do?

Or Henry and I would bring Bubby Kentfield and Noah Burk and maybe two or three more around to the apartment on a Sunday afternoon and find him asleep on the couch.

We would tramp into the room in a body, like a delegation, assuming that if he was not in a good mood, we could get him into one. We believed that there was strength in numbers.

“Uncle Andrew, we was wondering if you’d take us swimming.”

“Yeah, Uncle Andrew, we want to go to the quarry.”

He would turn his head reluctantly and look at us. “Aw God, boys, you all don’t need to go swimming.”

“Yes, we do. It’s hot.”

“Well, go on then!”

“Well, we need you to go with us.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, we do. Mother said if you went, we could go.”

“Suppose you drown.”

“She thinks you won’t let us drown.”

“The hell I won’t!”

“Well, are you coming?”

“Go on, now, damn it! Get out of here! Go do something else.”

He would fold his hands and shut his eyes, the picture of hope defeated.

Sometimes he would be quiet and sad-seeming. Always at those times he sang the same song:

Missed the Saturday dance

Heard they crowded the floor

Couldn’t bear it without you

Don’t get around much anymore.

Was there, somewhere, a woman he missed, or was he mindful that he was getting older, or did he just like the song? He had a good voice, and he sang well.

For fifty years and more I have been asking myself, What was he? What manner of a man? For I have never been sure. There are things that I remember, things that I have heard, and things that I am able (a little) to imagine. But what he was seems always to be disappearing a step or two beyond my thoughts.

He was, for one thing, a man of extraordinary good looks. He had style, not as people of fashion have it (though he had the style of fashion when he wanted it), but as, for example, certain horses have it: a self-awareness so complete as to be almost perfectly unconscious, realized in acts rather than thoughts. He wore his clothes with that kind of style. He looked as good in work clothes, I thought, as he did dressed up. Clothes did not matter much to me, and yet I remember being proud to be with him when he was dressed up—in a light summer suit, say, and a straw boater—for I thought he looked better than anybody. He was a big man, six feet two inches tall and weighing a hundred and eighty pounds. He had a handsome, large-featured face with a certain fineness or sensitivity that suggested possibilities in him that he mainly ignored. His eyes, as Grandma loved to say, were “hazel,” and they were very expressive, as responsive to thought as to sight. He loved ribaldry, raillery, impudence. He spoke at times a kind of poetry of vulgarity.

And yet there was something dark or troubled in him also, as though he foresaw his fate; I felt it even then. I have a memory of him with a certain set to his mouth and distance in his eyes, an expression of difficult acceptance, as if he were resigned to being himself, as if perhaps he saw what it would lead to. His silences, though never long, were sometimes solemn and preoccupied. When he was still in his twenties, his hair had begun to turn gray.

For another thing, he was as wild, probably, as any human I have ever known. He was a man, I think, who was responsive mainly to impulses: desire, affection, amusement, self-abandon, sometimes anger.

When he felt good, he would be laughing, joking, mocking, mimicking, singing, mouthing a whole repertory of subverbal noises. He would say—and as Yeager Stump later told me, he would do—anything he thought of. He would lounge, grinning, in his easy chair and talk outrageously, as if merely curious to hear what he might say.

I was in the third grade when the teachers at our school asked the students to ask their fathers to volunteer to build some seesaws on the playground. Henry and I, knowing our father would not spare the time, brought the matter before Uncle Andrew.

“Well, college,” he said, “I’ll take it under consideration. Tell all the women teachers to line up out by the road, and I’ll drive by and look ’em over. It might be I could give ’em a little lift.”

He had, I am sure, no intention of helping with the seesaws; he never had been interested in a school. But Henry, who was in the second grade, dutifully relayed the message to his teacher. I remember well the difficulty of hearing Henry’s teacher repeat to my teacher Uncle Andrew’s instructions. As I perfectly understood, our teachers’ outrage was not necessarily contingent upon Henry’s indiscretion; Uncle Andrew would have delivered his suggestion in person if the circumstances had been different and it had occurred to him to do so.

At times he seemed to be all energy, intolerant of restraint, unpredictable. His presence, for so small a boy as I was, was like that of some large male animal who might behave as expected one moment and the next do something completely unforeseen and astonishing.

One morning we went to the Bower Place only to find Charlie Branch stalled for want of a mowing machine part. We started back to Hargrave to get the part, Uncle Andrew driving complacently along at the wartime speed limit, and I chinning the dashboard as usual. We got to a place where the road went down through a shallow cut with steep banks on both sides, and all of a sudden Chumpy and Grover Corvin stepped into the road in front of us. Chumpy and Grover were just big teenage boys then, but they were already known as outlaws and bullies; a lot of people were afraid of them. They wanted a ride, and by stepping into the road they meant to force Uncle Andrew to stop. What he did was clap the accelerator to the floor and drive straight at them. His response was as instantaneous and all-out as that of a kicking horse. He ran them out of the road and up the bank, cutting away at the last split second. We drove on as before. He did not say a word.

Chapter 5

WHILE UNCLE Andrew farmed and did whatever else he did, Aunt Judith and her mother busied themselves with the care and maintenance of the Hargrave upper crust. Aunt Judith’s mother had been born a Hargrave, a descendant of the Hargrave for whom the town was named, and so Aunt Judith was virtually a Hargrave herself. By blood she was only a quarter Hargrave, but by disposition and indoctrination she was 100 percent, as her mother expected and perhaps required. The two of them belonged to the tightly drawn little circle (almost a knot) of the female scions of the first families of Hargrave—a complex cousinship that preserved and commended itself in an endless succession of afternoon bridge parties. At these functions everybody was “cud’n” somebody: Cud’n Anne, Cud’n Nancy, Cud’n Charlotte, Cud’n Phoebe, and so on. Theirs was an exclusive small enclosure that one could not enter or leave except by birth and death. My mother, for example, was excluded for the original sin of having been born in Port William—an exclusion which I believe she understood as an escape.

This feminine inner circle had of course a masculine outer circle to which Uncle Andrew pertained by marriage and in which he participated (being incapable of silence, let alone deference) by snorts, hoots, spoofs, jokes, and other blasphemies. He was particularly intrigued by the fervent cousinship of the little class that he had wedded, and he loved to enlarge it by addressing as “cud’n” or “cuz” any bootblack, barfly, yardman, panhandler, dishwasher, porter, or janitor he happened to encounter in the presence of his wife and mother-in-law. His favorite name for Aunt Judith was “Miss Judy-pooty,” but he also called her “Cud’n Pud’n.” Her mother he named “Miz Gotrocks” in mockery of her love of elaborate costume jewelry and big hats, and her little pair of pinch-nose glasses on a silver chain. But he also called her, as occasion required, “Cud’n Mothah” and “Momma-pie.” The latter name, because we children picked it up from him, was what everybody in our family came to call her.

Aunt Judith, as I judge from a set of photographs that used to hang in Momma-pie’s bedroom, had been a pretty girl. She was an only child, raised by her divorced mother, who had been an only daughter. Aunt Judith and Momma-pie were a better matched pair than Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew. Aunt Judith had grown up in the protective enclosure prescribed by Momma-pie’s status and character; Uncle Andrew had grown up in no enclosure that he could get out of. That the two of them married young and in error is plain fact. Why they got married—or, rather, why Uncle Andrew married Aunt Judith—is a question my father puzzled over in considerable exasperation for the rest of his life. He always reverted to the same theory: that Momma-pie had insidiously contrived it. A mantrap had been cunningly set and baited with the perhaps tempting virginity of Aunt Judith—and Uncle Andrew, his mind diverted to other territory, had obliged by inserting his foot. Maybe so.

Maybe so. If the theory was ever provable—and my father had no proof—the chance is long gone by now. But a story that Mary Penn told me, after I had grown up, suggests at least that Uncle Andrew was not an ecstatic bridegroom. One of Mary’s cousins, a schoolmate of Uncle Andrew’s, told her that on the night before his wedding Uncle Andrew got drunk and fell into a road ditch. His friends gathered around, trying to help him up.

“Aw, boys,” he said, “just leave me be. When I think of what I’ve got to lay with tomorrow night, I’d just as soon lay here in this ditch.”

He had seen his fate, and named it, and yet accepted it. Why?

However their marriage began, whatever its explanation, their unlikenesses were profound. The second mystery of their union was set forth as follows by my mother: “Did your Aunt Judith have so many health problems because your Uncle Andrew drank and ran around with other women, or did your Uncle Andrew drink and run around with other women because your Aunt Judith had so many health problems?” The answer to that question too, assuming that anybody ever knew it, has been long in the grave.

The question, anyhow, states their condition accurately enough. Aunt Judith did have a lot of health problems, some of which were very painful. Since no doctor ever found a cause or a remedy for most of them, it seems that the cause must have been in her mind, which is to say in her marriage. And perhaps also in her relationship to Momma-pie. My mother remembers that Aunt Judith never said anything without looking at Momma-pie to see if it was all right. But if Aunt Judith lived in some fear of Momma-pie, I am sure that she lived also in surprise, bewilderment, and dismay at Uncle Andrew, whom she nevertheless adored.

Sometimes Uncle Andrew could be sympathetic and tender with Aunt Judith, sorry for her sufferings, worried about her, anxious to help her solve her problems. Sometimes, unable to meet her demands for attention or sympathy with the required response, he met them instead with derision. Sometimes, I imagine, he was contrite about his offenses against her and wished to do better. But as they both surely had learned beyond unlearning or pretense, the time would invariably come when, under the spell of an impulse, he would fling her away. He would fling her away as a flying swallow flings away its shadow.

Aunt Judith always asked you for affection before you could give it. For that reason she always needed more affection than she got. She would drain the world of affection, and then, fearing that it had been given only because she had asked for it, she would have to ask for more.

“Sugah,” she would say to whichever of us children had come in sight, “come here and kiss yo’ Aunt Judith!” And she was capable of issuing this invitation with the broad hint that, because of her frail health, the grave might claim her before we would have a chance to kiss her again. I am glad to remember that, in spite of everything, I felt a genuine affection for her, especially in the time before Uncle Andrew’s death—before fate authenticated her predisposition to woe. In those days she could be a pleasant companion for a small boy, and I remember afternoons when we sat together while she read to me from the evening paper a reporter’s serialized account of the movement of a group of soldiers from training camp to troopship to battle. We both became deeply interested in those articles and looked forward to them. I remember how our reading fitted together our interest in the story of the soldiers, our sense of great history unfolding, and our mutual affection and pleasure. And yet when she turned toward me with her need, as sooner or later she always did, it was hard to provide a response satisfactory to either of us. It is hard to give the final kiss of this earthly life over and over again. Mostly I submitted silently to her hugs, kisses, and other attentions, profiting the best I could from that exotic smell of cigarette smoke and perfume that hung about her.

Her tone of self-reference almost always carried an overtone of self-pity. She asked for pity as she asked for affection—and her demand, as was inevitable in that hopeless emotional economy of hers, always outran the available supply. As she strove forward with her various claims on other people, she more and more destroyed the possibility of a genuine mutuality with anybody. Her need for love isolated and estranged her from everybody who might have loved her, and from everybody who did.

In her self-centeredness and her constant appeal to others to fulfill her unfulfillable needs, she was like Momma-pie. Both of them, I think, belonged to a lineage of spoiled women. From the time of her divorce, Momma-pie had lived with her expansive pretensions in a small room at the Broadfield Hotel on the income from a moderately good farm that she had never seen except from the road. During her life at the hotel she did nothing for herself except for the light and polite housekeeping of her room. Aunt Judith was a fastidious housekeeper and a good cook—she and Uncle Andrew had never had the money for household help—but her work always bore the implication of her poor health, and hints were often passed between her and Momma-pie that whatever she did she was not quite able to do.

The would-be aristocracy of the Hargrave upper crust was, after all, I think, a cruel burden for Aunt Judith and Momma-pie. According to the terms that they accepted and lived by, they were important because they were who they were. That was their axiom. And so there they were, suspended in the ethereal element of their pretension, utterly estranged from the farms and the work from which they lived, hard put to demonstrate their usefulness to much of anybody, and forced to bear the repeated proofs that Uncle Andrew assumed almost nothing that they assumed.

It is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Aunt Judith if she had married a milder, more tractable man, just as it is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Uncle Andrew if he had married a more robust and self-sustaining woman. Such might-have-beens only renew the notice that Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew married each other, and in doing so joined snow and fire.

Uncle Andrew, except that he possessed “aristocratic good looks,” could not have been anyone that Aunt Judith ever saw in her girlhood dreams. She must have seen him simply as she wanted to see him: a young man handsome as a prince, who would make her the envy of other girls. She must have imagined herself and him as “a beautiful couple.” To Momma-pie—assuming that my father’s theory of artful entrapment was correct—he must have seemed “an excellent prospect,” good raw material in need of polish. If in fact they captured him, then they captured a bull in a henhouse. He was, as undoubtedly he already knew or soon found out, the very reality that their not-altogether-pretended feminine delicacy was least disposed to recognize. And now they were obliged to try to contain him in an enclosure prepared for another kind of creature. He was, whatever else he was, a man of his own time and place. He honored to some extent the conventions of his capture; he was capable of affection, sympathy, and regret. Though his confinement did not exist except when he submitted to it, sometimes he submitted to it. But he could not be held. It was not so much that he resisted or defied or rebelled against his bondage; he simply overflowed it. When he filled to his own fullness, he overflowed his confines as a rising river overflows its banks, making nothing of the boundaries and barriers that stand in its way.

The three of them made their daily lives, formed and followed their routines, made things ordinary and bearable for themselves. Their strange convergence was not a perpetual crisis. But it was nonetheless hopeless. They were two almost forceless women entangled past untangling with an almost ungentled man. He of course was as spoiled in his way as they were in theirs. They had been spoiled by generations of men who had indulged and promoted their helplessness; he had been spoiled by women who had allowed him to charm them into acceptance of his inborn unstoppability. Aunt Judith and Momma-pie had spoiled him themselves, as I think all the women in his life had done. They were under his spell, as much caught by him as he by them. They could not contain him, but they could not expel him either.

The best friend he had, I am certain, was my father, who loved him completely. But my father, purposeful and tireless, sober and passionate, in love with his family and his work, true to his obligations, could not have been Uncle Andrew’s crony. They could be friends within the terms of brotherhood and partnership, but partly perhaps because he was Uncle Andrew’s brother, my father was not wild; the whole budget of Catlett wildness in that generation had been allotted to Uncle Andrew. For cronies, Uncle Andrew had Buster Simms and Yeager Stump.

In his look and laugh and way of talking, Buster Simms gleefully acknowledged the world’s lewdness. He was a freckled, smallish, quick-eyed man whose conversation tended to be all in tones of joking, from aggressive to kind. He called Uncle Andrew “Duke.” Yeager Stump was a tall, good-looking man of somewhat the same style as Uncle Andrew. Of the three, he was the quietest. You could see in the wrinkly corners of his eyes that he was always waiting to be amused, and was being amused while he waited. Of the three, he was the only one who lived to be old.

All three felt themselves too straitly confined in marriage, and they escaped into each other’s company. Or rather, each other’s company was their freedom that, spent or hung over, they allowed themselves to be recaptured out of, as Samson allowed himself to be bound with seven green withes that were never dried.

“We did everything we thought of,” Yeager Stump would say later. “Our only limit was our imagination.”

They called each other “Cud’n Andrew” and “Cud’n Bustah” and “Cud’n Yeagah”—for ordinary use abbreviated to “Cuz”—in endless parody of the female cousinship of Hargrave.

When they met in their daily comings and goings, they would greet one another with a broad show of camaraderie and affection:

“Hello, Cuz!”

“Hello, Cuz!”

And then they would laugh. Sometimes they started laughing before they had said anything.

Chapter 6

THE FIRST apartment that Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith lived in after they moved to Hargrave had no bathtub. Uncle Andrew loved a bathtub, and so he would sometimes come around to our house after supper to have a soak. That was one of the times when he and I would visit. I would perch on the lid of the thunder jug, as he liked to call it, and he would lie in hot water up to his chin, and we would talk. Or I would just sit and watch him, for in everything he did he fascinated me. Unlike my father, who was in all things thrifty and careful and neat and who bathed vigorously like a man grooming a horse, Uncle Andrew filled the tub full and bathed expansively, as if the tub were an ocean and he a whale. He would bask at length in the hot water, and then he would soap and rinse with a great heaving and sloshing and blowing and making of suds.

On one such evening, when I must have been about six or seven, I confided to him that I had fallen in love with the older sister of one of my friends. I said that I wanted to get her off by herself somewhere—a lonely back road, say—where we could be unobserved. I was going to say that I would then declare my love. I had given a lot of thought and effort to the planning of this event, but I lacked confidence; I wanted the counsel of experience. But I got no further than that detail about the lonely back road. For a while it looked as though Uncle Andrew might drown in the extremity of his glee.

“Aw’eah! Aw’eah!” he said as he laughed and whooped and splashed. “Now you’re getting right, college! Now you’re cooking with gas! You got your mind properly on your business ! You going out among ’em!”

It astonishes me a little yet to realize how characteristically he did not qualify himself. I had spoken as a small boy, and he had responded unreservedly as a man, as himself. I must have loved him almost absolutely to have so confided in him. And was I hurt or disappointed when he received my confidence with such rowdy approval, infusing my shy daydream with a glandular intensity from another vision entirely? Not in the least, as far as I remember. I was bewildered, certainly, but was happy as always to have pleased him and to be carried away on the big stream of his laughter. And now, of course, I am delighted.

Later, he would quote me to his cronies. Buster Simms would lean to glance in at me where I sat beside Uncle Andrew in the car. “Duke, is he looking at the girls yet? Is he transacting any private business?”

And Uncle Andrew would declare solemnly, without looking at me, “Why, he’s got a girl! And he tells me that his business with her calls for the strictest privacy.” And he would go on. Wishing he would stop, I yet listened in fascination, understanding vaguely that they spoke of a destination at which I had not arrived but to which my fare was already paid.

Thus, though I was as innocent as Adam alone, I became aware of the sexual aura that surrounded Uncle Andrew.

He was never apart from it. He was always playing to whatever woman was at hand, whether it was Minnie Branch, wearing a pair of Jake’s cast-off work shoes and with her brood in tow, or Miss Iris Flynn, who was in fact Yeager Stump’s girlfriend, or Aunt Roxanna, Grandma’s tall and lean oldest sister—anybody, so long as she was a woman. Or rather, he did not play to them; he lived to them, acknowledging them, requiring them to acknowledge him, as inhabitants of the same exuberantly physical and sexual world. How they responded he did not care, so long as they responded, which they invariably did. They scolded, scoffed, huffed, smiled; they reached out to him; they looked straight into his eyes and laughed. Of particular interest to me then, and still, was Uncle Andrew’s friendship with Minnie Branch, for of all the people in that overflowing household on the Crayton Place, I think he liked Minnie best. For him, maybe, the female world turned on an axis held at one pole by Aunt Judith and at the other by Minnie Branch—Aunt Judith, with her bred-in dependency, her sometimes helplessness, ill with fright and self-regard, childless and forever needy; and Minnie, who was fearless, capable, hardy, fecund, unabashed, without apology or appeal. Minnie could cook and keep house for what amounted to a small hotel, split firewood, butcher a hog, raise a garden, work in the field, shoot a fox, set a hen or wring her neck. She was a large, muscular, humorous, plain-faced woman who wore a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. You could hear her laugh halfway to the back of the farm. I can see her yet with her white hens clustered at her feet, picking up shelled corn; she is leaning back against the weight of the child in her womb, fists on hips, talking and laughing.

She conceived and birthed as faithfully as a good brood cow, welcomed each newcomer without fuss, prepared without complaint for the next. There was a running joke on this subject that Uncle Andrew carried on with Minnie and Jake.

“Well, by God, Jake’s been at it again! He’s as hot as a boy dog!”

Minnie would throw back her head and laugh: “Haw! Haw!”

And Jake would grin and shake his head in wonder at himself. “They going to have to do something about me.”

And when Minnie lay down on the bed, in the big, starkly furnished bedroom next to the kitchen, to suffer yet another birth, who would be there, anxiously hovering about, dispensing clean towels and hot water, eagerly bathing the infant who pretty soon appeared, but Aunt Judith and Momma-pie? They had no more to do with Minnie Branch in the ordinary course of their lives than they had to do with the farm. But Minnie’s birth pangs drew them like some undeniable music, and their conversation afterward was full of the news of their participation.

Beyond the obvious reasons, Uncle Andrew liked Minnie, I think, because she made nothing special of him; she did not see him as anything unexpected. She liked him wholly and asked for nothing. He was comfortable with her.

One overcast afternoon, I remember, Uncle Andrew and I were sitting in Minnie Branch’s kitchen, talking with Minnie and another woman I knew only as Mrs. Partlet. The older children and the hands, one of whom at that time was Jockey Partlet, Mrs. Partlet’s husband, had been fed their dinner long ago and had gone back to the field. The firebox of the cooking range was almost cold. Uncle Andrew and I were there perhaps just because Uncle Andrew enjoyed being there and did not particularly need to be anyplace else.

Minnie sat in a big rocking chair between the stove and the door into the next room. She was rocking slowly back and forth, with Coreen, her then-youngest, lying asleep in the crook of her arm. The second youngest, Beureen, was asleep in a crib just beyond the door. Angeleen, the third youngest, was standing quietly at Minnie’s knee, looking as though she would like to climb into her lap. At the moment, Minnie was ignoring other people’s wants. She had a chew of tobacco tucked into her cheek and was taking her usual big part in the conversation. Now and then she would turn her head and spit several feet into the ash bucket behind the stove. Mrs. Partlet, a plump, pretty woman, sat in a straight chair by the window. Her hands lay in her lap, and as the talk went on she fiddled with her fingers. I sat at the end of the table nearest the stove in one of the dozen or so straight chairs, no two of which were the same. Uncle Andrew sat at the other end, by the back door, his chair tilted onto its hind legs, his left arm lying along the edge of the table, his right hand in his pocket. Between the stove and the window where Mrs. Partlet was sitting, a large washtub full of soaking diapers sat on the floor.

The conversation went on casually enough for a while, and then it became humorous, and finally hilarious, carrying a sexual allusiveness that was grown-up and powerful; even I could recognize it. They paid no more attention to me than if I had been yet another infant too young to talk.

The laughter itself seemed to draw Uncle Andrew and Mrs. Partlet to their feet. He extended his left hand; she granted her right. He placed his right hand on her back and waltzed her around the room to a tune that they both appeared to have in mind, the two of them laughing and Minnie laughing from her chair. Uncle Andrew danced Mrs. Partlet backward to the tub of soaking diapers, where to keep from falling in she had to push against him, and she did. And then she whooped and ducked away, still laughing, under his arm.

He looked at me. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The women still laughing behind us, we went out the back door and past the well pump and the cellar wall.

And then Mrs. Partlet followed us out. “Andrew,” she said.

When I looked back, Mrs. Partlet was standing in front of Uncle Andrew, all flushed and flustered, her hands on his forearms, saying something to him that I was not supposed to hear.

He turned away, attempting to return to the hilarity of the moments before, but failing, and knowing it. “I got all the women I can take care of already.”

His face as he came away was solemn-looking, as it was sometimes when he was quiet.

To him, I think, the idea of consequence was always an afterthought. He did not expect consequences; he discovered them. When he could, he laughed them away. When they pressed in through his laughter, he shut his mouth and bore them. What he had done was his fate, and so he bore it.

The second apartment that Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith rented after they moved to Hargrave was the upstairs—three rather low-ceilinged rooms and a kitchen—of a small frame house not far from their first apartment. The new one had a bathtub. It also had two bedrooms, and so Momma-pie left her room in the Broadfield Hotel and moved in with her daughter and son-in-law. After that Uncle Andrew had to laugh more than ever to keep the consequences at bay. His home life now required him to deal constantly with two women whose dignity and self-esteem depended upon illnesses that were frequent, dramatic, and potentially fatal and that Uncle Andrew was therefore obliged to take lightly whenever he could. I remember Momma-pie’s patient and saintly smile, which told the world how much she had borne and how much she was resigned to bear. For if Uncle Andrew’s instinct for the outrageous was unfailing, so was Momma-pie’s instinct for the vengeance of patient endurance.

One of Uncle Andrew’s favorite loitering places was the Rosebud Café just off the courthouse square in Hargrave. The Rosebud sold beer, and my parents did not allow me to go there; it seemed even to me to be no place for children. I never went there alone or with my schoolmates. But in those days I went there often with Uncle Andrew. The Rosebud was owned and run by Miss Iris Flynn, who always had three or four nice young women working for her. It was a good-humored, interesting-smelling place, full of light from the big front windows in the daytime, and at night dim, lit mainly by neon—as I knew from standing on the walk in front and peeking in. Uncle Andrew loved to go there in the lulls that came in the late morning and the middle of the afternoon. Often, then, we would be the only customers. Uncle Andrew would order soft drinks for us, and then he would sit, tilted back in his chair, talking and cutting up with Miss Iris and the other women. They would gather round, or stop in passing, to join in the talk and the carrying on. These interludes were intensely interesting to me, and I devoted a lot of study to them.

One night when I was eating supper with Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew and Momma-pie at the little table in Aunt Judith’s kitchen, I said, “Uncle Andrew, how come you spend so much time talking to those women down at the Rosebud?”

Momma-pie assumed her smile of sweet patience.

Uncle Andrew looked at me and said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned!”

But he was already laughing. He either was embarrassed or knew he ought to be, and his embarrassment tickled him. For there I sat, the would-be friend of his bosom, his trusty hired hand, and I had betrayed him.

Burlesquing indignation to disguise whatever she felt—and maybe amused at me too; she could have been—Aunt Judith said, “Well! The next thing I know, Uncle Andrew’ll be out in my car with one of those Rosebud girls!”

Uncle Andrew said, “Aw’eah! Stretched out in it!”

The big flow of his laughter poured out, and all of us, in our various styles, went bobbing away.

Chapter 7

MY MEMORIES of Uncle Andrew are thus an accumulation of little pictures and episodes, isolated from one another, unbegun and unended. They are vividly colored, clear in outline, and spare, as if they belong to an early age of the world when there were not too many details. Each is like the illuminated capital of a page I cannot read, for in my memory there is no tissue of connection or interpretation. As a child, I either was interested or I was not; I either understood or I did not. Mostly, even when I was interested, I did not understand. I had perhaps no inclination to explain my elders to myself. I did not say to myself, “Uncle Andrew is wild,” or “Uncle Andrew does not think beforehand,” or “Uncle Andrew does whatever he thinks of.” Perhaps it was from thinking about him after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable or unwritable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us every day, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.

For a long time after Uncle Andrew’s death, when the phone would ring early in the morning, I would be out of bed and halfway down the stairs before I remembered his absence and felt the day suddenly change around me, withdrawing forever from what it might have been.

That was the way it went for I cannot remember how long. Uncle Andrew was right at the center of the idea I had formed of myself. I was his hand, his boy, his buddy, who was either always going with him or always wanting to go with him. I had wanted to be like him. It had not occurred to me to want to be like anybody else. That he was no longer present was a fact I kept discovering. It puzzled me that I did not cry; perhaps I would have, had I been able to name to myself what I had experienced and what I felt. Uncle Andrew had been a surprising man; often you did not know what he was going to do, and this was because he often did not know what he was going to do himself. But his death was a bigger surprise to me than anything I had seen him do while he was living. That he had been killed on purpose by another man, for a reason that was never adequately explained to me, made his death as much a mystery as it was a surprise. It was therefore a problem to me as much as it was a grief; I thought about it almost incessantly.

For my sake, I suppose, not much was said about Uncle Andrew or his death in my presence. Or maybe it was not for my sake. How easy, after all, would it have been to find the words? What could have been said that would have been adequate or fitting to a calamity so great and so new? The grown-ups’ grief, especially my father’s, stood silently around the life and death of Uncle Andrew like a wall or a guardian grove. I could no more have spoken of him or asked about the manner of his death than I could have doubted that he was dead.

Somebody told me merely that Carp Harmon had killed Uncle Andrew because Uncle Andrew had failed to cover a well near the lead mine, as he had promised he would do. I asked for no details, accepting the story as the truth, which it partly may have been, though I came to doubt it.

We had an upright piano at our house, and sometimes in the evening my father would play. I had no gift for music, but I liked to hear him and to watch him. He played hymns and popular tunes, sitting very straight at the keyboard, playing with precision and strong rhythm. What I best remember him playing, sometimes singing as he played, was “Bell-Bottom Trousers,” a sprightly, morale-boosting song that was popular for a while during the war, and another, a love song, “One Dozen Roses.” After Uncle Andrew’s death, my father never played the piano again. This was to me the most powerful of all the signs of the change that had come.

He went on with his law practice, of course, but now he also resumed the care of the farms. By then, he had to look after Grandpa Catlett’s farm, which we called the Home Place, in addition to the Crayton and Bower Places, because after Uncle Andrew’s death Grandpa was less and less able to see to it himself. All this, however great the burden or regrettable the cause, was one of the blessings of his life. Unlike Uncle Andrew, my father had a genuine calling to be a farmer. Farming was his passion, as the law was; in him the two really were inseparable. As a lawyer, he had served mostly farmers. His love of farming and of farming people had led him into the politics of agriculture and a lifelong effort to preserve the economy of the small farms. In my father’s assortment of passions—his family, the law, bird hunting, and farming—farming was the fundamental one; from farming he derived the terms and conditions of his being. It was farming that excited him until he could not sleep: “Like a woman!” he would say in his old age, amazed and delighted that it could have moved him so. When he could, he would take a day off from the office to farm: Maybe he would work all day with the cattle or sheep; I remember days too when he would get everybody together to harness and drive for the first time the new teams of two-year-old mules. He made the rounds of the farms every evening, after the office was shut, to see to his livestock, to learn what had been done, to find out what needed doing, or just to drive his car through the fields and look. Or he would stop and sit, and let the world grow still around him. Often he would be out on one of the places, driving and thinking and looking, talking to Jake or Charlie Branch or one of the Brightleafs, before office hours in the morning.

Sometimes he would be late getting back.

“Where’s Wheeler?” some would-be client, glancing in at my father’s still-empty chair, would ask his secretary.

Miss Julia Vye would raise her hands in a gesture of helplessness and take a noisy little sip of air over the end of her tongue. “Heaven knows where! Out somewhere in a field, I suppose!”

One day as I walked past my father’s car, parked on the street in front of his office, I saw a large grasshopper sitting on top of the steering wheel. By the time my father had owned a car for a year or so, the paint was thoroughly scratched by bushes and briars, and the radiator was choked with seeds.

On Sunday afternoons, after church and dinner, he would be at farming again—he couldn’t keep away from it—making the rounds that day with Grandpa, as long as he was able, or with Elton Penn or Nathan Coulter or Henry or me, or sometimes with all of us, Henry and I along to open the gates, to be teased and admonished, to listen. My father would drive slowly and alertly, turning the car abruptly this way or that to show an animal or a field to the best advantage.

When he could not go to the farms himself, he often sent Henry or me or both of us to do some piece of work he wanted done. He almost routinely overtaxed our abilities—as on the day he sent us, when we were still small boys, to separate the bull from the herd of cows on the Crayton Place and drive him to the Home Place; we saw a lot of the country on that trip, for the bull went into every side road and through every open gate he came to. Or else our father sent us to have some pleasure that he was too busy to have himself but that he imagined we could have if only he appointed us to have it and described it suggestively enough: He knew where we could catch a mess of fish or find a covey of birds, and he would tell us not only how to conduct the adventure he had in mind but also how to enjoy it.

Sometimes, later, he would say, as if thinking aloud, how much his interest and enthusiasm had been damaged by Uncle Andrew’s death, how that had baffled and delayed him, and I knew that this was so. He regretted bitterly and always the loss of Uncle Andrew, and of that part of his own life that he felt had gone with Uncle Andrew to the grave. But if he was damaged, he was not destroyed; he still had more than half his life to live, and he was a farmer to the end.

Now, looking back after all my years of thinking about the two of them, I cannot help wondering how satisfactorily their partnership might have continued if Uncle Andrew had lived. I know that my father knew that Uncle Andrew was wild—I am pretty sure that he knew the extent of his wildness and what it involved—and yet my father spoke even less of that than of his grief. At the time of Uncle Andrew’s death, he and my father had been partners for something like four years. As far as I know, it had gone well enough. Perhaps Uncle Andrew would have proved responsible enough and my father patient enough for their partnership to have endured—who could know? I know only that after Uncle Andrew’s death my father suffered not only a lost reality but also a damaged dream. It was a dream bound to sustain damage and to cause pain, and yet he never gave it up, and he passed it on. He dreamed, simply, of a world intact, the family together, the place cared for, and all well.

Perhaps without much awareness that he was doing it, or why, he transferred his dream of partnership to Henry and me. Because he needed so much for us to share his interests, his demands on us were often burdening and overburdening, though they taught us much that we needed to know. In spite of his impatience and his sometimes immense exasperation at our shortcomings, he gave us also his love for the ordinary excellences of farming and of life outdoors, and his extraordinary pleasure in them. He could be absorbed and exalted in watching a herd of cattle graze or a red fox crossing a field.

In his eagerness to have us learn and to fill us with experience, he put us into the hands of other teachers. Often, in the summer or on weekends, he would take us with him on his morning rounds and just leave us wherever work was going on.

“Here,” he would say to Jake Branch, for often it would be Jake with whom he left us. “Put ’em to work.”

And to us he would say, “I want you to work and I want you to mind. Listen to Jake and do what he tells you.”

“Jake,” he would say, “make ’em do. Make ’em mind.”

And Jake would say, “Aw, Mr. Wheeler, don’t you worry about them boys. Them boys is all right. Me and them boys get along.”

My father would touch the accelerator then, and be on his way.

Everything was different at Jake’s and Minnie’s without Uncle Andrew. It was quieter and plainer than it had been, and it was sad. As elsewhere, little was said about Uncle Andrew in his absence. Even Minnie, who talked easily about anything, would speak his name with care, as if both eager and reluctant to remember him. But it was Minnie who told me the little that I knew for many years about Uncle Andrew’s last day.

“Andrew,” she said, as if announcing her topic, “he come here that morning to bring Ab home. Ab got his hand cut, it was a bad cut, Andrew taken him to the doctor and then brought him here. And I’m here to tell you, Andrew knowed then that something was going to happen to him. He knowed it. He said he felt bad, and could he have a drink of water. I drawed a fresh bucket and give him a drink.

“We about had dinner ready and I said, ‘Here, Andrew, set down and eat before you go back.’

“And then he started out the back door; he come in at the front door, bringing Ab in. I said, ‘Andrew, it’s bad luck to go in one door and out the other.’

“He said, ‘It don’t matter. It don’t make any difference.’

“He went on out the back door. And it weren’t but a little while then till he was dead.

“He knowed something was going to happen, I’m atelling you. He knowed it as sure as I’m setting here.”

I believed her. Her story seemed to me to show that Uncle Andrew’s death had been fated. Whether he entered into the course of his fate by coming in and going out by different doors, as at birth and death, or by some other way, I did not know. But I felt that on the day of his death he had been fated to die, and that he knew it.

Her story made me see him as he had been when he came into the kitchen with death’s shadow over him and asked her for a drink of water, and drank, and set down the glass. I heard him say, “It don’t matter. It don’t make any difference.” I can hear him yet. I can see the expression on his face as he says it. The shadow of his death is already on him. He speaks in eternity even as he is speaking in time.

And yet Miss Iris Flynn told me many years later that on that morning, having left Ab with the doctor, Uncle Andrew stuck his head into the door of the Rosebud, gave her a grin, and said, “Hi, babe!”

But of those two glimpses of him on that day, Minnie Branch’s is the most powerful. I still raise with myself the question whether it is bad luck to come in by one door and go out by another, which I still associate with that old darkness of fate and calamity. And when I have it on my mind, I still go out by the same door I came in.

Only once was I ever admitted into the unqualified presence of the family’s grief. One night in the late fall of the year of Uncle Andrew’s death, I went with my father on his farm rounds after he had left the office for the day. In the dusk of the early evening we stopped to see Grandma and Grandpa Catlett. Grandma asked us and we stayed for supper. This was something my father had always done from time to time, but perhaps he had not done so since Uncle Andrew’s death.

Grandma’s kitchen was not so harshly utilitarian as Minnie Branch’s—it was neater, and the chairs at the table matched—but in its furnishings and aspect it was nonetheless a room mainly to be used. It had no fuss about it, nothing decorative except a calendar. It was a fairly large room, containing in addition to the table and chairs an iron cooking stove, a small coal oil stove sometimes used in hot weather, a wood box, a flour box, a dish cabinet, and by the back door a small wash table with water bucket and pan and a towel made of a flour sack hanging on a nail, the nail protruding through a carefully worked buttonhole. By then, I believe, there would also have been a small refrigerator. The table and chairs were old, covered with many coats of paint, the old coats chipped and cracked beneath the new. I remember from about that time a dishpan that had a leak and was slightly rounded on the bottom; when Grandma set it on the hot stove it was continuously rocked by little explosions of steam. Her fine things consisted of a set of silver teaspoons, a beautiful old painted pitcher, and a cut-glass bowl.

The table, covered with an oilcloth, stood under the windows on the north wall. Cellar, smokehouse, henhouse, and garden were still live institutions in those days. There would have been a crock of fresh milk; Grandma would have fried a stack of corn batter cakes on the griddle; she might have had a baked ham or a hen; the only sign of the war would have been a scarcity of sugar.

While we ate nobody said anything that was not necessary. I was left out of consideration almost as much as I had been in Minnie Branch’s kitchen on the day of Uncle Andrew’s dance with Mrs. Partlet, and that was unusual.

When the meal was over, we went through the cold hall to the living room and sat down. Grandpa and my father sat on opposite sides of the stove, in which there was a fire. Grandma sat in her little spindle-backed rocker. I sat off to myself by the stand table on which was Grandma’s small brown radio. Perhaps, feeling the sorrow in the room, I wanted to turn on the radio, but I did not turn it on. I could not have turned it on, or asked to do so. As several times before in the months since Uncle Andrew’s death, I felt as if I had just happened into a world that I had not imagined, in which I found no comfort. I had an obscure feeling that it would be politest to be somewhere else but that there would be no polite way to leave. The grown-ups sat in their chairs for a while, not speaking, and then they started to cry—all three of them. They wept without moving or speaking, each as if alone. And then they ceased. My father and Grandma removed their glasses and wiped away their tears, my father with his handkerchief, my grandmother with a corner of her apron. Grandpa simply raised his right hand and passed his forefinger under his eyes.

No more was said in the car that night as my father and I drove home. I can imagine now that he was searching his mind for something to say to me. He would have been aware of the difficulty for me of what I had witnessed, for he was not unaware of much. Demanding as he could be at times, when sympathy was needed he was generous, and he was good at finding the words. But I cannot imagine what he could have said to ease or mitigate the grief that had shown itself so nakedly to me. I was glad he said nothing.

Carp Harmon was tried and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. This also was never explained to me, though I knew that my elders resented the lightness of the punishment. I learned of the trial itself only from Jess Brightleaf, who told me that my father had asked him not to attend. If Jess had gone to the trial, then my grandfather would have wanted to go too. The reason for that I understood without being told. Given my grandfather’s character, his age, his grief and anger, he would not have considered himself subject to the restraints of the court, and my father did not want him raging there.

Later, after I knew that his sentence had expired, I spent a lot of time wondering what would happen if Carp Harmon gave me a ride while I was hitchhiking. Hitchhiking was another thing Henry and I did that we were absolutely forbidden to do. Our mother had read of many horrible things that had happened to hitchhikers, none of which I thought would happen to me. As I knew from experience, people I did not know who picked me up on the road I traveled, the Port William road, were likely to greet me by asking, “Ain’t you one of Wheeler Catlett’s boys?” or “I don’t reckon you’d be a Catlett, would you?” What I worried about was getting picked up by Carp Harmon. Though I had not knowingly ever seen him, I had no doubt that I would recognize him. And I knew that I would need great courage, greater courage than I was sure I had, to speak the necessary words, which I had rehearsed: “Carp Harmon, you son of a bitch, you killed my uncle.” And then perhaps he would pull out his .38 pistol and shoot me?

But he never gave me a ride; as far as I know, I never laid eyes on him in his life.

Another encounter that I grew to expect, as I grew into understanding of what I remembered of Uncle Andrew, was with a first cousin, some strange boy or young man, as I put it to myself, whom I would recognize because he would look something like Uncle Andrew, or even something like me. But if he exists, he has not come forward. As far as I know, I have not laid eyes on him either.

Chapter 8

WIDOWHOOD GAVE new impetus to Aunt Judith’s role as a sufferer. In the eighteen years that remained to her, she needed more sympathy than ever, and now more than ever she was persistent in asking or hinting for it, and was more than ever unappeasable. It was as though every calamity that Momma-pie had forestalled or denied by her masks of superiority had fallen on Aunt Judith, who was as naked to them as a shorn lamb. Whatever her faults, Aunt Judith lacked her mother’s arrogance.

Yet as her afflictions grew she seemed to become increasingly self-concerned. Her sufferings finally were not at all conditioned by the understanding that others also suffered; she suffered in an almost pristine innocence, as if she were the world’s unique sufferer and the world waited curiously to hear of her pains. She was so prompt and extravagent in pitying herself that she drove away all competitors.

She called Grandma Catlett on every anniversary of Uncle Andrew’s birth and death, and on every other anniversary or holiday that reminded her of her loss and her suffering. She kept this up year after year, speaking of “our Andrew.” Grandma said that she was grateful for these attentions, but they cannot have been easy for her.

Nor was Aunt Judith an easy burden for my father, who, in Uncle Andrew’s absence, became her adviser and protector. He fulfilled his duties faithfully, but without, I think, ever having the satisfaction of feeling that she was satisfied.

When Momma-pie died, my father had the duty, among others, of taking Aunt Judith to the undertaker’s to pick out a coffin. He got me to go along, but both of us together were as unequal to the occasion as he would have been alone. We knew that Aunt Judith had been dependent on Momma-pie for many things. We knew that Momma-pie’s death would leave Aunt Judith much lonelier than before. But our sympathy was so much a surplus as to be hardly noticeable.

Handkerchief in hand, chin quivering, Aunt Judith said many times that she was going to be awfully lonely now. Many times she said she did not know what she was going to do. She gazed lingeringly into every one of the coffins, of which there was a roomful, and every one of them reminded her of her loss and renewed her grief. Every one of the coffins had something about it that Momma-pie would have liked, and at these reminders of Momma-pie’s tastes and preferences Aunt Judith’s voice would become a whisper and she would dab at her eyes. She was using her grief to invite sympathy, and in doing so falsified her grief, and in falsifying her grief made it impossible to sympathize with her. And she compounded the difficulty by the innocence of perfect self-deception; she had, I feel sure, no idea what she was doing. And what was one to say? I could find in myself not the least aptitude for the occasion. I longed to exchange places with the wallpaper or the rug. My father, having assured Aunt Judith that he would do all he could for her, had almost as little to say as I did. She placed and left us in our embarrassment as she would have seated us at a table.

For some years she worked as a typist in one of the offices in Hargrave. Later, she contracted glaucoma and became virtually blind. She made her way about the town then truly alone, avoided under cover of her blindness by people who could no longer bear her importunities for sympathy and her endless recitation of her ills.

My last clear, unshakable memory of her is from the summer of 1949, when I was fifteen. One afternoon as I was walking in front of the courthouse, I called out to one of my friends, and in the same instant looked across the street and saw Aunt Judith. She had recognized my voice, and she turned to stare sightlessly toward me. I did not want to go to her; I was just empty of the willingness to do so. I went on as I intended to go, pretending under her following blind gaze that it was not my voice that she had heard and that I was not myself.

For want of compassion—aware that I would inevitably fail to be compassionate enough, but also for want of enough compassion—I denied that I was who I was, and so made myself less than I was. This was my first conscious experience of a shame that was irremediable and hopeless—a shame, as I now suppose, that Uncle Andrew may have met in himself, in her presence, many a time.

This surely was the punishment that she dealt out, wittingly or not, willingly or not, to him and to the rest of us. And if at times in the past I could abandon her to the self-martyrdom of the self-absorbed, and though I see now better than then how impossible she was, still I am sorry. For I can no longer forget that loss and illness and trouble, however a person may exploit them, cannot be exploited without being suffered. Aunt Judith exploited them and suffered them, and suffered her exploitation of them. She suffered and she was alone.

And so she is inescapable. In my mind I will always see her standing there in the street, her head tilted stiffly up, hopelessly hoping for some earthly pity greater than her pity for herself.

Chapter 9

THE HOUSE that Uncle Andrew seemed most to be gone from was not, for me, the one where he had lived in rented rooms with Aunt Judith and Momma-pie. Nor was it my own house at Hargrave, or Jake and Minnie’s at the Crayton Place. Where I most often met his absence and was obliged to deal with it was at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett’s.

Grandpa had been born in an earlier house on that site, the last of five children, about a year before the end of the Civil War. That house burned when he was six, and the present house was built on the old foundation. In the second winter after Uncle Andrew’s death, Grandpa took sick, went to bed, and did not get up again.

All his life he had gone to the barn at bedtime to see to his animals and make sure that all was well. That winter, staying at night with Grandpa, my father went to the barn at bedtime and returned to say that all was well. “And then,” my father said, “he would be pleased.”

“The day after I die,” Grandpa told my father, “get up and go to work.” He died where he was born, in the same corner of the same room, though in a different house. And on a raw day in the late winter we carried him, dressed up, to Port William and left him there in the hill under the falling rain.

The year and a half and a little more between the day of Uncle Andrew’s death and the day of Grandpa’s funeral seems to me now to have been a time of ending, not just of lives but of a kind of life and a kind of world. I did not recognize that ending as consciously then as I do now, but I felt its shadow. Uncle Andrew had not belonged to the older life; though he had grown up in it, he had lived away from it. He belonged to the self-consciously larger life that came into being with the First World War, and that was now rapidly establishing itself by means of another war, industrial machinery, and electric wires. But though that new world was undeniably present on the roads, the life of our fields still depended on the bodily strength and skill of people and horses and mules. In the minds of my grandfather and Dick Watson, the Brightleafs, and the Branches, the fundamental realities and interests and pleasures were the same as they had been in the minds of the people who had worked in the same fields before the Civil War.

The first death after Uncle Andrew’s had been Dick Watson’s, and Dick, like my grandfather, belonged to that older world. That the two of them belonged also to two different and in some ways opposite races did not keep them from belonging in common to a kind of humanity. They were farming people. What distinguished them from ever-enlarging numbers of people in succeeding generations was that they had never thought of being anything else. This gave them a kind of integrity and a kind of concentration. They did their work with undivided minds, intent upon its demands and pleasures, reconciled to its hardships, not complaining, never believing that they might have been doing something better.

Dick and Aunt Sarah Jane’s two-room house at the edge of the woods, down the hill from the barns, was a part of the Home Place, but it was also a place unto itself, with its own garden and henhouse and woodpile. Aunt Sarah Jane did not work “out.” She kept house and gardened and cared for a small flock of chickens and foraged in the fields and woods and sewed and mended and read her Bible. In the mornings and the evenings and in odd times spared from the farmwork, Dick kept their house supplied with water and milk, meat and firewood. I remember their pleasure in all the items of their small abundance: buckets of milk from Dick’s cow, cured joints and middlings from their hogs, vegetables from Aunt Sarah Jane’s garden, the herbs and greens and mushrooms she gathered on her walks.

In those years when I could not be with Uncle Andrew, I loved almost as much to be with Dick, though the two of them could hardly have been less alike. Dick was as gentle and quiet as Uncle Andrew was brash and uproarious. And whereas Uncle Andrew’s great aim in life was to “get out among ’em,” Dick, when I knew him, anyhow, was mostly content to stay put. With Uncle Andrew, you were always on a trajectory that was going to take you back to the road and on to someplace else. With Dick, when he wasn’t behind a team or on horseback, you traveled on foot, going not away but deeper in. Dick could sit still. He could sit on his rock doorstep after supper, smoke his pipe, and talk slowly and thoughtfully until bedtime. In my memories of Uncle Andrew, I am often behind him or off to the side, watching him, feeding my curiosity as to what manner of man he was. In my memories of Dick Watson, I am often beside him, holding his hand. From Dick I learned that the countryside was inhabited not just by things we ordinarily see but also by things we ordinarily do not see—such as foxes. That it was haunted by old memories I already knew.

Foxhunting with Dick, he on my grandfather’s mare and I on Beauty the pony, I first came into the presence of the countryside at night, and learned to think of it as the hunters knew it, and learned there were foxes abroad in it who knew it as no human ever would. There would be an occasional dog fox, Dick said, who would venture up almost to the yard fence to invite the hounds to run, and who, when the hounds accepted the challenge, knew how to baffle them by running in a creek or along the top of a rock fence. I had from Dick a vision of a brilliant fox running gaily through the dark over the ridges and along the hollows, followed by hounds in beautiful outcry, and this to me was a sort of doctrineless mystery and grace.

But what I remember most, and most gratefully, is Dick’s own presence, for he was a man fully present in the place and its yearly round of work that connected hayfield and grainfield and feed barn and hog lot, woods and woodpile and the wood box behind the kitchen stove, well and water trough. When the work was to be done, he was there to do it. He did it well and without haste; when it was done he took his ease and did not complain. Years later, when I was looking for the way home, his was one of the minds that guided me.

After he and then Grandpa were dead, the farm, in spite of my father’s long caring for it, lacked a coherence that it had had before. It needed not just attention and work but lives that made it a world and lived from it.

For several years after those deaths, I stayed with Grandma for months at a time. She started coming to Hargrave to spend the winters in a room at the Broadfield Hotel. And then on a Saturday morning in March or April, with spring bright in the air, Elton Penn would come with his truck, and we would load Grandma’s spool bed, her comfortable rocker, her clothes and linens, and take her home.

I would move in then to stay with her until she returned to town late the following fall. For me, this was freedom, more freedom probably than I was entitled to, but not more than I wanted and even needed. At Grandma’s, I was the man of the house. I had as my own room the little hallway behind Grandma’s bedroom, and I had, as it seemed to me, the whole country to range in, on foot or horseback, beyond sight or call of any grown-up. For grown-up company, when I wanted it, I had Grandma, and after 1945 Elton and Mary Penn on the Beechum Place, and Jess and Rufus Brightleaf and their wives. For a playmate, I had Fred Brightleaf. When my father took me or sent me to work for Jake Branch, I had the company of that large and various household. Hargrave, when I returned to it, took some getting used to. I decided to stay out of it if I could.

To get to school, I rode the bus or hitchhiked down to Hargrave in the morning and back again in the afternoon. I attended school by requirement only. I did not think of it when I was not in it. I did not establish a great reputation as a student.

Once Grandma and I had moved in, we revived the old house around us. I thought it a great adventure to build a fire again in the kitchen range and to help Grandma get together the makings of our first meal. On the colder mornings we would get up and hurry down to the kitchen to renew the fire. Charmed by the elemental pleasure of needing to be warm and then getting warm, I watched the day grow bright outside the windows while Grandma cooked our breakfast. As we ate, the sun came up beyond the still-living oak snag at the corner of the woods.

This was a homecoming for me as much as for Grandma. I had lived there with my parents during my first two years. I had come newborn to that house. It was the first house of my memory and consciousness. Sleeping there in my crib beside my parents’ bed, I had dreamed the sounds of the wind that drew its long breaths over the house at night. And I remembered waking there as if to a world entirely new, to see the sun shining on the wet grass and the white barns.

By the time I was born into it, the history of that place had become old. The sign of its age was much forgetfulness. Much had happened to us there that we did not remember. We had suffered and rejoiced there more than we knew. I acquired experiences there that never had happened to me at all. All my life I have recalled a sort of dream image of a man putting on his coat at the back door, speaking over his shoulder to a woman inside the house. A freed slave going away? One of our family going west? Or simply somebody going to the field? I cannot see his face; I do not know.

I had known, it seemed to me always, that when Grandpa was “just a little bit of a baby laying up yonder in the bed,” some soldiers had come at night and taken his father. They were a small band of Union horsemen who had come to “recruit” my great-grandfather, who would have been in his early forties at the time. They did this, I suppose, with a pleasant sense of justice, because he owned a few slaves and for that and other reasons would not have been sympathetic to their cause. Forcing him to mount behind one of them, they carried him to their encampment on the top of the next hill. Still in her nightgown and barefooted, my great-grandmother, Lizzie, followed them. By force of argument or character or both, she “made them give him back.” According to the story as I heard it, Lizzie “ran after them,” and so in my mind, as if from my own birth, I have had the image of that distraught and determined woman running up the dark road.

And I have had in mind always the fire that burned the old house when Grandpa was six. It is a pod of fierce light that opens greatly in the dark. In that light Grandpa is a small boy suddenly filled with terrible knowledge. He stands holding his saddle, his most precious possession, which he has retrieved from under his bed. They bring to him a small Negro girl, the cook’s daughter, a year younger than he. She is hysterical, wanting to run back into the burning house. And they tell him, “Hold her! Hold her tight!” And he holds her, while the grown-ups continue their effort to save things from the house, and then finally give up and watch it burn.

The new house had grown old too by the time I knew it, and had about it memories and reminders and intimations of unremembered things. The house itself was tall and finely outlined. Its high-ceilinged rooms, cool in summer, were lovely when filled with morning light. But its furnishings were meager and rather graceless. The best room, the parlor, in which we sat only on the most special occasions, contained an upright piano with a stool, a matching sofa and easy chair covered with rose and beige brocade, a glass-fronted bookcase, a small table, and two or three more chairs, not necessarily comfortable. The other rather formal room was the dining room, likewise seldom used. It was a north room, cool in summer, cold in winter, heated, like the parlor, only by a fireplace. I liked to go into that room for its strangeness and its cold smells of cloves and brown sugar.

The kitchen, living room, and three bedrooms upstairs—the rooms that were to varying degrees lived in—were furnished with not much of an eye for decoration or harmony. The furniture was inherited or haphazardly bought or come by; nearly all of it was old and well worn, some of it damaged or much repaired. The rugs were threadbare in spots, and where the travel was heaviest the finish was worn off the kitchen linoleum. It was a house that for a long time had been occupied by people struggling to hold themselves in place, who had not had much time for comfort or the means for luxuries. I understood this only much later; then it was merely familiar. The house had had a telephone for a good many years and electricity for four or five, but nothing else had changed, and it seemed somehow surprised by these amenities. It still had no running water. We used the privy down in a corner of the backyard, and carried water in buckets from the well.

There were a few framed photographs on the living room wall—pictures of Uncle Andrew and my father, and of us children. There was also a small tintype of Grandpa when he was a young boy; his mother had had to whip him, he said, to make him sit still for it. Upstairs there were larger photographic portraits of Uncle Andrew and my father as children, and of my great-grandfathers Catlett and Wheeler. Grandma’s decorations consisted mainly of a few crocheted doilies and table scarves. Her yearning for nice things was revealed by her attachment to ornamented candy boxes with hinged lids; the few of these that she had received she kept and filled with photographs, letters, and the pretty greeting cards that came on holidays. The most beautiful thing in the house, I thought, was a sampler made by my mother. I read it often, fascinated by the close rhymes. It said:

HOURS FLY

FLOWERS DIE

NEW DAYS

NEW WAYS

PASS BY

LOVE STAYS

Between us, Grandma and I carried on the best we could the old kitchen economy of milk cow and hen flock and garden. I helped her care for the hens, and I did the milking and sometimes the churning.

To amuse myself while I milked the cows I would sometimes take aim at the flies that lit on the rim of the bucket and squirt them down into the foam. Grandma, seeing them in the strainer, would say, “Lord, the flies ! Did anybody ever see the like!”

When I churned, sitting on the back porch with the stone churn between my knees, I could make buttermilk fly up through the dasher hole and hit the ceiling. And then Grandma would say, “Well, if you ain’t the limit!”

When I would catch a nice mess of little sunfish at the pond, or a turtle, or anything wild and good to eat, she would say, “Well, did you ever!”

One bright day after rain, when I had waded along the risen branch picking raspberries with Elton Penn, who wore a pair of gum boots and was going directly ahead as usual, Grandma ignored the cap full of berries I held out to her and looked at my sopping shoes and pants legs. “Andy Catlett, I reckon you haven’t got a lick of sense!”

I loved to stay with her, partly because she spoiled me, partly because she left me pretty free to live the life available in that place, which was the life I wanted. In the long summer mornings and afternoons I went alone on foot or horseback among the fields and woods and ponds and streams. Or I swam or quested about with Fred Brightleaf. Or I worked, if I could and if allowed, with the Brightleafs or Elton Penn or Jake Branch.

At mealtimes, and while we went about our chores, and at night, Grandma and I talked. Mainly she talked; I questioned and listened. She talked of things that had happened and of things that had been said, things that she remembered and things that she remembered that other people had remembered. At night it was best. After the supper dishes were put away, the long light and heat of the day now past, we would darken the house and go out to sit on the front porch. Or if the breeze was better out in the yard we would carry chairs out and sit at the foot of a big old cedar tree that stood there then. While the lightning bugs carried their little winking lamps up out of the grass, and the katydids sang in the late summer foliage, and heat lightning shimmered on the horizon, we sat invisible to each other, just two voices talking, until bedtime.

She told of the roads and distances of the old days, of the time when the little patch of woods by Dick Watson’s house had been part of a bigger woods that went on and on. She told of slavery times, when my great-grandmother, resting after dinner in the room over the kitchen, heard Molly, the cook, tell the cat, “Old Lizzie’s asleep now, and I’m going to beat the hell out of you.” She told of the end of slavery, when all the slaves went away, and Molly returned and was sent away. “You have your freedom now,” Lizzie told her, “and you must go.”

She told and retold, because I wanted to hear, of the night the soldiers came, and of the burning house.

She talked of Grandpa. There had been serious estrangements and difficulties between them, for both of them were strong-willed people, and they had not always willed the same things. But now in his absence that we both felt, she took pleasure in remembering him in his youth and his pride. She said, “He was the finest-looking man on the back of a horse that ever I saw.” She said he was a beautiful whistler. She had loved to hear him, off somewhere in the distance, calling his cattle. She knew what hard times and failures and disappointments had cost him, and she sorrowed for him as she sorrowed for herself when she had been young and proud, paying the same costs. There had been times when they had barely made it.

As a young wife she had lived with her mother-in-law, about whom I never heard her complain, and she remembered much that Lizzie had remembered: what the cook had said to the cat, for example, or an exchange of letters between Lizzie and her brother, James. James, Grandma said, was elected to the state legislature. When he was to be sworn in, he invited Lizzie to attend the ceremony. She wrote back, “I have nothing suitable to wear.” And James replied, “Wear the simplest thing you have, and let your manners correspond.”

One of my favorite people in Grandma’s stories was Grandpa’s older brother, Will, indolent and vagrant, careless and fearless, a comedian drunk or sober, a disappointment and an aggravation to everybody, and yet dear.

“Will,” Grandma asked him once, “were you ever in love with Sally Skaggs?”

“Yes, Dorie,” he said, “I loved her a little once.”

It was Uncle Will who cut off Uncle Andrew’s long golden curls “to turn him into a boy,” and broke Grandma’s heart.

She told also, troubled and yet amused, of her own younger brother, Leonidas, whom we all called “Uncle Peach,” who would get drunk and say to her, “Sing ‘Yellow Rose o’ Texas’ to me, madam.”

And it was Uncle Peach who had allowed Uncle Andrew to fall into the fire when he had just begun to walk, leaving what I thought a most attractive set of small scars across the backs of the fingers of Uncle Andrew’s right hand.

Grandma recalled a Negro farmhand, Uncle Mint Wade, who argued, “You will read in the Bible whereupon it say, ‘The bottom rail shall be the rider.’”

And she remembered Uncle Eb Markman, who pronounced, “The world is squar’ and got four cawners to it.”

From her reading she had culled a few phrases that she liked to repeat. It pleased her to speak of sleep as “nature’s sweet restorer.” Her speech had touches of self-conscious elegance that she used in tribute. Of dancing she would say, “It’s a lovely thing, stepping to the music.”

Our most frequent and fearful topic was the weather. Both of us were afraid of storms, which seemed to be uncommonly frequent in those days. Grandma would tell about storms that she remembered, and we would discuss the problem of where to be safe in case of a windstorm.

Before a thunderstorm, she would put a pillow over the telephone, theorizing that the feathers made good insulation and would prevent the lightning from coming into the house along the wire. And having affixed the pillow to the wall so that it covered the phone, she would always quote Uncle Will: “I believed that too, Dorie, till I saw lightning strike a goose.”

When a cold spell would come late in the spring, causing us to feel that some fundamental disorder was at hand, she would quote from a source I have never found: “The time will come when we’ll not know the winter from the summer but by the budding of the trees.” And though that time has never come, I believed then that it would come, and I believe it still.

Like many country people of her time, she did not have a very secure belief in progress. She believed that hard times did not go away forever, but returned. She had known hard times, and she did not forget them. There had been a winter, when my father was about seven years old, when Grandpa’s tobacco crop had not brought enough to pay the commission on its own sale. Grandma could not have forgotten that if she had lived a thousand years. My father’s lifelong devotion to the cause of the small farmers of our part of the country dates from that memory, and it holds its power still over Henry and me.

It seemed to have gone by Uncle Andrew without touching him. Uncle Andrew was sometimes burdened and was sometimes a burden to himself, but he also had the gift of taking things lightly. Grandma would quote, with disapproval and with a laugh, his reply to Grandpa, who was worrying about a field infested with wild onions: “The cows’ll eat ’em, and I don’t have to sleep with the cows.”

Grandma was thirteen when her mother died. Her father never remarried. She and her sisters grew up keeping house for themselves and their father and attempting with less than success to give a proper upbringing to Uncle Peach. For Grandma and her sisters, somehow, a mark of respectability and even gentility had been set. They cherished the schooling they got from the Bird’s Branch School and McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, one through eight. All her life Grandma had struggled and aspired, and her ambition had been confronted and affronted at every turn by the likes of Uncle Will and Uncle Peach and Uncle Andrew, too wayward to be approved, too close and dear to be denied.

Uncle Andrew and Uncle Will and Uncle Peach passed and returned in her thoughts and her talk like orbiting planets. They divided her mind; they troubled her without end. She could see plainly what a relief it would have been if she could have talked some sense into their heads and straightened them out. It would have been a relief too if she could have waved them away and forgotten them. In fact, she could do neither. They were incorrigible, and they were her own. In their various ways and styles, they had worried and vexed and grieved her “nearly into the grave,” as she would sometimes say. And they also charmed and amused and moved her. They were not correctable because of the way they were; they were not dismissable because of the way she was. She loved them not even in spite of the way they were, but just because she did. With them she enacted, as many mothers have done, and many fathers too, the parable of the lost sheep, who is to be sought and brought back without end, brought back into mind and into love without end, death no deterrent, futility no bar.

And so she suffered. She looked upon the human condition, I think, as not satisfactory—as unacceptable, notwithstanding that we are in it whether we accept it or not. She was a professed Christian and loved her little weatherboarded church, but I think that it was not easy, and may have been impossible, for her to make peace with our experience of mortality and error, of owning what we cannot correct or save, of losing what we love.

Grandma was fiercely, fiercely loyal to her own, and just as fiercely exclusive in electing her own. Within the small circle of her own, she was capable of profound charity; outside it, she could be relentless and unforgiving. And the boundary was not impermeable. Sometimes Uncle Andrew, for one, had been safely inside it, and sometimes he had been outside. When you were outside, as I knew from my own experience, her anger was direct and her tongue sharp.

Her term of execration was “Hmh!” which she could deliver as concussively as a blow and in tones varying from polite disbelief (for the benefit of guests) to absolute rejection. Her term of contempt was “Psht!” With it she could slice you off like the top of a radish.

Uncle Andrew had crossed the boundary into and out of her good graces many times. The nights of those years after his death, as we sat and talked, she was forever picking apart the divergent strands of her feeling for him. She would be pleased or amused or appalled, or amused and appalled both at once. And always she grieved.

When he was little, with that head covered with golden curls that she could not forget, he was beautiful. He could sing like an angel. And yet he was difficult and mischievous and never still. From the womb, virtually, he lived always a little beyond anyone’s anticipation. Even before he could walk, she would have to restrain him by pinning his dresstail under the leg of the bed. He had hardly learned to walk when he flung her good blue pitcher onto the flagstones by the porch step. When he was old enough to receive as a gift his own little hatchet, he chopped one of the rungs out of the banister. She would say regretfully and a little proudly that after he started to school he had become a good fighter. Proudly and a little doubtfully she would say that there never had been anything like the way he could dance.

When he was ready for college, Grandma and Grandpa sent him to the University of Kentucky in a blue blazer—as handsome a young man, they thought, as they had ever laid eyes on—and to do so they spent all they had; Grandpa went without underwear that winter. When he went to Lexington to see his son, he looked everywhere and could not find him, for Uncle Andrew’s adventures had begun. His fame as a dancer apparently began during his brief stay at the university.

Grandpa failed in Uncle Andrew, as he succeeded in my father, and it was a bitter failure. Except for the energy that both of them possessed in abundance, Grandpa and Uncle Andrew were as unlike as a tree and a bird. Grandpa could not tolerate, he could not understand, Uncle Andrew’s waste of daylight. For him, Andrew was the name of whatever was careless. “Sit up!” he used to say to me as I went by on the pony. “You ride like your Uncle Andrew.” It was not that Uncle Andrew rode badly but that he rode carelessly, his mind elsewhere, and Grandpa believed, and said, that “a man ought to keep his mind on his business”—he meant busy-ness, whatever you were doing. Uncle Andrew was Grandma’s failure too, of course. It was a mutual property, that failure; it bound them in mutual suffering and even mutual sympathy, and yet I think it stood between them like a heap of thorns. I imagine that their ways of regret were different. Perhaps Grandpa only saw what had happened and named it and bore it, whereas Grandma saw before her always the beautiful child and forgave and hoped. Perhaps. I do not know.

When Grandma and I looked through her collection of photographs that had come with letters from various family members, we would come to a picture of several men in army uniforms squatting in a circle, shooting craps. One of them unmistakably was Uncle Andrew, who had sent the picture, and she would always say “Hmh!” and she would laugh. The laugh seemed both to acknowledge her embarrassment and confess her delight. She delighted in him though he had grieved her nearly into the grave.

He was on her mind forever, and as the evening wore on toward bedtime she would begin again to grieve for him. And always as we approached her grief, we were divided. My loss was nothing like hers. My loss had occurred within the terms of my childhood; it was answered, beyond anything I felt or willed, by my youth and unbidden happiness and all the time I had to live. Her loss would be unrelieved to the end of her life, never mind that she would live on until I was grown and married; her loss was what she had lived to at last and would not live beyond. I could feel that she had come to loss beyond life, unfathomable and inconsolable, as dimensionless as the dark that surrounded the old house and filled it as we talked.

He was on my mind forever too, as I now see. But I was a child; for me, every day was new. I lived beyond my loss even as I suffered it, and without any particular sympathy for myself. And what I have grown into is not sympathy for myself as I was but sympathy for Grandma and Grandpa as they were. I see how time had brought them, once, their years of strength and hope, energy to look forward and build and dream, as we must; and I see how Uncle Andrew took all they had vested in him, their precious one life and time given over in helpless love and hope into the one life and time that he possessed, and how he carried it away on the high flood of his recklessness, his willingness to do whatever he thought of.

I see now what perhaps I have known for a long time that I would see, if I looked: He was a child who wanted only to be free, as I myself had been free back at the pond that afternoon of his death. He was a big, supremely willful child whom Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Judith could not confine, and who could be balked by no requirement or demand. And yet, hating confinement, he had been confined—in a hapless marriage, in bad jobs, sometimes in self-reproach, and finally in a grave with which he had made no terms. He had been confined because he had confined himself, as only he could have done, because he was the way he was and would not change, or could not. It was knowledge of his confinement, I think, that so surrounded us with pain and made us grieve so long.

When bedtime came, I would go up the stairs first and get into my bed in the little back hall, leaving the door open to the room where Grandma slept. I would hear her stirring in the rooms below, setting things to rights, making sure she had forgotten nothing. Assuming perhaps that I was asleep, she would have begun to talk aloud to herself. “Mm-hmh!” she would say as she shut a door or lowered a sash, “Mm-hmh !” as she turned off the lights.

And then I would hear her coming slowly up the stairs, the banister creaking under her hand as though now, alone with her thoughts, she bore the whole accumulated weight of time and loss. As she came up, she would be saying to herself always the same thing: “Oh, my poor boy! Oh, my poor, poor boy!”

I would hear her muttering still as she went about her room, preparing for bed: “May God have mercy on my poor boy!”

And then it would be dark. And then it would be morning.

Chapter 10

THE TIME had to come, of course, when what I knew no longer satisfied me. I had been told almost nothing about the circumstances of Uncle Andrew’s murder, I had asked nothing, and yet I wanted to know. That death had remained in the forefront of my mind, as I knew it had in my grandmother’s and my father’s and Aunt Judith’s. I knew too that for other people it had receded and diminished as it had mingled with other concerns. I could not have asked those whom my questions would have pained the most. With others, the subject did not come up. I did not want my curiosity about it to be known.

But finally when I was maybe in my last year of high school, I became conscious that there were such things as court records. The county court clerk at that time was Charlie Hardy, as dear a friend, I suppose, as my father had; they bird-hunted together. I made up my mind to ask Mr. Hardy to show me the records of Carp Harmon’s trial, expecting to see transcripts of the lawyers’ arguments and the testimony of witnesses; I imagined that there would be a great pile of papers that I could sit down somewhere and read, and at last know everything I wanted to know.

I watched for a time when Mr. Hardy was in his office alone. I did not want anybody but him to hear my request. Above all, I did not want my father to know what I was doing. What I intended to do was unbandage a wound. It was in part my own wound, but I felt it was my father’s more than mine, and maybe I had no right to know more than he had told me. Though I was determined to see those papers, I was also more than a little ashamed.

“Son, I’ll show you,” Mr. Hardy said when I finally walked in and asked him. “I’ll show you what there is, I’ll show you, son, but there ain’t much.”

Already I was sorry I had come, for I saw that he knew exactly what I wanted and that he too was thinking of my father. Spitting fragments of tobacco bitten from the cold stump of his cigar, he climbed a ladder up a large wall of file boxes ranked on shelves, selected one of the boxes, and brought it to me.

“See,” he said, “there’s not a hell of a lot here that would be of interest to you, son.” He showed me the warrant for Carp Harmon’s arrest, his indictment, several pleadings, all technical documents no more informative than they were required to be.

“I thought there would be a record of what was said at the trial.”

“Naw, son,” he said. “Nawsir, son, no such record was ever made. What was said at that trial is a long time gone.”

He explained that there had been no appeal. There would have been a transcript only if there had been an appeal. By then I was relieved that there was no record. Mr. Hardy was putting the papers back into their box. “Nawsir, son, that record you want to see, it never did exist.” He removed the cigar from his mouth, spat toward the wastebasket, and then looked at me. “Son,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

And still we both were embarrassed, for even though the record I sought did not exist, the fact remained that Charlie Hardy knew what had happened at that trial. I knew he could imagine my saying, “Well, Mr. Hardy, why don’t you tell me what happened?” And I knew—I know much more certainly now—that he would have given years off his life to be spared the question.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Hardy,” I said.

“Any time, son,” he said. “Any time.” He waved to me with the hand holding the cigar as if I were already out of the building and across the street. “By God, son, come back! Any time!”

But as time went on I did learn some things. Things that I did not know to ask for came to me on their own.

One day after the ewes were sheared, when Elton Penn and Henry and I hauled the bagged wool to market, we ran into Yeager Stump. Something was said about dancing. Maybe Elton mentioned that Henry and I were going to a dance, or had been to one; maybe he was complaining, as he sometimes did, joking, but only half joking, that when we danced late into the night we were no account in the daytime. Whatever was said, it reminded Mr. Stump of Uncle Andrew.

“Boys,” he said, and there was laughter in his eyes though he did not laugh aloud, “I’ve seen your Uncle Andrew too drunk to walk, but I never saw him too drunk to dance.”

Later it was Mr. Stump, leaning to talk to me through a car window, his eyes filled with that same quiet, reminiscent, almost tender unuttered laughter, who told me two little bits of Uncle Andrew’s poetry. “Your Uncle Andrew said that when he was with a woman and that old extremity came to him, every hair in his bee-hind was a jew’s harp playing a different tune.” Mr. Stump’s voice recovered exactly Uncle Andrew’s jazzy intonation. “He said a big covey of quail flew out his bunghole one bird at a time.”

And then Mr. Stump did laugh aloud, briefly. He clapped his hand onto the metal windowsill and straightened up. “Well, he was something. There never was another one like him.”

When I went away to Lexington to the university, forty years after Uncle Andrew’s failed expedition there, I continued my checking account at the Independent Farmers Bank at Port William. A number of times when I wrote out a check for a woman salesclerk, the lady would look at my signature and the name of the town, and she would say—it was invariably the same sentence—“I knew an Andrew Catlett once.”

“He was my uncle,” I would say.

And then she would say, “He was such a dancer!” Or “Oh, how that man could dance!” Or “I just loved to dance with him! He was so handsome.”

They always spoke of him as a dancer. They always smiled in remembering him. Speaking of him, they always sounded younger than they were, and a little dreamy.

One day in Lexington I cashed a check at Scoop Rawl’s Ice Cream Parlor. Scoop himself was at the cash register. He looked at my signature. “Andrew Catlett,” he said. “Port William. I knew an Andrew Catlett from down there.”

“Yessir,” I said. “He was my uncle.”

He looked at me over his glasses. “Your uncle. God almighty, we had some times!”

I said, “Yessir,” hoping he would say more, and he did, a little. He had known Uncle Andrew, apparently, not during his brief visit to Lexington as a student, but after his marriage, when he was traveling for a distillery.

“Andrew had a girl he called Sweetie Pie. He’d squall for her when he was drunk and you could hear him half a mile: ‘Sweetie Pie!’”

I knew how he sounded. I could hear that raucous mating call rising in the midst of the late-night fracas and hilarity of some Lexington blind tiger as Uncle Andrew hooked cute little Sweetie Pie with his right arm and pulled her into his lap. During my college years also I encountered a woman who had lived near us in Hargrave when I was a child. She had been beautiful when she was young and had been married to an old man. Uncle Andrew, she told me, laughing, had said to her, “When that old son of a bitch is dead, I’m going to stomp on his grave until he’s in there good and tight, and then I’m going to get straight into bed with you.”

She told me too of the midnight when Uncle Andrew and his cronies in their mating plumage, transcendently drunk, burst into Momma-pie’s bedroom, and Uncle Andrew snapped on the light. “Wake up, Momma-pie! We’ve bred all the women, cows, yo sheep, mares, and mare mules—and now, by God, we’re going to breed you!”

In spite of Yeager Stump’s later claim that they did whatever they thought of, I do not believe that this actually happened; if it had, Uncle Andrew’s moments of retrospective self-knowledge and regret would have forbidden him to talk about it, but it was a story that was known because he had told it.

I can imagine a night of hilarity, Uncle Andrew and Buster Simms and Yeager Stump out among ’em, women and whiskey on hand, Uncle Andrew talking, the others laughing and egging him on. He is conjuring up the most outrageous scene he can think of: he and his buddies crowding into that chastely fragrant room like a nightmare, the sudden light revealing Momma-pie in her nightcap, sans teeth, sitting up in bed, clutching the bedclothes to her bosom. I can imagine the tale repeated and improved at every opportunity as if it had actually happened, the work of alcoholic incandescence and a refined sense of impropriety.

But I know too that Mr. Stump was right: A lot of the things they thought of, they did. Their taste in women ran simply to the available; their pleasures were restricted only by the possible. In his times of breaking out, which apparently were the times he lived for, Uncle Andrew granted an uncomplicated obedience to impulses that men of faith and loyalty like my father struggle against all their lives. Men who obey those impulses surely invite their own destruction, and I think there were moments when Uncle Andrew knew this.

But obviously not all are destroyed. Yeager Stump, for one, enjoyed life far beyond the conventional three score years and ten. Even at the end, when he was housebound, he continued to enjoy life. Miss Iris Flynn, devoted as always, kept him supplied with good bourbon. On one of her visits, she handed him the anticipated bottle and exclaimed about its lately increased cost. “Yes,” said Mr. Stump, “maybe they’ll finally charge what it’s worth.”

Whether or not Uncle Andrew invited the destruction he in fact received is at least a disturbed question, and perhaps an unanswerable one. But I did not even know it was a question until one day—I was grown by then—I said point-blank to Elton Penn: “Why did Carp Harmon kill Uncle Andrew?”

Probably Elton was no more comfortable with my curiosity than Mr. Hardy had been, but he gave me a straight answer. “Well, the way I heard it, your Uncle Andrew propositioned Harmon’s daughter there in the store where the ones that were tearing down those buildings would go for lunch.”

It was not as though Elton and I were two people merely interested in the pursuit of truth; we both knew the hardship that that story would have presented to my family. We did not pursue the subject further, partly because of the pain that surrounded it, partly because I thought the explanation credible and had no more questions to ask. I believed that if he had thought of doing so, Uncle Andrew would have propositioned Carp Harmon’s daughter in the store, devil take the witnesses. He would have done it because he thought of doing it and because he enjoyed the outrageousness of it and because he relished the self-abandonment of it. From there, I supposed, the story had gone on to its conclusion according to the logic of anger.

The year following my grandmother Catlett’s death, I returned with my wife and baby daughter to live through the summer in the old house. Grandma’s things were still there, put away in their places, just as she had left them, and it fell to me to dispose of them. Because she had known no extravagance in her life, she had saved everything salvageable: string, pieces of cloth, buttons and buckles, canceled checks and notes, bits of paper covered with now meaningless computations and lists, letters and cards, clippings from newspapers—anything that, within the terms and hopes of her life, had seemed valuable or potentially useful or in some way dear.

Among all else she saved were twenty or so letters from Uncle Andrew. Most of these were written on the stationery of hotels in southern states, mostly in South Carolina. All of them show a wish to be a good son, and I have no doubt that this was a wish that he felt genuinely enough when he felt it; I do not think that he felt it all the time. The letters always intend to assure Grandma and Grandpa that he is doing better, or is now all right, or has resolved to lead a cleaner life. He clearly did not like the thought that they were worried about him. And yet there are, even in this small and perhaps selective sheaf that Grandma saved, too many letters of that sort. It is impossible not to suspect that he was trying, as if by incantation, to lay to rest the more obvious consequences of failings that he could not help, or that he did not much want to help. It is almost as if he felt that if he could just stop Grandma and Grandpa, especially Grandma, from worrying, there would be nothing to worry about.

And yet they are troubled letters, and they are troubling. One of them in particular has occupied all alone a large place in my mind since I first read it. It was written a few months after I was born and given his name. According to the letter, he has been “out”—certainly out of a job and perhaps also drunk. But now, he says, “While not making any money am better off than I was, some, and believe in six months will be much better. First want to tell you and ask that you not worry one bit.” He is evidently ready to begin work as a salesman for a liquor company. His associates, he says, are “the cleanest bunch of men you ever saw,” and they do not drink. But if Grandma wishes, he will try to get another kind of job, which he does not believe would be hard for him to do. He thanks the family for their kindness and consideration of his feelings while he was “out.” My mother in particular, he says, has been sweet and thoughtful. They all have shown him such love and affection that he could do nothing that would hurt them or shake their confidence.

And then he writes the sentence—troubled, tender, hopeful, and, as I know, hopeless—that binds me to him closer than my name: “And little Andrew, bless his heart—if for nothing else, I would be a man for him.”

Chapter 11

AFTER I FOUND the letters and read them and put them away again, I assumed that I knew as much about Uncle Andrew as I was ever going to know. I continued to remember him and to think and wonder about him, but I asked no more questions.

And then, thirty years later, after my father died, I found among his papers his file of bills, receipts, and other documents having to do with the settlement of Uncle Andrew’s estate. Folded up in that file was a copy of the Hargrave Weekly Express, giving an account of the examining trial of Carp Harmon. Why I had not thought before to examine the back issues of the Weekly Express I am not sure; I had believed the little I had heard, and perhaps that had satisfied me, but perhaps I also had felt that the truth about Uncle Andrew’s death, as long as my father was alive, was his belonging, not mine.

But now, that paper having come to me from my father’s very hands, which had folded it and put it away so long ago, I opened it and read the article as eagerly, I think, as I have ever read anything. Much of the article deals with technicalities, but two paragraphs are given to the story of the murder:

“P. R. Gadwell, merchant at Stoneport, testified that Catlett and a group of workers at the lead mine, where buildings were being dismantled, came to the store for lunch and soft drinks. He said Harmon’s daughter came in the store and gave her father some change. Gadwell then heard a noise and next saw Catlett getting up after being knocked down by Harmon. Harmon had hit him with an oilcan. He said he heard Catlett apologizing to Harmon, stating he did not know the girl was his daughter. Gadwell said he got Catlett and the other men out of the store but Harmon remained 10 or 15 minutes.

“Jake Branch of near Hargrave, who was assisting Catlett in the dismantling job, said he was 3 or 4 feet from Catlett when the accused hit him with the oilcan. He testified that the group went back to their work and about an hour had elapsed when Harmon suddenly came up to Catlett and said he was going to kill him and pulled a gun. He stated Catlett pleaded that it was ‘my mistake’ and ‘don’t shoot me.’ Branch said Harmon fired two shots and the workmen rushed Catlett to the hospital.

“R.T. Purlin, 16-year-old stepson of Branch, with the group at the mine, said he yelled to Catlett when he saw Harmon slipping through the weeds but believes Catlett did not hear him.”

R.T. Purlin, older than I by six years, had been a hero to Henry and me when we were boys, working and playing together on the Crayton Place, for even at the age of fourteen he was already in body a grown man with an arm like one of Homer’s spear throwers, and he never tired of entertaining us with feats of strength. He had a truly clear and generous heart and was never condescending in his friendship to us smaller boys. R.T. was the last living witness to Uncle Andrew’s murder. I had not seen him in a long time.

When I called him up and asked if I could come and talk with him, he said, “Yessir! You come right on over here.”

The old house that R.T. was living in had no front porch, but a wide back porch ran the length of the ell. Good hounds were chained to their houses under the trees out back.

R.T. came out onto the porch to meet me. “What you been doing all these years?” He talked loudly, like his mother, and had her turns of speech, sounding both like her and like himself.

We went in and sat down at the table in the kitchen where his wife was at work. I complimented his dogs, and we talked a little about coon hunting. R.T. spoke of a tree so full of coons that when their eyes shone back in the beam of his light, the tree looked like a Christmas tree.

We remembered things that had happened on the Crayton Place in the old days. We spoke of his brothers and sisters, whole and half, and of his stepsisters, Jake Branch’s daughters by his first wife, and we named and remembered Minnie’s six brothers and all the hands who at one time or another had worked for Jake. We spoke of Grandpa Catlett’s saddle mare, old Rose, and of Tige and Red, Jake Branch’s good team of mules.

Finally I spoke the question I had come to ask: “What happened down there at the lead mine when Carp Harmon shot Uncle Andrew?”

It was hot, R.T. said, when they went back to work in the afternoon, and they were hard at it—all four of them, he and Col Oaks, one of Jake’s sons-in-law, Jake himself, and Uncle Andrew. There was a spring of fine cold water down near the road, and after a while Uncle Andrew said, “Jake, let’s go get us a drink and leave it with the boys for a while.”

The two of them went down to where Uncle Andrew had left his car, just pulled in off the road, to get the top off Uncle Andrew’s thermos jug to use as a drinking cup. And then R.T. saw Carp Harmon coming up the road. He ran from one tree or bush to another, trying to stay hidden. When he got near the men at the car, he shot Uncle Andrew, threatened Jake, and ran away down the road again, stopping now and then to look back, R.T. said, “like a sheep-killing dog.”

I asked if Uncle Andrew had given some insult to Carp Harmon’s daughter when they were down at the store.

R.T. said emphatically, “Nawsir! Andrew never said nothing to that girl.”

On my way home, I stopped to see my mother. She was sitting in her chair, reading, as she usually is when I come by in the afternoon. And as usual she did not hear me until I rapped loudly on the door of the room where she was sitting. I always expect her to be frightened when I do that, but she never is, being far more reconciled to the unexpected than I am. And so she instructs me.

She looked up, smiled, and said, “Hello! Come in!”

I came in and sat down on the end of the sofa nearest her chair.

“Well, where have you been?”

“I’ve been to see R.T. Purlin.”

“Oh, R.T.!” she said. “What for?”

“To talk,” I said.

And then, surprising myself, broaching the issue with her for the first time in my life, I said, “R.T. says that Uncle Andrew didn’t say anything sexual at all to Carp Harmon’s daughter.”

That I could have introduced this subject so abruptly made me aware that we were speaking of Uncle Andrew’s death in my father’s absence, in the absence of his grief, free of it at last, as I know we both believed that my father was now at last free of it.

“No,” my mother said. “He didn’t.”

The whole business of the sexual insult to the girl, she said, was the defense attorney’s lie. Years later, in fact, somebody had told my father that the defense attorney had admitted to the lie. He said that he did not blame my father for disliking him, for he had made the story up.

Thus, suddenly, I was involved in a way I had not expected to be. If the story of the proposition to Carp Harmon’s daughter was a lie, then I was implicated in the lie, because for many years I had believed it. But I needed to consider also the possibility that it was not true that the defense attorney had lied. If his story was true and our people had falsely denied it, I assumed that this would not have been a deliberate or malicious lie but one that came about simply because those who loved Uncle Andrew, including R.T., could not bear to believe otherwise. And if this belief in Uncle Andrew’s innocence was a lie, then I was implicated there also, for I was grateful for whatever comfort it had given to those who had believed it.

Unable now to put it off any longer, I went to the office of the Weekly Express and searched out the account of Carp Harmon’s trial. According to the article I had already seen, the trial had been set for the September term, but I found that it had been moved to the January term because in September the jurymen had needed to be at home, harvesting their tobacco. In January the jury heard the case and gave their verdict. Carp Harmon received his sentence of two years in the penitentiary. The article in the Weekly Express seems meant only to explain the brevity of the sentence. These are the relevant paragraphs:

“During their lunch hour, according to Harmon, Catlett made a remark to Harmon’s daughter and Harmon knocked him down. Catlett apologized. Later in the afternoon Harmon went to the scene of work where Catlett and his helpers were and he shot Catlett when Catlett reached for a 2 × 4, following some words between them.

“Harmon testified that he went back to the scene of work to nail a covering over a well. He said Catlett told him to get off the premises along with a remark about his daughter, whom he included in the order to stay away. Harmon said that he fired when Catlett reached for the piece of timber.

“When questioned as to why he had a gun on his person, Harmon said he had been told that someone had run his trotlines.”

The jury obviously believed the story of the “remark” to Carp Harmon’s daughter—as did the reporter for the Weekly Express. If it was a lie, it was the work of a good liar, who could make his story both plausible and consonant with Uncle Andrew’s character, which would have been pretty generally known.

The Weekly Express writer evidently had believed the story also when it was told six months earlier at the examining trial. What seems significantly different between the two accounts is the appearance in the second of the two-by-four, which was not mentioned in the first.

If the story of the “remark” is true, and if it is true that Carp Harmon’s lawyer later admitted that he had told a lie, then the lie may have been this business of the two-by-four, for it is the only reported detail that would have supported an argument of self-defense.

At any rate, I now had learned the basis of the story about the well cover that I had heard when I was a child.

Why, as I got older, did I not ask my father for his version of these events? Now that he is dead, it is easy to wish that I had asked. And yet I know why I did not. I did not want to live again in the great pain I had felt in the old house that night when he had wept so helplessly with Grandma and Grandpa. I did not want to be with him in the presence of that pain where only it and we existed. If I were to speak to his ghost, perhaps I still could not bring myself to ask. When I am a ghost myself, perhaps we will talk of it.

Chapter 12

IF YOU go toward Stoneport from the high ground instead of along the river, you go at first through a country of excellent broad ridges, farmland greatly respected for its depth and warmth. And then the upland becomes more broken, the ridges narrower, the hollows steeper, the soil thin and rocky. The road to the lead mine turns off one of the ridges and follows a creek bed, usually dry in summer, down into a narrow, wooded hollow. Much of that country is now wooded and has been so for a long time. The farming on those slopes was done in clearings that moved about in place and time as the trees were succeeded by crops, which were succeeded after a short time by a new growth of trees. Now, after its inevitable diminishment by such cropping, the land has been almost entirely given back to the trees.

After it has brought you down nearly to Stoneport on the river, the road passes the site of the old lead mine, which lies off to the right on the far side of the creek. There is still a weedy clearing, originally a hole in the woods to accommodate a hole in the ground. The clearing has remained open because the floor of the hollow has been leveled and covered with tailings from the mine. A squatter has recently lived there in an old bus, which is now abandoned and surrounded by weeds and junk. The main building of the mine, which housed its heavy machinery, was up on the slope. Its foundation, now bare and weathered, straddles the creek, which was used to bear away some of the waste from the extraction of the ore. Behind it, the deep well that Carp Harmon was so anxious to protect is still without a cover; the surface of the water, twenty feet down, is covered with a floating crust of plastic jugs and bottles. Some-body has tried to “improve” the spring of good water down by the road by digging a deep trench into it with a backhoe. The nature of the place seems more insulted by the ordinary acts and artifacts of the present than by the mining of half a century ago.

I went there once with my father when he and Uncle Andrew and the others were in the process of buying the buildings, and I had never been back. I did not even know how to get there until R.T. Purlin went there with me on a hot August afternoon not long after I had hunted up the story of Carp Harmon’s trial in the Weekly Express.

We pulled off the road, now blacktopped but still just a narrow track coming down through the trees. While we walked over the valley floor and then climbed up over the old foundations into the returning woods, R.T. gave me the story again as the place brought it back to mind.

“Andrew parked his car yonder where you left your truck. Just pulled in off of the road, the way he did every day. Him and Jake went there to get the top off of Andrew’s jug on their way to the spring. That fellow stepped out of the bushes must have been right there. Maybe he had stood there a little while, watching them.”

He pointed into the air over the foundation of the main building. “Me and Col, we never seen him. We was way up maybe thirty feet in the framework of that building—big timbers!—tearing it down. And we heard the shots: Bam! Bam!

“I said, ‘What the hell was that?’

“And Col said, ‘I think that guy has shot Andrew.’

“And down we come.”

“Did Uncle Andrew say anything after he was shot?”

“Naw. He went to hurting then. He never said anything.”

“And Carp Harmon threatened Jake and ran off ?”

“He run right back down the road,” R.T. said, and he acted out Carp Harmon’s flight, running and then stopping to look back, running and looking back.

“And then you all loaded Uncle Andrew into the car and started for the hospital.”

“Yeah.”

“And you drove?”

“I was the only one that could drive. Jake and Col didn’t know how. Andrew had let me drive around a little on the farm. I never had drove on the road. I done pretty good that day till we got up to the top of the lane and onto the blacktop and I started trying to go fast. I had a hard time then to keep in the road. And Andrew was just kicking the car to pieces. We was lucky to make it.”

What a ride that must have been for a sixteen-year-old boy who could barely drive, was badly frightened, and who loved the hurt man kicking in pain! In only a few seconds they had been carried from their ordinary work into a moment impossible to be ready for: Uncle Andrew fallen, holding his belly with bloody fingers, Carp Harmon’s footsteps going away down the gravel road, nothing now in sight or memory that was quite believable, Uncle Andrew’s car sitting there without a driver.

It started to come to me. I began to imagine it, as I knew my father had done, time and again, seeing it as it must have happened and as he could not help seeing it.

And now I too saw them there. I knew how it had been, as if this imagining had suddenly descended to me from my father. I saw them as they lifted Uncle Andrew and got him into the car and as Jake and Col got in, leaving the driver’s seat empty.

I heard R.T., not just excited but scared now as well: “Who’s going to drive?”

I heard Jake—helpless, angry, bewildered, in a hurry, and yet necessarily resigned: “You are, I reckon.”

I saw the black car lurch backward into the road, and then lurch forward, gravel flying from under its wheels as it started up the hill.

And all this happened while I was swimming in the pond, for the moment safe.

R.T. and I loitered around the place a while longer, trying without success to find a rock that R.T. could identify positively as lead ore. He was sure that there had been many such rocks lying around when they had been working down there, but we could find none. Giving up at last, we got into my pickup and started on down toward Stoneport, less than half a mile away.

“And you say Uncle Andrew didn’t make a pass at Carp Harmon’s daughter?”

“Nawsir. He never,” R.T. said. “It was me that girl was talking to.

“I’ll show you,” he said. We were coming into Stoneport, just a few houses and other buildings scattered around a white weatherboarded church. R.T. showed me the small house where Carp Harmon had lived. He showed me the empty place where fifty years ago had stood the store belonging to P.R. Gadwell. He showed me the place on the roadside opposite where Uncle Andrew had parked his car under the trees.

“I was sitting in the car,” R.T. said, “and the girl was leaning against it, talking to me. That fellow could stand in his yard and look right down the road at Andrew’s car and see her there. That’s how it all got started.”

It is a wide street, the view unobstructed from the yard of the house that was Carp Harmon’s down to Uncle Andrew’s parking spot, a distance of three or four hundred feet. And so R.T.’s version of the story had the plausibility of a true line of sight. It could have happened the way he told it. He could have been himself the bait of a trap that had caught Uncle Andrew.

And yet R.T.’s memory, as I knew by then, was not safe from his imagination. He had told me, on two different days, both that he had and that he had not seen Carp Harmon as he came up the road before the shooting. And on that very day he had told me two versions of his and Col Oaks’s hearing the shots; in the first version, R.T. had said, “What the hell was that?” and in the second, Col Oaks had said it. If he had seen the shooting, which he must have done if he had seen Carp Harmon’s approach and had tried to warn Uncle Andrew, he apparently had found it too painful to remember. I don’t think that these were falsehoods in the usual sense but rather that R.T., in brooding over the story for so many years, had imagined it from shifting points of view, had imagined what he had not seen, had seen what he had not remembered. There is no assurance that he had not imagined also things that had not happened.

If Uncle Andrew had not, in fact, made the “remark” to Carp Harmon’s daughter, then why did both P.R. Gadwell and Jake Branch testify that Uncle Andrew apologized to Harmon?

The defense lawyer’s story, true or untrue, depended for credibility on the general knowledge of Uncle Andrew’s character. I was not the only one who assumed that if he had thought of it, Uncle Andrew would have openly propositioned a girl in a public place. According to that story, as I suppose the jury heard it, a man who lives by impulse invites his own destruction; if he is destroyed as a result of one of his impulsive acts, then a kind of justice has been done. Character is fate, and Carp Harmon was no more than the virtually innocent agent of the appointed fate.

If that story is false, if it was R.T. the girl was talking to, then Uncle Andrew’s fate had nothing to do with his character and everything to do with chance and the character of Carp Harmon.

But R.T. told me something else that I cannot forget, though perhaps it leads nowhere. He said he had heard that Carp Harmon had been wanting to kill somebody for a long time. “People down there shied him,” R.T. said. “He’d been carrying his pistol hid under a rag in the bottom of a ten-quart bucket. He wanted to kill somebody and make a big name for himself. He thought he could kill an outsider and lie his way out of it—which is about what he done.”

This story has the standing merely of gossip, but some gossip is true, and Carp Harmon would hardly have been the first of his kind who went about with a hidden gun, looking for somebody to kill. If the piece of gossip is true, then the other explanations are not explanations but merely excuses. But a man looking for somebody to kill can presumably find reasons and candidates everywhere, the human race being what it is. If Carp Harmon was in fact such a man, then why did he choose Uncle Andrew, who was not even the only available outsider?

Well, I know too that Carp Harmon was a widower, raising his daughter by himself, undoubtedly afraid for her and afraid for that considerable part of his own self-respect that was at her disposal. And he believed, as he told the court, that somebody was running his trotlines; he was prepared to shoot whoever it was. He was exceptional in none of this—neither in his fear nor in his suspicion nor in his violence.

Nor in his carelessness. Murder, I suppose, is the ultimate carelessness. But Carp Harmon’s seems to have been a fearful carelessness, the carelessness of a man who fears that he is small or that he is being held in contempt. And in Uncle Andrew, at least before their violent encounter in Gadwell’s store, he saw a man who must have seemed fearlessly careless, a man completely unabashed, carrying on as he pleased without regard to the possibility that somebody might mind. To a man fearing to be held in contempt, Uncle Andrew would have appeared to be the very holder-in-contempt he had been expecting, whose every gesture identified him as a lifter of skirts and trotlines, a man insufferably sure of himself.

If that is true, then I return again to the thought that Uncle Andrew’s character was his fate, and Carp Harmon the agent of it.

But if murder is the ultimate carelessness, it is also the ultimate oversimplifier. It is the paramount act (there are others) by which we reduce a human being to the dimension of one thought. I knew the utterly reckless and fearless, unasking and unanswering Andrew Catlett that Carp Harmon saw. But if Uncle Andrew sometimes possessed a sort of invulnerability of exuberance and regardlessness, he was no longer regardless when he apologized to Carp Harmon. Then he had become pathetic, because, as events would soon prove, it was too late. Carp Harmon cannot have known the quietness and the look by which I knew that Uncle Andrew sometimes bore his life and fate as suffering. Carp Harmon cannot have known, as I know, that for Uncle Andrew there was always a time or a timelessness after (and before) the fact when he wanted to be a better man—if for nothing else, for me.

And all along I have had to wonder what difference I might have made if Uncle Andrew had let me go to Stoneport with him, as I wanted to. Might my presence somehow have unlocked the pattern of the events of that day? Might a small boy, just by being there, have altered the behavior of two reckless men by the tiny shift that might have been needed to change all our lives? Might it be that Uncle Andrew’s great mistake was so small a thing as ignoring my advice that I should be taken along? Who can know? Who can know even that the difference, if it had been made, would have been for the better? It might be that if I had gone I would merely have witnessed the shooting. In which case I would not have needed to ask certain questions.

Finally grief has no case to make. All its questions reach beyond the world. And now I am done. The questions remain; the asking is finished. This gathering of fifty-year-old memories, those few brown and brittle pages of newsprint, all those years stand between me and the actual event as irremediably as the end of the world.

Finally you must believe as your heart instructs. If you are a gossip or a cynic or an apostle of realism, you believe the worst you can imagine. If you follow the other way, accepting the bonds of faith and affection, you believe the best you can imagine in the face of the evidence. And so at last, like R.T., I must believe as I imagine and as I therefore choose. I choose not to argue with the story of the “remark” to Carp Harmon’s daughter, because it seems both likely and unlikely, and now it makes no difference. I choose not to believe the argument of self-defense; why would even a reckless man with only a two-by-four attack a man with a pistol? I choose to believe that Uncle Andrew said, “Don’t shoot me,” for it is too plain and sad to be a lie.

And so at last I can imagine it as it might have been.

It is early in the afternoon. The sun is still shining nearly straight down into the tight little valley where Uncle Andrew, Jake Branch, Col Oaks, and R.T. Purlin are dismantling the framework of the main building of the lead mine. The two younger men are at work high up on the heavy timbers, which they are prying loose and letting fall. Uncle Andrew and Jake stand back as the timbers drop, and then move them out of the way and begin pulling out the nails. It is strenuous, dirty, and dangerous work (Uncle Andrew was right not to let me come along). In the small clearing there are stacks of timbers, sorted according to dimension, and piles of corrugated tin. The sun strikes all surfaces with relentless brilliance. Metal objects, including the tools the men are using, if laid down for long, become painful to pick up. There is no breeze; the air is humid, heavy, and still.

Uncle Andrew’s sleeves are rolled above his elbows. His arms are shining with sweat and flecked with dirt. His shirt is soaked. And yet he wears his soiled and rumpled clothing and his narrow-brimmed straw hat with a kind of style. He is quick to take part in the talk that comes and goes or to pick up a joke; otherwise his face resumes the expression it has when he is enduring what must be endured. The noontime events down at the store have remained with him. He was knocked down (with an unopened quart can of oil, R.T. said), and he apologized. These facts lie in his belly like something indigestible. What has been done needs undoing, and cannot be undone. As many times before, it is not the present that surprises him but the past, the present slipped away into irrevocability. As many times before, he would like to turn away, find an opening, get out. He feels his own history crowding him, as near to him in that heat as his clinging shirt, as his flesh itself. He feels the weight of the history of flesh. He feels tired. He thinks, “I am already forty-nine years old.” He has not drunk since they returned to work, and he is thirsty.

“Jake,” he says, “let’s go get us a drink, and leave it with the boys for a while.”

The two of them put down their tools. They go to the car where Uncle Andrew left his thermos jug, the water in it by then too warm to drink. Off in the shade they can see the spring flowing out beneath its mossy ledge.

And then Carp Harmon steps from behind the trees, already close, and he has a pistol in his hand. Two men, both drawn to that giddy edge where people do what they think of doing, have come face-to-face, and one holds a pistol, and one does not.

“I’m going to kill you,” Carp Harmon says, and Uncle Andrew knows he means it.

This, I imagine, was his second direct confrontation with his fate, the first having occurred in the road ditch on the night before his wedding. And I imagine that in this latter moment he knew clearly at last what he was: a man dearly beloved, in spite of his faults.

“Don’t shoot me,” he says. He is praying, not to Carp Harmon, but to another possibility, his own sudden vision of what he means to the rest of us—of what we all had meant and the much more that we might have meant to one another.

“Don’t shoot me.”

And Carp Harmon fires forever his two shots.

Chapter 13

EXCEPT FOR his silent whirl with Mrs. Partlet that afternoon in Minnie Branch’s kitchen, I never saw Uncle Andrew dance, but prompted by so many who did see and who remembered, I have often imagined him dancing.

He went into the music, I imagine, alert and aware and yet abandoned, as one might go running into the dark. Invested with the power that women granted him, he would be wholly given over to the music, almost gravely submitted to that which moved him, and yet elated, in reckless exuberance carried away.

I imagine a ballroom in some hotel—in Lexington or Louisville, or Columbia or Charleston—a large room dimly lit, a band on a dais at one end. The room smells of flowers, perfume, tobacco smoke. There is loud talking and laughter, Uncle Andrew in the thick of it, a little drunk. There is a sort of aura of careless delight about him, a suppressed extravagance of physical elation, as though he might at any moment do something that will draw the attention of the whole room to him. He seems himself to be unaware of this.

He is aware of the woman sitting beside him. (Who is she? She is, let us say, Aphrodite herself, for the while. Custom cannot stale her infinite variety.) For the while his being is directed toward her like the beam of a lamp, and she knows it. She casts back his light, granting him love—as I did, as we all did, because he had the power of attracting it; not ever asking for it, he called it forth.

The band members shift in their seats, take up their instruments, and begin another song. They play “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” a song elegant and inconsolable. (It may have come too late for him to have danced to it, but it is the one song I can remember hearing him sing, and so I imagine him dancing to it.) He reaches out without a word; the woman gives him her hand. They rise and walk onto the floor, dancing even before they dance. They step into the music. The woman’s weight on his arm, given to him, he forgets his feet. The two of them ask and answer one another, motion for motion. He holds her with an assurance that is almost forgetfulness, and yet is entirely attentive to her and to the song that moves them:

Darling I guess

My mind’s more at ease

But nevertheless

Why stir up memories

Been invited on dates

Might have gone but what for

Awf’lly diff ’rent without you

Don’t get around much anymore.

A trumpet solo sways, gleaming, in the air. Under it the man and woman turn and soar. The woman rests upon his arm, leaning back, at one with him in their now weightless flight. The little while it lasts, he does not know where he is.

Chapter 14

ONE DAY maybe forty years ago my father told Elton Penn, “I almost did something once that I would have been awfully sorry for.”

Elton told Henry and me not long afterward. We had been at work and were resting, as it happened, in the shade of some locust trees beside the tobacco barn that had been built of our share of the materials salvaged from the lead mine. Henry and I were grown boys then, eligible to be told things that Elton found it lonely to know by himself.

“I wonder what he meant,” Elton said. “I couldn’t ask him.”

The two of them had been in my father’s car, driving through the fields, looking at the condition of everything and talking, as they often did. My father, for some reason, reached over and opened the glove compartment. When he did so, Elton saw a small nickel-plated .32 revolver lying among the papers and other things my father kept there.

“What are you carrying that for, Wheeler?” Elton asked.

I no longer remember the reason. Probably he was on the lookout for stray dogs. He had sheep in those days, and dogs were always a worry.

Elton asked him if he had bought the pistol in fear that he might need to defend himself. We all knew that my father had once defended a man in a murder trial, at the end of which the acquitted defendant had been shot and killed by the victim’s brother. Elton wanted to hear about that. But my father only shook his head and said that once he had almost done something he would have been sorry for.

Sitting under the locusts, we tried to think what it might have been. We decided, with the barn there to remind us, that it must have had something to do with Carp Harmon, though we did not know for sure.

Of course, we did not know at all. I don’t remember that any of us ever brought up the subject again, though we were all much interested in my father and we talked about him interminably.

He fascinated us, I think, because he was so completely alive and passionate and intelligent, so precisely intent upon the things he loved, so eager to get work done, so fiercely demanding of us, and yet so tender toward us. We would be angry at him often enough, and yet he delighted us, and we were proud of him. Elton loved to mimic my father’s way of driving up in his car in a hurry, rolling the window down, patting the accelerator with his foot while he talked to you, and then—bzzzt!—taking off again, sometimes in the midst of your answer to what he had just asked you. He could use the telephone the same way, hanging up the instant he found out what he had called to learn, leaving you talking to the dead receiver. But sometimes when you were out at work he would seem just to ease up out of nowhere; you would look up and there he would be, sitting in the car, watching you and smiling, glad to have found you, glad to be there with you. Wonderful conversations sometimes happened at those times.

One day in the early spring Elton was disking ground a long way from the house. The day turned cold, and he had not worn enough clothes. Gradually the chill sank into him until his bones ached. And then, as he came to the end of one of his rounds, he saw my father driving up. Elton left the tractor and got into the car. My father turned up the heater and the two of them sat there and talked of the coming year while Elton quit shivering and got warm. Finally, having only a little left to do, Elton returned to the tractor and my father went on wherever he was going.

In such wanderings and encounters, my father enacted his belonging to his country and his people. He could be as peremptory and harsh as a saw—we younger ones all had felt his edge—but he knew how to be a friend. One night when he was old, he named over to me all those of the dead who had been his friends. He said, “If they are there, Paradise is Paradise indeed.”

He had a horseman’s back, like his father, and would often sit on a chair as if it were a stool. He was wide awake and on watch, as if he expected a fly ball to be hit to him at any moment. He rarely loitered or ambled. Until he began to fail, when he was well into his eighties, he moved with great energy, a certain lightness, and the resolution sometimes of a natural force.

Even his gaiety was resolute. Or his gaiety came of a sort of freedom within his resolution. He was determined to do what he had to do; he would look for no escape; he was free. I always loved to watch him dress for the office, for often at that time he would be in a high good humor, dancing as he buttoned his shirt and knotted his tie, sometimes already wearing his hat before he put on his pants. He had things he wanted to do, and he could hardly wait.

I sat many a time, waiting for him, in the outer office where Miss Julia sat, typing, at her desk. I would know he was coming when I heard the street door open suddenly and almost in the same moment slam shut, rattling the glass, and then I would hear his footsteps light and rapid on the stairs, for characteristically he would be running. At the top, there would be two hard footfalls to check his speed, and he would hit the door, turning the knob, and the door would open as by the force of an explosion in the hallway, admitting my father, who would say all in one sentence: “Hello Andy Miss Julia what did we do with that Buttermore file?”

It would be the same when he came home: swift footfalls on the porch steps, three long strides across the porch followed by the implosion of the door—and there would be my father going full tilt to hang up his hat.

One day not long after Carp Harmon had been released from the penitentiary, my mother heard that pattern of sounds when she should not have heard it: in the middle of the morning. Nobody but my father came into the house that way, and she went to see what had brought him home. All this she told me after he was dead.

When she came into the front of the house, he was taking that little nickel-plated pistol from the top of the corner cupboard in the dining room.

“What are you doing?” she said.

It measures the strength of his love for her that he answered her straight. He said that he had seen Carp Harmon in town, and he was going to kill him.

I know well the look that anger put into my father’s eyes; I can guess the size of the job my mother had on her hands.

She put herself in his way. She told him that killing Carp Harmon would not bring Uncle Andrew back. She told him he had more to think about than just Uncle Andrew. Or just himself. He had to think of his children, who would have to live with what he did.

He had to think of her.

It took her a long time, but she talked him out of it. He put the gun away.

She had spoken the simple truth: He could not bring Uncle Andrew back; he could not make justice by his own hand, according to his own will. She knew he was almost defeated, fallen under the weight of mortality and affliction and his own inclination toward the evil that afflicted him; he was nearly lost. And she called him back to his life and to us.

He told her one day that now he had nothing to live for.

“And then,” she told me, “I let him have it. I felt for him as much as one human ever felt for another, but I let him have it. And it did good!”

In that time of grief and discouragement and defeat—it comes clear to me now—all that my father was and would ever be depended on my mother. I can see how near he came to turning loose all that he held together, and how, in holding it together, with my mother’s help, he preserved the possibility of our life here; he quieted himself, lived, stayed on, bore what he had to bear. With my mother’s help, he kept alive in his life our lives as they would be.

Chapter 15

IN THE summer that I turned ten, the summer of Uncle Andrew’s death, all the tobacco and corn on the Crayton Place was grown in the same field in the middle of the farm. The field was divided in two by a road, just a dirt track, by which we went from the gate on one side to the gate on the other. To the left of the road, going back, was a long, broad ridge, sloping gently to the fences on either side. To the right of the road and on the far side of the ridge, the slope was broken by hollows and was somewhat steeper. The field was beautifully laid out, so that all the rows followed the contours of the ridge. This was particularly noticeable in that far right-hand corner where the plowlands were smaller and were divided by grassed drains. The design of the field would have been my father’s work: a human form laid lovingly upon the natural conformation of the place.

There came a morning when I stood in the dust of the road with a hoe in my hands, looking at the field, and was overcome by sudden comprehension of what was happening there. The corn was a little above knee-high, the tobacco plants about the size of a man’s hat, both crops green and flourishing. R.T. and I were hoeing the tobacco. I could see Jake Branch plowing corn with a riding cultivator drawn by a good pair of black, white-nosed mules named Jack and Pete. Somewhere beyond the ridgetop, Col Oaks was plowing tobacco with a single mule, old Red, and a walking plow. The air smelled of vegetation and stirred earth. Beside me, R.T. was filing his hoe. Standing there in the brilliance with my ears sticking out under the brim of my straw hat and my mouth probably hanging open (somebody was always telling me, “Shut your mouth, Andy!”), I saw how beautiful the field was, how beautiful our work was. And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, the place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. I saw how sweetly we were enabled by the land and the animals and our few simple tools.

My moment of vision cannot have lasted long. It ended, I imagine, when R.T. finished sharpening his hoe and nudged me with the file and handed it to me. It was a powerful moment, a powerful vision nonetheless. I have lived under its influence ever since.

Its immediate result was that I became frantic to own a mule. I saw how, owning a mule, a boy could become a man, an economic entity, dignified and self-sustaining, capable of lovely work. I fixed my mind on Pete, who was a little the tallest and a little the most stylish of the pair Jake Branch was working that day in the corn rows. My conversations with Uncle Andrew were all dominated by my obsessive importunings and proposals for the purchase of the mule. I wanted to buy him on credit, giving Uncle Andrew and my father my note for the full amount, and pay for him by my work—which, given my irregular employment at a quarter a day, would have taken quite a while.

It was a boy’s dream, sufficiently absurd, and yet the passion that attached to it I am still inclined to respect, for I still feel it. But Uncle Andrew thought my obsession was funny, when he did not think it a nuisance. This was my first inkling that, as much as I wanted to be like him, we were not alike. It was not a difference that I rationalized or made much of, but I remember that it troubled me; something in the way I was had set me apart from him, and I could not help but feel it. Though I know more fully now than then how much I loved him, and though I love him still, that is still a memory that troubles me.

After his death, anyhow, I went on to teachers who were more exacting: to Elton Penn, for one, and through Elton, to my father. Elton, whose father had died when Elton was only a little boy, had made himself a student to my grandfather Catlett and to my father. My father thus spoke to me through Elton before I learned to listen to him in his own right. And so from the influence of Uncle Andrew I came at last under the influence of my father, as perhaps I was destined to do from the first.

Elton and my father were alike in their love for farming and for work well done. They loved the application of intelligence to problems. They saw visions of things that could be done, and they drew great excitement both from the visions themselves and from their practical results. I loved those qualities in them, and longed to find or make the same qualities in myself.

My father could be gentle to the point of tenderness, but he was not invariably so. In certain moods, he had a way of landing on you like a hawk on a rabbit. He could be wondrously impatient; whatever needed doing he wanted already done by the time he thought of it, which would have been going some. Or he could be fiercely put out because you did not already know whatever he was trying to teach you. Sometimes this amused Elton—he enjoyed mimicking my father in such moods—but he suffered from it too, and so I could expect a certain amount of sympathy from him.

One day when I was angry at my father and needed somebody to complain to, I found Elton out by his garden, sharpening bean poles. He was kneeling on the ground in front of a small chopping block. He would take a pole from the pile on his left, stand it on the block, point it with three or four light licks of his hatchet, and lay it in the pile on his right. I sat down, not offering to help, and began my complaint. Elton listened to me, working steadily with his head down. For a long time he said nothing.

Finally he said, “Well, you’ve got responsibilities, you know, that he’s trying to get you ready for.”

I had known for a while what my answer to that would be, and I liked the way it was going to sound: “My responsibilities can go to hell.”

Elton stopped with the hatchet still in the air and looked at me with a look that seemed to originate somewhere way back in his head. He started to grin.

He said, “You don’t know tumblebug language, do you?”

“No,” I said.

He was wearing a leather glove on his right hand and he pulled it off. He held up two fingers in a V to represent the tumblebug’s feelers. He wiggled the right-hand finger: “Roll it to the right!” He wiggled the left-hand finger: “Roll it to the left!” He wiggled both fingers: “Stop that shit!”

He wiggled both fingers at me with that look in his eyes and grinned, and the grin kept getting bigger.

I did not stop it that day, of course, for I had a long way still to go to be a grown man; sometimes I see that I have not altogether stopped it yet. But I had received the sign I was looking for.

Chapter 16

I REMEMBER a later day—I was in college by then—when I went to my father’s office to tell him of a certain very rough hill farm I wanted to buy in partnership with Elton Penn. It was a cool, bright day at the end of summer, the tobacco crop was in the barn, and Elton and I had been on the back of his place, disking the harvested field and drilling it in wheat.

We finished early in the afternoon, and dipped the last of the unplanted seed out of the drill. The Markman Place, adjoining Elton’s at the back, had been put up for sale, and we stood leaning on the drill box in the satisfaction of the field replanted and safe for the winter, wondering who the buyer would be. The farm had been owned by an old couple, like many others, whose children had grown up and scattered to the towns. The husband had died on the place a good many years ago, and then, that spring, the wife had died at a nursing home down at Hargrave. Who the new owner would be was a mystery that troubled Elton, for it was unlikely that anybody would buy such a farm—small and off the road and now run down—as a place to live.

He stood silently looking over the fence a moment, and then he said, “Let’s go over there and look at it.”

And so we did. We climbed over the fence and started across a weedy field toward the house and outbuildings. Beyond the line fence the ridges grew narrower and dropped away toward the wooded hollows. Since the onset of Amster Markman’s last illness, the farm had been cropped by a neighbor and otherwise unused. Briars and sumacs and young sassafras trees had begun to colonize in patches the pasture we were walking through.

We jumped a rabbit, and Elton mimed a shot, snapping an imaginary gun to his shoulder. I knew his mood. He was feeling free and excited; the most anxious stage of the year’s work was behind him.

We went first to the house and walked around it, through the overgrown yard, to the front porch. We had in mind to look in through the windows—at least I did—but when we had climbed the steps we went no further. Miss Gladys Markman’s ruffled curtains were still hanging in the windows. The porch swing still swung from its rusty hooks.

At the edge of the porch we stood and looked out past the sugar maple in the yard and over the tops of the trees on the bluff into the Bird’s Branch valley. You could not help but imagine Gladys and Amster Markman, old and alone, sitting there in the cool of the evening.

“It’s a fine place for a house,” Elton said.

“It is,” I said, moved by possibility.

“And it’s a good house, too,” Elton said. “It’s been kept up. Nothing wrong with it at all.” He looked at me and grinned, knowing that I had a girl I was serious about down at Hargrave.

We went on around the other side of the house and drew a drink from the well by the kitchen door. Elton stood with his hand still on the pump handle, looking at the weed-covered garden plot and the lots out by the barns. “Nobody going out to milk here this evening,” he said.

The old tobacco barn was twisted and leaning as though about to collapse under the weight of its roof. The small feed barn was still straight, square, level, and plumb; we went in through the half-open door. The field we had walked across had been unscarred beneath the weed growth, and now we saw that Amster Markman had planted flagstones edge-up beneath the stall partitions and thus kept the manure from rotting the wood.

“He was a good farmer,” Elton said. “He had that name.”

There were stalls for four horses on one side of the driveway. On the other side there was a little feed room and two large pens, one with tie chains and troughs for five cows. A set of old harness still hung from pegs in front of two of the stalls. All the doors had neat wooden latches. There was still hay in the loft.

When we stepped out again into the daylight, Elton said, “Let’s you and me buy this old place and set it to rights.”

He was watching me, grinning again, to see how the thought would hit me. Remembering it now, I cannot be sure how serious he was. It was at least a thought that he could not resist thinking. And he was grinning, I suppose, because he knew that I could not resist it either.

“But how would I get the money?” I said.

“I don’t know.” He was still looking at me, grinning, poking in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “Maybe Wheeler would help you. You ought to ask him.”

The possibility then seemed to descend upon us and envelop us, like a sudden change of weather. It changed everything: our minds, the day, the place.

We went into the careening tobacco barn.

“The framing and innards are all sound,” Elton said. “It could be straightened up.”

We spent a quarter of an hour dreaming aloud of what could be done. And then we walked in the other ridgetop fields, down into the woods, and back up by the lane that went out to the road.

“Here’s a place where a young fellow could get started and go on,” Elton said.

I knew it was. The thought of it had already gone all through me. It aches in me yet, though the Markman Place never became a real farm again and the house was vandalized and finally burned by hunters.

By the time we crossed the line fence again we knew the layout of the place, and we had thought of a way to farm it.

And so, late that afternoon, I climbed up the sounding well of my father’s office stairs, the noises of the street shut out behind me so that I rose up within the sound of my own steps. At the top of the stairs I took the two further steps to the office door and opened it into the waiting room, now empty, where Miss Julia Vye’s typewriter sat beneath its gray cover. The room was full of the level-lying late sunlight that entered through the back windows. I shut the door quietly and took another couple of steps to see if my father was at his desk.

He had already swiveled his chair around. He was smiling. He said, “Come in, Andy.”

He was in one of his beautiful times. I knew of the times when he would quietly enter the shade where his cattle were resting, and sit down. I knew too that he loved the seldom-occurring times late in the afternoons when he sat on at his desk after the office had emptied, when he could be as quiet as the room, ordering his thoughts. It was a time when time seemed to have stopped and his work itself was at rest.

Sometimes when I interrupted him at work in the press of a day’s events, he could be short enough, but now he welcomed me into his ease.

“Sit down. I’m glad to see you.”

He positioned a chair for me and I sat down. He laid his writing pad on top of one of the neat stacks of books and papers on his desk. He screwed the top back onto his fountain pen, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and then he looked at me.

“What have you got on your mind?”

I told him. Though I guessed that he already knew the Markman Place, I described it to him as Elton and I had seen it, walking over it. I told him the possibilities we had seen.

My father’s attention, when he freely turned it to you, was a benevolent atmosphere. His hearing was the native element of my tale. He knew what I had seen; he had imagined such restorations as I had imagined; he had felt my excitement and my longing. The possibility I was trying to find voice for—an old place renewed and carried on—had kept him a farmer, though he was also a lawyer; it had sent him into endless struggles. Now, having lived to the age he was then and past it, and thinking of my own children, I know how stirred he was, listening to me, for he was hearing his own passion uttered to him by his son.

And yet he talked me out of it.

“Wait,” he said. “You’ve got more directions in you than you know.”

He wanted me to be free for a while longer. Perhaps he felt free to keep me free because he saw that I was already securely bound; my wish of that day would not leave me, though I had yet to drift far from it and return. In talking me out of my hope, he accorded it a gentleness that enabled me to keep it always.

Chapter 17

NOW THAT I have told virtually all I know of the story of Uncle Andrew and of his death and how we fared afterward, I see that I must return to my old question—What manner of man was he?—and make peace with it, for I am by no means certain of the answer. A story, I see, is not a life. A story must follow a line; the telling must begin and end. A life, on the contrary, would be impossible to fix in time, for it does not begin within itself, and it does not end.

Within limits we can know. Within somewhat wider limits we can imagine. We can extend compassion to the limit of imagination. We can love, it seems, beyond imagining. But how little we can understand!

Whatever he was, Uncle Andrew was more than I know. In drawing him toward me again after so long a time, I seem to have summoned, not into view or into thought, but just within the outmost reach of love, Uncle Andrew in the plenitude of his being—the man he would have been for my sake, and for love of us all, had he been capable. In recalling him as I knew him in mortal time, I have felt his presence as a living soul.

However we may miss and mourn the dead, we really give little deference to death. “Death,” a friend of mine said as he approached it himself, “is a convention . . . not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.” The dead remain in thought as much alive as they ever were, and yet increased in stature and grown remarkably near. The older I have got and the better acquainted among the dead, the plainer it has become to me that I live in the company of immortals.

One by one, the sharers in this mortal damage have borne its burden out of the present world: Uncle Andrew, Grandpa Catlett, Grandma, Momma-pie, Aunt Judith, my father, and many more. At times perhaps I could wish them merely oblivious, and the whole groaning and travailing world at rest in their oblivion. But how can I deny that in my belief they are risen?

I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.

That light can come into this world only as love, and love can enter only by suffering. Not enough light has ever reached us here among the shadows, and yet I think it has never been entirely absent.

Remembering, I suppose, the best days of my childhood, I used to think I wanted most of all to be happy—by which I meant to be here and to be undistracted. If I were here and undistracted, I thought, I would be at home.

But now I have been here a fair amount of time, and slowly I have learned that my true home is not just this place but is also that company of immortals with whom I have lived here day by day. I live in their love, and I know something of the cost. Sometimes in the darkness of my own shadow I know that I could not see at all were it not for this old injury of love and grief, this little flickering lamp that I have watched beside for all these years.

A PLACE ON EARTH

For Mary and Chuck
For Katie, Virginia, and Tanya
For Den and Billie
For Emily and Marshall

CONTENTS

PART ONE

1

The Empty Store

Missing

The Card Game

A Dream of Absence

A Departure

Rain, Rain

I Can Do It by Myself

A Voice from the Distance

A Little Shift in the Wind

2

Port William

Company

Like a Bird

The Carpenter Shop

An Old Wound

A Pretty Good Boy

Feeding

3

The Last

The Hotel

The Grass May Grow a Mile

Images Like Seeds

Waiting

4

The Barber’s Calling

Talk

A New Calling

Light and Warmth

5

Keeping Watch

The Sheep Barn

PART TWO

6

A Dark Morning

A Difference Made

A Comforter

The Sanctuary

A Knack for the Here

7

Born a Idiot, Educated a Fool

The Farm in the Valley

Flood

Where Are You?

Coming to Rest

A Vigil

The Keeping of the Place

Changed

8

Something Ain’t Right

Never What It Was

Some Cleaning Up

A Pleasing Shadow

For Someone Who Will Come Later

A Spring Night

Green Coming Strong

PART THREE

9

Look a Yonder

The Bridge

A Guest at a Strange Table

10

The Wanting of What May Be Lost

Something in the World to Do

A Pleasant Place to Sit

11

Green Pasture

Caught

Daylight

A Birth

PART FOUR

12

Going Down

Dangerous Ground

He’s Dead

13

Hard at It

A Widow Alone

Haunted

14

A Famous Escapade

The Presence of Grief

A Ramble

A Result

The Sense of Time Passing

What Is Left

15

That’s Fine

Another Result

16

Six Feet

It’s Over!

Redounding and Sublime

A Passing Dirge

Among the Dead

PART FIVE

17

Straightening Up

A Homecoming

Into the Woods

PART ONE

Chapter 1

THE EMPTY STORE

The seed bins are empty. The counters and rows of shelves along the walls, stripped of merchandise, contain only slanting shadows and the slanting rainy light from the front windows. The interior of the store has been reduced to a severe geometrical order over which the light breaks without force, colored but not brightened by the white of the walls, the pale green of the counters and shelves. Its swept surfaces outline precisely the dimension of its silence and emptiness, but the strict order and cleanness of the room make it a silence that seems actively expectant of sound, a carefully tended emptiness anticipating an arrival. In the back, near the entrance to a small screened-off area once used as an office, a black iron safe stands against the wall. When Frank Lathrop cleaned out the store after his son Jasper went into the Army at the beginning of the war, he left the door of the safe ajar for fear that if he closed it he would never be able to work the combination to open it again. He did not foresee that he would ever want to open it again, but at the time the precaution seemed necessary, consistent with the careful neatness in which he had left the place.

The four men who sit at the card game in the makeshift office feel the vacancy of the larger room as a condition of the smaller, which, like the seepage of wind through the back wall, subtly qualifies their presence there. All afternoon the sound of rain on the tin roof has pecked and swiveled through the hollow building, constantly changing in force and inflection, but never ceasing, until it seems to them the very presence and noise of emptiness. They have got used to the sound; consciousness, attentive to the details of the game, has overridden it, but at the back of their minds it persists. And the rain itself has persisted for days into the beginning of March, making the dawns sluggish, the evenings early and sudden, so that they have come to think of time as a succession of nights rather than days.

A large desk, its cover pulled down and locked, stands at the end of the room farthest from the door. On its top are several neatly marked boxes of accounts and receipts, and a radio playing so quietly that the music is no more than a series of stuttering accents like the far-off rattling of a snare drum. Between the desk and the heating stove at the opposite end of the room Jasper Lathrop’s meat block has been placed to serve as a card table. The two windows in the back wall look out on a narrow lot covered with dead weed stalks, chicory and poke and burdock, and the lighter brown napping of foxtail and wild oat. In the center of the lot there is a disjointed heap of weather-blackened crates that Frank Lathrop once intended to burn; but on the day, a week or so after Jasper’s departure, when he set the store in order and shut the building, he felt his duty to his son was more finished than he wanted to believe. The act of burning seemed too final, too suggestive of a conclusion he was unable to face. In the three years that have gone by since then, the crates have stayed there, and now in the steady rain they have the look of permanence, the stack of them monolithic and at ease, an indelible feature of the casual back view of the town. At the rear of the lot, built sidelong to the fence, is the small carpenter shop of Ernest Finley. Black coal smoke comes from its chimney, twisted off the bricks by the wind and driven to the ground, turning delicately amber as it thins. The carpenter’s pickup truck is parked in front of the door, and through the afternoon the men at the card game have heard the measured sounds of his hammering and sawing. Beyond the shop a broad pasture swags down to a creek branch and tilts up again, gently, to the top of a long ridge. A flock of sheep, heads down against the rain, straggles toward the barn at the top of the ridge for the night feeding. Beyond the ridge is the opening of the river valley.

The light is still strong in the room. The card faces turned up on the hacked surface of the meat block are still white and exact. Outside the windows the gutter drips, also exact, as steady and half-heard as a clock ticking. The sounds of voices and automobile engines out on the street reach back to the room only occasionally and faintly. The smoke from Mat Feltner’s cigar, which he has balanced fire-end out on the edge of the block, rises in a straight thin shaft a yard high, then scrolls out beneath the ceiling, clouding bluely down again into the light at the tops of the windows. Mat taps the fingers of his left hand against the seat of his chair, repeating the same rhythm half a dozen times, and then stops; the nervous rapidity of the sound seems to him to have communicated his uneasiness, and he glances at Frank Lathrop and then at Jayber Crow and Old Jack Beechum to see if they might have noticed. But they are occupied with their cards. He hooks his thumb into his belt.

He sits with his feet drawn back to the sides of his chair, his hat pushed back off his forehead. He is a fairly big man, and although his hair is white his body is still solidly composed, without excess or diminishment. The whiteness of his hair emphasizes the prominence of his features, the green of his clear eyes. Except for a slackening in the flesh of his cheeks his face has retained its angularity and firmness. It is a flexible, expressive face, deeply lined around the mouth and eyes, so that now in its apparent calm it seems near to both humor and sorrow. So far only his hand has betrayed him.

It is his turn to play. He draws from the deck and looks down to study his cards, his metal-rimmed reading glasses set a little low on his nose; he discards and leans back, taking up the cigar again.

Nobody else moves.

“Jayber, it’s your play, ain’t it?” Frank Lathrop says finally.

“Let a man think.”

“Hell,” Old Jack Beechum says, “a mule could’ve thought by now.”

Jayber plays. They play out the hand, and Frank Lathrop gathers the cards and shuffles and deals. Mat arranges his cards and tilts his chair back against the desk. He and Frank and Jayber wait quietly, watching Old Jack.

The old man holds the cards clumsily in his huge hands, fumbling them from one semblance of order to another with the forceful deliberate movements of a man laying bricks—a man building a spindling unwieldy tower of bricks that constantly requires the addition of one more brick to balance it upright. The earflaps of his corduroy cap have come untied; they flail out at warped angles from the sides of his head, dangling their strings, like the wings of some disgruntled bird. He reaches out, turning his cards face down against the block, and looks aggressively at the others as though to answer an insult.

“Your turn, old mule,” Jayber Crow says. He grins as he speaks, but speaks with a patience that amounts almost to gentleness.

Old Jack draws a card from the deck, stares at it, deciphers the message, and swats the meat block with it. He rolls his chew of tobacco over his tongue into the opposite jaw and clamps it there and turns away, aloof and silent; the movement abruptly repudiates his involvement in the game, dismisses his opponents and the game itself as finally as if he had gone out of the room.

They know that when his turn comes again they will have to call him back.

MISSING

Mat looks out the window at the crates tumbled together in the lot; the leafless weedtops poke through them, jerking and wavering in the wind. The pile of them, like the vacancy of the store, is a fact of the war; it remains for the same reason that he and Frank together have allowed the store to remain empty; they’ve foreclosed no possibilities. But now the boxes cluttered together in the rain seem to Mat to insist upon his own disquiet. His anxiety has become, after the first violence of its onset, more a physical state than anything else, a remote vibrance of numbness clenching and unclenching in his body as acutely as pain. The feeling is intensified by a vague awareness that, if he examined it, it would declare itself to be an extreme and desperate fear; but he has resisted any acknowledgment. He feels simply that he is bracing himself to confront an actuality not yet apparent—which, in loyalty to his son and his son’s life, he cannot allow himself to anticipate.

When he went to the post office shortly before noon to get the mail, there was no letter from Virgil. There had been none from Virgil for more than three weeks; but they had hoped, he and Margaret and Hannah, that there might be one on Monday. But he carried the mail home folded in the newspaper without looking at it, hastening then, in the presence of the fact, to qualify his hope, admit beforehand that he would be disappointed, to say that although he had hoped, he had expected nothing.

When he stood on the back porch a few minutes later, looking at the envelopes of what mail had come, he realized that he had failed to prepare himself; his precaution had spared him none of the force of his disappointment. It was not until he thumbed through the mail a second time that he noticed the government envelope addressed to Hannah, and felt change pass over his head like a chill. He picked the letter out from among the others, as though to dispose of it. And then he laid it down again, straight, with the others inside the newspaper, and he began an almost soundless whistling under his breath.

It is in his mind forever, that moment. For what seems a long time he stands as though deep in thought, though he is not thinking, the thin dry thread of his whistling crossing the edges of his teeth. His fingers tap nervously on the underside of the troughed newspaper. And then he thinks of Hannah and Margaret, and steps back into the angle between the wall of the house and the enclosure of the back stairway so he cannot be seen from the window. He leans against the stair door, looking out across the yard.

Rainwater has collected shallowly beneath the maple trees, making a large irregular pool stretching from the walk along the edge of the porch to the lilac bush beside the gate to the chicken yard. The rain is falling slowly in large drops so that the circles it makes striking the surface of the pool remain intact. For a moment at the center of each circle the black branches of the trees are mirrored perfectly, and then distorted and fragmented as the circles interlink and subside and renew. Across the fence in the chicken yard seven or eight hens stand together under the eave of the tool shed.

The chicken yard is bounded on one side by the wall of a large feed barn. The barn is painted white, and on its red roof there is a white red-roofed cupola with a spire and wind vane. Opposite the barn, beginning within the L-shape of the chicken yard and extending beyond it, is a large garden plot. To Mat’s right, looking off the porch toward the side of the lawn, a fence overgrown with honeysuckle hides the town from him; he can see only the roofs of the store buildings, the bare treetops among them, the roof and tall octagonal steeple of the church.

For a moment these things occupy his attention without his naming or thinking about them, as though his mind has become simply the cool grey-lighted space containing them, into which the rain falls.

But now he hears the pounding of his brother-in-law’s crutches coming up the walk beside the house. The familiarity of the sound is suddenly welcome to Mat. It fixes him steadily again in the day and place. Ernest is home for dinner. They will go into the house now.

Coming around the corner of the house, Ernest looks up, smiling at Mat. “Dinner ready?”

“I don’t know. I just got here myself.”

Ernest swings up onto the porch with a movement both cumbersome and strangely agile. He is ten years younger than Mat, his dark face finely modeled, strong-boned, the lips set firmly and evenly together in denial or concealment of the difficulty of his lameness. His faded work jacket fits him tightly across the shoulders. A flat yellow carpenter’s pencil sticks out beneath the band of his cap.

He stands beside Mat, leaning on the crutches while he reaches inside his jacket for a cigarette. “Did you hear from Virgil?”

Mat shows him the envelope. The two men look at each other a moment. Ernest shakes his head and starts to the door.

Having put it off as long as he can, Mat turns to follow him.

Margaret and Hannah are sitting at the table, Margaret beating eggs in a bowl she holds in her lap, Hannah sewing, holding the piece of white material a little awkwardly above the bigness of her pregnancy. They look up as the two men come into the kitchen. The room is warm, the air heavy with the smells of cooking. Nettie Banion stands at the stove, a lifting rag in her left hand, which she rests against her hip.

“Here they are,” Margaret says. “Put the biscuits in, Net.”

Ernest goes out into the hall. Mat goes to the table and holds the letter out to Hannah. There comes over him a great need to do this gently. But he can only do it bluntly, with a kind of shame as though there might be a polite way to do it but he does not know what it is.

She reaches out for the letter and takes it. Mat knows she is looking at him, but he does not look at her. And he knows when she looks away from him. She tears open the envelope and reads the letter, and lays it slowly and flatly down on the table, indicating that Mat should read it. And Mat reads it, and then, as though the duty falls to him, he reads aloud: “Virgil Feltner . . . missing in action.”

Nettie closes the oven door and turns around. She says “Oh” very quietly, her mouth holding the shape of the sound. “He ain’t dead.”

“No,” Margaret says.

Mat hears Ernest going up the stairs to his room.

Hannah has not moved. She sits staring out the window, her hands lying quietly on the piece of white material folded in her lap. Mat picks up one of her hands and holds it, awkwardly because she doesn’t respond. Her hand remains passive for a moment, and then she squeezes his and gently takes her hand away. She has not looked at him.

“It may not mean a thing,” he says.

“No.”

And Margaret reads the letter and puts it back on the table. She takes up the hem of her apron and wipes her eyes. Mat lays his hand on her shoulder.

“Wash up,” she says. “It’s nearly ready.”

Mat washes, and goes and sits down by the front window in the living room. He opens the paper, but looks at it without reading.

As if obeying an instinct, he has done what he usually does. But his eyes only follow the print of the page without reading; the headlines are a black strict architecture; he cannot, somehow, bring himself to assent to a meaning in the words. He folds the paper and moves over to sit on the sofa. Out the window the rain strikes and splashes on the black road.

The sounds become more brisk and rapid in the kitchen. Mat can hear Hannah setting the table. Ernest is in his room at the back of the house above the kitchen; now and then his crutches thump across the floor. Presently Hannah comes in and sits on the sofa beside Mat. She holds up her sewing for him to see. It is a small white gown, delicately embroidered with white thread.

Mat touches it with his fingers. “It’s going to be a mighty dressed-up baby.”

“Oh, you’re going to be proud of this baby.”

“I am. I know it.”

She folds the dress and turns and looks at Mat, smiling. “Tell me what you did this morning.”

And he tells her, the calm of his voice uncertain at first, contradicted by his effort to keep it calm. He was busy all morning with the cattle, he tells her. The cows are calving.

Virgil would be pleased to hear about the calves. But he does not speak of Virgil.

THE CARD GAME

“Uncle Jack,” Mat says, “it’s your play.”

Old Jack draws an ace from the deck, and with a large avoidance of looking either at his hand or at the card slaps it into the discard pile; and Mat, who holds two aces in his hand, decides he will wait until his next turn to pick it up.

The four of them have been there since the early afternoon. The rain by now has dried out of their coats, which have been spread carefully over the back of a wooden bench under the windows. They have, as usual, a fire going in the stove; as usual, except for Old Jack’s occasional fits of swearing, they have played pretty much without talking.

By now the card game in the empty store has become an institution, a kind of unnamed club that in the years since its beginning has acquired a fairly stable membership and meeting time. The habit of gathering there in the afternoons began in the late winter of 1941–42 with Mat Feltner and Frank Lathrop. The two of them had been neighbors and friends as long as either of them could remember. In the last thirty or forty years their friendship had led them in and out of perhaps a dozen business partnerships of one sort or another—the latest being the joint ownership of the old building in which, only a year before the war, Frank’s son had opened a general store.

But in the early weeks of the war, after their sons had gone into the service, their friendship changed from a casual fact to a necessity. Their talk stayed offhand and easy, but it was conditioned now by the presence of the war, the uncertain nature of their involvement in it, their sense of helplessness before an immeasurable fact. The silences they had always allowed to occur comfortably and simply between them were complicated now by the recognition that there were concerns too grievous for talk. They came to speak to each other with a kind of gentle vigilance, surrounding their conversations with sensitive boundaries, but also with a deepening need to speak.

In those first weeks of the war, after the tobacco had been marketed and they had begun the long and relatively idle wait for spring, they had taken to walking down to the store in the afternoons. It comforted them to build a fire there in the back room and sit and talk.

For a while they went on the pretext of seeing what would have to be done to maintain the building during Jasper’s absence, and what improvements ought to be made when he came back. “When and if he comes back,” Frank said cautiously only once. And after that they left Jasper’s name out of it. In spite of their avoidance of his name they both knew that he continued to be implicated in all they said. Any consideration of the future of the store became intricately a consideration of Jasper’s future, of the future and outcome of the war, of what would be lost. Something would be lost, was in the process of being lost, and they dreaded to ponder what. Their talk had become an obscure dealing with fate. It made them nervous.

But by that time Jayber Crow, the town’s barber, had begun coming to the store to sit and talk with them. Port William, Jayber said, provided a short supply of heads to barber, and an even shorter supply of heads that could make a satisfactory connection between a service rendered and a promise to pay, so he might just as well be talking.

“You might just as well,” Frank told him.

“If you can abide the company,” Mat said.

“I’ll do you the kindness,” Jayber said, “of not judging.”

In the afternoons he fastened to the knob of his shop door a battered paper clock which, because of the looseness of the hands, announced perpetually that he would be back at six-thirty; in consideration of the obtuseness of Port William heads he felt obliged to make no further explanations. “Hair’s my business. Let it grow.”

Jayber’s presence made the gathering permanent. There was an air of permanence in his idleness, his long body stretched in a straight line from the back of his tilted chair to the edge of the seat to where his shoe heels bracketed on the rim of the sandbox under the stove, his fingers laced behind his bald head. He would come and sit as long as they would stay, talking for the love of company and the love of talk. It was Jayber who brought the deck of cards.

So the rummy game is a creature of the war, shaped in the suspension of action, the suspension of all certain knowing, that the war has imposed on them. It came about almost by nature, they feel. They know it by its presence, which holds them there in the afternoons from the end of autumn to the beginning of spring, allowing them a dependable silence, masking and comforting them in the solitude of their fears. They are waiting—for the war to be over, for whatever resumption will take place at the end of it.

A DREAM OF ABSENCE

When dinner was over Nettie set the table again for Joe Banion and herself. Ernest put on his jacket and lit a cigarette and went back to the shop.

Now Mat has come back into the living room. He takes his shoes off and lies down on the sofa. He lies on his side, facing the window, his left arm bent back and propped against the pillow beside his head, his right arm resting across his hip, the hand dangling. He no longer thinks of where he is. He looks out the window, near sleep. The stillness of his hands comforts him. Out the window he can see the yard fence blind with honeysuckle, and above it the roof and white steeple of the church. The branches of the trees in the yard thatch across the steeple, the green shutters of the belfry under it. At the top of the sash a single bead of water swells and drips; the bead grows heavier, touches the point of the steeple, breaks; the drops, blown one at a time against the window, streak down, twisting the steeple, holding its whiteness against the glass.

The rain falls harder, the wind blowing it in against the window. The water beads and streaks over the whole pane, the sound sheeted and vibrant there, the rain striking and flaring, blurring the light. The steeple crumbles, its white and green held, with the black of the trees, in shivering transparent smears in the square of the window.

The surface of the water stirs when the wind stirs, ripples barring the reflected blue of sky with the green of water. Several blue dragonflies hover and dart over the pond and in the cattails at the pond’s edge, their transparent wings blurring the hard shine of the sun. The mud at the edge of the water is pocked with cow tracks, covered in places with a thin green skim of algae; in places it has begun to dry and only the earth in the cups of the tracks is wet. It is early afternoon. The sun is high. There are no clouds. The sky is hot and brittle, a vast sheet and splintering of blue light turning the eyes down. White and yellow and blue butterflies have lighted on the wet mud; their wings open and close slowly, mottling the light. The pond is at the center of a large field where Queen Anne’s lace and daisies are in bloom. The air is heavy with the noises of insects, the hot pungent spices of weeds. The wings of the butterflies open and close over the dark mud.

Mat sees the whole field circling the shimmering round blink of the pond, dipping down to the wet banks. He is aware of the tense articulation of white translucent petals around the yellow eyes of the daisies, the green smooth grassblades under which the ants traffic in a frail cross-hatching of shadows.

It is the middle of the afternoon. The shadows have lengthened and become intricate over the banks of the pond. The steeple of the church points whitely up over the horizon of the field. He expects Virgil shortly.

The yellow butterflies all fly up at once. They whirl and flurry in the air a moment and settle back onto the mud in a single movement like one small animal lying down.

The cattle come down to drink, wading out shoulder deep in the water. They drink leisurely, pausing to lift their heads and look at him. Flies swarm over their red backs. Mat can smell the water, the sharp cool mud-smell of it stirred up from the bottom. The cattle wade out again, slowly, muzzles and bellies dripping, hooves sucking out of the deep mud, and climb the bank. He watches them graze into the field. He can hear the grass tearing. It is late in the afternoon.

Virgil has not come. Mat suddenly is afraid. He calls, “Oh, Virgil!” but the sounds will not leave his mouth.

A DEPARTURE

He sits up, his throat tight with the unuttered sound of his voice. The suddenness of the movement makes him dizzy, and he sits motionless for a few minutes on the edge of the sofa, stiffened and weighted with sleep. He is still very near the dream, its colors and sounds continuing in his waking, his mind still caught in the abrupt fear that ended it. The house is quiet. He rubs his hands over his face, pushing his hair out of his eyes, and picks up his shoes and goes down the hall to the kitchen.

When he comes through the door Margaret looks around and touches her lips with her finger.

“Hannah still lying down?”

“Yes.” Margaret turns back to her work. “This is going to be hard on her.”

Mat walks over and stands beside Margaret, putting his arm around her. “On us too. But we can’t help it.”

“Yes.”

They stand without speaking for a minute. Then, “What’re you making?” Mat asks.

“Some chocolate pies. Bess and Wheeler and the boys are going to be here for supper.”

Mat smiles at her. “Well, I’m glad they’re coming for supper. And I’m glad we’re having pie.” He laughs. “And they’ll be glad too, I expect.”

“The boys will.”

He pulls a chair away from the table and sits down to put on his shoes.

“You slept.”

“A little.”

Mat goes into the hall to get his hat and coat off the rack and comes into the kitchen again. “I’m going to town a while.”

“All right.”

He goes out and turns down the street towards the store. It is raining still, and he walks with his head bent.

He is already in front of Jasper Lathrop’s store when he sees Nathan and Burley Coulter standing in the shelter of the little porch roof over the entrance to the drugstore. The soldier and his uncle stand there watching the rain fall onto the road. It will be some time yet before the bus comes, but they seem to have no intention of going into the drugstore to wait, as if now that Nathan’s departure has begun they will do nothing to interrupt it. Nathan’s brother Tom has been dead two years, killed in the war. As he looks at them, that death seems to Mat to be somehow implicit in their waiting.

Pausing, his hand on the doorlatch, Mat speaks to them.

They turn their heads. Burley raises his hand. “How are you, Mat?”

“Hello, Mr. Feltner,” Nathan says.

“Well, are you leaving, Nathan?”

“Yes sir.”

“I wish you luck,” Mat says, and regrets the words, which seem to him to say both too much and not enough.

They thank him. He opens the door and goes in.

RAIN, RAIN

The rain slackens, falls loosely and waveringly for a moment, and stops, but after a few minutes begins again suddenly and more heavily than before. It is only after this renewal, when the familiar rattle on the roof has steadied again in their hearing, that they become aware that the drip from the gutter never stopped.

Jayber Crow looks up, frowning, at the top of one of the windows. “Why don’t you all fix that gutter?”

“Did once,” Frank Lathrop says. “She sprung again.”

“Why in the hell don’t you fix it?” Old Jack says.

“It’s a weary old tune,” Jayber says. He speaks to nobody, the tone of objection gone out of his voice, as though nothing was said before.

“If you ever owned a gutter it’d be leaking.”

None of them replies. Old Jack’s most casual observation is apt to take the form of a final judgment—which could be considered an insult if anybody wanted to take the trouble. They know better than to take the trouble. Though the old man is willing for his remark to be taken better than halfway as a joke, they know that he himself takes it more than half seriously. Jayber owns his barber shop, but it is a fact that he does not own a gutter. It is Old Jack’s theory that a man who owns a roof ought to own a gutter, and a cistern to conserve the water, and livestock to drink at the cistern.

They hear the street door open, the slapping of rain against the wet pavement coming abruptly into the building, and then slam shut.

“Who’s that?” Old Jack asks, speaking to Jayber again because he is still looking at him.

“Burley, I imagine.”

They sit with their heads turned, listening to the approach of Burley’s footsteps, the sounds distinct and clear in the hollowness of the larger room, as though he bears toward them his own portion of its emptiness.

He stops in the doorway, leaning his shoulder against the jamb. He grins at them. The brim of his misshapen felt hat, weighted by the rain, bends over his eyes.

“Gentlemen.”

“Looks like rain,” Frank Lathrop says.

Burley nods. “I look for it.”

He shakes the water off his hat and leans there, creasing and smoothing the crown of it with his fingers, burlesquing his care. He watches their faces, prolonging his interruption of the game while he elaborates the joke of his concern for his hat.

“Looks like a man who could afford a ten-dollar hat for a ten-cent head,” Jayber Crow says finally, “could afford an umbrella.”

Burley stares at him, his face nearly expressionless, but with enough attention that it seems he shapes and completes the silence he allows to follow Jayber’s remark, as delicately as he now holds the perfected shape of his hat.

“It looks like to me,” he says then, “a two-bit barber with no hair ought to be more respectful of heads.”

He puts his hat on, nudging it a little toward the back of his head with his thumb, a gesture that seems both to finish the quiet and detach him from it.

“Well, Burley,” Old Jack says, “is the boy gone?”

“He’s gone.”

Burley unbuttons his jacket and comes into the room. He shakes the ashes out of the stove and puts in a lump of coal, and spreads his hands to the warmth. He shivers. When his hands are warm, he turns his back to the stove.

“Burley,” Mat says, “you might as well play.”

They make room and Burley pulls up a chair.

They play without talking—two more hands, and into a third. Mat pushes his glasses up on his forehead, rubbing his eyes, and turns to look out the window.

“Rain, rain.”

“The river’ll be out of its banks,” Frank says.

“Is now,” Burley says. “A little. It could get troublesome.”

“Well, I’ve seen it rain,” Mat says, “and I’ve seen it get troublesome.”

“You’ve seen it worse than it is now,” Old Jack says.

“Several times.”

“And if you don’t die you’ll see it worse.”

“I expect.”

Jayber plays, and Frank, and Burley.

Old Jack draws and slaps down the ten of diamonds and rams his final card into the discard pile. He looks triumphantly from one of his opponents to another.

He has played his ten of diamonds on Jayber’s seven, eight, and nine of hearts, but they choose not to notice his error, knowing what it would cost them to try to undo it. Once the old man has committed himself to a play, the rules, as far as he is concerned, no longer apply to it.

I CAN DO IT BY MYSELF

Old Jack is difficult. When the mood strikes him he can be magnificently difficult.

For nine years after the death of his wife the old man stayed alone on his farm and kept house for himself. But then, because his health seemed to her to be failing, his daughter insisted that he come to Louisville to live with her. He refused. She insisted that he hire a housekeeper; a man his age ought not to be left alone, she said. He refused again, and this time put himself to pains to see that she retreated with her plans and opinions thoroughly dismantled.

Finally, though, there was a partial surrender on Old Jack’s side. But it was none of her doing—he saw to that. It was Mat Feltner’s son-in-law, Wheeler Catlett, who brought about the compromise: that Old Jack would come to live out the rest of his life in the hotel at Port William. Wheeler was Old Jack’s lawyer and, when they agreed, his friend. And in this undertaking he had also the advantage of not being the daughter.

It was not that the old man had ceased to love his daughter. But her marriage to a prominent Louisville banker had long ago set her apart from his world and out of his reach. He saw that clearly at the time and admitted it unhesitatingly to himself, and so when she came to him with her invitation, well meant as he knew it was, he could see no reason to back off. And with perfect understanding of the consequences, for his daughter and for himself, he kept loyal to what he considered his own place in the world.

But Old Jack admires candor, and Wheeler Catlett stated the proposition to him with candor: “Uncle Jack, you’re old. You could get sick. It won’t be any pleasure to you to die out here by yourself.”

“I can do it by myself,” Old Jack said.

From the tone of his voice Wheeler judged he would do it to prove it if he had to, and after that he let him alone.

Old Jack held out another six months, to proclaim his independence and recover ownership of the decision, and then came to town. He arrived at the hotel toward the end of last October in Wheeler Catlett’s automobile, his clothes and shaving equipment packed in two five-gallon buckets that Wheeler afterwards carried back and set down on the well top in front of Old Jack’s barn.

Mrs. Hendrick’s hotel, in the time of her departed husband, had subsisted on the patronage of a fellowship of traveling salesmen who came and went more or less regularly through the town. But by the time of Jack’s arrival it was a kind of boardinghouse, inhabited for the most part by Mrs. Hendrick and two other, much older, widows who turned out to be extravagantly unsatisfactory companions for Old Jack. And he, by nature or by calculation, proved just as unsuited to the conversational purposes of the three ladies. Aside from the fact that the presence of a man under their roof seemed a breach of respectability, Old Jack’s language assumed for them, in this unsteady social predicament, the nature of a direct assault on their virtue. His disregard makes a kind of bridge on which he tromps across the chasm of propriety that once supposedly protected them in the insular delicacy of their sex. He says very little that they can reply to without seeming to countenance a liberty as opprobrious as seduction. Their precautionary muteness in his presence has been further intensified by Mrs. Hendrick’s discovery that he urinates in the back yard every night before he goes to bed and the first thing every morning—and by the knowledge, discreetly gossiped to them all, that the three of them are customarily referred to, by Jayber Crow and Burley Coulter among others, as “Old Jack’s harem.”

Mrs. Hendrick has a face like an auger, an imitation of the corkscrew twist of hair at the back of her head. She had accustomed herself to widowhood more readily than she ever had to marriage; the memory of Mr. Hendrick she had stashed away neatly in the phrase “My blessed husband, God rest his soul.” And then Old Jack’s coming put a sudden end to the satisfactions and conveniences of her widowhood. Between the two of them a kind of second marriage took place, enforced by circumstance, consummated by Old Jack’s unreckoning invasions of her privacy. But in consideration of the advanced age of the offender and the dollars he pays her punctually on the first of every month, she has felt obliged to tolerate him, and does, with the comforting sense that her virtue somehow prevails.

Old Jack made the card game in Jasper Lathrop’s vacant store his winter outpost. Except for the one afternoon a week when Wheeler Catlett drove him out to oversee the work on his farm, he sat by the fire in the little room, talking when he saw that the players’ interest in the game had flagged and they would listen to him, and talking at times when he knew none of them listened.

That lasted until Jayber Crow got the idea to teach the old man the game.

“Take a hand, Jack. We’ll show you how.”

“Play,” Old Jack said, gesturing refusal with the cane. “I don’t know one from the other.”

But they repeated the offer, and he finally agreed to let them try to teach him. “It’ll be uphill,” he told them.

It was, Jayber Crow said, like pushing a loaded wagon uphill with a piece of string. But once they got him into it the old man stuck. He stuck, not from any love of the game, but because he immediately hated it. He hates the impersonality of it, he hates it for the chance involved in it, he hates the implacable rules of it, he hates it because it is a game. He plays as if it is his obligation to wipe the game from the face of creation. That they have been able to teach him no more than half the rules has preserved his bafflement. His opponents are constantly trounced by his anger, for their persistence in playing against him, for being able to play without anger, for having caught him in the game in the first place. They accept his anger with equanimity, and usually with amusement. They oppose him as honestly and gently as they can, out of sympathy—realizing that the conflict has become necessary to him, one of the last staples of his life—and out of respect.

A VOICE FROM THE DISTANCE

Jayber grins and pitches his cards onto the block. “He’s won. Let’s call it a day.”

“You’re laying it on us, Uncle Jack,” Burley says.

The old man picks up his cane and wrenches his chair around to face the windows. “Yes sir, it’s a wet time, Burley.”

Frank Lathrop gathers the cards and shuffles them once, and places the deck in the center of the block. Mat relights his cigar.

Their gestures deliberately and a little gravely establish the game’s conclusion.

Frank nods toward the radio. “The news, Mat.”

Mat reaches behind him and turns up the radio. They make way for the voice of the announcer as for a procession, their gathering broken as each of them moves his eyes away from it, staring out the windows or at the floor. This solemn hearing of the news, after so long a time, has become a kind of ceremony with them. All afternoon, while the game goes on, the radio hums and murmurs in its niche among the boxes on the desk top, like an idol come to life above its altar, a crude cyclopean head erected and drowsily alert on the room’s edge. Until one of them, noticing a new inflection in its voice, calls attention to it. And they hush for the precise voice of the announcer stating the facts of the war, continuing from the point at which it left off the hour before or the day before; the voice carefully objective, studiedly calm, a fact itself which remains whole and remote among the facts it utters. The words come to them unjudged, without lamentation or joy. Their quiet listening becomes an obedience, an homage. For a few minutes they let the war exist there in the room, calmly mouthing its deaths.

“That’s that,” Frank Lathrop says. He shuts the damper on the stove and they leave the room. Old Jack leads the way down the row of counters to the street door. He walks rapidly, his pants bagging a little over the tops of his leather leggings, the dangling earflaps waving above his coat collar as though he flies as well as walks.

A LITTLE SHIFT IN THE WIND

When they step out on the sidewalk Frank Lathrop pulls the door to and locks it.

The sky is still clouded, but no longer darkly. The wind has shifted a little to the north, driving the clouds into the southeast. The wind is steady and deep; it seems to move the whole sky, holding the shapes of the clouds intact. The wind is colder now and they brace their shoulders against it, pulling their collars more snugly around their necks. Tomorrow, they hope, will be clear.

Under the clouds the air is already clear; the light is hard and precise on the wet surfaces of the buildings and the street, and on the bare upstroking branches of the trees. Northward, beyond the edge of town, is the broad opening of the river valley, seeming abruptly nearer with the rain gone. The farthest barns and houses appear nearly and solidly rectangular.

The road follows the river upstream and south from where it empties into the Ohio at Hargrave. For most of its distance it stays down in the floor of the valley, bending along the first steepenings of the hills, leaving the bottomlands intact between itself and the river. A couple of miles downstream from Port William it begins its one digression: it crosses a bridge at the mouth of a tributary valley, passes the sagging rusting coal tipple and shut store at the old town landing, turns away from the river, and climbs the bluff. It follows the backbones of ridges across the upland, goes through the town, and after another mile or so twists down the bluff into the valley again. From the sidewalk in front of the store they can see three-quarters of a mile of it—marked, for most of that distance, by brushy fencerows on either side: an irregularity of the landscape, like a scar or seam where two halves of the country have been divided or joined. In places they can see the asphalt surface of the roadbed; in places it goes out of sight between embankments or clumps of young locusts. It dips into a hollow, and turns toward the town, becoming visible again as it passes the graveyard and the first straggling row of houses on the outskirts.

They stand in front of the store, talking disjointedly on the verge of going home, leaning against the face of the building now to keep out of the wind. The departure of the rain seems to them to have altered the terms of their own departure, and they stay on—a little precariously, without definite reason, but deliberately nevertheless—to observe and speak of the difference.

“It’ll turn cold,” Frank Lathrop says.

“It’s March now,” Old Jack says. “You can’t tell what it’ll do.”

“Well,” Jayber says, “after it’s stayed one way long enough you’ll settle for nearly anything as long as it’s different.”

Burley nods out the road in the direction of the river. “Speaking of anything, here comes Whacker.”

Even at that distance he is immense, his great paunch flaring his coat around him like a funnel. And at that distance it is already obvious he is drunk. They knew he would be before they turned to look at him. Drunkenness is no longer simply his habit; it has become, for them as much as for Whacker Spradlin himself, his natural state.

They watch him pass in front of the most distant of the houses and come slowly down the row of them toward town, his walk a little unsteady but neither awkward nor faltering; he never strays out of his direction. It is the gait of a man intricately skilled and practiced in being drunk. There is a ponderous grace about it like that of a trained elephant or a locomotive. He sways heavily back and forth across the line of his direction, like a man carrying a barrel across a tightrope, his progress a sequence of fine distinctions between standing up and falling down. His drunkenness has become precise. He walks with pomp, his knees lifting as though he is climbing a stairway. By the time he comes even with Mat Feltner’s house they can see the smoke rising from his pipe.

He bears down on them, puffing his pipe, his overcoat held together at the neck by a safety pin and at the waist by a piece of twine. He wears a wide-brimmed straw hat, the crown full of raveling holes, which seems to them as much a part of his character as his drunkenness. They have never seen him without it. The hat sits on his head emphatically, bending his ears down. Behind him, in a child’s red wagon, he hauls a rusty cream can, the establishment of the bootlegger’s trade by which he subsists.

As Whacker goes past the front of the store, the five of them nod and speak to him. And Whacker nods to them without looking at them or altering his gait, moving implacably forward, the downhill momentum of his great body seeming to dominate and threaten the pavement in front of him. He goes on past the drugstore and the poolroom.

He goes on past Jayber Crow’s barbershop at the bottom of the hill and starts up the next rise, looking straight ahead, his movements the same going uphill as going down, precarious and deliberate, as though he will go on through the town and beyond it in the same direction forever.

They watch him out of sight, and then start, separately, home.

Chapter 2

PORT WILLIAM

It used to be asked, by strangers who would happen through, why a town named Port William should have been built so far from the river. And the townsmen would answer that when Port William was built they did not know where the river was going to run.

The truth is that Port William no longer remembers why it was built where it is, or when, or how. In its conversation the town has kept the memory of two or three generations haphazardly alive. Back of that memory the town was there for a long time—there are a few buildings still standing that are surely twice as old as anybody’s certain knowledge of them. But the early history has to be conjectured and assumed.

It is as though in their crossing to this new place, the first-comers lost everything to the wilderness but their names. And for a considerable length of time after they arrived, the wilderness continued to make demands of them. It asked, among other things, too much of their attention and energy to leave time or strength for record keeping. That the town had been begun, and was there, was more important than explanations and motives and reasons and memories. That they half exhausted the country, in surprisingly few years, testifies convincingly enough to the intensity of their preoccupation. The black ground broke open to their plows like a pile of ashes. There was never anything like it—that black humus, built up under the forest for thousands of years. There it was, dark as shadows under the trees, abundant and deep, waiting to be opened. Surely no dirt was ever more responsive or more alive. You could believe, for once, that the earth might give back to a man more than it took from him. It welcomed him everywhere he put down his hand or his foot or his seed. It had advanced through millennia to break itself open on the coulter of his plow; he could not have helped but feel that jointure and breaking in every nerve.

In two or three generations the country was imponderably changed, its memories, explanations, justifications fallen away from it. The first-arrivers left it diminished and detached from its sources. It was like an island, the past washing up to it, in fact, as the force of its becoming, but not as knowledge. Past and future bore against it under cover of darkness. Whoever wanted to make a beginning, then, had to begin with something already half-finished. And scarcely known.

COMPANY

Across the street from Jasper Lathrop’s store the white steeple ascends and narrows to a point above the green-shuttered belfry, higher than the tallest trees in the town. As he looks up at it from the sidewalk in front of the store, and at the clouds moving steadily southeastward in the deep wind, it seems to Mat for a moment that the clouds are still and only the earth moves, drawing the point of the steeple in a curving stroke through the sky.

Up the street, divided from the church by a vacant lot that contains a single broken-branched old locust and a stone chimney with the ruin of a hearth and mantel, is Mat’s house, its weather-boarded white walls visible through the branches of the maples in the yard. From the angle of the boundary in which his house stands, Mat’s farm extends in a wide irregular triangle to the river. The west line of the boundary follows the road out of town; at the top of the first ridge it makes shape for the graveyard, and then follows the road again to the top of the farthest ridge and down the wooded bluff; at the foot of the grade it turns away from the road and crosses the bottomland to the river. The land has been shaped by water. It has kept something of the nature of water in the alterations of its shape and character as it moves away from the high ground Port William is built on, descending to the river.

At the top of the ridge above the river bluff is the cluster of farm buildings that has been known to the Feltners since Mat’s father’s time as “the far place.” In the field below the barns white-faced Hereford cows graze with their new calves around the banks of a little pond.

The house and the land beyond it have become intimately the possessions of Mat’s mind. Before he looked he knew the lay and the shape and color of the field, and knew where the cattle would be. Even their erratic distribution over the field seems familiar to him as though, turning his head, he did not begin but continued to look.

Looking back at the house now as the gathering breaks up in front of the store, he sees his grandson running toward him out of the corner of the yard.

Old Jack, who has already gone halfway to the post office, stops and turns around. “You’ve got company at your house, Mat.”

“I see I have.”

“That’s a fine boy there,” Old Jack says. “He’ll grow up to be a shotgun of a lawyer like his daddy, you watch and see if he don’t. Tell Wheeler I said so.”

“I’ll do it.”

The boy waves. “Wait, Grandad.”

Mat goes on across the street and waits on the sidewalk in front of the church.

“Hello, Grandad.”

“Hello, Andy.” Mat puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders and hugs him. “When did you come?”

“After school. Daddy had to go down on Bird’s Branch, and he brought us by.”

“Who’s us?”

“Mother and Henry and me. We’re going to eat supper with you.”

“You are? Well, you haven’t asked me if you can.”

Andy laughs. “Can we eat supper with you?”

“I reckon so.”

“Granny’s already told us we can.”

“Well, you’re all right then, if both of us say so.”

“She said tell you to go down to Burgess’s and get a box of salt, and stop and tell Uncle Ernest to come home. Supper’s going to be ready as soon as Daddy gets back.”

“All right.”

And they go down the street, past the old stone building that houses the bank, toward Burgess’s store.

Neither of them hears the plane approaching. It has come in low over the town, and appears suddenly; the four engines and wings and grey fuselage take shape abruptly among the tops of the trees. For an instant it seems to have risen vertically, out of the top of the rise beyond the store. The racket of the engines comes on them all at once, so near they not only hear it but feel the vibration of it in the air and in the ground under their feet. As it comes nearer they can see the blur of the propellers, the black gun-barrels spiking out of the glass blisters, the rivetheads along the fuselage and wings.

It passes above their heads, shaking the ground.

“A big one,” Andy says.

The plane goes on beyond the town, becoming toylike, familiar, as it gains distance and altitude, circling eastward over the river.

The overcast has thinned, become dappled. The light glares on the town. Going into the dim interior of the store, Mat shuts the door slowly, allowing his eyes time to adjust.

Milton Burgess, his striped sleeves rolled two neat turns above his wrists, sits on a tall stool behind the counter, his elbow propped against the cash register. He has been talking with the band of loafers congregated on the opposite side of the counter, two of whom have hefted themselves up to sit in front of the cash register, their backs to Milton. With the loafers Milton allows himself a choleric indulgence in whatever news or argument is current—the one prolonged conversation that he has grudgingly allowed to continue there for forty-five years.

The store is a sprawling frame building, the foundation of which bridges the small creek that runs down out of the pasture behind Jasper Lathrop’s store and around Jayber Crow’s barbershop and under the road, so that after the creek goes out of sight in the culvert below the barbershop it does not come into the light again for two hundred feet or so. Beneath them, in wet weather, in the lapses of speech, the talkers in the store can hear it running.

With the loafers Milton condescends to loaf, his condescension apparent enough that he seems not to join their gathering but to permit each of them separately to intrude on him, so that above his idle participation in their talk his proprietorship still reigns undiminished and austere.

Seeing Mat and the boy come through the door, he climbs down off the stool and stands erect, his sparrowlike face becoming alert. He poises there, his spread fingers delicately touching the countertop, ready to jump instantly right or left at the slightest command from his customer. The quick sparrow face poises above the counter, waiting as if time halted when the door opened and will start again from the beginning the moment the customer speaks his order. It always happens. Mat knows that if one of the loafers, in the midst of their talk, should glance at the tobacco case and reach into his pocket the thin fingers would immediately graze the surface of the counter, the eyes quicken. “What can I do for you today?” Here, in this dim big room containing nothing that isn’t for sale, Milton Burgess has made his life. The husband of his ledger, he never married. Over the years, wringing every possible penny out of his business, spending nothing more than is necessary to keep him and his old mother alive, he has made what the town confidently believes to be a solid fortune, which he puts to no use. Nothing interests him unless it can be made to add up. Though he is growing old and has no children, his ambition is still to squeeze out every other merchant in ten miles. At present he is enjoying the absence of Jasper Lathrop.

“What can I do for you today?”

Mat gives his order, adding a box of cigars.

The plane comes over again. The store is caught up, lifted, shaken in the noise of the engines, the windowpanes rattling.

Andy runs to the door, too late, to see.

The men at the counter follow the sound of it with their eyes.

“What in the hell’s going on?”

“That boy of Grover Gibbs’s, I reckon. They made a pilot out of him.”

“He come cutting didos over Grover’s place that way a week ago. Said he about tore the roof off his daddy’s barn.”

They laugh.

“Said Grover’s mules run off when he done it.”

Milton looks up at Mat, inquiring. “Will that be all for you?”

“That’s all.”

Andy, who has come back to where he was standing in front of the candy counter, becomes conscious that Mat is watching him, and not wanting to appear to hint, he moves away and begins to look at a stack of tinware in the window. Mat takes a nickel out of his pocket and steps up behind him.

“What’s that you’ve got in your ear?” He takes hold of the boy’s ear and pretends to pull the nickel out of it.

“Oh,” Andy says. He turns around, laughing, and takes the coin.

“Thanks, Grandad.”

The men at the counter laugh.

“Is that Wheeler’s boy, Mat?”

“He’s Wheeler’s.”

“He’s a Catlett all right.”

Milton Burgess’s fingers are touching the glass top of the candy counter now, his eyes cocked at Andy, who has gone back to stand in front of it. “Something for you today, young man?”

Mat leans against the counter with the loafers now, waiting for the boy to be done.

“You all heard from Virgil, Mat?”

Mat starts to say what they have heard, but then, on the verge of speaking, hesitates. The truth, divided from his own love for his son, seems a betrayal. He does not want to expose himself to any drawing of conclusions, any offer of sympathy. Sympathy for what? For what?

“Not in a while.”

“Well, when you write to him tell him I asked about him.”

“I will. I appreciate it.”

Mat turns to the storekeeper, handing him another nickel. “Give me one more of those, Milt.”

Milton hands him another bar of candy and he puts it in his pocket.

“Call again,” Milton Burgess says. The door swings shut behind them. Andy takes Mat’s hand as they start across the road.

LIKE A BIRD

When the plane made its first pass over the town, Burley Coulter and Jayber Crow, having walked that far together, had stopped again in front of Jayber’s shop. Jayber stood with one foot on the step, his hand holding the doorknob turned, ready to go inside.

The sounds of the plane’s engines dropped down onto the town roofs like rocks, crashing and tumbling into all the crannies of their hearing, and then seemed to fill up the air above the town like water pouring into a glass jar.

“What’s that thing doing here?” Jayber said.

“Billy Gibbs, I imagine. He flies one of them.”

“They’d better hurry up and send him to the war before he kills somebody.”

“Or gets killed.”

Jayber stepped through the door. “I’ll see you, Burley.”

“I expect you will.”

Now Burley walks up the rise, heading home.

His mind freed, he has Nathan’s departure to think about. He walks back into Nathan’s absence. And with the sorrow that has come to belong to his life, into Tom’s.

He has gone a good way up the slanted street when the plane comes back. He stops and watches it go over the town, low over the treetops.

When he comes to the top of the rise he sees Uncle Stanley Gibbs standing out on the edge of his front yard above the road cut. The old man is in his shirt sleeves, hatless, his hair blowing, waving his cane.

Uncle Stanley’s life takes its shape, has taken its shape for years, around his Sundays. On Sunday mornings he goes across town to the church and rings the bell, long and loud, while the clapperstrokes penetrate luxuriously into his deafness. His little splintery body dangles ecstatically on the end of the pull rope, the bell lifting him. And then he goes out to sit on the step, while the congregation assembles and silence issues from the church door, waiting for the meeting to be over, to go in and straighten up.

“That boy of Grover’s come over here in that airplane of hisn” he shouts, waving his cane. “Come right up out of that woods back of Grover’s place.”

“I saw him, Uncle Stanley.”

“Says which ?”

“I saw him!”

“You did!” The old man bends forward, looking down at Burley, startled and proud. “Like a God-durned bird.”

THE CARPENTER SHOP

Ernest’s shop is orderly and warm, filled with the odors of shellac and lacquer and wood resins, the sound of a strong fire licking in the stove, light from the single large window in the rear wall. The room is neat to perfection. There is only the one day’s disarray of tools, the one day’s litter of wood fragments and shavings and sawdust.

Hanging on hooks and pegs and resting on the floor against the wall opposite the window are the ladders and rope tackle and jacks necessary for the building of barns and houses. At the end of the room farthest from the stove, neatly stacked, sorted according to kind and quality and size, are the stores of fine woods he uses in his cabinetmaking. His hand tools, their handles worn to a polish, hang above the workbench from a row of pegs driven into the long sill of the window. On the wall to the left of the window there is a pencil holder into which are wedged a number of thick-leaded pencils of various lengths and colors, a ball of twine stained with the dust of blue chalk, a calendar with a picture of an idyllic farm in the small valley of a creek where flowers and fruit trees are in bloom. While Ernest is at work he does not use his crutches, but leaves them propped in the corner behind the stove. The interior of the shop has gradually conformed to an arrangement that requires the least amount of walking. By a kind of natural growth, everything here has come within his reach.

Mat and Andy come in and close the door. They cross the room to the stove, and Mat sits down on a nail keg in front of it. Andy wanders here and there in the shop, looking, but touching nothing; Ernest will not stand for meddling. After a minute or two Andy comes back and stands beside Mat at the stove. Ernest is working at the bench, carefully dressing the edge of a walnut board with a plane. He has not yet looked around at them. They watch him without talking, waiting for him to be done.

AN OLD WOUND

In the early summer of 1919, when Ernest came home at last from the war, both his parents were dead and the house sold. Port William had got used to his absence, and he came back changed.

His wound had been difficult, complicated at the beginning by infection, and the healing was painful and slow. After his discharge he had to spend the better part of a year in the hospital. His foot was finally made as well as it would ever be; but this, the end of the healing, was the hardest for him to accept—that to be “cured” meant only that he would remain crippled. The fragmented bones and tendons were spliced back; the irreparable mutilation was made to heal and live. There would be no reason, they told him, why he should not live a normal life. Adjustments would have to be made, of course.

Still, as he prepared to leave the hospital, learning, as though it was some ultimately unsolvable problem of mechanics, to piece out his loss with the crutches, he was aware that he had suffered a defeat. And he knew that this defeat was real and final, allowing for no recovery or revenge, permitting no illusion to mitigate its permanence. And it was from this defeat, more than from any place he had been, that he came back to Port William.

He came back with his mouth shut, permanently, on these realizations. There were two things that he could neither speak of nor forget: his defeat, and the implausibility of the fact that something so vast as a war had picked out and defeated so small a thing as one man, himself. The difficulty was that this was an implausible fact. He was getting ready to leave the hospital; he was going back to Port William, to begin whatever would have to be begun, and now he realized that these thoughts belonged to him as permanently as his wound. He would go back to town, then, this much changed, and nothing could ever be as it was.

But Mat, who came on the train to bring him home, made it easier than he had imagined. When Mat walked into the hospital that morning, he raised his hand in greeting.

“I’m half contraption,” Ernest said.

And Mat said, “Not hardly that much.”

He smiled; they shook hands. Mat picked up Ernest’s suitcase and led the way to the door. To Mat it seemed that they brought home, between them, the recovery of a time—an injury and vacancy in all their lives, healed over, like Ernest’s wound, but with diminished pain.

They got off the train in the early morning. The town of Hargrave had not begun to stir, and the valley lay under a fog that seemed to weight the quiet and to separate the town and themselves immediately from the rattling departure of the train.

After an hour’s driving over the rutted road, disappearing always a few yards ahead of them into the fog, they climbed out of the valley into the open daylight. From the top of the first ridge they could see Port William lying in the sun ahead of them, the white steeple of the church pointing up over the cluster of treetops and roofs. They drove along the ridge, the car chugging and jolting ahead of its plume of dust, dipping out of sight of the town, climbing the rise into it. The maples, in the perfect foliage of early June, dappled the road and the white house fronts with their shade. Flowers were in bloom in the yards and porch boxes. On an old millstone in a patch of sun a yellow cat sat licking itself. Behind them the fog, a white sunlit cloud, filled the valley to the brim.

The town had settled into the quiet of workday mornings. Mat turned the car into the driveway beside his house and stopped and shut the engine off. And the quiet came over them—a susurration of the wakefulness of the town, in which the noon meal was being prepared, the floors were being swept, time was unwinding in the kitchen clocks, the sun was climbing in the warm clear sky toward noon and solstice.

There were the smells of honeysuckle, of barns, of cooking, of hay curing, of horse dung warming and drying in the road. Mat, waking from death, would have known in an instant the place, the time of year, the time of day. Looking at the house, he saw Margaret walking toward them across the porch, smiling, though she saw and knew what he had brought.

In the fall of that year Ernest built his shop. He did most of the work alone, with help now and then from Mat and Joe Banion when they could spare the time. The shop became, in a way, a town project, not of work, but of interest and curiosity—and then surprise that Ernest could lift and carry and climb and, more alone than not, frame and wall up and roof a sizable building. But Ernest had quickly developed the judgment necessary to his lameness, which enabled him to estimate accurately what he could and could not do—and to do more, by a considerable sight, than most of the townspeople would have guessed before they saw him do it. In the town they renamed him Shamble. Though the thumping of the crutches went ahead of him, he held up his face, and there would be a direct straight look in his eyes.

It was understood from the first that Ernest would make his home with Mat and Margaret. He took the room over the kitchen in the back of the house, which had a separate entrance by the back stairs and the upper porch. After his carpenter’s trade had been established, he seemed to withdraw into the established certainties and clear limits of it. He perfected his shop, making its work spaces neat and convenient. He perfected his silence.

A PRETTY GOOD BOY

Ernest straightens up from his work and looks around.

“Hello, Mat. Who’s that you’ve got with you?”

“I don’t know who this fellow is. He just followed me in.”

Ernest blows the shavings out of the plane and lays it down on the bench. He takes the board out of the vise. Holding to the end of it with one hand, he runs his thumb down the edge of it, and then, drawing it to his eye, sights along it.

“I believe he’s a good boy, though. I think I’ll keep him.”

Ernest looks away from the board and, with the same squint in his eye, sights down at Andy.

“He looks like a pretty good boy.”

Andy laughs. “Uncle Ernest, Granny said to tell you to come home for supper before long. She’s made a pie for dessert.”

“Ho,” Mat says. “That’s who he is.”

Ernest nods his head. “I knew him as soon as I heard him say pie.”

FEEDING

When they go into the kitchen, supper is cooking. Margaret and Hannah and Bess Catlett are all sitting around the table, talking. Bess is holding her younger child, Henry, on her lap.

When he sees Mat coming to the door, Henry jumps down and runs across the kitchen to meet him.

“See what’s in my ear, Grandad.”

He cocks his head sideways, putting his ear into the proper position.

Mat slips the bar of candy out of his pocket, concealing it in his hand, and with a great show of effort fetches it out of the little boy’s ear, and hands it to him. Henry takes it and looks at it, his eyes big.

They all laugh. Mat walks over to the table. Bess takes his hand, and he leans down to kiss her.

He stands there a minute to talk with them. None of them speak, as they usually do at these times, of Virgil, and they are all conscious of the avoidance. Over all they say there is a tension of awareness that the day has become strange. Mat has understood from the moment he came in that Bess knows of the letter—that, soon after she came, Margaret found a time, out of the hearing of Hannah and the children, to tell her. He can all but hear the sound of her voice, deliberately firm, discovering, by instinctive goodness, the least painful words.

When Wheeler comes, he knows, they will have to tell him. And so it has begun, and will go on. He buttons his coat around him again, and, getting the milk buckets from the pantry, goes out.

At the barn Joe Banion is already at work, watering the mules. The old Negro comes out of a stall, carrying a lead rein in his hand. The brim of his hat is turned down so that it nearly touches the turned-up collar of his mackinaw. The coat is too large for him, hanging nearly to his knees, the sleeves half covering his hands. His pant legs are stuffed into a pair of leather leggings, also a little large, which have been buckled and then tied top and bottom with pieces of twine. He is small and a little stooped, a little flinched against the chill. His face is that of a man who has learned long ago to do what is necessary: to work, to take pleasure as he finds it, to make do, to be quiet. His face does not show his age; his hands do. As early as Mat remembers anything he remembers Joe Banion.

Joe Banion shuts the stall door and slips the latch to. Turning then, and seeing Mat, he nods his head and smiles. He is thinking of the letter. He is thinking of Virgil, and is sorry.

For a moment, looking at Joe’s face, touched by the kindness in it, Mat would like to tell what he has on his mind, say what he is afraid of. But he does not name his fear even to himself, and he says nothing.

“It sure ain’t getting any warmer, Mr. Mat.”

“It’s not spring yet, Joe.” Mat speaks without thinking, and hears, almost with surprise, the casual tone of his voice.

“It’ll be before long,” Joe Banion is saying. “We’ll be sweating before long, I expect. Soon enough.”

Mat hangs the milk buckets up inside the door, takes a larger bucket to the crib, and fills it with ears of corn. He goes from stall to stall, down one side of the long driveway and up the other, dropping into the feed-boxes each mule’s ration for the night.

He puts the bucket back when he has emptied it, and climbs the ladder into the loft. He moves above the rows of stalls, forking hay down into the mangers. Below him he can hear the mules feeding, rattling the corn in their troughs.

He goes out the back door of the barn, through the lot gate, and up the long slope of the pasture to the sheep barn at the top of the ridge. The sod gives under his feet like sponge. Behind him his tracks are filled with water.

The flock of ewes, most of them with lambs now, grazes along slowly in the direction of the barn, picking here and there at the short grass. Seeing Mat on his way to feed them, they raise their heads, and come along more quickly. In this sudden forward movement of the flock, lambs get separated from their mothers, and the commotion increases. Mat goes into the barn and pulls the doors to behind him. In the dim light that comes in between the boards of the walls, the troughs and mangers stand end to end in a long rank down the center of the driveway. He makes two trips from the feed bin with buckets of grain, spreading it evenly in the bottoms of the troughs, and forks hay into the mangers. And then he covers the wet bedding with a layer of fresh straw. He looks over his work, again with satisfaction: the feeding and the night prepared, perfected.

He pushes the doors open and calls the sheep, standing back out of the way as they come in and crowd to the troughs. He stays there a while, looking over the field, making sure that none has been left out. He feels growing in him now, in spite of all, a familiar and precious calm. The flock is in the barn, well fed, safe from dogs and the cold, warmly bedded. They will be there safe until morning. If not today, on most of the winter days of his life this completeness has filled his mind.

The sun, almost down, breaks out of the overcast, throwing a warm orange light over the town and the house and the ridge where Mat is standing. Against the brightness of the clouds in the west, the town has become a silhouette. The naked branches webbing over the tops of the houses stand out clearly. The wall of the sheep barn is an intense glowing white. Everywhere the colors are stronger. The light picks out the smallest beginnings of green in the pasture. The damp left by the rain shines. Mat stands in the change of light as he has been standing all along, but changed. He knows he will not think of it as winter again; spring has become imaginable. He feels an elation, and then, in the same thought, sorrow that the first change has come beyond what has happened to them. Now they move again toward what will happen.

Chapter 3

THE LAST

A little less than a mile from town Burley Coulter turns off the blacktop into the gravel lane that goes back through the fields to his house and Jarrat’s. The lane runs somewhat windingly along the backbone of a ridge which points toward the opening of the river valley. To the sides of the ridge, though not so noticeably, lie the openings of the lesser valleys of Sand Ripple and Katy’s Branch. From so high Burley can see a lot of the country, in which the only sounds audible to him now are his own footsteps. He walks along carefully between the two depressed and puddled wheel tracks.

Toward its outer end the lane forks, as does the ridge, the left fork going to Jarrat’s house, the right to Burley’s. Here the two farms are divided by a hollow that becomes a deep ravine where the easy slopes of the upland steepen to the wooded bluffs above the river valley.

Since the death of his wife more than twenty years ago, Jarrat has lived alone, leaving his two sons to grow up in the other house, in the care of their grandparents and Burley. The boys lived too far away to know Jarrat as a father, near enough to know him as a taskmaster and judge. Jarrat has remained a good deal apart from the family, cooking and keeping house for himself.

Jarrat and Burley were born in the other house, the log house begun by their great-grandfather, completed by their grandfather, and weatherboarded by their father. Except for a reluctant trip to France in 1918, Burley has never left, and now the deaths and departures of the other members of the family have left him alone there. His father, Dave, died in 1940. And both the boys went away—Tom before the old man’s death, Nathan later—because of quarrels with Jarrat. It is not in Jarrat’s nature to indulge a small disagreement, and so his quarrels with his sons were the only real ones he had ever had with them, and the last ones. It is a severe manhood that Jarrat has, that feeds on its loneliness, and will be governed by no head but his own. Each of the boys was able to make a reconciliation of sorts between himself and Jarrat, on the terms of a quiet and mostly one-sided friendship, but the separation, once accomplished, was permanent, and neither of them came back home to live. And now Tom is dead.

After old Dave’s death and the departure of the two boys, Burley and his mother lived on there together, oppressed sometimes by the emptiness of the big house, but managing, as Burley said, to peg along.

“We’ll peg along, old girl,” he would say to her.

She would sniff, and then laugh, at his impudence.

The old woman lived on in bewilderment, divided from the lives that had been her care and duty. She went through times of deep loneliness; sometimes at night, after Burley had gone to bed, he would hear her wandering among the empty rooms of the house, whispering to herself.

During those last few of her years, Burley made the first honest attempt of his life to please her. He tried—always fumblingly, often with extravagant miscalculation—to be the kind of son he figured she had wanted him to be. He left off, as nearly as he could bear it, what she thought his most wayward habits, and when he was not at work or in town on some errand he mostly stayed at home with her. They would sit in the living room at night, and talk; or, more often, he would listen and she would talk, her old voice wandering at random among her memories. The past had come near to her, and she would talk on and on, remembering idly and easily, but also obsessively and endlessly. She would exhaust his ability to pay attention to her, and he would sit there, his mind drifting, nodding his head. She repeated the same stories time and again, reminded of them by new memories, until finally he was able to tell what story she was on just by the sound of it.

Occasionally in these ramblings of hers she would stumble, by accident, onto one of his misdemeanors. She would be taken by surprise; the recollection would come to her as forcibly as if it had just then happened. She would look up at him suddenly, crossly, over her glasses, and point her finger at him.

“And you, Burley Coulter, were drunk.”

She would shake her head, surprised and grieved that a son of hers could ever have been drunk.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Burley would say. “I expect.” And he would get up quietly and go out of the house, leaving her to whisper and gesture her way through her old anger.

Her early memories came back to her in swarms, but her ability to keep the immediate past in mind grew weaker. She could remember what happened fifty or twenty-five or ten years ago with lucidity and clarity of detail that were surprising even to her. She would have sudden recollections of things that she was no longer aware of having forgot. But she would be unable to remember what came in the mail the day before. She would hunt sometimes for half a day, having forgot where she had put down her glasses or her thimble. Her lifelong habit of putting things away was transformed, by this failure of her memory, into the interminable and wearisome process of hiding things from herself and finding them again, always by accident and with great pleasure, sometimes months later. A few things that she regarded as keepsakes or valuables she put away carefully and never found again.

One Christmas she put away a box of candy—thinking that she would ration it out carefully and it would last a month or two—and never came upon it again until the week after Easter. By then the candy was hard as gravel, and she had forgot how long it had been since she put it away. Burley, to please her, ate nearly the whole box—in two nights, to get it over with—talking the whole time about how tickled he was that she had saved it. And she nibbled along at it herself, looking inquiringly over her glasses, uncertain whether to believe him or not.

Finally she said, “I’ll declare, Burley, these false teeth of mine seem to have got out of whack.”

When he had time he helped her in the kitchen, and helped her keep house, sparing her as much of the work and worry as he could. In good weather he would sometimes persuade her to let him do the washing, and set up the tubs and wringer in the back yard to avoid cluttering the kitchen, and do in an hour what would have been a half day’s work for her. When he finished, the clothes he had on would be as wet as the ones he had washed.

“Burley Coulter,” she would say, “you’re worse than any kid.” And then she would laugh.

Seeing that his recklessness and awkwardness amused her, he plunged and rubbed over the scrubbing board more furiously than ever, making the water splash and spout higher than his head. Performing these elaborate exaggerations of his incompetence, he could make her laugh like a girl.

She made, finally, a kind of household pet of him, made a child of him, and he submitted painstakingly. She fixed special treats and desserts for him. In the years between Dave’s death and her own she crocheted a set of doilies for his room.

He remembers the heavy day, after her death, that he spent burning the leftover odds and ends of her life that she had carefully preserved in the closets and the bureau drawers: postcards and letters from people whose names he had forgot and hastened to forget again, photographs of people dead before he was born, whose names he never knew. Though he wanted none of it, though he lightened himself by getting rid of it, there was an awesome finality in the burning of those things, dear to her for reasons that would never be known again in the world.

Since his father’s death and the boys’ departure, and even more since the death of his mother, Burley has devoted himself to Jarrat—not because Jarrat ever has required devotion of him, but because he is touched by Jarrat’s loneliness, and in the absence of so many is lonely himself.

Jarrat lives for work. He has grown nearly silent. If Burley wants to talk, he has to wait for a chance to go elsewhere. But he and Jarrat have continued to work together, and there has been a great deal to be done and always more to do. During the past two years, in addition to farming their own places, they have sharecropped on Mat Feltner’s. Jarrat took this new work, Burley knew, simply because the acreage became available—and because he is, within the limits of his strength, unable to let the opportunity of a crop go by.

Burley has made himself Jarrat’s friend. Though Jarrat will never acknowledge any dependence on him, Burley has made himself dependable. He has been, as he never was earlier in his life, faithful to their work, not for his own sake, but for Jarrat’s. In these years of their loneliness devotion has become Burley’s habit. He has become more gentle as Jarrat has become more hard.

Now, as he comes up to the yard, Jarrat is waiting for him, standing on the stone walk between the back porch and the cellar house. He is past fifty now, and looks older—all leather and bone and lean meat, taller and leaner than Burley, a little bent in the shoulders. His face, beginning to hollow in the cheeks and temples and around the eyes, is covered with a week’s growth of nearly white beard. His mouth is cleanly shaped, firm, and tightly, deliberately, closed. His eyebrows are coarse, heavy, completely black; below them his eyes are set deep and have a peculiar fixity of gaze.

He is wearing an old hunting coat, soiled and stained and frayed. His large hands hang down at his sides, the knobbed heavy bones of his wrists showing beneath the coat cuffs. His hands are scarred and hardened, weathered to the color of an old saddle. Jarrat’s face invites no sympathy; to Burley, all the humanness and vulnerability of him are in his hands, and he is always touched by the sight of them. For three or four years, Burley knows, Jarrat has been unable to sign a check. His hand has become incapable of performing the small movements of his name, can scarcely grasp and hold steady so small an object as a pencil. It is the peculiar adaptation of his strength that he can do small work only clumsily or not at all, but manages the roughest and heaviest labor with grace and seemingly without strain.

He stands midway of the walk, awkwardly waiting. He asks, “Did he catch the bus?”

“Yes.”

“You got him there all right. And saw him off.”

“Yes.”

Jarrat is looking down at his feet. He nods. And then, as though he had been not waiting but passing on some errand, he goes out the gate and starts home.

Burley walks up the steps and onto the porch. He wipes his feet on the piece of old carpet beside the door and goes into the kitchen.

He lays a fire in the cooking range and lights it. Once the blaze has caught, he goes to the living room to build up the fire there, and then goes out along the path to the barn to do his feeding.

When he leaves the barn, the sun, just before setting, shines out of a breach in the clouds, and below him the valley is suddenly filled with a transparent mist of rich light. He stops to look. A window in a house he cannot see, on a ridgetop three or four miles away on the other side of the river, catches the sun. His clothes are still damp from the rain; his feet are wet and cold. He stands there, watching the light, thinking suddenly of spring.

Back in the house, he gets out a pair of dry shoes and a change of clothes. He stands in front of the stove in the living room, taking off his wet clothes and putting the dry ones on. He waits there, holding his hands over the top of the stove, until he is warm.

The house has become dark. He goes through the cold hall to the kitchen and turns on the light and begins preparing his supper. He goes about his work in about the same way as his mother would have gone about it.

Usually his housekeeping seems to him to be too painstaking, even wasteful, for one man living alone. At times he has thought it would be better to move his bed down to the kitchen and live in the one room with the one fire, as Jarrat has always done, and close up the rest of the house. But he has never been able to bring himself to the change. He follows the old habits of the household, keeping at least the three rooms alive. And he keeps Nathan’s room clean and waiting, refusing to accept loneliness as the culmination of anything. He knows better than to hope outright for the return of anybody, but he is careful to leave the possibilities open.

When his meal is done with and the kitchen is set to rights, he goes back to the living room and sits and smokes in his chair beside the stove. The room is furnished sparely and to Burley, despite his own presence in it, it feels deserted. There is a checkered linoleum on the floor, a small carpet in the center of it in front of the stove. Besides Burley’s rocking chair, there are four straight-backed chairs, a sofa, and a table under the front window. On the mantel behind the stove a stopped clock stands between two glass vases. Between the clock and the vases are pictures of Tom and Nathan in their uniforms, and an enlarged photograph of the family taken by Jarrat’s wife in the year before her death. They are standing in a row in the yard in front of the house. It is Sunday, or else they have dressed up especially for the picture—he cannot remember. The two little boys, at either end of the row, are grinning, looking into the camera. Jarrat and Burley, almost unrecognizably younger, stand with the boys beside them and the old people between them; they have their hands behind them, their feet apart, their eyes squinched against the sun; Jarrat, self-consciously, is smiling. The grandmother stands with her hands clasped in front of her, her feet placed together at a prim angle, in what was considered graceful posture in the time of her girlhood. Beside her, peculiarly apart from her, and from all the rest of them, old Dave is leaning forward over his cane. He might be there alone for all the deference he pays to the presence of the others. He is as tall as Jarrat, and as lean, his white hair uncombed. He is wearing a white shirt and tie and a dress coat of an old-fashioned cut which fits him too tightly across the shoulders, but his pants are work pants, without creases. The set of his face is stubborn. He has submitted only grudgingly—only, finally, at the insistence of his pretty daughter-in-law—to the taking of the picture. He stares straight ahead.

They look into the room: the living faces of the dead, the different younger faces of the living, more perishable than the paper of the photograph. Jarrat’s young wife was the first to die, leaving Jarrat and the two boys to become what they would not have become if she had lived, changing all the possibilities. And old Dave held on to his life as if nothing was less obvious and less certain than death—until a simple sleep, like a child’s, pried his fingers loose. And the old woman died, among the gathering of her memories, as though she died into a death she had already lived in for years.

And Tom is dead. And Nathan is gone again, bound to them now only by the thin strand of departure.

Burley leans forward, opening the door of the stove, and throws in the butt of his cigarette and empties the ashes out of his hand.

He picks up a newspaper and looks at it a moment. But it is yesterday’s paper—he forgot to get the mail when he came in. He puts the paper down and turns on the radio, and then, anticipating with a kind of fear the breaking of the silence, turns it off again.

He gets up and walks to the window and, shielding his eyes from the light in the room, looks out. There are no stars. The wind has quieted and the overcast, he imagines, is thickening again. He stirs the fire and sits back down.

For a long time there is only the sound of the fire burning, the occasional shifting of the coals. Occasionally, marking the silence into long spans, he hears the cracking of the floors and walls as the house contracts and settles into the night cold. He is thinking of Tom.

Tom had been a bulldozer operator with a battalion of engineers, following the invasion into Italy. One morning they were sent up into the mountains where a battle had been fought the night before. The field was strewn with the dead of both armies, and Tom’s outfit had orders to bury them. The area was still under threat of counterattack, and they were to do their work in a hurry. The ground was stony and thin and frozen, covered with a layer of snow. With considerable difficulty, Tom scooped out a long shallow grave. The bodies were laid in quickly, side by side in the naked grave, and he began covering them. He replaced the dirt he had moved, and to make the burial as deep as possible he began scraping up dirt from the area around the grave to mound over it. It was desperate work. Twice he became confused about the dimensions of the grave and dug out the bodies he was trying to cover. The forward movement of the heavy machine rolled them out of the pit before he could stop.

Now, grown still in the chair, the warmth of the stove around him, Burley doesn’t know if he is awake or asleep. Cold in his mind, he digs in the skimpy dirt, moving back and forth on the narrow shelf of the mountain. Beneath him he can feel the shove and pitch of the machine, the sound of the engine alternately straining and idling. Looking down as if from a height, he sees the unfinished long mound of a grave. Under the mound are the dead, lying side by side in their torn uniforms, a single long rank of them, facing up into the raw dirt. He scrapes at the frozen ground, loosening only handfuls at a time, and pushes it onto the grave—to make the dead safe there, to be done with them, to hide them forever. He is in a terrible hurry, and there is not enough dirt.

He uncovers a face. Tom’s. The boy lies on his side, his right arm crooked beneath his head. His eyes are shut, the dirt against his cheek like a blanket.

He wakes up. The house and the fire tick on into the silence. He sits still, trying to recover his presence there in the familiar room. It is time he was going to bed. But he puts on his hat and coat, and picking up his lantern at the kitchen door, starts back along the road to town.

THE HOTEL

The lobby of Mrs. Hendrick’s hotel, considering its public intention, is a cramped small room. The ceiling is too high for the length and breadth of it. Light from the one-eyed ramshackle fixture in the ceiling thins and dims, reaching down into it. In a steep diagonal across the back wall of the room a stairway goes up to the second floor.

Beneath the stairway, divided from the rest of the room by a short counter, there is a small triangular alcove, which was the office of the establishment in its more or less flourishing days. The alcove contains a double row of empty pigeonholes. The counter bears a frayed ink-marked green blotter, a crusted inkstand and pen, a small nickel-plated bell. None of this has been in use for years. Now all the business of the place can be transacted well enough in and out of Mrs. Hendrick’s snapping change purse, but she has maintained the little office as an appearance or reminder of her better days. The lobby is furnished with three wicker chairs and a wicker settee. They sit there empty, in conversational arrangement, offering hospitality in the empty room.

The dining room is a little better than twice as long and half again as wide as the lobby. Four ample tables stand in a row down the center of the floor. Light fixtures hang by cords from the ceiling at either end of the room, but only the most distant one is lighted. At the far end of the room a door opens into the kitchen, showing beyond it a large black cooking range. The table nearest the kitchen is the only one with a cloth on it.

At this last table Old Jack and the two lady boarders are seated. The old man sits at the end of the table toward the front of the building. At the opposite end is Mrs. Hendrick’s empty chair. The old ladies sit, facing each other across the table, on either side of the landlady’s place. The plates of the three women make a small close triangle, leaving as much of the table’s length as possible between them and Old Jack. The old ladies have woolen shawls drawn around their shoulders, and Jack still has on his coat and cap. The meal is nearly finished. The old ladies have stopped eating, and are leaning toward each other, talking almost in whispers. Now and then they glance down the table at Old Jack, but covertly, so as not to violate their pretense that they are unaware of his presence. As their glances at him show, their exchange of womanly confidences is a little thrilled at its surreptitious occurrence in the presence of the old man.

Old Jack is still eating. He has heaped his plate full for the second time, and has no more than half finished it. He eats with the forthright assistance of his left thumb, with a great wielding of his elbows. Whatever the old ladies say to each other at mealtimes, it always has a tacit reference to the old man’s table manners. At the moment there is a trickle of gravy on its way down his chin; sooner or later, they know, ignoring his napkin, he will wipe it off on his sleeve.

Mrs. Hendrick is standing just out of reach of his left elbow. She is holding out, vaguely in his direction, a nearly empty meat platter. She has been standing there for a full minute, waiting for him to notice her, her face set in a twist of impatience. Jack continues to eat, concentrating on the space between his plate and his mouth.

She pokes the plate at him. “Do you want any more of this meat, Mr. Beechum?”

“Naw’m,” Jack says. “You can take that away, Suzy. I’m done with it.”

Mrs. Hendrick’s name is not Suzy. None of the three women is named Suzy. But Old Jack simplifies matters by calling them all Suzy.

One of the old ladies giggles in confidential outrage at the other.

Mrs. Hendrick makes hard rapid tracks to the kitchen with the meat platter. She comes back and scrapes up the old ladies’ dishes and her own, and carries them to the kitchen. Her steps peck brittlely back and forth over the floor. She brings in the coffee pot and fills the triangle of cups at the ladies’ end of the table and sits down again. She passes the sugar and cream to her lady boarders.

Old Jack finishes eating and pushes back his plate. Mrs. Hendrick gets up and hustles around the table, her heels again picking out the thin hard code of her martyrdom. Sometimes she gets furious at Mr. Hendrick for having died and left her alone, and poor, and dependent on these distresses. She brushes Old Jack’s crumbs into his plate and takes it out to the kitchen. She pours his coffee and sets the cream and sugar by him, and goes back to her place.

The old man scoops in three heaping spoonfuls of sugar and pours in cream until his cup fills to the brim. He stirs, slopping the coffee out into the saucer. Holding cup and saucer unsteadily in his big hands, he pours the saucer full, and blows on it and drinks. He finishes the coffee in five saucerings, rapidly, with a loud mixture of breathing and blowing and guzzling, and gets up, scraping his chair backwards, scrubbing his mouth on his coat sleeve. He unhooks his cane from the corner of the table.

He looks at Mrs. Hendrick and gives her a large smile. There is a blunt obtrusive kindness in his expression, utterly unaware of the displeasure that she has been at such pains to make obvious.

“I thank you, Suzy. And good night to you.”

He turns and goes, walking heavily the length of the dining room and out the door, leaving his chair pushed back at an angle from the table.

Jack’s departure, as far as the two old ladies are concerned, is as disturbing as his presence. His leave-taking is absolute. The turning of his back completely dismisses the entire circumstance of the meal and its company—themselves. He bears away from the table a filled belly, but beyond that not a thought. The set of his head and shoulders, the momentous stomping and hobbling of his gait, suggest that he has never looked behind him in his life. He seems to participate unequivocally in the continuing deaths and completions of things. His knowledge is as forthright as his hunger. He speaks of the approach of his own death as much as a matter of fact as he speaks of the approach of Tuesday. He accomplishes everything as if he is both aware and willing that every breath he draws will be the last of its kind. To the old ladies there is something obscene in it. They exchange a series of self-conscious glances—as after a near stroke of lightning.

From where they sit they hear his cane and his footsteps thumping slowly up the stairs.

At each end of the hall a bulb the size of a walnut gives a thin weak light shadowing the offsets of the doorways. Into the half-dark of the hall the rooms exhale the cold musk of emptiness. Jack goes into his room, leaving the door open so that a little light drains in from the hall. He feels his way to the light switch, and turns it on. The room contains only an iron bed, a tall bare-topped chiffonier with a peeling oval mirror, a large rocking chair. That the bed is made up is the only sign that the room is lived in. Old Jack’s coming has changed nothing.

He shoves the rocking chair over to the window and hooks his cane over the arm of it and sits down. He leans back.

The room contains his sleep. It is there, waiting for him, folded in the iron bed. But he has to prepare for it. He has to get his mind ready for it beforehand. In the last few years, since he has become too old to work, he has slept a light short sleep. A sleep too easy to wake up from—his mind is always just barely submerged under it, as though he is looking up at light through an obscuring thin film of water. Unless he is careful he will wake up in the night and think of his fears.

Most of all he is afraid that before he dies he will be sick and unable to attend to himself. Death does not worry him so much. He has no time for the solemnity usually attributed to it, but it is a fact, at least, and can be considered and dealt with. He thinks of dying as a kind of job that will have to be done, and, as he tells Wheeler Catlett, he can do it. But the thought of sickness makes him afraid. He fears living on past sickness into dependence on other people. He dislikes the uncertainty of these thoughts. He has lived all his life loving solid objects, things he could hook onto with his hands and pull. He has loved to feel in his hands the thrown-back weight of his body.

Other times he will wake up thinking of the imperfections of his life. He will lie there, remembering his mistakes and stupidities and errors of judgment, furious at himself, furious and sickened at the impossibility of correcting the past. These recollections return to him like old pains. And once they start they come at him one after another. They are worse than nightmares; he cannot wake up from them, and he cannot go back to sleep.

And so he sits up by his window each night, waiting to need to sleep. He waits to go to bed until he feels he can trust his sleep to last until morning.

He goes to bed a good deal later now than he used to. But he has kept his old habit of getting up early. Long before dawn these winter mornings he will be out of bed and wide awake. After he puts on his clothes he draws the covers back over the bed. And then he turns out the light and feels his way to the rocking chair and sits down. When daylight comes he will be there at the window, waiting for it.

A single set of footsteps goes along the walk in front of the hotel, and farther down the street somebody is talking loudly in front of one of the stores. A door slams somewhere off in the town. Below him in the kitchen Mrs. Hendrick is rattling the supper dishes.

Up the street he can see lights in Mat Feltner’s house. Wheeler Catlett is there for supper, he remembers. For a few minutes he considers going over to Mat’s to pay a visit and talk to Wheeler. He thinks a lot of Wheeler—admires him, in fact, a good deal more than he aims to let him know. He imagines going in and sitting down and talking a while with Wheeler and Mat. They are fine men, and have good heads on them. And he would like to see Wheeler’s little boys. Wheeler has taught his sons to call the old man “Uncle Jack.”

“Uncle Jack,” the littlest one said, “you’ve got tobacco juice on your shirt.” That tickled Jack. And Wheeler’s embarrassment tickled him even more. That littlest boy of Wheeler’s would walk right up and tell Franklin D. Roosevelt he had tobacco juice on his shirt. Old Jack’s face creases into the shape of a large laugh, and he snorts. He thinks a lot of those boys of Wheeler’s. Every Christmas he buys a little something to give them. Wheeler appreciates that.

He would like to hear Wheeler say something about the war. Jack stays troubled about the war. There is too much dying. Too many young men dying. He mistrusts what he reads in the papers. The war is more serious, it seems to him, than the papers make it out to be.

It may be necessary to use up the lives of young men; Jack will agree to that. He has no liking for defeat. But after a choice has had to be made between terrible sacrifice and terrible defeat, it is a time of mourning.

The newspapers add up the deaths of young men as if they were some kind of loan, an investment in something.

What is dead is gone.

He reaches into the bib pocket of his overalls and takes out a small notebook in which there is a carefully folded newspaper picture of the President. He opens the picture and looks at it. The President sits there behind his great desk. His eyes look direct and straight out of the picture so that they seem to focus on Old Jack.

The President’s face is sober and tired, sorrowful. The strain of the war shows in it, the burden of knowing of so many deaths. It would take a lot of strength to know so much.

A great man, with a powerful head on his shoulders.

Jack thinks how it would be to sit in Mat Feltner’s living room, and talk with Mat and Wheeler and Franklin Roosevelt. It would be brilliant.

“Mr. President,” Wheeler says, “how much longer do you think it’ll last?”

“I don’t know.” The President looks straight at Wheeler. “It’s a hard proposition. We’ll have to fight them until they quit.”

That’s a responsible answer, Jack thinks. He has to say so. “That’s right,” he says. “Go to it. By God, we’re for you, sir.”

“Thank you, my friend,” the President says.

It is too late, now, to go over to Mat’s. They would not be expecting him. He will see Wheeler later in the week, anyhow.

Saturday afternoon, or maybe Friday, the two of them will drive out to spend a couple of hours or so seeing to things on Old Jack’s farm. And then maybe they will go on over to Wheeler’s daddy’s place, as they do sometimes, and visit a while there. Or go somewhere to look at a farm that Wheeler will be thinking of buying—and spend a while pointing out and describing to each other what could be done by way of improvement. Or maybe—it could be any day—Wheeler will have a case to try in one of the counties upriver, and will stop by and pick up Old Jack and take him along. They usually ride all the way to the courthouse without talking much, Wheeler’s briefcase and maybe a law book or two on the seat between them. There’s too much going on inside of Wheeler then. It is as if, while they are on the way to the trial, Wheeler’s mind and his nerves are drawing down like the spring of a steel trap. And with Wheeler—who, in Old Jack’s opinion, has a mind like a steel trap—that is a mighty formidable thing to see happening. Because once he stands up in one of those courtrooms, with the judge and the jury and the opposing lawyer and the plaintiff and the defendant and the crowd of courthouse regulars and loafers and idle farmers and the framed portraits of four or five generations of judges all looking at him, Wheeler’s intelligence shines. Whether he wins or loses, Wheeler shines, Old Jack can see that. Every point Wheeler makes has the clean sound to it of a good axe chopping into a locust stump. And Old Jack, in his seat in the back of the room, says “Ah!” On the way home, after Wheeler has got limbered up and relaxed a little, Old Jack will slap him on the knee and tell him: “You’re all right, son. You’ve got a powerful head, and that’s fine. Mighty fine.”

He folds up the President’s picture and puts it back. He thumbs through the notebook until he finds a clean page; and then he takes a short pencil out of his pocket, and begins to write down a column of figures.

That pocket in the bib of his overalls is Old Jack’s place of business. That is where he keeps his old silver pocket watch and his notebook and pencil; he tells Wheeler he uses the pocket to hold what he has got left of his mind. He and Wheeler both know that he’s still got a shrewd head on his shoulders, but they let on as if he would have no mind at all if he had no pocket to put it in.

It is true enough that the old man no longer has any memory for figures. And all his accounts and receipts are kept in a file in Wheeler Catlett’s office in Hargrave. He does his figuring in the notebook by guess, estimating and imagining what he cannot remember or never knew, and coming up invariably with a monstrous error in the result. But he has the habit of figuring, and so he figures, night after night, sitting by himself in his room, chewing furiously at his cud of tobacco, his imagination freewheeling among wishes and guesses, going up one side and down the other of what he presumes to be his farm accounts.

This is his farming, the remnant of habit and fascination from his life’s work, which he claims he has died out of now, all except his mind. He relishes his ciphering. The figures come into his mind smelling of barns and grain bins and tobacco and livestock. His figures grunt and bleat and bray and bawl. This is the passion that has worn him out, and made him old, and is still a passion. As he labors over it, the notebook becomes as substantial in his hands as a loaded shovel.

Scratching and stabbing with the pencil, he makes a column of figures representing his guesses as to what his earnings have been since the first of the year, and his predictions of what he will have earned by the year’s end. Beside that column he makes another, guessing and predicting his expenses. He adds both columns, and subtracts expenses from earnings. If the margin of profit strikes him as too small he begins again, and repeats the operation, increasing the earnings and economizing on the expenses, until he comes up with a figure that suits him. The next night he does the same thing, disregarding all the figures he has already made. And then, while they make their weekly drive out to the farm, he reads off his latest figures to Wheeler.

“No, Jack,” Wheeler says. “You can’t make that much.”

And then they have an argument. Old Jack argues. And then Wheeler argues. And when Wheeler stops the car in front of the barn they both figure in the notebook.

“Lord no!” Wheeler says.

It is an argument that neither of them ever wins. Jack never admits that he has lost, but he can never bring himself to think that Wheeler has lost, either—not for a minute. What he does believe, what he keeps very firm in his mind, is that between him and Wheeler it does not matter who wins, which is to say that between them the idea of winning is not a very important idea. As a matter of fact, nothing would trouble him more than to beat Wheeler in an argument.

“Well, then, Wheeler,” he says to mend their dispute, “I reckon we’re going broke then.”

Wheeler laughs. “No we’re not, Jack. We’re going to do fine. Don’t you worry.”

Old Jack slaps his hand down onto Wheeler’s knee. “You’re all right, son.”

To tell the truth, Old Jack loves Wheeler as much as he would have loved his own son if he had ever had one—maybe more. Loves him stubbornly and strictly by his own rules, but devotedly and generously nevertheless. He has been seen more than once sitting on the back bench of a courtroom, grinning and crying shamelessly as a child while Wheeler makes his closing speech to the jury.

“Listen to that boy,” he says. “He’s a shotgun. Lordy lord.”

THE GRASS MAY GROW A MILE

The room was Virgil’s. It was hers and Virgil’s. Now it is hers.

But not hers. And this house is not hers.

When she and Virgil married they came here to live—a short time, they thought, until their own house would be built. They had made their plans.

And then, soon, Virgil was called into the war. Both her parents were dead. She stayed on, to wait.

“They want you to stay here,” Virgil told her. “And I do.”

“You’re welcome here. You know you are,” Margaret and Mat told her.

She knew she was. She could not have refused them if she had wanted to.

Margaret and Mat made her welcome. They did all that was possible to make it easy for her to be there. She stayed, feeling that she belonged because Virgil belonged.

In the still room, Virgil’s and hers, not hers, she lies in bed, looking up into the dark. She is not sleepy yet. With the bigness of her pregnancy she is uncomfortable any way she lies. It will be difficult to sleep.

Below her own window she can see the elongated shape of the living-room window printed in yellow light on the yard. Mat is still down there. At this time on most nights they would all still be there in the living room, still talking. Now, divided in separate rooms, they have made themselves lonely—to think alone, as now they must.

Virgil was gone more than a year and a half, and then, in the last summer, he came home for two weeks. He had to leave again. For her, that short time of his presence was nearly as painful as his absence. It began nothing, ended nothing—a brief touching, an interruption of his absence, in which there seemed little to be said, nothing to be planned—a troubled bearing of the nearness of his departure. She loved him; she would be with him a few days; she would live beyond them, as she would have to, remembering them. A certain amount of happiness was possible for a little while; she would see to it that he knew nothing but her happiness. After that she would wait again. It was simple enough. She would do what she had to do. Wait. She had learned to do that.

“I’m getting better at it every day,” she told Virgil. “I’m a champion waiter.”

“You’re a champion waitress,” Virgil said.

She never wasted a chance to smile. And it seemed to her that there was a finer reality in her bogus happiness than in her sorrow. It was a gift to Virgil—what she could give him; she kept him from knowing what it cost her. And, curiously, this bogus happiness became the source of a real happiness—fugitive and small, but triumphant in a way, and precious to her.

One afternoon, two days before he had to go, they filled a picnic basket and walked out across the ridges in the direction of the river. They stopped on the point of the farthest ridge. At the end of a long gentle slope, the ground tilted upward again and made a small grass-covered knoll over the woods on the bluff. From there they could see the bottoms in the long bend of the river, and for miles on either side of them the valley lay open and broad.

They stood together at the top of the knoll, looking.

“This would be a fine place for a house,” Virgil said. “What do you think?”

“Yes. The loveliest place.”

“Then right here is where I’m going to build you a house.”

“Build us a house.”

“I’ll build you a house. And then you can give me back half of it. If you want to.”

She laughed. She still remembers the sound of her laughter. “Yes. I want to. I’ll give you all of it. And you can give me all of it.”

“And that’s the way it’ll be. We’ll give this house to each other. We’ll pass it back and forth, like a kiss.”

“After the war?”

“After the war. And now too.”

He picked up a flat rock and laid it down on the center of the knoll.

“There’s the front doorstep.”

He found more stones, and, pacing out the dimensions, marked the boundaries of an ample house, its rooms and doors.

Watching him as he moved back and forth in the imagined courses of walls, she was happy. She was happier than she remembered being. Beyond his absence, it began. She could see it.

He finished his design, and stood in the middle of it, smiling, looking at her.

“Come in.”

She came in.

They gathered wood and built a fire. A little later they spread their picnic and ate. Afterward, while the fire burned, they sat on in the light of it, talking. At dark a soft wind had got up; it made sound now in the woods below them.

When Virgil was a child, he told her, Mat took him and Bess out to where he was having a new barn built; they had wanted to watch the carpenters, and pestered Mat until he let them come along. The framing of the barn had been completed, but the roof and the siding still had to be put on. They stayed through the afternoon, playing with wood scraps and watching the carpenters. And then, shortly before quitting time, it began to rain. Mat came hunting them and, taking their hands, hurried them inside the barn.

“Let’s get in out of the wet.”

And he brought them in, and stood there, his face extravagantly serious, while the rain poured down on them between the open rafters.

“Daddy, we’re getting wet,” Bess kept saying. She would look up at him, her eyes begging, pointing down at the wetness of her dress.

Mat looked down at her. His hat brim had filled with water, and when he tilted his head it poured down like a veil in front of his face. “It’s lucky we got this barn built in time,” he told her. “We’d have drowned if it hadn’t been here.”

And then they had to give in to his joke and laugh. They stood there in the warm rain, holding hands, laughing, until the shower went by.

Now, as by some return of that free joyfulness, he had made this house that was no house, and had given it to her. It was no house that was their house. Strangely, it had made them glad. After what had been their estrangement—in the seeming futility of talking or hoping, in the nearness of Virgil’s departure—their desiring of this house was like a bet made, making the thought of winning possible. In this house that was the hope of a house they gambled toward what might be.

Hannah was happy. Her sadness that he would leave again was still in her, and was not changed. But also she was happy, and now her happiness seemed to her to exist apart from her sadness, and to be as great.

As the fire burned out the dark grew. Hannah gave herself into the possession of this house of theirs. There, in the dark, away from the other house where she had spent her waiting, its walls were nearly real. It made a new belonging imaginable. The fire had opened a space of light which was the space of a house—which remained, though the fire had not. Her house was as near her as his hands touching her, the weight of him.

In his absence their child grew in her. She no longer felt herself to be waiting, sorrowful and mute, on the edge of Virgil’s absence. Her body seemed to turn around a new center. The thought of Virgil’s coming back enclosed her and she enclosed his child. Everything leaned inward around the child, the beginning, in her, of both their lives.

But now she is afraid.

How long?

The grass may grow a mile in the imagined boundaries of their house.

IMAGES LIKE SEEDS

Company gone, Mat stayed on in the living room, smoking and reading the paper. He heard Margaret and Hannah first talking in the kitchen and then stirring around, preparing for bed. Now the house is quiet. He folds the newspaper, moves over to his desk, and turns on the lamp. He takes a sheet of white letter paper out of one of the drawers, and searches among the pigeonholes until he finds a packet of photographs.

The last letter from Virgil asked for pictures of Port William and the house and the farm. He was forgetting what they looked like.

On the Sunday after Virgil’s letter came, Mat and Hannah spent the afternoon taking the pictures. They made an excursion of it, driving and walking here and there in the town and on the farm, deciding what Virgil would want to see, pleased to be doing what he had asked.

Mat takes the photographs out of the envelope and lays them separately on the desk, making an orderly arrangement of them.

The first was taken from the walk in front of the house, looking down the street into the town. To the right of the picture Old Jack is on his way up the street to the hotel.

“Stand still, Mr. Beechum,” Hannah called. “We want to take a picture for Virgil.”

“Good God,” Old Jack said. “He don’t want to look at me.” But he stood still and let them take the picture.

Looking backward from the same place on the walk, there is a picture of the house, the maple branches and their shadows brittle and clear against the white front.

By the time Hannah had taken this second picture and wound the camera, Old Jack had crossed the street. He walked up to Hannah and laid his hand on her shoulder and patted her.

“You get in it yourself, honey, and let Mat work the machine. What he wants to see is you.” Old Jack waited to make sure she had understood. And then he smiled. “You’re a pretty thing. If I was way off over yonder I’d want to see you.”

And so Mat took the camera and Hannah stood on the porch steps and smiled for Virgil and Old Jack, and they took the picture again with her in it.

There are the photographs, arranged now on the desk, making a departure from the town and a return to it. Out of his remembering and knowing Virgil would be able to give them colors, movements, sounds, odors, histories. In his mind these small images would grow like planted seeds, become heavy in their dimensional depths, sizes, brightnesses.

Missing. From among these things.

Mat gathers the photographs and puts them back in their envelope. The sheet of paper lies on the blotter, filled with bright light. He picks up his pen. He writes the date. He writes “Dear Virgil.” But then he lays the pen down and leans back.

My dear boy, today we have had grievous news.

For several minutes this sentence shapes and reshapes itself in his mind—the compulsion and limit of what he is able to think. The words form, particularizing his fear and grief as on a point, and then dissolve into the whiteness of the page.

My boy. We have had grievous news.

He puts the photographs and writing things away. He gets his hat and coat from the rack in the hall, and turns out the lights.

He leaves the house and starts down into town. A light is on in Old Jack’s room at the hotel, the only one he can see still burning. While Mat is looking, the old man walks out into the center of the room, undressed except for his cap and underwear. He stops and stands still a minute, facing the window, leaning on his cane, scratching the back of his head. And then he moves out of the frame of the window and turns off the light.

Now all that part of the street is dark. No stars are out. It is clouding up again.

WAITING

Margaret sits by her window in the dark.

She has unpinned her hair, and is brushing it with slow long strokes. Her hair falls dark over the shoulders of her gown.

Mat has gone out. The house is quiet and dark.

She brushes her hair, gathers it, and, drawing it over her shoulder, braids it in a heavy braid.

With the day’s last possible task finished, she sits quietly, overhearing, as if deep in her body, the sounds of outcry and of weeping. She expected this. She knows it has gone on through all the afternoon and evening, and only now she has become still enough to hear.

The house fills and brims with its quiet.

The brush lies in her lap. She rocks slowly in the chair. The rockers make a quiet creaking and tapping on the floor.

Her eyes have become used to the dark. Her gown, the white pillows on the bed, the white closed fronts of the buildings down along the street draw a little light now and are pale.

In the quiet of the house she waits, as though, divided from Virgil by half the world, she might hear him breathe.

Her waiting seems not so strange to her. She waited, after his birth, to hear him cry. She has waited, even in her sleep, to hear him wake. Here, in this house, she has waited for him to come back from a thousand departures.

He was born out of her body into this absence.

She will hear every footstep, the opening of every door.

Chapter 4

THE BARBER’S CALLING

Jayber Crow mostly grew up and went through high school in a church orphanage called The Good Shepherd.

It was there, as the school barber’s flunky and understudy, that he learned barbering, although at that time he had no thought of making his living by it; it was simply a duty, assigned him by the superintendent, to permit him to earn a part of his keep. He was, to the frustration and annoyance of his teachers at The Good Shepherd, both bright and utterly careless as a student. After he learned to read he would customarily read his textbooks, or read all that interested him in them, within two or three weeks after they were given to him, and after that he refused to open them again. He read everything he could lay his hands on; by the time he left The Good Shepherd he had read and reread the meager supply of readable books to be had there. He managed, by the random force of his curiosity, to learn a good deal, and most of the time there was enough coincidence between what he learned and what he was expected to learn to allow him to make passing grades.

He was vastly more inclined to learn than to be taught; that made him the natural enemy of his teachers, and he suffered for it. He came away from The Good Shepherd, he said, bearing more marks of scholarly discipline on his tail, by a considerable margin, than his teachers had ever been able to imprint on his mind.

In his last year of high school he decided to become a minister of the church that had raised him. Whether this was because of some feeling of obligation, or some vague wish to do good, or what, he no longer is sure. After the later failure of his motive, he was unable to be certain what it had been.

He was given a scholarship to a small college run by the church, and spent nearly three years there, waiting tables in the women’s dining hall, and continuing to be a recklessly bright and unsatisfactory student. But the college had a better library than the orphanage, and he made good use of that. In his third year, by a sort of boiling over of his intelligence, he began to question the theological assumptions of his professors, and then his own. In the spring of his third year he resigned his scholarship, and said he was sorry.

He thought then that he might make a teacher of himself. He worked in a barbershop to pay his way through a year and a half of classes at the state university. After the religious confinements of the orphanage and the college and his pastoral ambition, his freedom in the university town excited him, and he began a careful exploitation of it. He divided his free time between the library of the university and the bars and brothels of the town—not anymore by his old recklessness, but by a strict husbanding of his time and money. By carefulness, he discovered, he could do pretty much as he pleased, and among other things he pleased to do more studying than was required of him. He became, for the first time, systematic and competent as a student. His grades improved. During that time he was quiet and deliberate; his extravagances were as methodical as his cautions; most of the time he was alone. For a while it seemed to him that he was satisfied with himself. He was managing to save a little money.

But he failed again, as if the failure of his first ambition infected his second. It was the same failure of certainty and of purpose. He was utterly free. It was, he believed more and more, the freedom of being on his way from nowhere to nowhere. It was often a depressing and lonely freedom. His leaving the church college had cancelled all but his earliest beginnings. His year and a half at the university had failed to offer an imaginable future. Sometimes he half believed that, having been born by nobody’s intention, and brought up as a mistake by public duty, he had come finally into his fated inheritance, the failure of all purpose. He had made no friends. He owed nothing to anybody. He became more and more depressed under the burden of his freedom.

He left, less because he wanted to leave than because he no longer wanted to stay. He packed his clothes and books into a box, paid his rent, and put the rest of his savings into the lining of his jacket and his shoe. The simplicity of it startled him. In ten minutes he had cancelled out a year and a half. When he ate breakfast he was on his way out of town.

Three mornings later, having walked the better part of the way, wandering the backroads to circumvent the waters of the great flood of 1937, he arrived in Port William, near which he had been born and had lived his earliest years. The town’s most recent barber had left. Using his savings as a down payment, Jayber bought the shop. He slept that first night in the barber chair, half freezing, his head drawn like a terrapin’s into the collar of his voluminous raincoat. In two days he was in business. The question if this was the fortune he had come in search of passed out of his mind; barbering suited him well enough, and would support him—if enough hair would grow in Port William, and when he looked over the prospects he figured enough might. His given name was Jonah; he signed himself J. Crow; the town christened him Jaybird, and then Jayber.

His barbershop, which is both his place of business and his home, is a tiny frame building in the swale of the branch. The shop has two stories, a single small room in each. The downstairs room is the shop, walled with white-painted bare boards, the floor polished by the tramping underfoot of the shorn hair of generations; it smells of hair, hair tonic, shaving lotion, mug soap, and tobacco smoke. In the center of the floor there is a rusty stove, which serves in winter as a source of heat and a spittoon, and in summer as a spittoon and a foot-prop. The barber chair is placed near the door in front of a long mirror; beneath the mirror a board shelf bears an assortment of bottles of tonic and lotion, a whetstone, a large ornamented shaving mug and brush, an array of scissors and razors and combs, a cigar box containing the cash proceeds of the day. On a table at the end of the shelf a metal water container with a faucet perches on a two-burner coal-oil stove. In the open spaces along the walls are maybe a dozen ill-matching chairs. Jayber rarely has so many customers as he has chairs, but the shop is also a loafing and talking place, a sort of living room, for the townsmen, and for Jayber himself. In any assemblage at any time there will be more of what Jayber calls “members” than there will be customers. Around the walls are a number of calendars of various years, none turned past its respective January. And hanging here and there from nails driven in at random, there are Indian relics, hornets’ nests, extra big stalks of tobacco or ears of corn that the farmers have brought in. Anything found or plowed up in the town or the neighborhood that might be classed as odd or interesting, and that conceivably could serve as a subject of conversation, is apt sooner or later to wind up hanging from a nail in Jayber’s shop—and will be duly examined and talked about and forgot and left hanging. Over the years the shop has become a kind of museum in which the town has put down what it thought about.

The upstairs room, reached by a stairway up the side of the building, is as private as the lower one is public. Jayber has managed to cram all the essentials of his life into it: bed, books, table, chair, dresser, kitchen cabinet, cookstove. Few in Port William have ever been there, and those only rarely—not that Jayber makes any particular attempt at privacy, but there is seldom an occasion or reason for anyone to come there. The shop is his living room and guest room, to which most of the men of the town consider they have a standing invitation. To eat or sleep or read he goes upstairs and is alone. To work, or for company, he goes down and opens the shop. He keeps no regular hours. His shop may be closed for three days at a stretch, or open any hour of the night.

He has continued to be a student of sorts, as far as short funds and few books and erratic habits have permitted. He is likely to know something, if not a good deal, about anything—and likely to have to be asked before he will tell what he knows. He has come to a few friendships, all of them made and kept in the public atmosphere and easy talking of the shop. At one time or another, in one way or another, he has befriended nearly everybody he knows. There is an offhand goodness in him that has made him welcome among the men of the town. They know him for good company and a good talker. They take for granted that talking is as much his business as hair-cutting—at any rate, none of them ever feels obliged to get his hair cut to justify his presence in the shop. When Jayber finishes with a customer and asks “Who’s next?” he is as likely as not to find that nobody is, and then he will climb into the chair himself, and, if no new customer comes in, talk half a day. He practices—sometimes willingly, sometimes by the sufferance of impositions on his good nature—a kind of poor man’s philanthropy. He lends considerably more money than he ever has the heart to collect, and is apt at Christmas to play Santa Claus, secretly, to the children of the ones who owe him most. His shop is occasionally used as a roost by husbands and sons too drunk to go home. Now and then he puts in a weekend drinking and wenching down in Hargrave, and he makes no apologies. He is seldom invited into the domestic life of Port William; he knows it by its manhood and boyhood passing in and out the door of his shop.

TALK

After he ate supper Jayber had a smoke, and then unloaded his table and washed his dishes and put them away. He took his time. Working or loafing, his life is mostly public. Privacy is his luxury—his chance to be quiet, to pay a little attention to what may be going on inside his head. He did not come back downstairs until he remembered that the fire would be getting low.

When he opened the shop nobody was waiting for him. He sat down in the barber chair and leaned it back and crossed his ankles over the foot rest. And then remembered the fire again, and got up and fixed it, and sat back down. He came into the shop while most of the town was still at supper, and now he hears things beginning to stir again: doors slam here and there, a car engine starts and goes out of hearing over the rise—footsteps, two single sets and then a pair, come down the street, past the door—two or three doors up the street a boy’s voice calls “Here, Mike!” The boy waits and whistles and calls again. It has been dark nearly an hour.

Jayber sits up and takes another smoke, wishing somebody would come in. Three times a day, morning and noon and after supper, the town starts up out of a silence and begins again. These are the times he finds it most difficult to be alone. There is an impulse in him, these times, to close the shop and go out and talk a while with anybody he may meet, take up with anybody who may be coming by, and go with him wherever he may be going. His absences from the town always begin with this impulse.

But now Uncle Stanley Gibbs comes through the door. This is the third time since morning that Uncle Stanley has been in. As a general rule the old man does not come to the shop except to get a haircut, but he got one just three or four days ago, and so Jayber supposes he must have something in particular on his mind. On his two previous trips the shop was crowded, and he seemed satisfied and even a little relieved just to sit down and pretend to be listening while the others talked. Both times he got uncomfortable after a few minutes and, muttering industriously to himself, throwing out the pretense that he was having an awfully busy day, hustled up the street toward the church.

He has pushed the door open, but is still standing out on the sidewalk. In his old age he has grown into the habit of doing only one thing at a time. He would not talk and scratch or look and walk at the same time to save his soul. Now that he has opened the door, he glimpses in, peeping up at Jayber and then around at all the empty chairs and then back at Jayber. His collapsed bristly old face is set in its normal expression of outrage that the world does not make enough noise. When he walks from his house over to the church—footing the white line down the middle of the road—he is always seeing shoot out in front of him automobiles and trucks and buses he never heard coming. He knows, he says himself, that he could burn up in his house any night while his neighbors all stand at the door yelling “Fire.” And hard to tell how many times he has been insulted right to his face and not known it. Hour after hour the world pours itself into his deafness like a high waterfall that turns to mist before it can strike and make a sound. His face, by habit, wears his furiousness—not in response to anything in particular, but just in case something or somebody may be taking advantage of him.

Uncle Stanley stayed young a long time. He was wild as a bear, he claims, and stout as a mule and bad around the women. He has remembered himself a good deal worse than he ever was, but this “memory” of his wildness is a comfort to him.

In his prime he had a sort of local fame as a curser. The economy of his vocabulary, and the dexterity and versatility of his use of it, were remarkable. He could talk for thirty minutes without saying a word fit for the hearing of a woman or a child. They called him Stanley Ay-God By-God Gibbs.

His first vice, his professed badness with the women, was cured by time. He wore it out and discarded it—or was worn out and discarded by it; and lived beyond it, and kept the overhauled memory of it for stock in trade during his retirement.

And his vocabulary was completely renovated in collaboration with Brother Preston soon after he was hired by the church to be janitor and grave digger. Since then the only thing that has broken him loose from righteousness and sent him climbing back up into the upper ranges of his old eloquence was the news that his grandson Billy, Grover’s boy, had become the pilot of a four-engined airplane. And he has continued to need all the words he knows to express his appreciation of that glory.

He pushes the door wider open with the point of his cane, and then grabs the doorjamb with his free hand and climbs into the shop.

“What do you know, Uncle Stanley?”

Uncle Stanley cannot possibly have heard, but according to his theory of social procedure, this is the time for a greeting to be offered and accepted. He bites into the air four or five times as though pumping himself up. And then he yells back, at the top of his voice, and as pathetically and sickly as possible at that volume:

“Fair to middling, Jayber, by golly. But, by dab, ain’t it been a awful winter?”

Jayber’s first inclination is to kick the chair around and help himself to the comfort of a private grin. But remembering that the mirror is behind him, he wipes his own face straight with the back of his hand, and waits. The old man has said exactly what Jayber and nearly everybody else in Port William could have predicted last week that he would say, for the second article of his theory holds that all greetings surely must take the form of a question about his health. But the townsmen, who know his theory, take pains to avoid the question, knowing he will answer it anyhow. With the exception of Brother Preston and two or three helplessly well-intentioned female members of the church, it has been ten years since anybody asked Uncle Stanley how he feels.

Now that the greeting is done with, he removes his grin and sits down. He looks up at Jayber out of the bristling of his whiskers and eyebrows, and bites off some more air.

“Yes sir, by golly, it’s been a hard winter. It’s been hard on the old bugger, by golly. I was just telling the madam here the other night, by dab, I believe it’s weakened me. I believe it’s aged me.”

Jayber lets himself laugh now, and says loudly, “It’s not the cold that’s getting you down, Uncle Stanley. You’ve just been too active at night for an old buck.”

That’s flattery. Uncle Stanley grins. His mouth draws open like a rubber band; you could loop the corners of it over his ears.

“Aw-aw now, Jayber, that time’s done gone.” But he shakes his head, and then nods. “I’ve seen the time, though. I call back forty, fifty years, I could work all day, by juckers, and wench like a tomcat all night.” He laughs in sincere admiration. “With the best of them. By grab, I didn’t know what a night’s sleep was. When I heard the roosters crow I just come home and et breakfast and went to work. But not anymore. It’s done gone by.”

“I can’t believe that, Uncle Stan. Some of them told me they hear you romp and stomp and bellow like a bull all hours of the night.”

“Naw. Too late for that, Jayber. If I was still able to bother any women it wouldn’t be the madam. When Grover was born that about fixed it between me and her. Said all that foolishness might be a pleasure to me, but wasn’t nothing but suffering and trouble to her. Said, by grab, I could just sleep in the back room. By juckers, I’ve put up with her all these years for her conversation. And can’t hear what she says a third of the time. Hard on a man! By dab by grab.”

Mrs. Gibbs is a stout member of the Port William church and sings in the front row of the choir. She was the only one of the congregation who voted outright against hiring Uncle Stanley to be janitor. For maybe forty years nobody has seen the two of them together in public. If Uncle Stanley is sitting out on the front porch, Miss Pauline will be sitting on the back porch. She keeps house for him and cooks his meals and sits down at the table with him, but only because it’s her “duty as a Christian,” not because she wants to. Otherwise they live like strangers who happen to have rooms in the same hotel. She has forced Uncle Stanley to live behind her back, and he probably forced her to force him, and she probably forced him to force her to force him, and so on and so on; it’s just as well to accuse time and the world and Port William, which are also, and just as uncertainly, to blame. Since the first few years of it, the marriage of Uncle Stanley and Miss Pauline has been an armistice, likely to break into hostilities any minute. Neither of them makes any bones about it. Whenever the question of increasing Uncle Stanley’s wages or of giving him a little “token” at Christmas is put to a vote before the congregation, Miss Pauline votes against it. And Uncle Stanley is apt to publicize, in the normal course of his conversation, at the top of his voice, anything from the trouble Miss Pauline is having with her bowels to the events of their wedding night.

Once the old man gets started there is no telling when or where he will stop. As long as he is doing all the talking he is certain, for a change, what the conversation is about, and he aims to make it worth his trouble. Jayber listens to him, usually, with a growing sense of guilt and alarm. If there was anybody else in the shop it would be mostly funny, but always when he is the only one in the audience Jayber feels himself helplessly implicated in what the old man is saying. He never intends to get him started. He will be carrying on what seems a harmless conversation, with the best intentions in the world, and then all of a sudden Uncle Stanley will have taken off into some outrageous confession—not just spoken, published. And Jayber feels like somebody who intended to light a cigarette and set the town on fire. The old man has no secrets, no concern for privacy, no wish for dignity, no notion of responsibility that might stop him or make him lower his voice. It is not that Jayber fails to be amused and even tickled at what he says, and not that any particular thing he says is not in one way or another more amusing than disturbing; but running along with the amusement is the nearly terrifying certainty that there is no limit to what he might say, or would say if he knew how. Once that awful mouth of his loosens up and starts running, anything is possible. Nothing has any value except conversational. Nothing is worth anything except as it maintains the sound of his own voice bubbling up into the silence of the world. Listening to him, Jayber sometimes thinks that the words don’t come out of his mouth, but disappear into it. That mouth is an abyss that the whole world and the planets and stars might be sucked into and vanish forever. He can be heard distinctly, in calm weather, fifty or seventy-five yards in all directions, advertising at a shout the failure of everything to mean anything.

In the face of Uncle Stanley’s devouring garrulousness, as confirmed and free a bachelor as he is, Jayber always finds himself taking up the defense of marriage. Not so much the defense of any particular marriage—not, by a long shot, of Uncle Stanley’s—but of marriage itself, of what has come to be, for him, a kind of last-ditch holy of holies: the possibility that two people might care for each other and know each other better than enemies, and better than strangers happening to be alive at the same time in the same town; and that, with a man and a woman, this caring and knowing might be made by intention, and in the consciousness of all it is, and of all it might be, and of all that threatens it. At these times it seems to Jayber that, of all the men in Port William, he’s the most married—not in marriage, but to this ideal of marriage. He is bound in this way, as he is bound, beyond his friendships and his friends, to an ideal of friendship.

These are the last remainders of Jayber’s ideals. He holds to them against the possibility that life will mean nothing and be worth nothing. He is a despairing believer in these things, knowing that everything fails. The ideal rides ahead of the real, renewing beyond it, perishing in it—unreachable, surely, but made new over and over again just by hope and by the passage of time; what has not yet failed remains possible. And the ideal, remaining undiminished and perfect, out of reach, makes possible a judgment of failure, and a just grief and sympathy.

In Port William, or beyond it or above it, Jayber imagines a kind of Heavenly City, in which each house would be built in a marriage and around it, and all the houses would be bound together in friendships, and friendliness would move and join among them like an open street. His living in Port William has been a bearing of the descent of the town from that ideal—as though at the end of each night, out of his mind and his desire, he gives painful birth to the new real morning and the real town—as though he watches the descent of all things from Heaven, like a snowfall, into the aimless gap of Uncle Stanley’s mouth. But he is also the adulterer of his marriage, the servant of opposite houses, faithful to both and unfaithful to both—slipping away from his Heavenly City, to which he has sworn his devotion, to become the lover of all the perishing lights and substances of Port William and of the weather over it and of the water under it. After so long, it seems to him that he is the native and occupant of both places, and passes freely between them, and in serving either serves both.

A NEW CALLING

Tonight Jayber has ceased to listen to Uncle Stanley. He sits looking out into the dark street and at the light in Milton Burgess’s store, letting his mind run. Out of kindness, he pretends to be listening, nodding his head now and then in a movement he intends to be ambiguous, but which he knows Uncle Stanley will take for encouragement.

The old man runs down finally, and Jayber lets him be quiet a few seconds to make sure. Then, with his voice carefully noncommittal, he says:

“Well.”

“Says, which?”

“Well!”

“Yessir!” Uncle Stanley says.

He’s quiet for nearly a minute, and Jayber sees that he is getting down to his business, whatever it is. He looks out the window, slowly opening and shutting his mouth, thinking over what he has to say. When he turns back, he prods Jayber’s shin with the point of the cane and says, “I’ve got a proposition for you, Jayber. I’ve been trying to get a chance to talk to you all day.”

“What’s on your mind, Uncle Stanley?”

“Well, I got a job to offer you. Keeping care of the graveyard. Preacher told me to find somebody to do it.”

“You mean dig the graves?”

“Well, that’s part of it.”

“About all of it, ain’t it?”

“Well, some of the time. But in the summer you’ve got to cut the grass. And ain’t so many dies in the summertime. In the winter just about all of it’s digging the graves. Mud, or ground froze hard as a bull’s horn, by grab, and every kind of weather, and ain’t hardly enough pay to make it worth the trouble. But it’s a job, and there’s a little money to it, and every little bit helps if you want to look at it that way. I quit looking at it that way. And, by grab, I quit, I did.”

“How come you’ve quit?”

“How’s that?”

“What did you quit for?”

“Why now, by gob, preacher and that undertaker come up day before yesterday wanting me to go out there by myself in that rain and dig two graves in one day. I says, ‘By grab, I won’t do it. I’m too old. I can’t do it. All I can do to dig one grave in a day.’ ‘Well now,’ preacher says, ‘Mr. Gibbs, perhaps you ought to try.’ ‘Try nothing,’ I says, I did. ‘You look at that ground out there. That ground’s so wet you could dig a grave with a bucket as quick as you could dig one with a shovel. That’s a job of work. I reckon you don’t know a job of work. But I do. Because I’ve done several.’ ‘Well,’ preacher says, ‘what are we going to do?’ ‘Do?’ I says. ‘We’re going to get somebody to help me dig them graves or they ain’t going to get dug, and you can just keep them corpses until I get around to ’em, that’s what we’re going to do.’ ‘Mr. Gibbs,’ he says, ‘you was hired to dig them graves.’ Made me mad, he did. I says, ‘Now look a here, they’ve set around here for six weeks in a row and ain’t a one of them died, and now here two of them ups and dies in one day. It ain’t right, and I quit.’”

“Did you dig the graves?”

“Well, I dug one of them two. Preacher got them big old boys of Siler Smith’s to dig the other one. By grab, you ought to seen it. Them big old idiots wallowing and tromping around in that mud. They’d dig out a little hole and it’d cave in on them; and they’d throw out a shovelful of mud and a shovelful would run back in. And them a fighting it like killing snakes and cussing till you’d a thought they’d a woke up everybody there. Even I could hear them. I got mine dug and went home about the middle of the afternoon, and they’d just got theirs down about waist deep. Some of them said the preacher and that undertaker finally had to come in to help them, and they was all out there with a lantern still digging when midnight come.”

Uncle Stanley has to stop and laugh.

“Well, they dug a pond, shaped sort of like a funnel. I know just how it happened because I made the same mistake myself when I was new at the work. When you dig one of them holes in the mud, if you don’t be careful about tramping around the edges of it, and don’t watch what you’re doing when you cut down the sides, to do it just so, well it’ll widen out at the top quicker than you can deepen it at the bottom. When the preacher and the undertaker and them boys got done gauming around in it and tramping around it and falling into it and climbing out of it, that grave must have been eight foot wide. And tracked and tramped and muddied around the edges till it looked like where a sow’d had pigs. They throwed the dirt out on the downhill side because it was easier, and it rained a hard one before daylight, and there wasn’t nothing to keep half the hillside from draining right into the hole, and she filled plumb to the brim. That undertaker was there half the morning unrolling that imitation grass of hisn, trying to make a kind of shore to it, so the family and friends of Mrs. Brewster wouldn’t notice they was attending one of them naval burials. He let on he didn’t see me coming, on account of the words I’d had with him and the preacher the morning before, but I walked right up like the sun was shining and we was the only friends each other had. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘the Jordan’s running a little muddy this morning, ain’t she?’ He went right on about his work like he never heard me. I says, ‘Is this going to be a baptizing or a funeral?’ He tried not to say anything, but I see it coming up in him, and finally he had to let it out. ‘You’d look a damn sight better with your mouth shut,’ he says. ‘I’m just here waiting for the boat,’ I says. And then I let up on him and give him a hand. We bailed out the hole, but the rain wouldn’t quit, and it was filling up again.

“Well, Grover come down by the house after the funeral, and he said in spite of all the talk and flowers and artificial grass it still looked more like a boat launching than a burial. ‘You’ve heard of crossing to Jordan’s other shore,’ I says. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if that’s how it’s done, Mrs. Brewster’s on her way. Go look.’ I put on my coat and went up. That undertaker had just bundled all his muddy grass and trappings into the hearse and gone back, and nobody was left in the graveyard but the preacher. He was standing there in the rain with his hands in his pockets watching Mrs. Brewster’s coffin. It was floating just as dandy as you ever seen. He was as glad to see me as if we was both preachers. It showed all over his face. He thought I’d just walk up and pull out a plug or something, and everything would be fine. But I knew it wasn’t no simple matter, and I wanted him to know it, so I just happened up to the edge of the grave like a casual bystander and took a long look. I says, ‘Well, well, well, you’ve got a right smart little problem here.’ I says you. He looked across at me like I was an angel fresh out of Heaven. ‘What’re we going to do, Mr. Gibbs?’ he says. He says we, so I taken it up. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘we could catch her and tic her up until the water goes down. Or,’ I says, ‘if it don’t go down, we could load her with rocks and try to sink her.’ And right there’s when the wobbling shaft jumped off of the bobbling pin. It come a little closer to him than I meant it to, to tell you the truth. He’d got his mind all made up to hire me back, I seen that. But I’d done ruined it and made him mad, and I swear to you, Jayber, I done it more or less by accident. But there wasn’t no undoing it, and I just had to stand there and watch him swell up. He was mad enough to drown me and bury me right in the same water hole with Mrs. Brewster, but he didn’t want to be ill-mannerly. I thought he’d bust. I says to myself, ‘Now you’re going to hear it.’ Because if I ever seen a thirty-minute cuss piling up in a man I seen it then. But finally he says, just as even and quiet: ‘Mr. Gibbs, after you get done filling these here two graves, perhaps you can find someone else to take your job.’

“It wasn’t that I hated to lose the work and the little dab of pay I was drawing out of it, but I did hate to end on hard feelings. So I said very friendly: ‘Well now, Preacher, it won’t be easy, because you don’t find a man that can dig a grave just anywhere you look. There’s sleights to every trade, Preacher,’ I says, ‘by grab, and there’s sleights to this one. You and that undertaker, now you all thought poor old Uncle Stanley didn’t have no more brains than it took to bend his back, and that he’d been doing this work all these years without learning anything about it. But now you all can see from this here mess that it takes considerable know-how to do the job the way it ought to be done. Now it’s a job that ain’t going to be easy to fill, but I’ll look around, Preacher, and I’ll find you a good man. And no hard feelings.’

“But he never softened. ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Gibbs,’ he says, ‘by grab, I’ll appreciate it if you’ll find someone right away.’ I says, ‘Now Preacher, there’ll be some things he won’t understand how to do right off, but I’ll stay around with him and oversee his work and learn him how to do a good job for you. And no hard feelings, by grab,’ I says.

“‘That’ll be perfectly fine, Mr. Gibbs,’ he says. ‘Well,’ I says, ‘do you want him to keep care of the church too, or just the graveyard?’ ‘Just the graveyard, for now, will be all right,’ he says.

“So I’ve been studying about it, Jayber, and I figured you was the only one with enough brains and time that could use the money. The work’s hard, but it ain’t what you’d call steady. Sometimes everybody’ll be alive for three or four months in a row.”

“What did you do about Mrs. Brewster?” Jayber asks.

“Aw, me and them old boys of Siler Smith’s, we bailed the water out again and rolled in a few mudballs.

“Well, what about it, Jayber? You want to take this job? I’ve got to find somebody. You was the first one I thought of and I thought you might appreciate it.”

“Are you sure the preacher won’t hire you back, Uncle Stanley? Don’t you reckon he’ll change his mind if you go and ask?”

“Aw now, Jayber. He won’t. I done tested him out. Well, to tell you the truth, I did go ask him, by grab. I went to his house last night, and I asked him. I even told him the madam wanted me to have the job again. But he said he’d just stick to the understanding we’d worked out.

“Anyhow, Jayber, I’m too old to do it much longer. It’s just getting more than I can do.”

“Why, Uncle Stanley, you just said you dug a grave by yourself in half the time it took the Smith boys and the preacher and the undertaker to dig one.”

“Aw, I can still dig them all right, Jayber, ain’t no worry about that. But I’m getting so derned old that when I get one dug I can’t hardly get out of it.”

The old man falls quiet, and confusion crosses his face like a shadow.

“Let me think,” Jayber says.

“Says which ?”

“Let me think!”

Uncle Stanley perks up and keeps watch while Jayber thinks.

The idea of extra money is foreign to Jayber’s way of life. For a minute he doesn’t know what in the world he would do with it. But he knows that in the back of his mind there has been, not exactly troubling him, but asking for his attention, the question of what he’ll do with his old age. He has been a little uneasily on the lookout for an ending to his life. Until now he has silenced the question with the reply that he will just barber right on through to the end. But now, for the first time, here is another possibility.

Jayber would like to fish. He would like to become a fisherman. Suddenly and surprisingly the whole vision blooms before him. It becomes imaginable and desirable and even possible in a single stroke. Put a little money aside every week, and before too many years he could build a small house on the river bank. The land would not cost much, would be practically worthless except for such a use as he would have for it, and he would build the house himself out of used lumber. He would stay there and fish and be quiet until the end of his days. He would cease being a public man and become a private man. He would fish in the river as though that was the highest calling that had ever come to a man. And he would fish in his mind. He would have a boat—he could see it, painted green, floating lightly as a leaf among the willows at the foot of the bank.

“I’ll tell you what, Uncle Stanley. I’ll take the job. And then I want to hire you to stay on as supervisor. I’ll do the work and you can furnish the know-how, and we’ll split the money.”

“And now,” he says to himself, “you’ve started something.”

He has, he realizes, changed his life. He has, from the moment just past, begun to live like a man possessed by an idea and a plan—a man who suddenly knows what he will do for years ahead if he is able—a man possessing not only a life, but a death. He has changed beyond anything he could have imagined a minute ago. But also, for the first time since he made up his mind to leave the university, he is uncertain that he wanted to do what he has done.

But there is no uncertainty in Uncle Stanley. He is delighted. This is a realization of his highest ideal: a position of authority with half-pay and no work. He would not ask more of Heaven.

“Well, Jayber, I was going to offer to stay along with you and learn you the sleights of it, and see to it that you don’t get into any problems.”

He saws his cane across Jayber’s shin.

“But that proposition you just made, now, by grab, that was mighty kind. It was white, by grab.”

Jayber starts to say something, but he does not have a chance. Uncle Stanley is going to do all the talking. They are partners now. They are a team, and Uncle Stanley is the leader. Now that he has said yes, Jayber is to have nothing more to say.

“Next one dies, now, that’s our start,” Uncle Stanley’s saying. “Preacher’ll let you know and you let me know, and we’ll start in. Maybe tomorrow you ought to come and let me show you where I keep the tools and give you a key to the shed.”

Every new idea is better than the last. Uncle Stanley never realized what great authority he had until he lost it, and now he has had it given back to him. It is a resurrection. He thought he was a goner, but now his life is twice as abundant as before.

He goes into a discourse on the sleights and subtleties of gravedigging, a discourse on method: how to dig a grave in the rain, in the snow, in mud, in clay, in rock, in hard ground, in soft ground, on sloping ground, on flat ground, on top of a rise, along the edge of a drain, in frozen ground, in hot weather, in cold; how to dig them big, how to dig them small; what to do with the dirt; how to fill, how to mound, how to sod, how to set a tombstone; what to do with wilted flowers. His erudition and eloquence surprise him. He knows things he did not know he knew. Gravedigging becomes the science and art that explains the world.

Still pretending to listen, Jayber gets up and sweeps the floor and sets the place to rights and begins stropping his razors. He is a fisherman, thinking of the river, biding his time.

LIGHT AND WARMTH

A car pulls off the road in front of the shop. The door slams. The shop door opens and Big Ellis comes in. He stands inside the door nodding and smiling at Jayber and Uncle Stanley. It has been several weeks since Big Ellis has been to town, and Jayber is surprised to see him.

“Who dug you up?”

Big Ellis laughs as freely as a child.

“The woman run me out. Said not to come back until I got some of this hair and beard cut off. Said it was like living with a horse.”

“Paying customer?”

“She let me have a little money.”

“You mean I’m really going to collect? Let me see your money.”

Big Ellis pulls a handful of coins out of his pocket and holds them out.

“Welcome, sir.”

Jayber brushes off the barber chair. Uncle Stanley is still talking. When Big Ellis came in the old man just waved his arm at him as though he was passing by, and went on with his lecture.

“What’s he talking about?”

“He’s giving me a lesson.”

“Oh,” Big Ellis says. He begins unbuttoning his overcoat. His hair has grown out over his collar, and he has at least a week’s growth of whiskers.

“I’ll have to charge you twice for cutting all that off.”

“Well, it’s the woman’s cream money. Go ahead.”

The thing about it is that Big Ellis means it, the woman’s cream money or not. His face, the smile widening on it to show Jayber that anything he wants to do will be all right, is the most pleasant and agreeable single object in the neighborhood of Port William. Smiles and laughs have wrinkled and creased it like an old leather glove. Big Ellis wants to please. He wants everybody around him to be pleased. That is his weakness and his nature and his passion. If he offers you a cigarette he means for you to take the whole pack. If you happen to be at his house when mealtime comes, you eat, and while you are reaching to the meat platter Big Ellis will spoon you out another helping of beans and his wife will refill your glass.

He gets into the chair and Jayber pins the cloth around his neck.

“What kind of lessons is he giving you?”

“Gravedigging lessons.”

Big Ellis gets tickled and Jayber has to wait.

“Have you gone into that business?”

“I’ve just contracted to take over Uncle Stanley’s job. The graveyard part of it.”

Uncle Stanley has just finished saying that if you strike bedrock you’ve got to blast. And now he is telling how to set the charges. A few years back, after he got so deaf, he remembers, he let off a blast on one side of the hill while they were holding a burial on the other side. You got to be careful about that.

Burley Coulter comes in.

“Look who’s back,” Jayber says. “What do you know, Burley?”

“Not much. What do you fellows know? How’s everything over at your house, Big Ellis? You haven’t been out much lately.”

“Pretty good,” Big Ellis says. “Well, a fellow just as well stay home, hadn’t he? Weather no good. No money. No place to go. Jarrat ain’t working you too hard?”

“Not much he can do.”

“You find any sand and plaster up there in my head, Jayber, don’t be surprised,” Big Ellis says.

“All right, I’ve got over being surprised at what I find in people’s heads. What’re you doing with sand and plaster in yours?”

“The ceiling fell in over home the other night. If it hadn’t hit me in the back of the head, it would’ve hit the woman right square in the face.”

Burley hangs up his hat and sits down.

“We’re going to have some more rain, ain’t we?”

“Looks like it. I’d have thought it would’ve cleared and frosted maybe.”

“This keeps up there’s going to be water in the bottoms.”

“Well, everything happens for the best,” Big Ellis says.

Usually such a remark would either end the conversation or change the subject. But this time, to Jayber’s surprise, Burley takes it up, and in a tone that does not leave room for argument:

“It don’t do any such of a damned thing.”

“What I mean, the Lord knows best, don’t He?”

“Well,” Jayber says, “He’ll have the final say, anyhow. So if there’s a flood you all just as well go down and fish in it.”

“Hanh?” Uncle Stanley says.

“Burley,” Big Ellis says, “we’ve got a new graveyard man in Port William.”

Jayber takes a bow.

“You?”

“Who else in this town has both brains enough and time enough?”

Burley laughs, and they can tell from the sound of it that he is sorry for his shortness with Big Ellis.

“You’ve gone into business. Port William’s a corpse factory, and now you’re the foreman.”

“No, Uncle Stanley’s still in charge. I’m just his second-in-command. I’m going to be the shovel specialist.”

“How come the old man to give up his job?”

“Well, he says he’s getting too old for it. Says he can’t hardly get out of them graves once he gets them dug.”

They laugh.

“Uncle Stanley hasn’t wintered too well,” Big Ellis says.

“He says he won’t be around many more winters.”

“Did he say that?”

“He said he can’t stand many more like this last one.”

Burley turns to Uncle Stanley and raises his voice:

“I expect the old boy’ll be around a long time yet. Bothering the women. How about it, Uncle Stan, can you still take up on the bit?”

“Aw, ain’t no good at all, Burley. Them days are gone.”

Jayber tilts the chair back, and begins lathering Big Ellis’s face.

Now that he has regained his audience, Uncle Stanley goes into a long reminiscence of his younger days—his dog days, he calls them. And winds up:

“Oh lordy lordy lordy lordy. But not anymore.”

“That’s not what I heard, Uncle Stanley,” Big Ellis says. “Some of them was telling me about you.” He laughs and looks over his stomach at Burley. “Said they seen a bunch of young girls walk past Uncle Stanley’s house a Saturday or two ago, and there was Uncle Stanley marching up and down the top of that road bank, nickering like a stud horse, and that cane just whirling.”

He looks up over his stomach at Uncle Stanley, who is pleased out of his mind, and then drops his head back and laughs, splattering white flecks of lather up into the air over his face.

“You’d better be still,” Jayber tells him, “unless you want your throat cut.”

But Big Ellis is so tickled now at the picture he has made of Uncle Stanley that Jayber, laughing too in spite of himself, has to wait again.

As soon as Big Ellis finishes laughing he is immediately sorry to have made fun of the old man. And so now he will try to make up for it: “I saw Billy when he came over today, Uncle Stan.”

Uncle Stanley wants to hear that again, clear. He leans over and puts his hand behind his ear.

“Says which?”

“I saw Billy when he came over in his airplane. He came right over my barn and then on over to Grover’s place.”

That’s all it takes. That’s the word. Billy! If Billy ever so much as hinted that he would like to bomb his grandfather’s house, Uncle Stanley would get right up and walk out, and stand on the other side of the road with his hat over his heart and watch him do it. It seems to him that he and Grover and all their forebears back to Adam have lived only for these minutes when their Billy comes roaring over the town in his bomber. He dreams of this brilliant young man leaning his head and elbow out the window of his huge flying machine, swooping like a hen hawk over all the little towns of the world—majestic and glorious as a railroad engineer and the Archangel Michael rolled into one.

“Yes sir! By dab, by grab, God durn, I seen him myself.”

He goes out the door on the crest of his wave.

And they resume.

“That old boy of Grover’s didn’t have brains enough to hold his ears apart, did he?”

“Aw, they’ve educated him since he got to flying.”

“They may have trained him. They haven’t educated him.”

They laugh, and then Big Ellis, his voice so gentle and generous as to allow even Billy Gibbs a place on earth and in Port William, says: “Well, a fellow ought to think the best he can of a fellow oughtn’t he? Old Billy, he was a little chuckleheaded and wild, but that’s just a boy, ain’t it?”

Suddenly—whether because Big Ellis said “was,” or because his words recovered Billy Gibbs himself, their neighbor and fellow man—suddenly the war is around them again, as though it has come up in the dark to crowd the walls of the little room. They become silent. And a thought runs among them like a path, and joins them and divides them: What if he dies? What if he is sent away tomorrow and never comes back?

And now they feel the raw night leaning against the lighted small room, and they know with a terrible certainty that one will not explain the other. In this dimly lighted place they sit divided, filled with thoughts of struggle and of darkness. They contemplate the death of Billy Gibbs, as though it already exists and awaits him.

Mat Feltner comes in blinking from the dark street, and stands at the stove. They greet him, and he replies. He unbuttons his coat and pushes his hat back off his forehead.

“Nathan gone back, Burley?” Big Ellis asks.

“This afternoon.”

“He was over to see Annie May and me the other day. We appreciated it. They’re going to send him back across the water, ain’t they?”

“He thought they might. He didn’t know.”

“That’s a long way from home. Fellow like me wouldn’t know what to do there, even if there wasn’t a war. But I reckon a young man like Nathan, he’ll do all right, won’t he? Told me he was even learning to talk like them.”

“Yeah. I guess in a way it’s giving him a lot of chances.”

“Take a fellow like me and put him across the river, and I’m lost. Ain’t you?”

Jayber finishes shaving Big Ellis and sets up the chair, and turns it so Big Ellis can see himself in the mirror.

“How’s that?”

“I wish I’d been born rich in place of pretty. What I owe you, Jayber?”

“Sixty cents.”

“Is that double?”

“That’s half-price.”

“I’ll match you for it.”

“You match me. All right.”

Each of them flips a coin and slaps it down onto an arm of the barber chair.

“Heads.”

“Heads it is. Keep your money.”

“Naw, I’m going to pay you anyhow.”

“Why, I’m not going to take your money. You won.”

“That don’t matter. I want you to take the money. Come on, Jayber. I just done that for a joke.”

Big Ellis’s world is turning slowly upside down. For the sake of friendliness and fun, he is persistently in and out of trifling wagers on the fall of a coin or the length of something or the weight of something. “A fellow has to have a little sport, don’t he? A little fun?” But he never means to win.

Big Ellis tramps along with the coins held out in his open hand, backing Jayber around the barber chair.

“Take your money and go on.”

“Ain’t going to do it.”

And then Big Ellis, who would be a match for two like Jayber, picks him up by the waist and holds him and puts the money in his pocket. He takes his coat and hat, and goes out the door putting them on.

“Good night to you fellows. Thank you, Jayber.”

And they hear him start his car and gun the engine, and the car lurch out onto the road.

Jayber climbs back into the chair.

They’re silent a few minutes. As soon as they cease to talk they are surprised at how deep the silence is. Except for them the town is asleep. The light has gone out in Burgess’s store. The silence in the little shop is also the silence of the town and of the whole dark countryside. In it the only living thing might be the fire stirring and breathing in the stove.

Though his hands are warm, Mat holds them out into the heat over the stove.

Jayber stretches and yawns, a long-drawn O with a grunt at the end.

Burley asks, “What have you heard from Virgil, Mat?”

It was coming. It was bound to come. He might be speaking out of a well, his voice sounds so strange to him: “He’s missing. We had the notice today.”

He feels as though he has run to the edge of something and jumped.

Burley and Jayber say nothing for a moment. But their silence turns toward him, and is an admission of the difficulty and insufficiency of what they will say.

And then they say that they are sorry. Their concern touches him and, as though still falling, he feels himself caught in what they are saying, and hears the sound of his own voice speaking among their voices, becoming familiar again.

He mentions what room he believes there still is for hope. He hopes.

The others agree. So long as a man doesn’t surely know, he has to hope. And that is more difficult than to know the worst surely.

Burley knows that. It has been hard for him to free Tom’s death from the hopeless hope that he may still be alive. So far away as he died, it is hard to quit hoping that it may be only a long confusion and a mistake.

Jayber sits quietly in his chair, keeping the shop open for them, their talk his gift. Finally, as the subject changes, he takes part again.

The light has been out two hours in Milton Burgess’s store. Mat and Burley hate to leave the lighted warm room and start home by themselves.

Finally they have to.

Chapter 5

KEEPING WATCH

From the first week of January, when his lambs begin coming, until the end of bad weather, Mat keeps watch on the barns, seeing to the lambing of ewes and the calving of cows. Whatever is born will be born into his wakefulness and his care. He makes his first round in the dark of the mornings, his last at midnight. He is out of the house at night nearly as much as in the daytime. The smell of the barns stays in his clothes. In the dead of winter, in the time of the long sleeping of most things, he becomes more wakeful than ever.

It is a weary time. The days will string together for weeks in a row, never divided by enough sleep. There are freezing nights when his feet break through a crust of ice into the mud on his first round after supper, and on his last round the tracked mud and manure at the barn door are frozen hard. There are thawing nights of heavy rain when he walks ankle-deep in mud, and nights of snow when the tracks he made going to the barn will be filled by the time he starts back. And there are nights sometimes when there will be a difficult birth, and he has to wake Joe Banion to help him, and the two of them work on into the second half of the night, their hands chilled and numbed by the birth-wet, their feet stinging in their shoes.

In the winter the country sleeps, withdrawn from summer. And Mat, in his growing weariness, will be aware of that rest. Sometimes his head will fall forward and for a few minutes he will sleep an oblivious sleep, at the table after a meal, or sitting in his chair in the living room.

From nightfall until midnight his weariness seems to grow less, and he sits with the family in the living room and talks until the others go to bed. And then he has the quiet to himself, and he sits by the fire, reading or figuring or planning, passing the time between his rounds. This is the easiest and pleasantest time of his day, and the most precious to him. Going his night rounds, walking among the barns and the animals in the light of the lantern, the weather and the moon working their changes, he hungers for the births and lives of his animals, as though the life of his place must be held up by him, like something newborn, until the warm long days will come again and the pastures begin to grow.

In spite of the difficulty and weariness, he goes about his work with greater interest and excitement than at any other time of the year. This is the crisis of increase—what he was born to, and what he chose. When he has made sure of the life of whatever is newborn—when he has done, at any rate, all that can be done—he is at peace with himself. His labor has been his necessity and his desire.

THE SHEEP BARN

Mat goes up the hill, walking in the room of light the lantern makes. The ground appears to dip and waver under the swinging light, and every track is filled with shadow. Beyond the light of the lantern he can see nothing. He goes now as by the inward pattern and usage of his life.

He comes to the fan of tracked mud in front of the barn and, raising the lantern, picks his way to the doors, and slides them open a little to let himself in. The sheep raise their heads and get up, but they are used to his coming and only step slowly out of his way as he moves among them. Shadows leap up around his light. As he moves the barn seems to sway and rise within itself. The ewes’ breath smokes above their heads.

In one of the back corners of the barn he finds an old ewe stretched on the bedding, her breath coming in grunts. She lifts her head to look at him, but makes no effort to get up. A newborn dead lamb is lying near her, not completely free of the birth sack. Mat knows that this second labor prevented her attending properly to the lamb she had already got born. He should have been here earlier. In spite of the circumstances of the day, he thinks with guilt of his failure. His mind has fallen short of its subject.

But now the consequence requires his mind of him. Taking a piece of twine from his pocket, he ties the lantern to a tier rail above his head, and then brings a small hinged gate and pens the ewe into the corner where she is lying. He takes the dead lamb out of the pen and puts it by the doors so he will remember to carry it out. He beds the pen with fresh straw, making himself a clean work place. Already it begins to simplify. It is an act already complete in his mind that he goes about. There is no hesitation and no hurry in his movements. Where nature and instinct fail, he begins with his knowing. He desires the life of what is living. He requires the life of the body suffering to give birth and the life of the body suffering to be born. Nothing else is on his mind now.

Moving gently and slowly, he straightens the lamb’s head and forelegs, and delivers it, wet as a fish, into the air. He holds it up a moment—a limp, dangling thing—to make sure its nose is clear, and then touches it to the ground. It begins to struggle and to breathe. It comes tense and alive in his hand, wobbling its head, reaching down with its legs. It struggles against its weight, and breathes in the cold dung-smelling air.

Mat feels a kind of magician’s triumph. His trick is the trick of the life of a thing, almost as liable to fail as to succeed. His labor is a labor of joy whose joyfulness depends on this precarious result.

He takes hold of the ewe and lifts her to her feet, and she remains upright, head hanging and dazed, loins caved. He carries the lamb to her flank and works the tit into its mouth. As soon as it takes hold and begins to suck he scratches its wet rump with his finger, in imitation of the way the ewe would normally lick and nudge. It becomes more eager, shaking its tail and butting weakly at the udder.

Satisfaction comes into Mat, pressing up into his throat like laughter. Once the trick is set working, the longer it works the better it works. Its own strength and purpose come into it now, and he becomes less necessary to it.

When he puts the lamb down the ewe turns to it and begins licking it, snuffling and bleating quietly and anxiously as she tends to it. Mat takes the lantern and a bucket and brings water from the well, and brings an armload of hay.

He hangs the lantern overhead again, and sits down to watch. He is far from sleep now. He does not think of going back to the house. He holds himself and his thoughts near to these things that his work and care have made familiar again. He sits there on a bucket, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped together, conscious only of the nearness of this place: the ewe and lamb in the lighted pen, the flock sleeping and stirring in the dark behind him, the cold night air on his face and hands.

PART TWO

Chapter 6

A DARK MORNING

He wakes in the dark, unsure how long he has been asleep. He wakes without movement except for the opening of his eyes. For the moment he thinks of nothing. And then from the kitchen on the other side of the house he hears a footstep light and hard on the linoleum. He realizes with relief that he has slept all the way through the night. He reaches across the bed and feels the warmth where Margaret lay asleep minutes ago. The footstep in the kitchen is followed by the sound of the coffee pot scraping on the top of the stove, and by voices—Margaret’s and Nettie Banion’s. For a little while longer he lets himself lie quiet. As if by some movement of his mind during the night, the uneasiness of the day before has left him. It is as if without his will his mind has turned and opened toward the new day. There is, deep in him, an acceptance of time as persistent as time. He wakes on the rising of the morning. The future bears down, and as in hard times before he feels in himself the determination to let it come.

He turns the covers back and gets up.

A fuzzy paleness drifts into the room from the lighted doorway at the other end of the hall. He opens the shutters to close heavy darkness and the sound of rain coming down hard and steady onto the yard and the walk along the side of the house. It has been raining for some time; the sound is that of water striking water. He shivers at the sound and at his apprehension of the wetness of the day. Under such a rain, he knows, the surface of the whole countryside will be a sheet of water moving down onto the loaded streams. He thinks with a kind of panic of how briskly, in a more seasonable year, he would have things moving by now, with the spring coming and the crops to get ready for. This season he will be beginning late, in loss. It rains into Virgil’s absence. The sense of loss has carried his mind out of the house into the wind and rain over the soaked fields.

A DIFFERENCE MADE

By noon on Tuesday Virgil has disappeared from the knowledge of the whole town. The news has gone its rounds among the gathering places, and has quietly set the young man’s life into the past tense of the town’s consciousness. The town has begun to speak and think of him by the act of memory alone. To speak of him in the present tense becomes the private observance of his family—the enactment of their hope.

Wherever Mat goes among the gatherings of his neighbors he feels himself surrounded by an embarrassment, which both he and they are powerless to relieve. Though he is troubled by this at first, it becomes understandable to him. Virgil’s absence, which was once only an absence from the place, has become a vacancy in their minds. They are suddenly barred from the usual forms of politeness; they can no longer ask him about Virgil or offer him their greetings to be passed on. And so, except for the casual give and take of crop talk and weather talk, they have nothing to offer Mat but silence. He accepts this, and as time goes on he will accept it more and more gratefully.

He is most sharply aware of this estrangement in his meetings with Frank Lathrop. In their long bearing of the absence of their sons, and their waiting, Mat has finally gone beyond what either of them had dared admit was possible. He has become the proof of what they most feared. The anticipation of loss that once bound them has been replaced by a reality of loss that divides them. In himself, Frank Lathrop is divided between a kind of shame at this inequality of fortune and a gratitude for it—neither of which he can acknowledge to himself, let alone to Mat.

Now it is only with Burley Coulter that Mat feels at ease. Telling his news that night in the barbershop, he felt it was to speak to Burley that he had come. Common knowledge went between them as a bond. During the following days, in casual meetings on the street and at the card game, they seldom speak of those absences that are most in their thoughts, but they accompany each other into their talk with trust.

A COMFORTER

Early Wednesday afternoon Brother Preston leaves the parsonage and walks across town to the Feltner house. He walks quickly and attentively, sidestepping the puddles. The town is shut against the weather, and quiet except for the sounds everywhere of water dripping and running. He meets no one along the road. There is no sign of life at the Feltners’ either.

Stepping up onto the porch, he closes his umbrella and props it beside the door. Leaning against the wall, he removes his rubbers and places them side by side next to the umbrella. He draws a small black leather Testament out of his coat pocket, faces the door, and knocks. His knock is itself an act of ministerial discretion; the sound is perfectly modulated, both quiet and loud enough. As he waits he continues to face the door, standing erect, lifting himself slightly forward now and then onto the balls of his feet, patting the little Testament with a sort of correct casualness against the palm of his hand.

Footsteps approach from the back of the house, and Margaret Feltner opens the door. Her apron is caught up in one hand, and he knows she has been at work in the kitchen. In a movement of understanding, his imagination sees her wiping her hands on the apron as she hurries along the hall toward the door. He takes off his hat.

“I’m sorry to break in on your work.”

“That’s all right. We were just finishing up the dishes.”

She smiles, greets him, moves aside from the entrance in welcome. The openness of her welcome is a little disconcerting; she is putting him at his ease—which is not why he has come. He senses that she has anticipated him, foreseen his coming and his purpose, but greets him now on her terms, not his.

She takes his coat and hat, hangs them up on the hall tree, and leads him into the sitting room.

He goes to the chair she offers him.

“Make yourself at home a minute. I’ll go take this apron off.”

“Mrs. Feltner,” he says, and she stops. “I hoped I’d find all of you at home is why I’ve come so soon after dinner. Is Mr. Feltner here?”

“He’s out at the barn, I think. We’ll call him. There’s not much he can be doing.”

Again he feels headed off. Her offer seems again an act of her own generosity, in no way a concession to his reason for coming.

He sits down as she leaves. Her footsteps go back along the hall. Again in his imagination he sees her: her hands reaching behind her as she goes, untying the apron. He sits erect in the chair, holding the Testament in his lap. The attitude of his body seems to isolate him from the room, to hold out to it a formality alien to it. Some part of his presence is withheld from it; he might be sitting in the tall-backed chair behind his pulpit.

Margaret’s footsteps enter the bustling noises of the kitchen, which he now realizes to have been continuous since he came in.

“Net,” he hears her say, “would you call Mat? Tell him we’ve got company.”

Out of the sound of her voice—not speaking to him now, remote from him—and out of the look and atmosphere of the room where he sits, there comes to him the sense of the completeness of this household, the belonging together of Mat and Margaret Feltner, the generosity of these people, in which there is maybe no need for him. He feels himself alone here. He is alone in his mission which, whole in itself, surrounds him with its demands, and isolates him. Uneasiness coming over him, a swift tremor, he thinks of the burden of his duty. And then, as though under the pressure of his own hand, he knows his old submission to the mastering of this duty, and knows he will do it.

He stands as the footsteps approach the room. Hannah is with Margaret now. Greetings are exchanged again, and they sit down, he in his chair, Margaret and Hannah together on the sofa, facing him. They talk with a determined pleasantness about trifles—all of them conscious that they are delaying, waiting for Mat to come, that they digress from their feelings and from the purpose of the visit.

Nettie is on the back porch, calling Mat. She has difficulty making him hear, and calls several times before she comes back into the kitchen, slamming the door.

His mind only half-occupied by the conversation, the preacher watches Hannah. She is wearing a clean white smock, the sleeves turned back from her wrists. Her heavy hair is drawn neatly back from her face. She is a beautiful girl; he has thought so often before. And he thinks so now, as always a little startled to find that he does so emphatically think so. He watches her face, alert for some sign of what she must be feeling, but he discovers nothing. Her face is composed and quiet. He both wishes and fears to know her thoughts.

And he watches Margaret. He believes that he sees in her face the marks of her grief for her son—but no sign that she expects to be comforted, or asks to be. To the preacher she also seems to be a beautiful woman. But hers has long ago ceased to be the given beauty of a girl; it is beauty that she has kept, or earned, through all that has troubled her and aged her. In all she says there is an implication of Mat’s presence in her life, an assenting to it. To Brother Preston, it is as if something in her leans in waiting, not for him to begin the business of his visit, but for Mat.

They hear him come into the kitchen. He stops at the sink to wash his hands, and then comes on through the house.

“Don’t get up,” he says, entering the room and stepping over to the preacher’s chair.

Brother Preston, leaning forward, takes the hand that is held out to him. The hand is hard, weather-roughened, communicating the chill of the outside air. The brief tightening grip of it is an announcement of welcome, which doesn’t, today, put the preacher at ease.

“I’m sorry to take you away from your work.”

“You needn’t be. There’s not much we can do you’d call work.”

And so they begin again, speaking now of the weather, the delay of work, the rising river. The preacher feels himself drawn again, helplessly, into the stream of pastime conversation, which moves by no force of its own but by a determination in all of them against silence. He speaks and listens with an increasingly uncomfortable sense of his own hesitation, feeling at every turn and shift of the talk that he is failing again the duty that brought him.

Mat’s coming has added something implicitly formidable to the uncertain pleasantness of the gathering. Now, in the faces of all three of the Feltners, there seems to Brother Preston to be a secrecy preserved against him. They have, none of them, made any acknowledgment of what they must know to be his reason for coming. It is as though their very grief is an affirmation of something that they refuse to yield to him.

At last, taking advantage of a break in the conversation, he begins, straightening in his chair and leaning forward a little, his eyes moving to the eyes of each of them:

“My friends, I’ve come because I know of your trouble.”

He is surprised by what seems to him to have been the forcefulness of his voice. It is as if some barely perceptible stirring has moved among them, as at the first rising of a wind among tree leaves.

Now Margaret Feltner lifts her hand out of her lap and touches the tips of her fingers lightly to the side of her face.

But he has begun and he goes on, hastened, like a man walking before a strong wind, moved no longer by his intention but by the force of what he is saying. His eyes have become detached from his hearers; he might be speaking down from his pulpit now, looking at all, seeing none. But beneath the building edifice of his meaning, he is aware of something failing between them. It is as though in the very offering of comfort to them he departs from them. And now he is hastened also by an urgency of haste. He feels that the force of his voice is turning back toward himself, that he is fleeing into the safe coherence of his own words, away from those faces shut between him and their pain. He speaks into their silence like a man carrying a map in a strange country in the dark.

At the beginning Mat only half listens. He sits, staring out the window, like a boy in church. But knowing what must be the difficulty of the situation for Margaret and Hannah, his attention is drawn to them, and his separateness from the voice of the preacher is destroyed. He watches the two women, sorry for them, determined to bear with them, as dumbly as he has to, what must be borne. It is of the loss, accomplished or to come, of Virgil Feltner that the preacher is speaking. And Mat’s fear, which he has kept silenced until now, begins to take its words. It is the fear of the loss of his boy, his good and only son—the preacher’s voice seems to search it out. The preacher’s voice, rising, rides above all chances of mortal and worldly hope, hastening to rest in the hope of Heaven.

In the preacher’s words the Heavenly City has risen up, surmounting their lives, the house, the town—the final hope, in which all the riddles and ends of the world are gathered, illuminated, and bound. This is the preacher’s hope, and he has moved to it alone, outside the claims of time and sorrow, by the motion of desire which he calls faith. In it, having invoked it and raised it up, he is free of the world.

But in this hope—this last simplifying rest-giving movement of the mind—Mat realizes that he is not free, and never has been. He is doomed to hope in the world, in the bonds of his own love. He is doomed to take every chance and desperate hope of hope between him and death, Virgil’s, Margaret’s, his. His hope of Heaven must be the hope of a man bound to the world that his life is not ultimately futile or ultimately meaningless, a hope more burdening than despair.

It is from this possibility of meaninglessness that the preacher has retreated. So that the earth will not be plunged into the darkness, he has lifted up the Heavenly City and hastened to refuge in its gates. And Mat, in the very act of leaning toward that restfulness, turns away from it to take back his pain. His mind seems to steady and move out again to its surfaces. He watches Hannah and Margaret, anxious for them, sorry for their sorrow. He is conscious again of the room, the window, the wet street opening into the town. The buds on the maple trees leaning over the road have grown big. He notices this as he always notices it for the first time in the spring, with an involuntary pleasure, saying to himself that he is surprised to see it happen so early.

The preacher sits with his head tilted so that the lenses of his glasses reflect the window. In his rapt intent face the opaque discs of light look exultant and blind.

Mat and Margaret seem to look at him now with a peculiar kindness, nodding their heads, not so much attentively as indulgently. He feels that he has become again the object of their generosity, that they are offering to him, out of some kind of hospitality, the safe abstraction of his belief. They are releasing him from the particularity of the time and place, and of the life he is talking about.

Concluding, preparing to leave them, he looks again at Hannah. She sits at the end of the sofa, beyond the light of either of the windows, looking down at her hand which lies beside her on the cushion. She reminds him of some white-petaled delicate bloom. “Surely,” he thinks, “the people is grass.”

He stands up abruptly.

“I must go.”

Mat helps him into his coat and walks out onto the porch with him. They make the small sentences of leave-taking while the preacher puts on his rubbers and opens his umbrella. They shake hands.

“Come back,” Mat says. “Thank you.”

He stands on the edge of the porch while Brother Preston goes down the steps and starts out toward the street.

Coming into the house again, he thinks: “Well, that’s done. That’s over.”

The living room, as he goes back into it, holds the quiet of a Sunday, as though the voice of the preacher is still present in it. Margaret has got up and is moving about in the room, halfheartedly and needlessly straightening the furniture and the papers on Mat’s desk. Hannah is sitting as before. He goes over to her and reaches down to pat her shoulder.

“All right?”

“I’m all right.” She nods, smiles.

And then as though suddenly jarred, she cries aloud like a hurt child:

“No! I’m not all right! I’m not!”

Margaret comes to her and holds her while she cries. Against Hannah’s hair Margaret’s face is turned to Mat. Their eyes hold them there a moment, admitting their sorrow for the girl and for each other and for themselves.

And then Mat turns and goes. In his life he has made this movement time and again, this turning away from himself or his loved ones, leaving them to bear what they must. With his children, time after time, he has come to this turning away.

His mouth set, thinking “If it has to happen, it’ll have to happen,” not daring to think what he means, he goes out of the house and turns down the street toward Jasper Lathrop’s store.

Passing under a low maple branch, he breaks off a twig. He feels the softening bud at the tip of it, tastes the cold, bitter taste of the sap. And then, hating to waste it now that he has broken it off, he sticks it into the band of his hat.

THE SANCTURARY

Swollen by the wet weather, the door binds against the sill. Brother Preston shoves hard to open it, and the sound of its breaking loose falls like a long plank into the empty church. But entering, shutting the door behind him, he does not make a sound. He stands just inside the vestibule a moment, letting the quiet of the place come to him. To his right, within reach of his hand, the heavy bellrope hangs down, the lower foot and a half of it polished and darkened by Uncle Stanley’s hands. It drops straight into the vestibule from the arm of the bell up in the steeple, the hole drilled for its passage through the ceiling worn whopsided by the rope’s sawing through it, and the rope at that place fretted to half its original thickness. At the end there is a big club of a knot which Uncle Stanley can just reach, and which is just out of reach, it is hoped, of the members of the Intermediate Boys’ Sunday School Class.

On either side of the vestibule a door opens into a high narrow room, stark in its proportions and furnishings. Uncle Stanley has been in to clean up in preparation for the Wednesday-night prayer meeting, and everything is in a state of neatness and order which now, in the quiet, seems to deny its dependence on the likes of Uncle Stan. Unviolated now by any presence but his own, the old church seems to Brother Preston to stand erect and coherent, enclosing him.

As though the racket he made opening the door signaled a division between the church and the town, the sanctuary is now filled with quiet. He might be moving across the bottom of a deep pool. Tiptoeing, not making a sound, he comes on down the aisle and sits on a bench near the pulpit and directly in front of it.

He came away from the Feltner house grieved by the imperfection of his visit. It was not, as he had hoped it would be, a conversation. It was a sermon. This is the history of his life in Port William. The Word, in his speaking it, fails to be made flesh. It is a failure particularized for him in the palm of every work-stiffened hand held out to him at the church door every Sunday morning—the hard dark hand taking his pale unworn one in a gesture of politeness without understanding. He belongs to the governance of those he ministers to without belonging to their knowledge, the bringer of the Word preserved from flesh. But now, sitting on the hard bench in the chilled odors of stale perfume and of vacancy, he feels that he has come again within the reach of peace. On the back of the bench in front of him, like some cryptic text placed there for his contemplation, are the initials B.C. in deeply cut block letters four inches high. Leaning forward, his finger absently tracing the grooves of the initials, he bows in careful silence while his mind seems to stand in the pulpit above him, praying as always: “Our gracious and loving Heavenly Father, we are come into Thy Presence today with our burdens, our troubles, our sorrows.”

The afternoon goes on, and he continues to sit there, his mind coming slowly to rest. He leans back, his hands folded and idle in his lap. Showers come and pass over without his hearing them.

The outside door clatters and slams, and footsteps tramp in. The vestibule door is bumped open, and Uncle Stanley appears at the head of the aisle. In one arm he carries a load of kindling, in the other hand a gallon bucket of corncobs soaking in coal oil. Loaded as he is, Uncle Stanley manages a whole chorus of gestures which greet and exclaim and apologize. Peeping over his load, waving the bucket of cobs, he shuffles down the aisle, his walking cane, hooked into his hip pocket, trailing on the floor behind him like a tail.

“Go right on, Preacher,” he yells. “Go right ahead. Don’t mind me. Keep right on a talking to Him. I know you got it to do. By juckers, if you can squeeze it in anywhere, you can tell Him about me.”

He drops the wood with a racking crash down against a leg of the stove. He opens the fire door and lays in cobs and kindling, and douses in coal oil from the bucket. He tosses in a lighted match, the fire ignites, and the crackling of the flames is immediate and steady. In all this he makes a large avoidance of looking at Brother Preston or speaking to him, leaving him to his prayers.

He goes out, and returns carrying two buckets of coal which he places beside the stove. He adds more kindling to the fire, throws in a few lumps of coal, and goes to the nearest bench and sits down, still wearing his hat. He has gone about his work, and now sits and rests, with utter familiarity toward the place. His attitude intimates that he is a fire builder by profession, the best in the trade, and that his skill and responsibility require a certain indifference to all other considerations. A large chew of tobacco is actively at work in his jaw.

Not wanting to appear unfriendly, Brother Preston comes back and sits near the old man—trusting that, by keeping a distance of four or five feet between them, he can hold the conversation to an exchange of formalities and then leave in a few minutes. But he is exactly as much mistaken as he was afraid he would be. Uncle Stanley gets up and spits into the stove, and then sits down next to him and claps a hand down onto his knee.

“Yessir! By grab, last thing I’d want to do is break in on a fellow’s praying. I reckon there’s plenty of need for it around here. I reckon I ought to know that. But I had to get that fire to going for the prayer meeting tonight. Take the damp outen this air.” He laughs knowingly, slapping the preacher’s knee again. “Take their mind off of their old bones while you say your say to ’em. We all got our calling. You got yours and I got mine. And we go about ’em and get along. Ain’t that right, Preacher?”

“That is so, Mr. Gibbs,” Brother Preston says.

A KNACK FOR THE HERE

March 9, 1945

Dear Nathan,

I’ve laid off to write to you every day for the last four, but it has been hard to get around to. I’ve been hoping for some good news to tell you. But none has happened.

I was in the barbershop the night you left, and Mat Feltner was there and told us that Virgil is missing in action. I’ve been studying the last four days whether I ought to tell you about it or not. I know you’ll be sorry to hear it, but my guess is you would want to know it anyhow. He was a good boy.

I talk like he’s dead for certain, which there ain’t any reason to believe yet. But in town I notice it’s coming mighty easy to most to talk about Virgil as if missing means dead. You don’t hear Virgil is. You hear Virgil was. It’s understandable. It’s simpler to go ahead and think the worst and get it over with, and hard for most people to hold out much for people they’re no kin to. But Mat and them are holding out. I hand it to Mat. He’s just himself, the way he always has been, as far as he’s letting anybody see. He come up to this a man. And I reckon will go through it a man.

I never been what you would call close to Mat. In spite of knowing him right onto fifty year. He hasn’t been the kind you would need to worry about, for his sake or yours either. He has minded his business and stayed at his work. Has known his place, as they say. But the last four days he has been on my mind. I have the feeling that I’m holding out for him. In my mind I stick with him and hope his boy is alive. That’s sympathy, I reckon. And we’ve come to it a hell of a way. By what has happened to us we’re set apart kind of, and made to know each other.

Wednesday afternoon, after the news had pretty well got around, I seen Brother Piston going in up there at Mat’s. And I says to Jayber, “I know the speech he’s going to make.” And so would all of us. He come and said all that to me after we knew Tom was dead. And none of it quite fit. You could say that he didn’t have too good of an idea who he was talking to. While he was having his say I sat there and thought my thoughts. Here in a way he’d come to say the last words over Tom. And what claim did he have to do it? He never done a day’s work with us in his life, nor could have. He never did stand up in his ache and sweat and go down the row with us. He never tasted any of our sweat in the water jug. And I was thinking: Preacher, who are you to speak of Tom to me, who knew him, and knew the very smell of him?

And there he sat in your grandaddy’s chair, with his consolations and his old speech. Just putting our names in the blanks. And I thought: Preacher, he’s dead, he’s not here, and you’ll never know what it is that’s gone.

The last words ought to say what it is that has died. The last words for Tom ain’t in the letter from the government, and they won’t be said by the preacher. They’ll be said by you and me and the rest of us when we talk about our old times and laugh about the good happenings. They won’t all be said as long as we live. I say that a man has got to deserve to speak of the life of another man and of the death of him.

The difference between people is what has got to be taken notice of. There’s the preacher who has what I reckon you would call a knack for the Hereafter. He’s not much mixed with this world. As far as he’s concerned there is no difference, or not much, between Tom Coulter and Virgil Feltner. Their names fit into the riddle he thinks he knows the answer to. I wouldn’t try to say he ain’t right. I do say that some people’s knack is for the Here. Anyhow, that’s the talent I’m stuck with. For us it’s important to keep in mind who Tom was. And for Mat and them I judge it’s important to know who is meant when they speak of Virgil. We don’t forget them after somebody who never knew them has said “Dead in the service of his country” and “Rest in peace.” That’s not the way these accounts are kept. We don’t rest in peace. The life of a good man who has died belongs to the people who cared about him, and ought to, and maybe itself is as much comfort as ought to be asked or offered. And surely the talk of a reunion in Heaven is thin comfort to people who need each other here as much as we do.

I ain’t saying I don’t believe there’s a Heaven. I surely do hope there is. That surely would pay off a lot of mortgages. But I do say it ain’t easy to believe. And even while I hope for it, I’ve got to admit I’d rather go to Port William.

As Jayber says, when we seen Brother Piston go in up at Mat’s, the worst thing about preachers is they think they’ve got to say something whether anything can be said or not.

Well, it’s been raining right along since you left. The ground, you know, was soaked while you was here. So every drop that has fell has gone in the river. The river has got way up. It’s into most of the bottoms. And the creeks are still running out big. And the radio says more to come.

Night before last Anvil Brant sent word up here by his son-in-law that he had a sow and nine pigs he wanted to sell to me and your daddy. So yesterday morning we got in the pickup truck and went down. When we got there Anvil’s wife said he was out to the barn. And we could see why. There Mrs. Anvil was with her children, and there was her and Anvil’s oldest girl with her children, children and grandchildren looked like all running about the same age, and looked like four or five in each set, and all of them been fastened up there together since the rain commenced. And there was Mrs. Anvil, with her hair sticking out right stiff in several directions like a frozen floor mop, and one child sucking and one hanging onto her arm and one standing under her dress so you couldn’t see nothing but its legs, standing there in pee smell strong enough to make your eyes water, slapping here and there and yelling at them all to be quiet, taking three or four minutes to tell us Anvil was down to the barn, anyhow she reckoned he was, she hadn’t seen him since breakfast.

We walked out that little rise the house and buildings are on, and found Anvil sitting in the back door of the barn. One of the older boys was there with him, and his dogs, and we could see right off that things weren’t much more comforting at the barn than they were at the house. The river was up into the bottom there in back of the barn, and between there and the trees on the river bank was nothing but about three hundred yards of muddy water, with here and there a willow or a few dead horseweeds or a cornstalk sticking up out of it. And you just knew, as soon as you saw how things were, that Anvil had been coming out there to the barn every morning for the last three or four to watch it rain and watch it rise, and know he was doing nothing because there was nothing he could do. We went in the upper doors and walked down the driveway and spoke. I says, “How’s it coming, Anvil?” “Up, by God,” he says. I says, “How’re you coming?” “Drownded out, by God,” he says. “Britchies legs rotted off plumb to the knees.” We sat there with him and the boy until nearly dinnertime and talked, none of us having anything better to do. And we wound up buying the sow and pigs. For more than they was worth. To your daddy’s way of thinking, you don’t what you would call trade with a man who is hurting. I know it has got hard for you to know your daddy, but he has that kind of rightness about him. He’s very straight in his dealings.

Anvil didn’t figure the river would get into his house, but I expect it surely was in his barn by this morning. They say the Ohio has got into a few of the houses down at Hargrave. And the rain falling right on.

March 10

Still raining. Off and on all night, and pretty hard and steady since before day. When the rain lets up you can hear water running anywhere you stand. The mud is a foot deep around the barns here, and the barns are as wet inside as out. We put down a little dry bedding every night, but it gets tramped out of sight in a few minutes.

Anyhow, it’s raining and I’ve got nothing to do for a while but sit here and write to you. Which I aim to do, because once the weather fairs up it won’t be easy to find the time. I’m writing at the table by the front window in the living room. The rain coming down steady outside, and a good fire going in here. When I look back I don’t see many wet weather mornings in my life when I’ve been sitting inside and doing something quiet. And in a way I wish there had been. I notice that every now and then I do something I wish I’d done more of, that I’ve lost a lot of chances for.

I’ve quit minding to write as much as I did at first. When you boys was first in the army it give me some trouble. I don’t reckon I’d wrote much more than my name for thirty years, and I did have an awful time trying to keep what I had to say inside of what I could spell. But finally it got so it come tolerably easy. I’ve got the habit of it now, and when I’m working or walking to town and soon, I think of a letter to you that says what’s taking place. It’s company for me.

The weather is throwing us behind in our work. Every day we lose, the loss gets a little more on our minds. We’ve got plant beds to burn and ground to break and the barns to clean and so on and so on. When the weather does fair up things are going to break loose around here in a mighty hurry. I was thinking about it while I was eating breakfast, and kind of dreading it. You know how your daddy will come untied the first day the sun shines. He’ll be just like a fox. One minute he’ll be laying quiet, and the next minute in a dead run, and you’ll have to look mighty quick to see the difference.

There hasn’t been many times this morning when you could see from here to the yard fence, but the rain has nearly quit now. A good deal more water in sight today than yesterday, so it must of rose considerably during the night. The bottoms are all under water as far as I can see in both directions. There’s water from the foot of the hills on this side to the foot of the hills on the far side. Looks from here like the water is up to the window sills of the old Traveler house in the big bottom on the far side, and there’s a car sitting in the front yard with just the roof and windows showing.

Awful as it is, I have to say that a flood can be about as interesting to me as anything ever I run into. As soon as I see the backwater get into the bottoms I want to be out on it in a boat. You remember. And I finally did get around to it yesterday afternoon. I was in the barbershop toward the end of the morning, after I got done writing to you, and just happened to mention to Jayber that all morning it had been awfully easy for me to imagine that you could have some luck if you was to go fishing. And for some reason Jayber jumps right up and says “Let’s go”—which he never did want to do before in his life. He turned around that old paper clock of his that says “Back at 6:30,” and locked up, and we got a pound of cheese and a box of crackers from Milton Burgess, and went over the hill. I had my boat chained up on the porch of the old cabin, and the water was nearly up to the joists, so all we had to do was just roll her over and slide her into the river. About fifty foot from the porch we caught her in a long eddy and went just shooting up through the trees along the bank. We went over the road at the creek bridge, and across the backwater, and right on up into the big woods in the creek bottom. We tied the boat, and sat up there inside the woods and fished in the rain all afternoon. We ate cheese and crackers and smoked and talked and caught fish.

We carried what we caught back to town and fried them up at Jayber’s little living place over the barbershop. It’s not but a little bit of a room, and he’s got everything he needs fitted into it just perfect. And you never seen the like of books he’s got up there. I’ve known Jayber mighty well for a long time, and I never knew he read books. But he tells me he’s read some of them books as many as several times. Some of the authors was ones I’d heard of. You’ve got to hand it to Jayber for the way he’s held his learning and not let it go to his head. When he seen I was interested, Jayber told me that books has meant a lot to him, and there’s some of them he puts a great deal of stock in.

I thought about you all along while the good times lasted, and wished you was here. Afterwards, while I was walking home, I was thinking about you, and our old times fishing and keeping batch down on the river. I can remember whole conversations that we had back in those old times. Them was good times, I says to myself, and one of these days we’ll have them again.

Well, according to what they say I ought not to write you anything but cheerful news, and I see I’ve wrote little enough of that. There ain’t but mighty little to be had around here right now, so it’s hard to write much of it. Unless I lie. And I think I ought to save lying for when we need it worse. And I don’t aim to ever start lying to you. If I lied to you who would I have for company then?

I think a lot about you, and a lot of you.

Your uncle,

Burley

Chapter 7

BORN A IDIOT, EDUCATED A FOOL

In the latter two-thirds of his life Mat Feltner’s cousin Roger Merchant has memorialized his father as a cultivated and enlightened gentleman farmer—which Mat knows the old man never was, never thought of being, and would have refused to be if he had thought of it.

The truth about old man Griffith Merchant is that he lived on his land like a blight, troubled only by the slowness with which it could be converted into cash, unable to see or care beyond his line fences. If Armageddon had blazed to those boundaries and stopped, he would have noticed it only to think that he had been rightly spared. But Roger—“born a idiot,” as his father once took occasion to remark, “and educated a fool”—has believed otherwise. By luck, defect, or determination, he has thought himself the descendent of gentleman farmers and one himself.

He has lived by himself for forty years in the slowly collapsing house built by his grandfather, half log and half stone, on a point overlooking a wide creek valley to the south of Port William. The foundation under the log forepart of the house has been caved and splayed by groundhogs tunneling under it, and by dogs digging after the groundhogs. The yard-thick walls of the stone L are buttressed by locust poles wedged at uneven angles against them. The house and outbuildings haven’t been painted in half a century. Bees hive in the cornices. Maple seeds sprout knee-high in the gutters. A rambler rose has completely overgrown the steps and posts of the front porch, live runners threading heavy meshes of dead growth. In the garden, briars grow as high as the fence posts. The wall of an outbuilding near the garden fence has burst, spilling an avalanche of tin cans and bottles down the slope. The barn provides shelter, but no longer confinement, only for an old team of mules, kept to validate Roger’s assertion that he has in his “latter years” restricted himself to “a little light fawming”—though there is not a complete set of harness for either of them on the place.

In the last decade Roger has made a slow retreat from the opening cracks and leaks and bucking floors of the front rooms, and now lives entirely in the stone kitchen. That room is large and tall, in summer cool as a cellar and dim from the heavy shade of the maples in the yard. In the back of the room there used to be an enormous fireplace, now walled up and plastered, replaced by a tall, black cooking range. In a corner is an old kitchen cabinet whose doors customarily stand open, showing a supply of store-bought canned goods, mostly soups of various sorts, pork-and-beans and Vienna sausages and sardines, boxes of crackers and cookies. A broad table, at which a numerous family or a crew of field hands might be fed, stands in the center of the room. The room is filled—all its horizontal surfaces littered and heaped—with plunder that Roger has salvaged from the front rooms as he has needed it: a walnut fourposter bed of excellent make, an outsize rocking chair, a half-dozen or so split-bottom chairs, a chamber pot, a grindstone, a hand-cranked Victrola, a five-shovel tobacco plow. Hanging from nails around the walls are various articles of clothing, a hat or two, a pair of fairly new half-swinny mule collars, a double-barreled shotgun, and a minnow seine. Against the chimney there is a pile of ear corn for the Dominecker hens that roost on the back porch.

Surrounding this center, taking in ridge and bluff and creek valley, lie seven hundred acres of land, plundered by old Griffith Merchant in his lifetime, ignored by Roger in his. All the farming done on it now is done by tenants, who vary in number from two to four, and whom Roger may see three or four times a year. His only dealing with any of them is through an old lawyer in Hargrave, who arranges for their coming and going, and collects from them Roger’s half of the proceeds from the sale of their crops. And the tenants, in turn, pester the lawyer in order to secure minimum supplies and to keep their houses and barns standing. Each of them raises a few acres of tobacco and corn, and is allowed to keep a few hogs or cows. Except for their shrinking islands of cropland, the place is overgrown with bushes and trees. Some of it Roger has never seen; much of it he has not seen since his boyhood; most of it, if taken to it, he would not recognize. In all his life he has built nothing, added nothing, repaired nothing. For twelve years Whacker Spradlin has kept him supplied with whiskey, making the seven-mile round-trip from his place to Roger’s in all weather, as faithfully as the prophet’s raven.

When Roger drinks his aim is prostration. His fits of drunkenness extend to remarkable lengths. He has been known to go for months without getting out of bed except to answer what he calls “the physiological summons.” He has been known to lie dormant through the coming and going of a whole summer.

His trips to Port William are becoming less and less frequent. When he goes he drives a 1927 Ford, which since 1927 he has driven something less than three thousand miles, mostly back and forth over the same three and a half miles of road. Spangled with sparrow dung and rusted, the car wears as a hood ornament a cow’s bleached skull with a four-foot spread of horns, the anonymous gift of some generation of Port William boys. Roger has never driven the car out of low gear. So far as he knows, that is the only gear it has. When he is asked—as he has regularly been asked for eighteen years by the boys of Port William—how he likes his car, Roger replies: “It is slow, sir, but powerful.”

It’s a taxing kinship that Mat has with Roger Merchant. It has been, if not one of the difficulties, at least one of the perplexities of his life, both obligation and nuisance. With something like regularity, over the years, Roger has presumed both to need Mat and to find him useless. When Roger’s summons goes out to Mat and the old lawyer, they go. Usually Mat gets there first. And usually he waits, stopping his car at the roadside below the house, until the lawyer arrives. And then they walk together up the slope and around the house where Roger will be waiting for them—on the porch in good weather, in the cluttered kitchen in bad. Roger greets them ceremoniously and solemnly, shakes their hands, offers them chairs, stands until they are seated, and seats himself. The order of business never changes.

At the beginning Roger defines and analyzes his problem in his prim, deliberate voice, in language so excessively grammatical and discriminating that Mat and the lawyer sometimes leave after two or three hours without any certain idea what is the matter. The problems vary from urgent to trivial without producing any change at all in the length of his deliberation or the tone of his voice. Once he wanted them to ponder “carefully, gentlemen, if you will be so kind, the perfectly alarming proliferation of mice in the corncrib.” Once he was wondering “if the wild honey could not be extracted from the cornices of the house to some profit.”

After he has stated the problem, Roger asks Mat what he would advise. And Mat, knowing that it can come to nothing, explains what he would do if he were Roger. And then Roger turns to the lawyer and asks him what he would do, and the lawyer invariably agrees with Mat.

Roger listens to each of them, attentive, nodding, polite. And then he leans back and, touching the tips of his fingers together, delivers a long discourse on what he, himself, Roger Merchant personally, considers to be “good fawming in the present case.” This can go on for the better part of an hour, supported by no practical sense, no knowledge, no experience. At the end of this spiel it is normally discovered that the lawyer has footed quietly across from Mat’s plan to Roger’s. Mat is outvoted; Roger is delighted by the reception of his idea; the old lawyer is pulling his ear and looking at his eyebrows.

THE FARM IN THE VALLEY

From Roger’s front porch the view down into the creek valley takes in a tract of his land that is in itself a little farm. The house and its clutch of outbuildings stand on a low shelf of the hill on the far side of the valley. A little down the creek from the house, and a good deal nearer the floor of the valley, stand a large barn and corncrib and stripping room. Even from that distance, the buildings and the fields look better kept than any of the rest of the Merchant land.

And if you were to step off Roger’s porch and walk down the hill to the front of the tobacco barn where Gideon Crop is standing now, you would see that the apparent good order of the valley farm is no illusion of distance. On closer look you would see that the extent of this orderliness, though it is real, is not large; the hillside that rises behind the buildings was worn out and given up long ago, and now is covered with thicket; the place is poorly fenced where it is fenced at all, and the buildings are old and rundown. You will guess that the place must have declined unimaginably from what it was when Griffith Merchant was a young man.

But what is left of it has been well cared for. The fields in the bottoms along both sides of the creek show the signs of having been regularly mowed and sensibly cultivated. Here and there on the old buildings a loose board has been nailed back in place with new nails. Hinges and latches are in good shape. In the sheds and outbuildings things are put away neatly on their shelves and hooks. In the barn the farming tools have been properly greased and stored for the winter; the dirt of the floor is swept clean. A sizable area to one side of the driveway has been partitioned off, whitewashed on the inside, and stanchioned for five milk cows. At opposite sides of the upper doorway there are stalls for a team of mules. On up the inclining path along the face of the slope, standing under an enormous white oak, there is a small building that has apparently at some time been rescued from collapse, pulled back, straightened, rebraced, and made into a toolshed. There is evidence everywhere—around the other buildings, the house, the garden—of the presence of a strong, frugal intelligence, the sort of mind that can make do, not meagerly but skillfully and adequately, with scraps.

To Gideon Crop, standing in front of the barn in weather that has been wet for days, the clouds so low now that they snag and unravel against the wooded bluffs on each side of the valley, it seems that he is still just barely ahead of his circumstances. He is thirty-seven years old, and in the years of his manhood he has held tight, and come out finally a little ahead of where he was when he began. Not much, but a noticeable little. That is how he is able to see it in his good moods. In the bad weather of his mind it can seem to him just as undeniable that the settled account of these years shows him falling behind. There is the money in the bank, all right, more by some few hundred dollars than there was when his father died. But what about the years? He has seen more good years and days than he will see again. His time of limitless energy and limitless hope is gone, and there is nothing yet to show beyond that hopeful column of figures in the bankbook and in his mind, growing, he is afraid, too slowly. His life seems to him to have become a kind of race to see whether those figures will grow to their power before he has exhausted his own.

From his father Gideon Crop inherited three things: a little bank account in the name of “John Crop and Son,” an ambition to own the farm they have lived on, and Roger Merchant.

“Gideon,” John Crop would say, “don’t let anybody tell you it ain’t hell to do good work for another man who don’t care if you do it or not. Who, by God, don’t know if you do it or not.

“But, boy,” he would go on, “have good ways about you. First thing, don’t leave anything behind you that you wouldn’t claim. Second thing, we don’t want to buy a place we’ve ruint ourselves.”

After the tobacco was sold in the winter Gideon was seventeen, John Crop made his only attempt to buy the farm from Roger. He had managed to save more money than he was ever to have at one time again. The morning after he had sold his tobacco he wrote his bank balance on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket and walked up the hill.

John Crop’s savings would barely have made a down payment, if that. From his encounter with Roger that day he learned that if he’d had the full value in cash he still would not have had enough. Roger looked on the place as an heirloom. He would not sell. Beyond a half-dozen perfunctory courtesies, he would not talk.

Gideon, standing at the woodpile where he had been sent to work when they finished breakfast, saw his father turn out of the creek road and start back along the lane across the bottom, and stopped and watched him, leaning on the handle of the axe. John Crop came picking his way carefully over the thawing mud, and passed in front of the house and on down the incline toward the barn. When he went by Gideon he smiled and kept walking.

“Honey,” he said, “that axe handle ain’t made to lean on.”

FLOOD

At ground-breaking time, the spring of 1932, John Crop was dead and buried, the Depression was on, and Gideon Crop’s name was signed to the new contract in the office of Roger’s lawyer.

Gideon had not forgot, and never has yet forgot, the silence his father kept when once or twice a year Roger and the lawyer would drive down to the valley farm. It would usually be in the middle of the day—as Gideon remembers it, it is the noon of a fair day in the summer; they have finished their dinner and are resting on the front porch—and Roger and the lawyer would drive in and stop in the road below the house and blow the horn. And John Crop would walk down to the car and stoop to the window. He nodded and spoke in answer to their questions, saying no more than necessary, volunteering nothing. Gideon, watching from the porch, knew that his father spoke out of the silence a man must keep when all abundance and order in his sight are to his credit but not in his possession.

In John Crop’s pride and silence Gideon continued. He had the gifts of quiet endurance, of tolerance of rough work and poor tools, of makeshift, of neatness in patched clothes, of thrift.

He has seen the last year’s tobacco crop through the market at a good earning, and is ready to begin preparations for the next, waiting only for the weather to break and the ground to dry. Today he has made the rounds of the buildings, cleaning and straightening and putting away. Since noon he has given a fresh coat of whitewash to the milking stall, and the afternoon is only half gone. The wet weather, the rising backwater, the delay of ground-breaking are worries, but the knowledge that for the time he has done all that is possible to do is deeply pleasant to him. It is a rare time in any year when he can permit himself to say that he is caught up.

He goes to the little toolshed under the oak tree, brings out a five-gallon bucket, which he upends against the face of the building, and sits down. From there he can see perhaps half a mile of the little valley, from the big woods in the slue hollows above the mouth of the creek to where the creek bottom narrows at the upper end and turns out of sight. Up the creek, among the trunks of leafless sycamores, he can see his and Ida’s little girl Annie sitting midway of the swinging footbridge, wearing a red coat. A brown and white feist named Speck is lying on the foot-plank beside her. She appears to be talking to it—playing something, he supposes, but who can tell about a child? Since the rain quit shortly after noon she has been outside with the dog, keeping to the good footing along the road and the stepping-stones of the paths as Ida warned her to do. Gideon has watched her, amused by her simple companionship with the dog, pleased to see her out of the house after being so much shut in. And for the last half hour he has watched the building up of a heavy rainstorm over Port William and the upland to the north and west.

But for days now he has been used to rain, even used to the reflection that he and the whole countryside are losing by it, and so the storm up there does not break his peace. He is looking at the fields in the bottoms in front of him. Empty of the last year’s growth, awaiting the new season’s crops, they seem to him to have the same serenity that he feels in himself, the same poised free rest between one time and another. Above the edge of the woods that cuts off his view downstream he can see where the flood has broken over the creek banks, and the brown flat of the backwater has begun to fan out a little over the bottom.

He takes off his boots and straightens his socks and pant legs and puts the boots back on. And then he stands and, unbuttoning his work jacket and loosening his pants, carefully straightens and tucks in the tail of his shirt. He sits down again and makes and lights a cigarette. Behind him, up on the hillside, his milk cows have started down through the thickets toward the barn; he can hear the faint ringing of their bells. And from half a dozen places comes the sound of water running through the rock-choked notches of the slopes.

And then he hears another sound, way off, like the hard whispering of the approach of a strong wind. By the time he has thought what it is, he can hear the bushes breaking under the weight and force of the water. He is on his feet now, running along the slope in front of the house toward the bridge. As he runs his mind knots in accusation against himself for not knowing sooner what he knows now.

“Annie! Come up here!”

He sees the girl look at him, turn and look back up the creek, and with what seems to him a weighted slowness stand and take two steps toward the near end of the bridge. Strangely—he will think of this a thousand times before he dies—she does not cry out. She just gets up and starts toward him with the slowness of the sun moving.

The wall of water bursts into sight among the trees, the full sound of it opening on Gideon like an unexpected explosion, though he knew it was coming. And he stops running and stands still. As if in those few running steps he left behind all that was comprehensible, Gideon stands there useless, stripped of all but vision—the unbelievable taking place before his eyes without bothering to become believable.

It hits the bridge. The cables and footboard tear loose at the near end, flinging the girl and the dog up and outward and then down.

And now Gideon is standing at the edge of a turbulent swift river as wide as the floor of the valley, the fields he was looking at a few seconds ago no longer there. The muddy water sucking around his boots, he is still looking up at the grove of trees, though he is already failing to know exactly how the bridge looked.

He stands there another minute, the water drawing nearly to the tops of his boots, hunting with his eyes over the wide surface of the water, the miracle he is looking for instantly clear in his mind. That red coat bright against the water. And then his mind bears up the remembrance of the two of them as they were moments ago, absorbed in their pleasure, balanced in the path of doom, and still free of it. He should have known.

Running again, he goes back up the slant of the ground toward the toolshed. As he goes he notices that the shoreline now strikes almost exactly midway of the length of the barn, the lower end of which has been slapped clean off its foundation as if its timbers had been so many straws. The water slides over his cropland, silent, muddy, a quarter of a mile wide, keeping pace with him as he runs beside it; its flowing seems already established, beyond thought of beginning or end. Even a serenity seems to be in it now, and to brood over the face of it.

At the toolshed he throws open the doors and goes in. Resting upside down on a pair of carpenter’s trestles in the center of the floor is a small johnboat. He takes hold of the length of chain fastened to a ring on the bow-end and drags the boat forward off the trestles and out the door. Lifting the boat at the middle, his hands under the gunwale and then the bottom, he turns it over and over, rolling it down toward the edge of the water. He works in great haste. He is not deterred by his instinctive knowledge of the futility of what he is about to do. He works, maybe, simply in obedience to a determination that he must not stay still—as if to act now, even though it is too late, is the just consequence of his failure to act in time.

Leaving the boat balanced on the shoreline, he runs back to the shop and brings a set of oars, shoving the boat out and leaping into it. As he straightens up he sees Ida, bareheaded and bare-armed, running down toward him from the house, calling out to him: “Gideon, where is she? Where’s Annie?” the weeping breaking suddenly up into the sound of her voice; she knows as well as he does where Annie is. Looking at her, moving away from her, he feels torn from her as he feels torn from Annie. More than that, with all the force of self-hate, he feels ashamed before her. He does not answer.

Before he can balance himself and turn and sit down and set the oars into the locks, he is already a good way past the barn; the house and Ida are out of sight. Thinking to combat somehow the power that has bereft him, he sees now, he has only abandoned himself to it. There grows in Gideon an awareness of the size of the thing that has taken him, the hurtling muddy current, carrying the trash of slope and woods, riding over his known place. He can smell it. He has failed again to consider what he has known all his life. The hope or the sham of saving his child is now replaced by the attempt to save himself.

The current is sweeping him rapidly down toward the woods. By the time he has straightened the boat he has already covered half the distance, and is caught in a strong current at about the middle of the valley. The boat is heavy and squarecut, dangerously clumsy in such water. Seeing that he cannot make shore this side of the woods, he turns the boat around, so that he is facing the direction of the current, pushing the oars rather than pulling. And now, working the boat as well as he can toward the right-hand shore, he gives his main effort to guiding.

Holding the boat straight with the current, he plunges forward into the woods, his speed appearing suddenly to quicken as the treetops heighten and come over him. He crashes through the thicket growth at the margin and breaks in among the big trees, the current hurling and sucking among the trunks. Problems, obstacles, dangers go out of sight before he can move in answer to them. He notices only that he seems to be carried ahead unobstructed for a remarkable length of time. And then one of the forward corners of the boat strikes a tree. He sees it happening, braces himself, takes the jar, and more feels than sees the boat hesitate, and turn, and continue turning as the current reclaims it and carries it forward again. Now Gideon thinks only of getting the oars out of the locks and into the bottom of the boat. Trunks and branches bear down, turn, go by. And then a limb strikes him and sprawls him backwards. He lies perfectly still, his eyes open, the calves of his legs resting across the seat. He does not move—because he cannot or because he does not want to, he does not know which. He expects that at any second the boat will strike crossways of a tree and be broken or rolled under. But he knows these things strangely now, without caring.

More quickly than he would have imagined, the sky clears of branches and the forward motion of the boat seems to be subsiding. He feels building in him the unearned exhilaration of a man alive by luck, who has gone by one of his deaths. Instantly he is on the seat and rowing again, straining for the shore. Having failed in fighting for his life while it was in danger, he will now fight for it when there is no need to. And suddenly he seems to have reached some apex of absurdity. He sees all that has happened to him stripped of reason or cause. He has been beaten by a power larger than he can imagine, much less understand, and now he comes out alive, not even by his own will, much less his own power. He rows strongly across an eddy at the creek mouth, and drives the bow-end of the boat onto the shore.

He steps out onto the mud and instinctively draws the chain out after him and stoops to tie the boat to a tree. He built the boat himself, and his pride clings to it. But this thought of his own doing immediately drives into him the memory of Annie’s two steps along the bridge; and in repugnance and pain he flings the chain back into the boat, shoves it off the shore with his foot, and leaves it for the current to take.

He has come undone. The reality of what has happened begins to seem doubtful to him. He cannot be certain even of where he is in the joining of the two valleys, which are changed beyond recognition. He turns and begins running heavily through the sodden mud of a cornfield, which dips out of sight under the water at his right hand.

WHERE ARE YOU?

It takes him a good hour and a half, in spite of his hurry, to get back, circling the in-reachings of the backwater.

Not long before dusk he steps around the upper corner of the barn, past his cows waiting to be milked—seeing them, regretting his neglect of them, forgetting them almost in the same thought—and stops below the oak tree where he started. His own tracks there seem to him unbelievably fresh. He stands, looking down at them. The darkening water flows high and quiet through the grove where the bridge used to swing.

He turns and starts up toward the toolshed. His direction and even his hurry are the same as when he went up to get the oars. His sense of this similarity is so powerful that for a moment he feels caught and confused, as if the first time was a dream, or he is dreaming now. But this time he turns toward the house. He goes through the gate and up the slope of the yard and around to the back porch.

Hearing his footsteps on the porch, Ida comes out of the kitchen. She has thrown around her shoulders an old jacket of his that she wears to do her chores.

“She’s dead, ain’t she, Gideon? She’s drowned.”

Her voice breaks on the last words. But she remains dry-eyed and erect, and continues to face him.

His own voice is even and steady, but he hears himself speak as though he is another person standing a few feet away.

“Hush now, Ida. You go on back in the house now.”

It is the gently commanding tone of a parent speaking to a child, and to his surprise she minds him.

But when he has taken the lantern down and filled it at the coal-oil barrel behind the smokehouse, Ida comes back out, not wearing the coat this time, her bare arms folded against the chill.

“Gideon, don’t you want to eat? I’ll have supper ready before long.”

Her voice seems to him now to have the stillness and solemnity of voices in the presence of death. He sees, through the door she has left standing half open behind her, that the meal is on the stove, and he is touched. But he cannot eat now. Again when he speaks he does not know what his voice will sound like, and again, almost without any attempt on his part to control it, it reveals no feeling except kindness.

“No, Ida. No, I don’t want anything right now, sweet.”

He runs down the slope of the yard, the lantern swinging and rattling in his hand. He has not heard the kitchen door close. He believes that Ida is still standing in the open door as he left her, unable for the moment to turn and face the meal that nobody will eat. But he cannot go back. He does not stop.

The rain has started again. He does not know when it began. The water is beading on his hat brim. It is raining steadily on all the darkening countryside.

Before long it is dark. For a while there is a grey mirage of twilight, which shifts and tilts over the surface of the water. And then that goes. The surface of the water becomes soft, absorbent, drawing the darkness into it, fusing with the air at some indeterminable distance from the shore.

He does not light the lantern, unable to bear the confinement of his vision. And he gives up the attempt to hurry. In daylight his compulsion was to run, as though if Annie were still alive, she would most likely be somewhere ahead of him. But in the dark his impulse is to go slowly and quietly, listening, afraid now that she is alive within his hearing and that he will go by without hearing her. He will save the lantern for when he needs it.

Before he has walked an hour he is wet to the waist, his matches sodden and useless in his pocket. The lantern swings in his hand, lifeless.

The difficulty of the going is enormous, the ground sloping, slick, and uneven. Feeling his way ahead, tensed against the darkness and his failure by now to have any idea where he is, he falls repeatedly. A number of times he slips down feet first into the water, clawing the mud with his free hand, and then has to crawl up the slope on all fours and take off his boots to pour the water out.

But difficulty and misery do not stop him. Again he knows with a furious concentration what he wants, what he is waiting for. In the dark the thought of the sound of Annie’s voice is clear to him. Now and then he believes he hears her, and he stops and answers:

“Annie, where are you, honey? Holler loud!”

And then the valley is silent. His own silence seems to grow large around him, and he hears the rain falling.

He has lost all sense of time and distance. He walks in a dimensionless landscape of which the only characteristic is that each successive footstep proves it solid—of which the only landmarks are the sounds of water flowing, of rain falling.

His mind seems to have broken in two. His judgment tells him, as it has been telling him all along, that Annie is dead, that there is almost no chance that he will even find her body. But with another less controllable, more urgent part of his mind, which seems not to understand or even to hear the voice of his judgment, he fixes on the thought of the sound of Annie’s voice calling to him over the water. And though he can hardly bear the smallness and loneliness of his voice he does not stop calling to her—at times calling in answer only to the silence, only because silence may mean anything.

He flounders through the fringe of briars and sumac at the lower edge of the woods and steps out into a cornfield. His boots are immediately clubbed with mud, but he feels lightened and goes more erect now that he is free of the woods. He goes on until the rain slackens and he sees house lights along the top of a ridge way off to his left, and he knows that he has turned out of the creek valley and come upstream along the river maybe half a mile. He turns, cursing the water and the darkness and himself, and starts back.

But now he makes no attempt at all to follow the edge of the water. Guessing at everything, with the fury of a man who has nothing to lose but time and is losing that, he turns away from the river at an angle that he estimates will take him back to the creekwater below the edge of the woods. He is running now, plunging through the darkness with as much abandon as if it were daylight, running into corn shocks and bushes and fences, cursing the darkness and everything in it, telling it to do its God-damnedest and be God-damned.

Sooner than he expected and without even the forethought of stopping, he cleaves like a diver into the briars at the rim of the woods, tangling his feet and throwing him forward—and like a diver he turns at the bottom of his fall, and makes his way out into the open again. He stands still, listening. Not hearing the water, he runs again, and before he has gone a hundred steps plunges in shoulder-deep, feeling, as his forward momentum decreases, the current begin to take him. He lunges, grabs to his left, and finds branches.

He goes up onto the mud and sits down and drains his boots.

He is shaking hard now from head to foot, though, blunted with fatigue as he is, he cannot determine the location of his misery, does not know if it is in his mind or in his body. Sitting on the mud, he can hear himself moaning at the end of every breath, and an old knowledge out of childhood tells him that he is trying not to cry. His clothes feel so heavy he cannot imagine that he will get up again.

But even while his mind frets at their weight, he is already getting up and starting into the woods. For a good many steps he cannot be sure whether he is still sitting down, dreaming of going, or going, dreaming of sitting down. With surprise he finds that the lantern is still hanging in the crook of his elbow.

He gropes and stumbles among the trees, no longer finding his way by conscious effort, repeatedly surprised, when his mind strays back to him, to find the water’s edge still beside him. But now his body begins to quit on him—to balk, flinching from the punishment he is putting it to—and it takes him several seconds or several minutes, he does not know how long, to get it moving again.

During one of these involuntary pauses, while he waits for his body to move on, the outward nightmare of that regionless darkness begins to be accompanied by another that is inward. He becomes aware of the bearing down of a question that must have been pursuing him all night. Without a boat or a light, what could he do to save Annie if she should, by whatever miracle it might be, answer him? And he damns himself, with a willingness that startles him, for turning the boat loose, for having taken no precautions to keep the matches dry.

Taking the matches out of his pocket, he finds that the heads are either already gone, or that they crumble as soon as he touches them to see if they are there. But he continues to take the dead sticks out of his pocket one at a time and to stand them upright inside the sweatband of his hat. It is as though his mind, which like his body has begun to work apart from his will, is gambling that absurdity will be more bearable than reasonableness. He corrects the alignment of the matchsticks, making it a good job, and puts his hat back on. Off his head, the hat has become cold. His legs wait to walk forward until it has grown warm and familiar-feeling again.

Now all his stops are tortured by imaginings, the actuality of which he can neither prove nor disprove until his body lurches forward again into the unchanged darkness. He seems to hear Annie calling to him, and he stops and sits down and calls back to her, assuring and encouraging, through the night, afraid that if he goes out of the sound of her voice for help he will never find her again. And when morning comes she is not there; there is no longer any answer to his calling.

Hearing her, he swims out to her, to help her hold on until morning. But the current is too strong. He feels himself carried away from her, her voice becoming fainter and fainter behind him.

He risks leaving her to find a boat. He goes, telling her to hold on and trust him, for he will surely come back and he will bring a boat. And he goes, his mind plunging like a man running to all the places he might find a boat. He finds one and comes back—to discover, in the daylight, that he has no idea where he was when he heard her calling, much less where she was.

“Annie! Oh, Annie! Holler loud, sweet baby!”

Now the sound of his voice calling her name makes him cry.

His grief is no longer that of a grown man, but that of a child lost in the dark. And in his abjection and misery his desire still knows the sound of her voice answering him:

“Here I am!”

To his longing for it, her voice has become stronger, superior to his own, assuring and calm.

“Here I am!”

As if at those words the flood of darkness and water would be cleft by a light like the sun shining on snow, new heaven and earth.

COMING TO REST

He does not know how long he has been standing still when he becomes aware of a heavy grey light in the sky. He is divided from the open, he sees, only by a thin scarf of the woods. The rain has stopped, and there is no wind. The silence has grown perfect around him. Through the screen of bare branches, divided from him still by several hundred yards of water, he begins to make out the lurching outlines of the big barn. He feels growing in him, as simply as the growth of daylight, the intention to go home and sleep.

But his body’s weight seems too great to move. He falls back into his stupor, oblivious as a tree among trees.

He is aware next of a flock of mallards feeding on the open water ahead of him. He believes that their flying down must have alerted him, and that his attention has been coming toward them slowly for some time, for they are settled now and calmly feeding, remote from the flurry of their arrival, scattered—forty or fifty of them—over the water. He is so close to them that in the grey, slowly strengthening light he can see not just the bold coloring of the drakes, but also the subtler patterning on the backs and wings of the nearer hen birds. He feels let into the depth of intimacy—the peacefulness of wild things among themselves. Their peacefulness stretches among them, holding them at rest on the shining surface of the water.

And so another knowledge seems to have reached him after a long approach: the water is standing still. The sound and movement of it have stopped—he wonders how long ago. A good way out a light, steady wind has begun to riffle the surface. And that is all. The debris of its violence has come to rest on it. The valley floor is covered no longer by a river but by a lake. The rise of the creek has been met by a rise in the river that has backed it and held it still.

The day, again, is heavily overcast, the clouds dragging low over the rim of the little valley. He reaches home, he judges, by sunup or a little after. All the way he has been hurried by the thought of his bed. But now as he comes abreast of the toolshed he turns out of the path, as if he understands, and has all along, that on this day he can bear anything better than comfort. He closes the door behind him and hangs up the lantern. He finds matches, shavings, kindling, and builds a fire in the forge, cranking the bellows until the brittle flame stands still and high, raking bits of coke into it as it burns stronger. As the room warms he sheds his wet clothes, and spreads them to dry. Hanging bundled from the rafters are several hundred-foot lengths of the light canvas used to cover the beds of tobacco plants in the spring. Now, having cleared a place on the workbench to lie down, he takes down one of these lengths of canvas, wraps himself in it, and sleeps.

A VIGIL

When he wakes he sees that a meal has been set out for him, kept warming on the coals. His wet clothes are gone, except for the hat and boots, and folded on the bench near him there is a change of dry ones. It must have been Ida who awakened him, shutting the door as she went out. Through the windows above the bench he can see the milk cows straying up away from the barn through the bushes on the hillside, and the two sows feeding busily at their trough. So she has done the morning chores. He knows that she did them last night too, after he was gone. He puts on the dry clothes, and eats hurriedly, standing at the bench before the windows. It has begun to rain again, though now it is hardly a rain at all but a steady drizzle; the sound of it striking the tin roof is only a whisper. Under it the surface of the water has turned softly opaque. He can no longer see the far shore. There is no trace of a doubt in him about what he is going to do, though at the same time there is no trace of a conviction of the usefulness of doing anything. He puts on his jacket and hat. The hat is still wet, heavy, stiff-feeling, and cold. The feel of it recalls to him his last night’s toil, the quick-grown familiarity of his ordeal. His vigil mends over the short interval of his sleep; it is as though he has never stopped. This time before going out he takes a burlap sack and capes it over his shoulders, pinning it at his throat with a nail. He opens the door to the sound of water dripping off the eaves and the branches of the oak—and to the sound, faint and sharp through the drizzle, of the church bell ringing at Port William.

In the step that carries him into the weather there is already established the pace that in three-quarters of an hour brings him out of the woods on the hillside above the house of a fisherman, his nearest neighbor on the upriver side of the creek mouth. Once he is clear of the trees he stops for the first time in his walk and studies his whereabouts, measuring in every direction the difference the flood has made. Here the slant of the hill drops from the lower edge of the woods to the top of the river bank, unbroken except for a tapering shelf of bottom just wide enough to provide a bed for the road, now under water. From the front porch of the house a row of stepping-stones goes down the slope and disappears into the flood. At the edge of the water below the house he can see two boats, the smaller one of which he recognizes as belonging to a doctor in Hargrave who uses it in the winter for duck hunting.

When he starts forward again, he goes toward the boats, letting the slant of the hill lengthen and hasten his stride. He has no thought of going to the house to ask for help. Help to do what? How would he bear to tell what it is that he no longer needs help for?

As he steps over into the doctor’s boat, he sees from the litter of sticks and dead leaves along the shore that the river is still rising. And then pushing hard on the oars, he feels the boat free itself. He pulls strongly, threading his way among the treetops, breaking out then into the open river. And now, finally, he looks back at the house. No one is in sight.

He sets the boat into the current, staying just outside the channel to keep his oars clear of the drift. His old anxiety of haste has come on him again and he continues to row hard, the blades of his oars driving him on ahead of the current. Approaching the creek mouth, he eases over into the dead water, and then enters the narrower valley, crossing the road a little upstream of the bridge.

All day he can see no more than a hundred yards in any direction. He rides on the detached floe of his vision, which has for edge now the brushy or muddy rim of one shore and now that of the other—which contains, besides himself and the boat, now and again the top of a bush or a tree drifting aimlessly out of the mist and back into it. And in all that day he does not call once; in all the hours of his moving over the face of the water he does not hear himself speak.

The flood crests toward the middle of the week. The rain slacks and stops. The weather clears. As he continues his watching over it, the water slowly gives way beneath him, yielding the land back to the light. And on the seventh morning—Saturday again, though he has lost all track of the days—when he wakens and looks out the window of the toolshed, he sees that the flood has withdrawn below the edge of the woods. Behind it the valley lies free of it, the mud streaked with the red sunlight of the early morning.

And he goes. He goes, it seems to him, through the opening at the end of his life as it was. To stay, now that the end has come, would be to plant and reap in the very earth of his ruin.

It seems to him that he has already been on his way for days, so that when he does step through the shed door, leaving it open behind him, he has not even the feeling of departure.

THE KEEPING OF THE PLACE

When the water came down Ida did not hear it. She was sitting beside the window in the kitchen with a pile of mending on her lap and pies for Sunday dinner in the oven. And she had the radio on. That Saturday, and the day before too, she had kept the radio on most of the day, waiting for the weather reports that were coming out of Louisville every half hour or so.

When the rain stopped after dinner, she got Annie into her wraps and sent her out to play, warning her to keep her feet dry and stay out of the mud, and then snapped the radio on again before settling into her afternoon’s work. She left it going, paying little mind to it except when the businesslike voices of the news or the weather came over it, while she washed and put away the dishes, went to the cellar for jars of berries to put into the pies, made the pies and put them into the oven, went around the house to see about Annie, and saw her sitting with Speck on the swinging bridge—and then at last sat down to her mending.

When the radio stopped in midword a few minutes later, she got up and tried the light switch. She sat down again and took up her work, saying to herself that a tree surely must have blown down on the wire. That sometimes happened, she knew, though it never had happened since the line had come to them. But it occurred to her suddenly that there had been no wind. The thought frightened her, she did not know why. She sat forward in the chair for a moment, her hands still, listening. She got up and started to the front of the house. She was thinking “Uh-oh, uh-oh.” She would remember that.

Before she got to the window, of course, it had already happened.

She stood at the window for a good many seconds, as if waiting to see what she would do next, not able to look a second time at the bare grove where the bridge had been. And then she ran to the telephone, put the receiver to her ear, found it dead, and hurried on into the kitchen.

Wondering at herself, she seemed to watch as she went to the stove and opened the oven and saw that the pies were cooking well and shut the oven. And then, running, she went out the back door and across the porch and around the house and down the path toward the toolshed, below which Gideon had just stepped into the boat.

“Gideon! Where is she?”

But she knew.

“Where’s Annie?”

But Gideon did not answer. He stood in the boat, as the current caught it and began to turn it slowly, looking back at her, and then turning away as the boat turned.

She watched him go away on the current—trusting him to it, as she had trusted him to other absences, believing that he would bear the worst that could happen to him and come back. Maybe she even hoped he would bring the child back—though she knew what they were up against, she had seen, and the dirge in her mind never stopped.

She turned and started back up the slope toward the house. She went slowly, conscious of the weight of her body lifted stride after stride. In the kitchen she sat down in her chair, moving her sewing basket out of the seat onto the floor. She sat without moving, only looking now and again at the clock.

When the time came she got up and took the pies out of the oven. She seemed to regain something then, and she did not stop. She built up the fire in the stove and began to prepare supper. After that one lapse when it seemed that she kept living only because she could not easily break the habit, she began again her daily ordering and keeping of the place.

When Gideon came back at dusk, she had the supper ready except for the biscuits, which she had waited to put into the oven until he came, as she always did. But he would not eat, and she stood in the door and watched him go back around the corner of the house. When he was gone, seeing that it was getting dark, she went up the back stairs to the room over the kitchen, and brought down an oil lamp. She took it out to the barrel and filled it, carried it into the kitchen and wiped it clean, rubbing the inside of the chimney with a page of newspaper, and lighted it. And then, moving the food off the fire onto the other end of the stove where it would stay warm, she put on the jacket again and started to the barn, carrying the lamp in one hand and the milk bucket in the other. Though knocked off its footing at the lower end and half flooded, the barn, she thought, would stand. The pens and stalls at the upper end were dry. She would not worry about it yet. She milked the cows, fed and cared for the stock, and shut the barn.

When she returned to the kitchen she set a place at the table and made herself eat a little of everything she had cooked, and washed the dishes and put them away. She sat down in the chair again, with the lamp on the edge of the table beside her, and took up her sewing. Gideon would be back before long, she thought, and she would have to keep the light on until he came.

He did not come. She got up now and then and went around the house on the chance that she would see his lantern or hear him, but the darkness was unbroken all around, and it was quiet except for the water running and the rain falling. And she went back and took up her work. She seemed somehow to have gained an extraordinary control over her mind. When she went out into the yard to watch for Gideon, she seemed to know to the second how long she could stand it, to know to the second when to turn, as if away from the sound of her own crying, and come back into the lighted kitchen, where she would force her attention back to the sewing. It was Gideon’s absence that occupied her. She thought about it, speaking to herself about it, as though it was the same as his other absences and this night the same as other nights: “He’ll be along. He won’t want to be too late.” And then she would say to herself: “Yes, he’s probably on his way. He may be coming up by the barn right now.” And there was also a limit to how much she could stand of that, and she would have to get up and draw the coat around her and go out again.

And that other absence seemed still to lie somewhere ahead of her, a place she had not yet come to.

Later, with the light still burning beside her, she fell asleep.

CHANGED

She woke up cold. The lamp flame was pale in the full daylight. The fire in the stove had gone out. Waking she said, “Gideon?” From the sound of her voice in the unwakened room, not answered, she knew, with the same cunning she had had the night before, that her next utterance, if she kept sitting there, would not be so articulate as a word. She got up and put on the old coat and built a fire and, taking the milk bucket, started to the barn.

She saw the fire-heat rising out of the chimney of the toolshed. She walked around and looked through the window at Gideon’s face. He lay there, wound in the soiled canvas, his arm under his head. She would have held him then. But glad of his sleep, she left him to it. She hurried through the work at the barn, giving it, she said to herself, “a lick and a promise.” Back at the house, she made a breakfast for Gideon, wrapped the change of clothes in a newspaper, carried those things down to him, and, gathering up his wet clothes, slipped out again, hoping he would wake up presently and eat and go back to sleep.

When she went down to the woodpile an hour later, he was gone. After she filled the woodbox, she went to the toolshed again, and carried the empty dishes up to the house and washed them. She got through that day as she had got through the night before, and as she would get through the next five. She washed Gideon’s muddied clothes and ironed them, kept the house, prepared the meals and had them ready at the usual times; made work for herself, made herself tired; slept, gratefully, when she had become tired enough.

Like Gideon, she did not, during that week, go back to their bed to sleep, but kept to the rocking chair in the kitchen, bringing down a quilt from a trunk in the back room to wrap around her.

As Gideon went back and forth in his watching, she watched him, aware of his trouble more clearly then, perhaps, than she was aware of her own. He was, it seemed to her, straining to survive the death of their child, as she had once strained to survive the birth. And so she did not approach him, except to meet him at the edge of the water with food.

When she woke on the Saturday morning at the end of the flood, a brilliant pool of sunshine lay across the kitchen floor. She sat still for a while, wrapped in the old quilt in the rocking chair, and looked at the light. It changed her. Before she moved at all, she understood that she was no longer the same. The weather and the place, changing, had changed her.

She got up and folded the quilt and made the fire and prepared to go to the barn. When she stepped out the door a steady drying wind blew against her, coming from the same direction as the light. Around her on the open slopes, above the line of the flood, she could see the faint green of new grass. Below the end of the barn, tilted at what last night had been the shoreline, was the boat. Around it the fields lay free of the flood and empty.

And now, looking over into the bottom on the far side of the creek, she sees Gideon’s tracks going away.

She sets her buckets down and goes back to the kitchen. She takes off the coat and hangs it over the back of a chair. She goes through the hall door and down the hall and through the other door into the sitting room. She opens the stair door and starts up. She walks in great haste, hurrying ahead of the oncoming of her pain. She reaches the top of the stairs and goes through the door into Annie’s room. Closing the door, she stands just inside it a moment, looking around her. It is a wide low room, the ceiling taking the slant of the roof. There are windows in three of the walls, and now the strong morning light floods into it. The floor is littered with playthings. She walks over to a chair near the bed and, holding to the back of it, lets herself down onto her knees beside it. Her outcry begins deep in her, and rises, and breaks out.

At last the sound of her weeping leaves her more easily, and then it quits. She grows quiet, letting her head rest on the seat of the chair. And then, lightened, able again, she gets up, and straightens the room, and leaves it.

Chapter 8

SOMETHING AIN’T RIGHT

Mat hears the knocking before he is awake. The sound is repeated at regular intervals, politely quiet, but insistent. And then Margaret touches his shoulder.

“Mat, there’s somebody at the back door.”

He gets up, pulls his pants on over his nightshirt, and goes through the hall to the kitchen without turning on the light.

Burley Coulter is standing on the porch, wearing a pair of earmuffs under his old felt hat, his work jacket opened below the two top buttons and his hands shoved for warmth under the bib of his overalls. Back of him, the east has begun to brighten with the premonition of sunup. A steady east wind blows into the doorway, sharp with the night chill.

“Mat, I’m sorry to wake you up.”

“That’s all right, Burley. Come in. Come on in here where it’s warm.”

Burley begins pulling off his boots, using the doorstep as a bootjack.

“Don’t worry about that.”

He pulls them off anyway, and steps into the kitchen in his socks. “But I figured you’d be getting up pretty soon, anyhow.”

“Yes. The night’s about over.”

Mat goes to the switch beside the hall door and turns on the light. “What’s the trouble, Burley?” And it was not until he heard himself speak those words that it dawned on him that something must be wrong.

“Well, Mat, what I’ve come about really ain’t any of my business. I think it probably ain’t any of yours either, really. But the reason I come is that if it ain’t our business then it probably won’t be anybody’s.”

Mat is clear awake and listening, but he raises his hand to stop Burley, and beckons him to a chair. They move over to the table and pull out chairs, and Burley goes on:

“Well, about the middle of yesterday afternoon, it was beginning to look like the weather was going to dry out finally, and I went over to Jarrat’s, thinking maybe he’d want to plan a little work. We hadn’t much more than got set down to talk when this horn started blowing down on the river road. I thought at first somebody must have had a wreck and stuck the horn. But then, after a good while it stopped and then started in again. We didn’t know what to think. But since nobody lives close to the road along that stretch, and nobody has been passing over it during the high water, we figured it was sort of up to us.

“So we dropped down through the woods on the hillside pretty straight to where the sound was coming from, and a good while before we got down to it we could hear a motor running full-throttle underneath the sound of the horn. And then when we got down in sight of the road we could see this bright red Ford sort of leaning over the edge of the road into the ditch, all covered with radio aerials and foxtails and mudflaps and one thing and another until it looked like a carnival booth. Whoever was driving it had it running as hard as it would go, the rubber stinking and the blue smoke blowing and the mud spraying twenty feet behind the left hind wheel. And there was an old woman the size of a cow standing above it on the top of the road bank, with her fists doubled up on her hips, just looking at it.

“It wasn’t the sort of situation you’d just walk into. And we stopped in the bushes at the edge of the road to see if we knew who it was, and to try to understand if we could what in the world was going on. The commotion was just a little hard to see through. We wasn’t hoping to see through it to anything reasonable, but did hope for something recognizable.

“I’m telling you this from the beginning because I want you to know how I come to be meddling in it.”

“Go on,” Mat says. “Tell it all to me.”

“Well, I didn’t have any trouble recognizing the woman. She was a sister to Gideon Crop’s wife’s mother. Lizzie Kate Skinner. Used to be married to old man Albert Skinner in town here. You know the one I mean, the one they used to call Meathouse to her back. Big rough brass-mouthed woman. Spent half her life trompling Albert into his grave, and then married an old fellow by the name of Greatlow down on the other side of Hargrave. Well, that’s who it was was driving. I knew him along back before he married her. He was a pretty tolerable decent sort of fellow, as big as a bull himself, but awfully quiet and shy, and not too well stocked with brains. A bachelor all his life, for sixty or sixty-five years, and had a little farm, a good one, which is how come her to fall in love with him.

“What had happened, as near as we could see, was they’d come down the hill from here and hit that layer of wet mud that the high water put down on the road, and of course after that couldn’t either guide the car or stop it. And had gone scooting over into the ditch. And there they were. And the old man hadn’t quit driving yet. The old woman had got out and up onto high ground, to save her life, I reckon. And the old man, I reckon, afraid she’d kill him if he ever once admitted he was stuck, was keeping on doing his level damnedest.

“Me and Jarrat waded across the mud to the other side of the road. We just sort of nodded and tipped our hats to the old woman, and eased on around the front end of the car, and then along the slope of the bank to the door on old man Greatlow’s side. He was still driving right on, blowing the horn in great long bleats. The car was just shaking and bouncing, but aside from that wasn’t moving. The window was streaked with two or three slashes of tobacco juice, where he’d got confused and tried to spit it out while it was shut. I had to lean close to get much of a look at him. And there he sat, both hands gripped onto the wheel, staring straight out the windshield, pouring the gas to her like Casey Jones. He had the door locked.

“I leaned down to the glass and hollered: ‘Whoa there, Mr. Greatlow! Hello!’ And then I knocked on the door.

“He never let up or turned his head, or gave any other sign.

“Finally I leaned over the windshield and waved and hollered, and directly he saw me. ‘Whoa!’ I said. And I went to his window again and tried to signal to him to stop the racket. He rolled the window down, and spit over my shoulder and hollered ‘What?’ and kept that old car bucking right on.

“I hollered to him: ‘Shut that engine off. We’re going to try to help you a little!’

“He seemed glad enough to do that, and he shut the racket down and scooted across the seat and got out. The door on his side was leaning too far over against the bank to open enough. And once he was out he didn’t pay any more attention to me or Jarrat. The only one he was thinking about was the woman. He sort of backed out into the middle of the road, looking toward her but not at her, with his hand up. ‘It’s all right now, Lizzie. I’ll get it out. Just let me alone, and give me a little time. And I’ll get the son of a bitch out of there. The God-damned road department.’

“And Aunt Meathouse stood there on the top of the bank, sort of clouding up over him, like she was still waiting after six years for him to do or say something sensible.

“Well, I seen that wouldn’t do, so I walked up the bank and raised my hat, and said, ‘Where was it you all was aiming to get to, ma’am?’”

The sky has whitened. The first stain of the coming sunrise lies on the horizon. While Burley has been talking the two of them have turned to the window.

“It’s going to be clear again,” Burley says.

“Yes. Another good one,” Mat says. “Well, go on. You asked where she was trying to go.”

Burley pushes his hat off his forehead, and settles it, and puts his hand back in his pocket. “That’s right. Sort of by way of polite conversation I asked her where they were going.

“Well, I found out. That is, I sort of gathered it in from among a good many strong statements about what old man Greatlow wasn’t much good at, driving and so on. What it come down to is that it had been something better than a week since she’d talked to Ida Crop on the telephone, which she says she usually does every day or so because, with Ida’s mother and daddy dead, she feels called on to take some interest. It’s a worry to her and all, but she does it. Well, last Saturday, she said, she tried to get Ida and couldn’t—it wouldn’t ring. She called the operator, and the operator told her the line was out. She said she knew there wasn’t much chance of getting into that creek bottom on account of the high water. So she called the phone company and told them the whole story, and told them they’d have to get down there and fix that line, and I can’t remember all the strong statements she did make to them about it. Well, of course the phone company couldn’t get in there any better than she could. And so the line stayed dead, and so on and so on. And she spent the week worrying about Ida.

“And so when the river began to fall, she didn’t waste any time getting the old man into that beautiful automobile that her son had fixed up, looked like, to haul movie actresses in, and then left with them when he went to the Navy. And they’d been on the way since sometime in the morning. The old man surely hadn’t driven anything since a Model A, and he poked along, fumbling at it, scared to death—and that old woman, I know, mouthing at him every foot of the way. They had to give up the river road about a mile out of Hargrave, and double back and come by the hill roads and the ridges. And, finally, when they got here in town they somehow thought they’d made it—and went rolling into the mess we’d found them in.

“I felt sorry for them, even her. She was sort of licked, for once, and it improved her. Or, anyhow, I got the feeling—which I never had before about her—that she was letting me live because she wanted me to.

“While she was talking he’d been standing down in the road, making a show of studying the situation. And when I stepped down off the bank I said, ‘Well, Mr. Greatlow, what do you think about it?’

“And he said, ‘A man build a thing like this, this day and time, and call it a road. It’s a shame.’

“I’d seen about all I needed to see, and knew Jarrat had. So I said, ‘Well, hold on, old chap. We’ll have to go get a team to pull you out.’

“We started back up the hill toward Jarrat’s house, and then Jarrat said, ‘Second thought, you’d better go get your team too.’ So I branched off to my barn. We got the teams geared up, and threw the singletrees and doubletrees and log chains and some digging tools onto Jarrat’s sled. And when we got back they were still standing there just like we’d left them. As we stopped the teams, just as cheerful as I could I said: ‘Well, now, folks, just settle back, just be at ease. We’ll have you on your way in about five minutes.’

“It took forty-five. It was a hard enough pull, no more purchase than the mules could get on that mud. But to make it worse, it took Jarrat and me both to handle the teams, and we didn’t have any choice but to let old man Greatlow handle the car.

“Jarrat fastened the log chains to the back bumper and hitched the teams one ahead of the other, and I dug behind the buried wheel so as to give it a way out. We got the old man back into the car and got it started, and Jarrat told him how, when we gave him the word, to give it just a little gas and let it pull along with us. We let the mules ease up over that slick footing into the slack of the chain. And then we called on them, and they tightened, and we called on old man Greatlow, and he jerked the clutch out and poured on the gas, and went to drilling away in low gear just like he’d done before. Pulling against us! And throwing mud all over us.

“We got the mules stopped, and got old man Greatlow stopped, and Jarrat put the gearshift into reverse for him, and told him not to give it too much gas, just let it pull easy. And we tried it again, and he mashed the gas pedal down to the floor again as if anything would save him that would.

“ ‘Whoa!’ Jarrat said. And then he said to me: ‘He’s going to run clean over us if we do pull him loose.’

“So we stopped him again and told him we thought it’d be best if he just sat there and held the wheel the way we showed him, and let the mules do all the pulling. We called on the mules again, and in four or five tries finally pulled him out of the ditch and up onto the road.

“We unhooked the chain and drove the teams out of the way, and Jarrat told him: ‘Go back easy, now. You’re still on mud. Go slow.’

“And the old man started her up, and shoved her into second instead of reverse, and slipped her right back into the same hole, just like shutting a drawer.

“Well sir, I thought that old woman would die. Thought she’d fly all to pieces like a dropped clock. You could see that he’d done just exactly what she had thought he’d do, and she felt justified—but still it made her mad.

“So I sung out to him, like I’d never looked at a better job of driving, ‘That’s the time, old chap! Now you talking! Now you got her in shape so we can get her out!’ For some reason or another that headed her off. It looked like, then, she turned him over to us. She stuck her chin up and turned her back.

“The second time we didn’t take any chances. We made him hold the wheel straight, and drug him past the mud, and got him out, and Jarrat got in and turned the car around, and we loaded them both back in and told them to start on home so they’d get there before dark and told them the shorter way to go.”

Margaret comes into the kitchen, and Burley hushes and stands and takes off his hat.

“Good morning, Mrs. Feltner.”

“Why, hello, Burley. I didn’t know it was you. You’re out early.”

“Yes ma’am, I know it’s a mighty bad time of day to come knocking on your door.”

“Oh, don’t mind that. Any other time, we’d already be up. The wet weather made us lazy.”

“Ain’t it everybody?” Burley says.

And then Nettie Banion opens the back door and comes in. Everybody says good morning again, and what a fine one; and after that the women begin preparing breakfast. Burley moves to another chair to be less in their way.

“Well, Mat, I never gave another thought to what the old woman had said about not hearing from the Crops until I’d left Jarrat and had gone home. And then, while I was doing my night work at the barn, it got to worrying me. And I said, well, I’d go back over the hill as quick as I got a chance and see for myself how they’d made out. And then I’d see if I could get word to old Mrs. Greatlow, since I’d seen that she sure enough was worried. And, to tell the truth, I was sort of touched to think of Ida Crop’s not having anybody outside their little valley to worry about her except that drastic old aunt. But by the time I’d finished my work it was getting on toward night, and I said I’d go first thing in the morning. I put the thought aside then, and fixed a little supper and ate and radioed until I got sleepy and went to bed.

“And, it must have been two-thirty or three o’clock this morning, I commenced to hear that horn again. And I says to myself, ‘Well, Burley, your dreams are getting too loud to sleep with.’ I rolled over and tried it again and it didn’t stop, and it come to me then that I was hearing it. And I says, ‘Well, durned if the luck ain’t picked you out.’ After I’d listened a while, I could tell it was stuck sure enough this time, wasn’t anybody blowing it that way on purpose. I had the suspicion from the first that it was the same horn. But I somehow hated to admit it.

“I was out of bed by that time and had the light on and was climbing into my clothes, and hurrying. I went down and snatched up the lantern and lit it and started out. And hadn’t more than made it to the yard gate before I realized I didn’t have any idea at all which direction I ought to be going. That horn seemed to be bawling from every direction at once, the air just ringing with it. My head was full of it, and it seemed to be piling up around me, getting louder all the time.

“Figuring any direction was more likely than none, I took off running down the hill, because it was easier, I reckon, and into the woods. And then the sound began to fade out. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve found out something.’ And I turned around and started back up the hill. As I broke out of the woods I seen a light at Jarrat’s, and then his lantern coming across the field toward my house. I swung my lantern and he answered with his, and we met and went on together. When we climbed over into the lane at the top of the ridge we struck a fresh car track.

“Well, you know that old lane used to go on out the ridge and down the branch, and struck the creek road there opposite Gideon Crop’s house. But I don’t reckon anybody’s used it beyond my gate for twenty-five or thirty years. And that’s where the car had gone. It had a sort of running start by the time it hit the unused part of the road, and it went down the slope of the ridge, spinning and slipping, riding down the weeds and bushes as it went, and then picked up speed where the road turned down into the first hollow, and went over the bank and wedged itself finally into a kind of jungle of undergrowth and grapevines and briars at the bottom of the slant. By the time we’d tracked it into that hollow, we could hear the engine running again just the way we had before. But even after that it took us a while to find it, buried in all that brush, and us with no better lights than we had. We finally caught the shine of one of the taillights and sort of dug our way in to it. And there they were.

“Only this time they were both still in the car. They were just sitting there, looking straight ahead, sort of hopeless and forlorn. And the old man was pouring the gas to it again, like it was that or else. Where the difference was, was with her. Instead of being sort of outside the situation, and mad about it, this time she seemed to be in it as deep as he was, just as puzzled and beat.

“We had to holler and whoop and beat on the roof for it seemed like five minutes before we could get them to see us and unlock the doors and let us help them get out. Which took some doing, the car was so wedged in among the bushes and vines, and at that we couldn’t open but one door. We got them out and got the engine shut off, and then opened the hood to see if we could stop the horn.

“It was like the old man hadn’t heard the horn, or paid any attention to it, until we did that. All of a sudden it just made him nervous all over. He hadn’t listened to it a second before he’d had every bit of it he could take. And he reached in where the motor is and began pulling the wires loose. You never saw anything like it. A man as big and stout as he is, all of a sudden tormented and mad as he could be, pulling that wiring up with his hands like it was grass, and the sparks and blue fire shooting all over the place, and the horn blowing right on like it was coming down out of the sky. There wasn’t a thing for Jarrat and me to do but hold the lanterns up and stand back. Well, he tore out every wire he could lay his hands to, and some of the other pieces besides, and the horn still kept on. And then he caught hold of one of the battery cables and picked the battery up and went to shaking it like a dog would shake a rat—the blue sparks still flashing and snapping—and finally jerked the fastening loose. That stopped the horn, and stopped him too. He quieted right down, then, and just stood there. And so did the rest of us, while the songbirds and mosquitoes and things flew out of our ears and off into the woods. It was so quiet you could hear yourself breathe.

“ ‘Well, Mr. Greatlow,’ I said, ‘this may not be where you was going, but you’ve done got here.’

“ ‘Hanh?’ he said.

“And then he looked back at what the lantern showed of the sort of tunnel he’d bored coming down. ‘The God-damned government,’ he said. ‘Build a thing like this, this day and time, and call it a road.’

“And for a while after that we just kept on standing there in the quiet, like maybe if we waited around it would finally begin making sense to somebody. And it was a right remarkable scene—all of us standing there, listening to the racket flying away, everybody standing sort of alone, all about the same distance apart, all facing the automobile but not looking exactly at it—like it was one of them things you ain’t supposed to admit you know as long as there’s a lady present. And the old woman was standing just where we’d helped her to, her mouth all puckered out like Whistler’s mother. And I said to myself, ‘She’s going to kill him or she’s going to cry.’ Well sir, directly she began to cry.

“About the time she started that, and maybe because of it, it hit me what a comical scene it was, and I began to get tickled. And at the same time I knew that that old woman standing off there by herself, crying, was about the saddest thing ever I seen. She wasn’t asking for any comfort because she never had and didn’t know how, and probably suspicioned that she might not deserve any. And her old husband so hard rode that he couldn’t have gone to her even if he’d wanted to.

“I went to her then, and consoled her the best I could—told her we’d get them home all right, and everything would be fine, and so on. And then I says, ‘Ma’am, how in the world come you all to be trying this road? Mistook your directions, I reckon.’

“But that wasn’t what they’d done. She calmed down before long and told me.

“After we got them unstuck in the afternoon, they went on back to Hargrave by the way we told them to go, and got there about dark. They stopped at the little store this side of the bridge to get some groceries, and the storekeeper tells them, first thing, that Gideon Crop had been in there about the middle of the afternoon. Said he had about a week’s growth of beard and looked like he’d been dug up out of the mud. And acted to the storekeeper like he never saw him before. Just bought some cheese and crackers, and cashed a check for four dollars, and carried his eats out in a paper sack.

“Well, the old woman said she knew then that something wasn’t right. That’s the way she kept putting it: ‘There’s something ain’t right. Lord, I know it.’ So she didn’t do a thing but get back in the car and make the old man turn around and head back up here. They went to Roger Merchant’s first. But Mr. Merchant, he”—and here Burley hesitates, and looks at Margaret—“wasn’t in no shape to receive company.”

“Drunk,” Mat says.

Burley nods. “So when the Greatlows knocked and hollered at the back door, nobody came. The light was on inside and they could hear Roger talking—to himself, I reckon—but they couldn’t raise him. They gave up there finally, and went on over the hill as far as they could go in the car, and then tried to get over to the Crops’ house on foot. Of course there wasn’t any chance of that. They had nearly a mile to go in the mud and the creek to cross, and it still running deep, and they never even had a light. They sort of felt their way along for a while, and finally admitted it was hopeless, and turned back. And then they see that they ought to have left the car lights on because it took them a good while, creeping along the way they had to in the dark, to find the car. They got to it, finally, and got it turned around and started back up the hill—and were just ready to give up and go home again when the old woman remembered the road that used to go down from our place. She figured that if they could get to the foot of the hill there she would at least be in calling distance of the house. So she decided to try it. She hadn’t been down that road since she was young, but she thought that in all that time it surely was bound to have got better, not worse.”

“Burley,” Margaret says, “we’re fixing breakfast for you. You’ll eat with us, won’t you?”

“Why, yes ma’am, Mrs. Feltner. Now that you’ve asked me, I reckon I will.”

“Go on,” Mat says.

“So, anyhow, we decided that Jarrat would take the old people home in the truck, and we’d let them know how Ida was as soon as we could find out. Jarrat started off ahead to get the truck, and I stayed back with the Greatlows, sort of helping the old woman up the climb. Jarrat had the truck waiting at my gate when we got there, and I helped them in.

“I’d already promised myself to go right on down to the Crops’. I hadn’t said so, but seemed to me I had to agree with the old woman—something ain’t right down there.

“Well, the more I thought about it, the more sure I got that they’re in some kind of trouble, and the more I sort of hung back from the thought of walking into it by myself, to tell you the truth. And then I thought of you, Mat, and decided I’d ask you. I know it’s Sunday and all, but would you mind?”

NEVER WHAT IT WAS

At the bottom of the hill, just above the high-water line, Mat pulls the truck to the side of the road, and they get out. Before them in the sediment of the flood is the scrawl of the Greatlows’ first catastrophe and rescue. Where it is broken by the clutter of tracks, the mud has begun to dry.

To avoid the mud as long as possible, they walk along the face of the hill just above what was the shoreline a few days ago. At their feet, the spring has made its small beginnings: narrow grassblades spiking out of their dead sheaths, spring beauties, a few white flowers of bloodroot. The sunlight again becomes a dwelling place. The life of the ground has begun its rise. And Mat walks, thinking, a kind of singing and crying pressing in his throat: “Yes. It has come again.”

They walk as quietly as hunters over the soft ground along the slope as it turns from the river valley into the valley of the creek. The sun is well up now, the warmth of it pressing their heads and shoulders. On the hillside around them there is still that stain of green. In town Uncle Stanley Gibbs is ringing the church bell.

The brush thickens on the slope ahead of them, and to avoid it they turn down the hillside to the creek road. Their feet now weighted with mud, they go more slowly, laboring to walk. Before they have gone many steps, they come to the tracks of a man going out. The tracks turn out of the road just ahead of them, go up the bank, and disappear among the bushes on the hillside.

“They must be Gideon’s,” Burley says. “He went out the same way we’ve come in.”

“And he hasn’t come back. At least not by the same way.”

They are coming toward the upper end of the woods in the bottom, the road going along the edge of the valley floor. They seem to have come, not back into the winter, but beyond any season. Around them everything has been flowed over, coated with mud. A few days ago the water stood higher than their heads where they are walking now, and they do not forget it.

They come out of the woods and Burley stops suddenly and points to the careening barn.

But the barn isn’t all. Fences have been pushed over and weighted with drift. A great fan of rocks and gravel has been thrown out onto the cropland. Along the banks of the creek are several notches where big trees were torn out by the roots.

“Lord, she was rolling when she hit here.”

“Awful,” Burley says. “Awful. Look at them fences. Look at them rocks. It’ll never be what it was.”

The road crosses a rise of the ground, and from the top they can see the long curve of tracks swinging up past the house to the ford of the creek and back down to the road. Deep, brimming with shadow, they are the only marks.

“They’re Gideon’s all right,” Burley says.

“He couldn’t come out by the bridge,” Mat says. “It’s gone. Look yonder.” He points to where the bridge hangs snarled in the tree branches.

“And we can’t get in by it, either, come to think of it. We can cross at the ford, I reckon, the way he did.”

They leave the road, walking beside the old tracks, around the openings of which a dry crust has begun to form. The going becomes harder now. They sink to their ankles at each step, and then, as they heave the other foot out of the mud, sink deeper. Every step requires a combination of main strength and delicate balance.

But they don’t stop again until they come to the ford. There where the high banks have been tapered back to let the road across, they stand a moment looking at the water still running strong, and then they look at each other and laugh.

“Nosir,” Burley says, “we ain’t going to wade that in boots.”

Each dreads it more than he wants to admit, and they stand there another minute, a little fidgety, looking up and down the creek, wishing for a bridge. And then they pull off their boots and socks and britches, and wade the thigh-deep icy stream.

When they knock at the back door, nobody answers. They knock and wait, and knock and wait.

They have just turned to start off the porch when Ida comes around the corner of the house, carrying a load of stovewood and an axe.

She says, “Hello, Mr. Feltner. Hello, Mr. Coulter. How’re you all?” And steps up onto the porch, leaning the axe against one of the posts.

“Fine, thank you,” Burley says. “Better weather, ain’t it?”

Mat says, “We thought we’d stop by to see how you made it through the flood. Gideon ain’t here, is he?”

“No sir, he ain’t.” And, when they seem to wait for her to say something more: “He went off. I ain’t expecting him before supper.”

“Well,” Burley says, “that old creek surely did come out romping and stomping.”

“Yes,” she says, nodding, “it did.”

Mat says, “I usually see Annie before I see you, Ida. Where’s she?”

She hesitates, seems to brace herself between the porch floor and the load of wood; her eyes brim with tears. But her voice, when it comes, is steady and quiet:

“It drownded her. You seen the bridge. Well, she was on it when it tore out.”

For a few seconds they stand, all three of them, as if startled by a sudden loud sound in the distance. And then Ida turns and looks directly at them and smiles, her eyes still blurred by the unfallen tears.

“Lord,” she says, “I’m letting you stand out here like I haven’t got any manners at all. Come in and sit down. I know you’re tired. I know you must have had to walk nearly the whole way. And through that mud.”

She opens the door and goes ahead of them into the kitchen. As she builds the fire, she begins her story: “I was sewing. In that rocking chair right there by you, Mr. Feltner. And all of a sudden the radio up and quit.” And before long she interrupts herself: “I know you all would like some coffee.” And without waiting to let them answer, she fills the coffee pot and sets it on the stove. And then she resumes, interrupting again, when the coffee is made, to fill their cups. She does not sit down with them, but stands, facing them, sideways to the stove, her right hand now and then, absently, reaching for the handle of the coffee pot, which she takes up twice again to refill first Burley’s cup and then Mat’s. She never once falters in her telling. Nor by her tone does she seem to expect help or consolation, as though she simply takes for granted that the time has long gone when she could have been either helped or consoled.

When she has finished, Mat says, “Ida, you oughtn’t to be down here by yourself. Why don’t you come up and stay with us—for a few days anyhow? It wouldn’t put us to a bit of trouble.”

She shakes her head. “I’m much obliged to you, Mr. Feltner. But I got this stock here to look after, and these chickens, and them old cows to milk.”

Mat does not insist. “Well, if you get to wanting to come, you come. We’d be glad. Margaret would be.” He hesitates. “Do you reckon it could be a good while before Gideon gets back?”

“Mr. Feltner,” she says, “he’ll be back. I know if a man’s going to make a crop he ought to be here getting ready. But I’ll see to things.”

But her next words are borne on a pride that divides her from them:

“Of course, that’s up to Mr. Merchant. It’s his place.”

“No,” Mat says, “That’s one thing I wouldn’t worry about.”

She nods, and then smiles. By another change of voice, she again makes them her guests: “You all have another cup of coffee.”

But Mat gets up. “We’ll have to get on. We want to go down and look at the barn before we leave.”

They all go out together to the barn. They go from one upright to another, studying the sprung framing, now and again pointing to a burst mortise or a loosened brace.

“Well,” Burley says finally, “she looks like she’s sort of got herself propped up. She might stand up in this shape for a long time.”

“Yes,” Mat says, “but, still, I wouldn’t trust her too long to a hard wind. She’ll either have to be straightened back, or torn the rest of the way down.”

They go out. At the house Ida thanks them and leaves them.

They wade the creek again, and start toward the river road.

SOME CLEANING UP

It is past the middle of the morning by the time they get to the truck and start back up the hill. As they approach the entrance to the Coulter lane, Mat says, “I’m going out to Roger’s. But there’s no use in your going, unless you want to.”

“Well, I ain’t got anything better to do.”

At Roger’s, as they expected, there is no one in sight. The only sound, after Mat shuts the motor off, is a loose sheet of tin on the barn roof grating in the wind. As they come up the slope of the yard a groundhog, sitting erect on his dirt mound at the corner of the front porch, tumbles into his hole.

As they turn the corner of the house and come in sight of the back porch, Roger’s half-dozen old Dominecker hens come running toward them.

“Hungry,” Mat says.

They go on to the back door. They shoo the hens out of the way, and the ragged old birds trot out to the limits of their fear and then come back like so many yo-yos.

Mat knocks, and they listen, and he knocks again, louder.

“Roger!”

No answer. They stand there a moment, the hens watching them, the flap of loose tin grating on the eave of the barn.

Mat turns the knob and gives the door a shove, expecting it to be locked; but it flies open, banging against a chair. The hens rush in and begin pecking at the corn piled against the chimney.

Roger is lying in the big four-poster bed, wearing shirt and tie and coat and hat, generously covered with quilts, his head propped against the bare headboard—sound asleep, his bottle propped beside him, a large briar pipe lying extinguished on his chest. That he has escaped burning himself up is owed, according to some, only to the Lord’s noted solicitude for drunkards and fools.

Mat and Burley stand outside the door, looking in, a little startled by the sight of what they had expected to see. And then, as if by a sudden exhalation of the old room, they are hit by the stench of it.

“Pew!” Burley says, “Good God!”

“I reckon you can see now where you made your mistake,” Mat tells him. “You’d have found things smelling a good deal better at your place.”

“I will admit,” Burley says, “them old hens have got a good deal better stomach than I do.”

Breathing as little as they can, they go into the cluttered room. They plunge through the wrangle of furniture and tools to the windows—which come open with considerable difficulty, and once opened won’t stay. Through all the rattling and banging Roger sleeps with the composure of a funeral effigy, emitting a series of remarkably lively snores. Having breathed the corrupted air as long as possible, they hurry back outside. Searching the yard, they pick up sticks to prop the sashes and plunge in again.

They come out this time ahead of the wind, which comes pouring through the opened windows behind them, and they stand in the yard to let it work.

“Let her blow. Let her breathe.”

They stand a while and let her breathe, and then Mat says, “Well, do you want to see if we can wake him up?”

They drive the chickens out and toss several ears of corn into the yard to keep them busy, and go over to the bed. Mat leans and taps the old man on the shoulder.

“Roger.”

Not a stir.

“Wake up, Roger!” He shakes him. “Oh Roger!” He shakes him hard, and the old man’s eyes open.

“Roger, wake up! You’ve fouled yourself like a baby. Are you sick?”

“There’s none here, sir,” Roger says in a weak thin voice, raising a hand. “None here. In the bank, in the bank. There’s not any here. It’s in the bank.”

“Roger, it’s Mat and Burley. You’ve stunk the place up till a normal man can’t breathe in here.”

“Cousin Mat, I’ve lost control of my unavoidables.”

Roger, remembering the bottle then, feels along the headboard for it, and slips it under the covers.

“What we want to know, Roger—are you sick?”

“I’ve—ah—been slightly under the weather. You might say. Yes.”

“Or are you just drunk?”

“No, Cousin Mat. Indeed not.”

“You’ve been here all night without a fire, Roger. How long has it been since you got up out of that bed?”

Roger’s voice chirps with righteous sarcasm. “Why, I would imagine, not since about Washington’s birthday.”

Mat walks away. When he speaks again he speaks to Burley. “Let’s build a fire.”

They soon have the little stove roaring and crackling with as much fire as it will hold. They find a washtub and fill it and set it on the stove. While they wait for it to heat they set the room to rights. They carry out and pile up and rearrange and sweep until it is possible to cross the room in a fairly straight line without climbing. While they work Roger lies as they found him—asleep or awake, they cannot tell.

When the water is warm they set the tub on the floor in front of the stove.

They find a piece of soap, a scrap of a rag, an old towel, and put them on a chair beside the tub.

Mat goes back to the bed.

“We want you to take a bath, Roger. Can you get up?”

“If you please, Cousin Mat, I wish to sleep. Your visit, and Mr. Coulter’s too, is appreciated, I want you to know. But now, perhaps, you will be so kind as to leave.”

Mat jerks the quilts back and takes a handful of Roger’s shirt.

“Get up! Stand up!”

And he brings him up, and stands him upright on the floor beside the bed.

Roger stands there in hat and coat and shirt and soiled underwear, sagging a little, but standing up, surprised—for once, silenced—by Mat’s anger.

The two cousins stand face-to-face. They seem to balance a moment across Mat’s pointing forefinger, which then buries itself up to the first knuckle in Roger’s coatfront.

“Roger, I want you to clean yourself up. I want you to wash yourself. And when you get those clothes off, put them in the stove, you hear?”

And Roger turns, obedient as a child, and gets started on his buttons.

“Have you got other clothes to put on, Roger?”

“I should think so, cousin.”

“Clean?”

After looking in the wardrobe, Mat takes the cleanest of the quilts from the bed and folds it and puts it down beside the washtub. “You just wrap up in that, Roger, when you get clean. And keep close to the fire.” And to Burley: “Let’s just carry that mattress and the bedclothes out and burn them.”

And they do, each of them taking two corners of the mattress and doubling it, lugging it off the springs and out into the yard. They pile the debris of their earlier cleaning on top of it, soak the whole mess with coal oil, and set a match to it. A big fire stands almost instantly over the pile, the flame-end cracking like a whip.

“There’s nothing here fit for a human to wear or sleep on or eat,” Mat says. “If you don’t mind staying with Roger, I’ll go to town and see what I can find. We’ll need to eat before long. And I’ll have to stay here, I reckon, until I can get Roger straightened out.”

“You go ahead. If Mr. Merchant lives through that bath, I’ll see to him.”

A PLEASING SHADOW

Margaret has taken off her hat, and put on an apron over the clothes she wore to church. She looks around at Mat and smiles as he comes into the kitchen, and turns back to the stove. She is wearing her grey dress that so becomes her—a pretty woman. He takes that in. He comes into her presence as he would come into the pleasing shadow of a tree—drawn to her, comforted by her as he has been, usually, all his life. And in spite of all that he has to do, he pulls a chair out from the table and sits down.

“Widow woman, you look mighty nice.”

“I was wondering when you’d be back. Did you all get down to the Crops’?”

He nods. “They lost their little girl, Margaret. Annie. She drowned in the flood. And Gideon’s gone.”

“Ah!” Margaret turns toward him, and though he does not look up he feels her looking at him while he tells her.

“We saw Ida,” he says, finishing, “and she seems to be doing as well as you could expect. Better.” He utters a kind of laugh, a sound of amazement and pity. “She’s farming that old place like there never was anybody there but her.”

“Mat, she oughtn’t to be there by herself.”

“I know. And I told her to come up here, but she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I got this stock here to look after, and these chickens, and them old cows to milk.’ ”

“Well, I must go down there.”

“Yes. You must. The next time I go. But now I’ve got to do a family duty.”

She looks at him.

“Roger. He’s been down drunk, and got in awful shape. I suppose we’re going to have to arrange to take care of him, whether he wants it arranged or not. I’m going to call Wheeler and see what can be done.”

“What are you going to do now? Today, I mean?”

“Well, Burley’s out there with him. And I guess I’ll have to stay a night or two until he’s straightened up, and by that time maybe we can find somebody to live with him. First thing, though, we’ve got to have something to eat, and Roger’s got to have something fit to wear. And since Burley and I burned up his old mattress and his bedclothes, I’d better get some bedding out of the attic.

“So”—he goes to the door, stops, and looks back—“why don’t you see what you can scrape us up in the way of vittles? And I’ll get the bedding.”

“Lord, Mat, things are happening here, aren’t they?”

“Yes. They are—and have and will.” He comes back and kisses her. “Maybe you can find one of my old suits for Roger. He’s particular what he wears, you know.”

Half an hour or so later Mat finds Roger sitting by the stove in his hat, wrapped in the quilt. And Burley, having further simplified the order of the room, is finishing a second sweeping of the floor. The room smells of burning locust wood and the fresh wind.

Mat sets his load down on the table. “Well, did he get washed?”

“All but his hat, I think.”

Mat hangs the fresh clothes over a chair beside Roger. “How’re you feeling, Roger?”

“Somewhat refreshed, thank you, cousin.”

“Good. Put these clothes on, then. And we’ll fix a bite to eat.”

He and Burley finish unloading the truck, and make up Roger’s bed and a cot for Mat, and prepare a meal.

Roger sits across from them at the table, as bodiless-looking as a coat hanger in Mat’s suit, his frail old face and hands sticking unaccountably out of the collar and sleeves. There is a certain exaggerated delicacy in his handling of the knife and fork—a certain tilt to the face, as if he is balancing an invisible straw on the bridge of his nose. He looks, Burley thinks, like a cross between King Louie the Fourteenth and a turtle. When he finishes eating he leans his head against the chair back and goes to sleep.

FOR SOMEONE WHO WILL COME LATER

That night, after dark has fallen and the supper dishes have been put away, Mat sits in the small light of a lamp in a corner of Roger’s kitchen, reading the Sunday paper that he brought back from town when he went in the late afternoon to do his feeding. In the bed on the opposite side of the room Roger lies asleep.

Mat is more than a little lonely, more than a little depressed at having to be away from home at such a time. Once or twice he has had to fight off the temptation to get in the truck, along with this fruitless dying branch of the family, and go back to Margaret and his own house. But he has plenty of reasons not to do that—not to be fetching in the worst to be served by the best. But still his own house tugs at his mind.

In this alien house, troubled only by its slow weathering and going down, Mat is aware of other houses: Gideon Crop’s, the Coulters’, his own—and others, at all distances, in all times of day and night, troubled by deaths and absences.

He sits alone with the brutal history of his time, reading bad news and bad good news, as if there is nothing else to read, believing that probably there is not. Once, in Port William, they might not hear of a death in Hargrave until after the burial. Now they know the outcome of a battle on the other side of the world before the dying are dead.

He sits, making his mind be led by the words, under the fall of light from the lamp. The narrowly opened window above the table breathes the freshening of the year, the moist night, the shrilling of frogs. And across the room continue the audible entrances and exits of Roger’s breath.

In the left-hand pocket of his shirt since the middle of the afternoon has been his copy of a contract—drafted by Roger’s lawyer in longhand on yellow paper, signed by Roger and by Mat—by which Mat is employed as overseer of Roger’s property at an annual wage of something less than he imagines will pay for his trouble. That afternoon’s meeting between Mat and Roger and the lawyer bore no resemblance at all to their earlier ones. Mat controlled it deliberately from the beginning, deferring neither to Roger’s wish to speak nor to his own consideration, which once constrained him, of Roger’s right of say-so. They sat at the kitchen table and made the agreement to Mat’s specifications, the old lawyer writing on his pad below Mat’s pointed forefinger. For Mat was angry enough, and he had told himself: “If anybody besides him is responsible, it’s me, and I’ve sat and watched as long as I’m ready to.” Before it was over, while the lawyer was still there, he said to Roger: “There’ll be a man coming here, as soon as I can get hold of one, to live with you, and look after you, and keep this old house. You can’t go on living here by yourself. Do you understand?”

And Roger said he did.

Mat takes no pride in that—it is only patchwork—but he is glad, relieved. And he has made some plans. Coming and going in the latter part of the afternoon, he has looked newly at Roger’s land. Some of it, the steep ground of the hillsides, is worn out; it will have to be owned by its thickets longer than Mat will live. That part of it he has put to rest in his mind, turning to what can be kept and used and made better. While he was at home in the afternoon he hired Ernest Finley to work on the barn at Gideon Crop’s.

Although he has increased his worries, he has no regret, no feeling that he has done less or more than he had to do. But a few days ago, if he had considered expending time and bother on this land, he would have considered also the possibility that he might later be able to buy it. But now Virgil is missing, and Mat needs no more land for himself. He is too old now to need it—if he ever did. This new work must be done for the sake of the land itself—and for the sake of no one he can foresee, someone who will come later, who will depend then on what is done now.

A SPRING NIGHT

Tuesday and Wednesday it turned cold again. The wind blustered all day both days. But sometime Wednesday night the weather quieted, and Thursday morning the spring seemed to have gained back all it had lost, and more.

On Tuesday morning Wheeler Catlett phoned and left word for Mat that he had found a man who might do to stay with Roger, and that the two of them would drive up to look at the place and talk wages that afternoon.

An arrangement was made, and the man—a hearty, loud-talking fellow named Bailey—promised to gather his belongings and return on Friday. Now, Thursday night, supper finished and Roger gone sober to bed for the fourth night in a row, Mat is sitting alone on the well top behind the house, smoking a cigar. Just the pale last minutes of the twilight are left. The sun’s heat rises out of the ground, and the air is still and warm—summer air. During the day, taking Roger with him here and there in the truck, he has made the beginnings of his spring work, and he is tired with a familiar tiredness that now, near rest, comforts him. In spite of the bothering with Roger, it has been a good day, and the night is good. Tomorrow night he will be at home.

Behind him, in the old kitchen, he hears Roger cough and stir. And he becomes aware of a sadness, too, that he has been feeling, staying there those nights. Roger is old with his wasting of himself and with age—coming down to the end of the line, for him, and for the line too. Mat has been thinking of that. Roger is the last remnant of a history of which he is the only admirer. After him, there will be no sign that the Merchants ever existed, except for a diminishment of the earth and of human possibility. They have gone, and are going, leaving nothing behind but thicket growing back over the slopes they destroyed, and a remnant of usable soil on the ridges and in the bottoms that they would have destroyed if they had lived long enough.

Around Mat, the country throbs with the singing of frogs. Too high in the dusk to be seen, a flock of wild geese passes, a kind of conversation muttering among them. They will go talking and talking that way all night, flying into new daylight far off. That they do not think of him, that they go on, comforts Mat. He thinks of those wild things feeding along weedy lake edges way to the north with a stockman’s pleasure in the feeding of anything, and with something more.

And now Burley Coulter steps over the sagged yard fence without breaking stride and comes on down the slope of the yard through the dead weeds, carrying an unlit lantern in his hand. He comes over to the well and sits down beside Mat and lights a cigarette. They sit smoking for a while.

Finally Burley says: “Spring night sure enough, ain’t it? Frogs singing.”

“Yes.”

“And I heard a flock of geese go over just before I got here.”

“I heard them.”

There is another silence, and again Burley is the one who breaks it: “Well, Mat, since I saw you—when was it I saw you? Day before yesterday evening?”

“I think so.”

“Well, after we talked I went and talked to Jarrat, and we did some telephoning to various ones about Ida’s troubles. If everybody does like he says, we ought to be able to give her all the help she’ll need. We went down this afternoon and broke some plant-bed ground on top of the ridge. Some of the others are going down tomorrow to haul wood to burn on the beds when we get them ready. And I reckon that’s about the way it’s going to go.”

They talk on, considering possibilities, looking ahead through spring and summer and fall, thinking of what will have to be done and how they will manage to do it.

“Ida says all we need to see to is the heavy work—the plowing and so on,” Burley says. “She’ll do the rest.”

“Do you think we ought to depend on her to do that?”

“She’ll do it anyhow,” Burley says. “So we might as well depend on her.”

GREEN COMING STRONG

March 25, 1945

Dear Nathan,

I laid off to write you last Sunday, but never got around to it, and reckoned you would be on your way across the water anyhow. I expect, if that’s so, you’ll get this one about as quick as you’d have got the one I didn’t write last week. I hope so.

The flood is over now. It was a bad one, and come at a bad time, and done damage, and has throwed everybody way behind. We got awfully tired of looking at water.

The worst of it—which we didn’t even know about until it was over—was that Gideon and Ida Crop’s little girl, Annie, got drowned on the 10th. Gideon, according to what Ida says, watched over the backwater until it went down. And then he went. And hasn’t been found either. Mat Feltner has been trying to find him, calling the police and such in different places, but hasn’t heard a word of him. It seems a man is about as easy to lose in this world as a pocketknife. I wouldn’t have thought it. But there’s a lot I never would have thought that has turned out to be so.

Virgil Feltner, by the way, hasn’t been heard from either. Nothing to say about that, I reckon, until Mat says something. Except it’s bad.

I hate to write down these sad troubles. But I can’t think of any argument why I oughtn’t to tell you. They happened. And I’m in a way obliged to speak of them because they did happen and I know it. Seems to me that when you start home you’ll want to know what’s here and what’s not. And if anybody’s going to write it to you, looks like it’ll have to be me. I said to your daddy the other day, “Why don’t you write to Nathan?” And he said, “God Amighty, Burley, he knows what I’m doing.”

Making tracks is what he’s doing. Making that team of black mules realize what he fed them through the winter for. Which I imagine you do know.

Well, spring is here, finally. And we’ve had some days of fine weather. This is one, clear and quiet, hardly any air stirring at all, just warm enough to be comfortable in the sun, and the country turning greener all the time. I’m happy today, in spite of everything, glad to see it all come back.

The old spring comes up in me just like it comes up in everything, and I’m gladder to be alive today than three weeks ago I imagined I’d ever be. The night, say, of the day you left.

Speaking of time, I was fifty years old on March 12, and clean forgot it. Jarrat was the one finally thought of it. Day before yesterday he says, “Burley, you’re fifty. You’ve been fifty for two weeks.” It scared me. And then it made me mad. Which made him laugh, which don’t happen every day. And we counted up and fifty’s what I am. Half a hundred years I’ve been alive. And it’s a mystery where they’ve gone. I used to think that when I got to be a man I’d do what I pleased. And what I aimed to please to do was hunt and fish, and breed as far and wide as a tomcat. But there’s a great many pretty girls that I’ve gone by, and a lot of good hunting nights, and a lot of fishing weather. It has happened that that wasn’t so much what I was called to as I thought. What it has been, I reckon you would say, is love, for Jarrat and you boys. I realize now that if my calling hasn’t been that, I haven’t had one. When I die there won’t be much around here that anybody can point to and say “Burley Coulter done that.” There’s not any wheeling and dealing of mine that anybody’ll remember. But for me, when I think of my life I have to think of it with Jarrat’s and yours and Tom’s. And even if there is a lot I’ve let go by, I don’t say I ain’t blessed.

Don’t pay any attention to what I write, unless you want to. My mind just gets to going. Jarrat and I are so quiet, looks like I don’t know what is on my mind until I go to writing to you.

When the ground dried off enough to let us get on it with the teams, which was last Tuesday morning, Jarrat went at it just like I told you he would. And I’ve been my usual hundred feet behind him ever since. We’re both soft from the winter and from being idle so much during the wet weather, and pretty old too for such a pace, but I expect we’ve left as many tracks behind us in the last week as we ever did in our lives. The sun has been getting up mighty fast and going down mighty slow.

We’ve got ourselves behind an awful pile of work—farming on both of these places, and at Mat’s. Plus we’re trying to help Ida carry on until Gideon turns up, if he does. Plus there’s no chance we can see of hiring much help. There’s sort of nobody here but children and women and old men. I imagine I’m going to get mighty tired of looking at your daddy’s back before October.

All week we’ve been burning and sowing plant beds—at Mat’s, and then down at Gideon’s, and since Friday afternoon up here. Fact is, that’s what we’re doing right now. Last night when we quit I said to Jarrat, “Let’s get a little rest tomorrow.” And Jarrat said all right. And we passed it back and forth awhile, saying we’d lay around today and get over some of our soreness and hit it hard again Monday morning. And then this morning early we got to looking over all we’ve got to do, and piddled around and greased the wheels on Jarrat’s wagon and sharpened our axes. And first thing you know we’re out here on the ridge, working like it’s the last good day. And every time we get a little break I come over here to the wagon and write some on this letter.

It’s on in the afternoon now, and we’re just sitting here, resting and watching the last of it burn. I do like this work. There’s something about this fire going before the new crop that’s cleaning. The thought of it is good. All last year’s old mongrel chances burnt out of the ground. And first thing you know we’ll have them little tobacco plants speckling up through the ashes.

Everybody seems to be as behind in his work as we are, going early and late. From the house at night I can see the plant beds burning for miles, and smell them too. And you know people are awake and busy around them. It sort of brings the country together in a way it never is any other time.

Down in the bottoms they’re still waterlogged, just sitting and looking at mud and waiting. Anvil Brant says if it wasn’t for fishing he’d try to get in the Army.

Old Ike just come up and laid down under the wagon. I’ve heard him treed way down in the hollow nearly all day. And he’s finally dug out whatever it was, and eat it. So I reckon I’ll have to be the one to eat the leftovers tonight. He wants to know what’s the matter with me, I haven’t been hunting with him for so long. And I don’t know what to tell him. I’ve been thinking that if you stay around this part of the country after the war, maybe we’ll get hold of a good bitch and raise a litter of pups, and start over.

That’s one of my thoughts. Amazing how I’ve got so I depend on my thoughts. I can take one I like and just about wear the hair off of it between supper and bedtime. I can remember a time when my head wasn’t exactly the part of me that I was most interested in. And now there’s actually some thoughts that I kind of look forward to getting a chance to think. I’ve got a pretty good pocketknife and a pretty good dog and three or four good thoughts.

And a good country to live in, I will have to say. This is about as pretty a time right this minute as you’d ever want to see. Still and clear, and little smokes here and yonder from the plant beds, and that green coming strong. And I’m tired enough that I don’t mind to see the sun going down. I wish you was here.

Lord bless you, old boy, I think about you all the time.

Your uncle,

Burley

PART THREE

Chapter 9

LOOK A YONDER

From the top of the ladder, among the branches of the apple tree, Mat’s horizon is enlarged. Along the crest of the eastward ridge he can see the line of white canvases covering the plant beds that Burley and Jarrat Coulter sowed five days ago. They make a single stroke of whiteness, drawn exactly along the horizon between the blue of the sky and the ridge, which, in the same five days, has become green. Down the gentle fall of the ground behind him is the town, which he turns toward and turns away from again and again as he goes about his work. The roofs are still visible, their angles sharp, among the treetops stippled with buds. Northward he can see the opening of the river valley, the folds of the upland on the far side, woods and fields clear in the sun. Feeling the limb on which the ladder is propped spring against his weight as he moves, Mat prunes the tree. He likes this work—the look of his hands moving and choosing, correcting, among the tangle of the branches. The orchard is one of the works of his life.

On the ground under the tree Joe Banion is gathering up the cut twigs and branches as Mat lets them fall, loading them onto the wagon. The black clear shadows of the branches tangle over him like a net as he moves. On the edge of the wagon bed, his sheepskin coat buttoned a foot off-center, Old Jack sits watching them, keeping them company. They weren’t at work there a quarter of an hour before Joe said, “Well, we going to have help, Mr. Mat. Here come the old boss.” Sure enough, there he came up along the row ends of the garden and into the orchard. And until now he has sat there holding the team, driving the few feet to the next tree when Mat and Joe move.

It’s a little past the middle of the morning; the early chill has gone out of the air. The town has become quiet. The children are shut in the school, the men gone to the stores or the fields, the women to the kitchens. The voices of cackling hens in Mat’s henhouse and barn come brassy and loud into the quiet, and from beyond the turn of the hill comes the bleating of sheep. From the wagon Old Jack’s voice follows the turnings of his mind—sounding both comforted and comfortable, one of the sounds of the place come back into the open.

The garden gate opens and shuts, and this time it is Hannah they see coming up along the row ends toward the orchard. She walks heavily over the uneven ground, leaning backward a little against the weight of the child. The wind blows her skirt and her hair as she walks.

She does not come near them, but goes into one of the upper corners of the orchard where late yesterday afternoon Mat pruned a peach tree and left the branches lying. She waves as she goes by, and they wave back. They watch her as she moves through the clutter of branches, gathering the budded shoots. By an awkward stooping and bending she picks them up one at a time, holds them up to look at them, their graceful slendering weighted and knobbed with buds, and lays them into the crook of her arm.

Old Jack sits studying her. “She’s a mighty fine girl.”

“She is,” Mat says.

Old Jack shakes his head. “Ay, Lord!”

They hear the sound of an engine in the air and, looking up, find a small army plane coming fairly low over the town.

“Look a yonder!” Old Jack says. “Yonder’s one of them flying machines.” A second follows, the look and the sound identical to the first. “God Amighty, there’s another’n!”

One after another they come, spaced evenly, a considerable distance apart, their sounds building and fading in steady rhythm. The three men stand looking up, Old Jack braced on his cane like a tripod in the middle of the wagon bed, Joe by the mule’s heads where he went to quiet them, Mat on the ladder in the top of the tree. They count. Four, five, six. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. And when the twenty-sixth one carries its sound away, and none follows, they watch them out of sight.

The morning goes on. Mat’s mind has been drawn away from his work into the uneasiness of the sky, empty of all sound now. He thinks of the young men enclosed in that deathly metal, their fates made one with interlocking parts and men and events. He feels a cry toward them grown in him, unreleased. It is a long time before his mind will content itself again to take back the tree and his own hands busy in it. Below he can hear Joe Banion:

“How’d you like to fly one of them things, Mr. Jack?”

“Ay, Lord! I wouldn’t do it.”

“You and me, boss man. You and me.”

THE BRIDGE

As he always does when the first outside work begins in the spring, Ernest felt a little reluctant to give up the orderly enclosure of the shop. And so he was glad enough to spend most of the morning getting ready—lugging his ladders and rope tackle and jacks and tool boxes out of the shop and loading them on the truck; setting the shop to rights, sweeping it out, putting tools away, feeling the place settle around him and grow still.

When he came up opposite the Crops’ house, a few minutes before noon, he eased the truck out across the bottom to what, two weeks and two days ago, had been the outside end of the footbridge. He turned the truck around and killed the engine, and ate the sandwiches he had brought.

During the fifteen or twenty minutes he spent doing that, and the five minutes he spent smoking a cigarette afterwards, the place began to make its claim on him. It took him only a few seconds to foresee in some detail how he would have to go about the rebuilding of the bridge; after that his mind was free to take in the look of the place. Except for the singing of birds and the steady rippling of the creek, the little valley was quiet. There were no human noises anywhere. For a while he remained half alert for the sound of a voice or a door or an engine—one of the habits of his winter work in town. But he grew used to the peacefulness of the place. He quit expecting anything but the natural sounds. The silted bottoms, he saw, were beginning to show a faint scaling of green, and along the banks of the creek, running clear now over the rocks, the muddied limbs of the willows were putting out new leaves.

Almost without his realizing it, his thoughts going ahead of him, he has begun his work. The butt of the cigarette still burning in the corner of his mouth, he fishes a pair of rubber boots out from behind the seat. He sits down on the running board and puts them on. He places the crutches under his arms and, moving around the truck, takes a coil of half-inch rope out of one of the tool boxes, and starts up along the creek. He makes his way with some difficulty into the swift water of the ford. The water comes nearly to the tops of his boots, caving them in coldly against his feet and legs. He is aware, almost as soon as he begins to move against the push of the current, of the absurdity of wading swift water on crutches. His gratitude that nobody is there to see him, and then his fear that somebody may come, make him ridiculous to himself. He crosses the creek, feeling his way over the uneven stones of the riffle with the crutch ends, and goes down the shallows along the far edge until he comes to where the bridge dangles in the trees. When he has fastened the rope to the loose end of one of the cables and weighted the free end of the rope with a rock and thrown it over to the other bank, he wades back across.

Using a block and tackle, he pulls the bridge out of the trees and across the stream and into place. He locks the pulleys and walks to the top of the high bank and stands there for three or four minutes, studying the job now that he has it out where he can look at it. The snarled skein of wood and cable and wire that he has hauled tense between the banks has not even begun to resemble a bridge. The footboards have been broken and split, some of the crosspieces knocked out or broken, the hand-wires wound and tangled through the mess of the rest—and the whole thing, crusted with silt, bearded and swatched with drift, twisted two full turns. But the beginning is there, made. While he watches, a kingfisher lights on one of the strands of the tangle, perches a moment, sees him, startles, flies off down the creek. “I’ll finish her by sundown,” he says to himself. And he goes back to the truck for his tools.

Until after sundown, until the bridge is a bridge again, and looks like one, curving its perfect curve between its fastenings, he does not stop. He untwists and splices the broken cables, binds them back around the trunks of the two trees from which they were torn loose, rebuilds the steps up to where the end of the footboard will be laid. He goes into it then, building his way across, wedging his way into the mess of it, leaving it made and straight behind him. Fixing as he goes, crawling back and forth for materials over what he has finished, he attaches the crosspieces and lays on and nails down the footplanks. And over his bent back the day moves toward the end of its own curve. He hurries at his work, excited by his high balancing out on the thing he has made, feeling the echo of every hammer stroke rock back under him along the taut cables—and excited by knowing that a bridge is what it is. There comes to be something deeply pleasing to him in the idea of a bridge—not, maybe, the first mark a man makes on the earth, but surely one of the first marks made by a neighborhood—and he hastens toward its completion. Long before he is done, he already knows how it is going to be, and he is driven on by an appetite for the finished look of it.

The sunlight goes out of the valley, rising up along the sides of the hills on the eastern side. The ground begins to cool. His mind begins to take leave of his work. He gathers his tools from the ground around the finished steps and goes back to the side he began on, walking without the crutches and having to move slowly with his load to keep balanced. At the other end he puts the tools down, and takes up his crutches. For a moment he stands there, looking at the bridge and the water under it. Finished, he is let down now into his tiredness. He lights a cigarette, smokes it a moment with deliberate pleasure, and turns and begins loading tools and rope and usable scraps back into the truck.

Hearing something, a footstep maybe, he looks across the bridge at Ida standing on the top step at the other end of it. She is wearing a plain faded cotton dress, and a sweater that he knows at once belongs or did belong to Gideon. She is smiling in reserved greeting to him, in expectation of what from him he does not know. She steps up onto the end of the bridge, and he feels the inwashing sense of the presence of her body, kept waiting inside that coarse, worn sweater of Gideon’s.

“Can I come across now?”

“Yes. Come on across.”

She comes out onto the bridge, giving her weight to the flexible strength of it, following down into the curve of it. And then, for the first time all day, he thinks of this woman’s drowned child, and his remembrance flinches inside him. He is suddenly nerved tightly as one watching a tightrope walker. And he sees that a hesitance grows in her as she comes on toward the place where she knows Annie was sitting during the last half hour she lived. To Ernest she seems to force herself up to that place, and then past it. And once past it, she is all right. She comes on, the footboard rocking slightly under her.

He is standing beside the steps, and as she comes to the end of the bridge he reaches his hand up. He would not ordinarily have done so opening a thing—not, especially, hold out his hand to a woman nearly a stranger to him. But she takes it. And sensing the strength in that arm levering over the bar of the crutch, she looks at him. It is a look that he knew to anticipate—a look of surprise and of a sort of dismay, as if the only thing more odd than a cripple is a cripple of great and capable strength who smells and sweats and works and wears out pretty much the way everybody does. But Ida does not withdraw. She gives her weight to his hand, and steps down.

“Thank you.”

And again she looks at him, this time with such immediate and open candor, such accepting of him as he is, that he feels himself made natural, made as if whole, by her look. It is as though she has reached into him with her hand. He turns and starts back to the truck.

“Lord, you sure did get it done fast. I thought, the mess it was in, it would take a week.”

“Well, it wasn’t too much trouble. Once you get started into a thing like that it’ll usually turn out very well.”

“I declare, it’s nice to have it up again. I ain’t been on this side of the creek in I don’t know how long.”

She is walking along beside him now, a little ahead of him—a woman not yet thirty, strongly and a little thickly made. Her face still keeps some of the prettiness of her girlhood, her hair pulled back out of the way and gathered and pinned. She walks with the naturalness of a woman who has gone a great deal on foot, and without the self-consciousness of one who has ever tried deliberately for grace—so calmly a woman of her own kind and place and way that she seems hardly aware of herself, and so quietly belonging to Gideon that the idea of him seems as near her, as much touching her, as his old sweater. Ernest is aware that she has given no thought to how she may look to him. His hand keeps the memory of the feel of her hand, nearly as hard as his own.

He throws the last armload of scraps into the truck bed with a satisfying completing slam. “Well, I reckon I’ll call it a day.” Looking up at the house now, he sees that she has already finished her work at the barn for the night—the rinsed milk buckets, which were not in sight earlier, are turned up to dry on a bench beside the cellar house.

“Mr. Finley—you’re going to town, ain’t you?”

“I’m aiming to.”

“Well, could I ride out as far as the mailbox?”

“All right. Get in. I’m just ready to go.” He hastens ahead of her, opens the door, and makes a place for her, shoving aside the tools, gloves, chains, water jug, pieces of rope that have collected on the seat and the floorboard. “It’s a mess. Maybe that’ll be room enough for you.”

“It’ll be fine.”

He gets in, starts the truck, and they leave, jolting and rattling over the violent surface of the road.

“Gideon has to fix this piece of road every spring—all the way from our house out to the pike. The county’s supposed to, but it don’t much.”

Ernest cannot think what to reply, surprised at the ease with which she speaks of Gideon. She mentions him casually, as confident of his presence somewhere she does not know as she could be if he had gone to Port William.

She stays silent for several minutes, holding to the door handle with one hand and bracing against the dashboard with the other to steady herself, looking out at the evening which is very slowly dimming toward twilight.

“You going to fix that barn?” she asks.

“Aiming to.”

“Mr. Feltner said you was aiming to tear down that lower end of it.”

He nods.

“Well, I reckon there’ll still be room left for Gideon’s tools and things, won’t there?”

“I believe there will. I don’t believe you need to worry about Mat mistreating you all.”

“Gideon’s always thought a lot of Mr. Feltner. So do I. Though I never had many dealings with him until here lately.” She watches the road approach and pass under, shaking the truck. “You going to do all that work by yourself?”

“I imagine so.”

She gives him another speculating look, her eyes as direct and unapologetic as if she is studying the back of somebody’s head.

“Well, I imagine that’ll be right smart of a job for one man.”

“I imagine so.”

He stops at the mouth of the lane, and she opens the door and gets out. Standing there looking back at him, holding the door ready to shut, she says, “I’m much obliged to you.”

“Do you want me to take you back in? Save you the walk.”

“No, I don’t mind.” She smiles for the first time since he looked and saw her standing on the bridge. “That’s a better road for walking than it is for riding, anyhow.”

She starts across the road to where the mailbox perches on its careening post, doorless, wide-open mouth tilted upward, like the hungry young of some big bird.

Ernest turns into the road and goes, but slowly, watching her in the rearview mirror. He sees her walk over to the box, look in, and turn back empty-handed into the lane.

A GUEST AT A STRANGE TABLE

He was on the roof the next morning before the dew went off. He set his ladders up against the eave, flung a long rope over the barn, tied it at both ends to give himself a kind of banister, and propping his crutches against the foot of the ladder, went up and began.

And he has been surrounded by his own noise now for nearly three hours—his hammer-claws driving in under the nailheads, the nails screeching out through the tin, the released sheets sliding down over the sheets still fixed and striking the ground. The sun is getting high, and the metal roof has begun to give back the warmth of it. From time to time he goes down and stacks the sheets he has torn off, and drinks, and goes back up. Aside from that, he has hardly raised his eyes from his work. After each interruption the sounds of his work have enclosed him again, and carried him on. And each time he settles back into himself and into the work, his habitual commenting to himself in his thoughts begins again. Finding he has worked beyond reach of his rope, he thinks, “Uh-oh!” Nerves aching with the smooth hard slant of the metal as he crawls after the rope, he thinks of falling, and his thought shudders and whistles. “Shoo! Watch that! That won’t do!”

He hears Mat saying—having put him and Virgil to painting the roof of the feed barn, Virgil with a boy’s bravery walking upright on the slant—“Be careful up there, boys. We haven’t got time now for a funeral.” And then, his voice lifting and hardening: “Virgil, damn it, when you move on that roof take hold of the rope. A man’s work asks you to be a man. Don’t play!” And again, his voice suddenly admitting what he feels: “Sweet boy, don’t get hurt.”

The rope in his hand, Ernest feels the dread of falling loosen from him. “Good enough. All right.” Taking up his hammer and laying the rope down beside him in reach of his left hand, he goes back to work. “Virgil,” he thinks.

“Uncle,” Virgil says, “why in the hell does he have to be after me all the time to be careful?”

“Well, if he didn’t think a lot of you he wouldn’t do it. That’s one thing. And, another thing, being careful doesn’t come natural to you yet, and he knows it.”

“Well, if you know it too why aren’t you after me all the time the way he is?”

“Because you listen to me better than you do to him.”

Virgil laughs. “Why?”

“Because he’s your daddy and I’m not. That’s the way it always is, and he knows that too. That’s the reason he sends you to work with me as often as he does.”

For a moment he can see Virgil, paint bucket in one hand, brush in the other, sitting on the comb of the roof, looking down at him and grinning with a boy’s perfect confidence in the superiority of youth to anything. The hot sky stands open above him.

“Mr. Finley.”

He looks down and sees Ida on the ladder, holding up a half-gallon glass jar full of water.

“You want a fresh drink?”

He does. Though he has, as usual, his own jug of water in the truck, he hands himself down along the rope to the edge of the roof, and drinks and replaces the top and hands the jug back and thanks her. Pulling himself along the rope in a clambering, lopsided two-step, knowing that behind him she is still on the ladder, watching, he goes back up the roof.

“How did you hurt your foot?”

“In the war.”

“Not this one.”

“No. The other one.”

“Well, you sure don’t have any trouble getting around.”

He nods. He takes it the way it is meant, a compliment, but his mind fumbles around it, not able to manage a reply. And then he says: “It slows me down some.”

“Well, I reckon we’ve all got our troubles.” But as if she did not intend to admit that, she smiles and steps down a rung. “I’ll have dinner ready about half past eleven. You can come anytime around then.”

“Well, I’ve got my dinner there in the truck. I reckon I’ll just eat that. That’s what I usually do.”

“Oh, Gideon wouldn’t stand for that, Mr. Finley. He says anybody that works here eats here. So you come.”

Her head disappears below the eave, and he sits still and listens to her going down. She calls up to him from the ground, still out of sight at the foot of the ladder: “I’ll just set this jug here by the wall.”

“All right,” he says.

He is not comfortable with the thought of going to the house to eat. For one thing, he never enjoys eating at a strange table, and he is particularly uneasy about eating at this one in Gideon’s absence. For another thing, he takes pleasure in the quiet noon meals he eats alone between the noisy halves of his days. But the generosity of her invitation is familiar to him, and he knows he cannot refuse it kindly.

He is high on the roof and, looking over the comb of it, he sees her come around the end of the barn and walk up the incline of the road toward the house. He sits there not moving, the hammer dead in his hand, until he sees her go into the kitchen and hears the door slam. And then he slides the claws of his hammer under the next nailhead. The noise of his work stands up around him again. He goes back into it. He works steadily over the metal slope, letting the sunlight drop, after its long absence, through the dark meshing of the barn’s framework to the ground.

When the time comes he goes down, hangs his hammer on one of the ladder rungs, and stacks the scattered sheets. He takes up his crutches, drinks, pours out what water he doesn’t drink, and, carrying the jug, goes up to the house.

The kitchen door is open, and Ida calls him to come in before he has had a chance to knock. She is busy at the stove. On the opposite side of the room he can see an ironing board set up, and a pile of freshly pressed clothes on the seat of a chair. He comes in, ready to do without question whatever she tells him, sets the jug down against the door facing, puts his hat on the floor beside it.

She takes the teakettle off the stove and comes over to the washtable just inside the door, and pours two inches of hot water into the pan.

He dips from the bucket, diluting the hot water, leans his crutches against the wall, and washes.

“When you get washed you can sit down. It’s ready.”

There is only one chair at the table and he pulls it out and sits down, putting the crutches on the floor beside him. And she sets the food on—an abundant simple meal.

While he eats she does not sit down. She goes on about her work. As long as he is at the table she makes no attempt at conversation, seeming to take for granted that he has come only to eat, requiring nothing of him except that he fill himself.

He grows amazed at her, at the dignity of her quietness in which he knows she is lonely and grieving. What else he might have expected he does not know, or no longer knows.

When he has emptied his plate, she comes and picks up the meat platter and offers it to him again. “You help yourself, now.”

And he does.

Finished, he picks up the crutches and stands and replaces the chair. “That was mighty fine. I thank you.”

“Well. You fill that water jug at the pump and take it with you.”

He has been stopped twenty-five minutes for dinner. He decides to give himself another twenty. Because he is slowed by his lameness, he usually works by the job rather than by the day. Still, though he never works by the clock, he always rests by it—because, as he has explained it to Mat, it is harder to stop resting than to stop working.

Having given himself those minutes, he becomes saving of them, and hurries back down to the barn so as to waste as few of them as possible. He brings out a feed bucket, turns it upside down against the wall, and sits down in the sun. The only sounds now are a few sparrows chirping back in the driveway of the barn and, continuous and more quiet in the distance, the running of the creek. He sits for a moment without moving, letting these sounds and the little valley and the sunlight and the white-clouded sky take their places in his mind, and then gets out a cigarette and lights it. He smokes slowly, carefully attentive to the pleasure of it. He flips the butt out away from him onto the ground, and leans back, his eyes closed, aware of being at rest in that place, feeling the sun draw the skin of his face and hands, feeling the air stir coolly over him, the light filling his shut eyes with red.

After a while he sits up and looks at his watch. He still has three minutes of his time. He yawns and rubs his eyes, and rather than sit there and watch the time run out, hating to see it go, he gets up. Groggy with sunlight and sleepiness and his full belly, he fights off the dread of movement. Moves. Takes up the crutches and goes around to the foot of the ladder. He drinks, picks up his hammer, and climbs to the roof.

The day and the work are established around him again. He goes on, deeper in, with a kind of excitement growing in him, a kind of hunger for what it is possible to do before night. It becomes easier to go on than to stop.

After about an hour he sees Ida come out of the house. She comes down to the woodpile, splits a day’s supply of stovewood, carries an armload up to the house. The next time he sees her she is out in the bottom, mending and pulling up and straightening one of the fences broken down by the flood. Ernest does not stop to watch her. When he looks up as he shifts from one place to another, he sees her, farther along than she was before. Twice he forgets her completely for the biggest part of an hour, and when he looks for her again she has moved on but is still at work, the fence standing up behind her, makeshift and staggering, but stout enough to keep the milk cows out of the crops.

Later, when he looks up, she is gone. And then in one of his pauses he hears her beneath him in the barn. He sees that the team of mules and the cows have come down off the hill and are waiting at the upper doors. And they are not there when he turns in that direction again; she has taken them in, fastened them in their places for the night, fed them. He sees her on her way to the house with the milk buckets, and again pouring the skimmed milk in for the hogs.

When he winds it up, satisfied, the last sheet of roofing torn off and stacked on the ground, and turns in the chill of the evening to go, she is standing beside the truck, wearing the old sweater again.

“Would you care if I rode out to the mailbox?”

Getting out at the river road, she tells him she is much obliged, as before, and turns to her errand. And again, watching in the mirror, he sees that nothing has come.

Chapter 10

THE WANTING OF WHAT MAY BE LOST

When Hannah lay down for a nap early Sunday afternoon, Mat had not come in to dinner, but an hour or so later, when she wakes up and goes into the living room, he is there, obviously waiting for her, sitting with his feet propped on the desk, hat and jacket still on. He grins at her.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Well, Margaret’s gone to visit Mrs. Burgess a while. I reckon she’s in for two or three hours’ talking about rheumatism.” He gets up. “I thought we might farm a little this afternoon, you and me, since you’re feeling fine.”

“All right,” she says, “Good.” She cannot, somehow, make her voice sound as glad as she is. But when he has helped her on with her coat and they are starting out the door, she puts her hand into his.

“Now you’re talking,” he says.

It is clear to her that this excursion has been on his mind since morning and that he has been looking forward to it. And she is grateful. It is good to be going farming with him, getting out of the house. A wind, high up, carries the overcast swiftly across the sky. The sun comes through. They stop while a bright patch of sunlight passes over and beyond them, and they watch it sweep rapidly on over the ridgetops.

While they get into the truck and go along the road toward the barns on the far place, there are a few minutes of silence between them, a little awkward.

But once they are through the gate, starting back the gravel road along the backbone of the ridge, they are among Mat’s reference points. And he begins to talk, pointing out jobs of work that he has done lately or is doing or planning to do. One thing reminds him of another.

“This barn here,” he says, “my daddy built it when I was a boy. I remember walking over here from town to watch the carpenters. An old fellow by the name of Walter Stovall built it. He had three or four grown sons and they all worked together. They were good carpenters, all of them. It was poplar lumber they had to build with then.”

He gets out and helps Hannah out. “You can’t get lumber like that any more, maybe never will again.” He gestures upward with his hand. “I reinforced the loft and put on a new roof when Virgil was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was about the first man’s work he ever did. I sent him over here with Ernest and they did it together. It would worry me to death trying to get any work out of him then, but he’d work for Ernest. I saw how that was and remembered how it was with me. Mighty hard to get a boy to come to it right under his daddy’s hand. I don’t know why.”

There are cows and calves scattered over the lot in front of the barn, others lying down around the door and inside the driveway. These get up and move slowly out of the way as Mat and Hannah step up to the doorway and into it.

“Well,” Mat says, “I do know why. By the time a boy gets big enough to work, his daddy’s already been his boss for a long time, and not always an easy one. They’ve already pretty well tested each other, and know each other’s weaknesses and flaws. There are a lot of old irritations all ready-made. And then a man teaching his own boy gets misled by pride. What he does wrong looks like your failure as much as it is his, and so you don’t correct or punish for his sake, but yours. The way around it—or the way my daddy took with me and I took with Virgil—is to let him work with somebody older than he is, like Ernest, that you know he admires.”

“Was he bad?” Hannah asks. “When he was a boy, I mean.”

“Fairly,” Mat says, and grins. “Though it’s hard for me to tell how to judge a boy’s behavior. He wasn’t any worse than I was, I’ll put it that way. Nor any better, I reckon. He did a good many things he ought to have got a whipping for. And did, and got a few he didn’t deserve, which”—he opens his hands and folds them slowly, one in the other, behind his back—“I wish he hadn’t.”

“He told me several times that you were a good father.”

“Did he? I’m glad he said that. I’m glad you told me.”

They are standing inside the barn now, looking out through the doorway. Mat makes a vague abrupt movement with his forearm and hand, whether to dismiss the foregoing part of their conversation or to begin the next, she cannot tell.

“When he came home from college after his last year, I asked him, ‘What are you planning to do?’ Lord knows, I’d wanted to know a long time before that, and he’d mentioned wanting to farm before, but the time to ask and be told never had come until then. And I was worried a good deal, because I wanted him to come home here and take this up—or wanted him to want to—and was afraid he wouldn’t. And was afraid, too, that he’d see what I had on my mind. But I held right steady, watching him, and he said, ‘I want to stay here and farm with you.’ ”

There is a pause now, while Mat seems to steady and gather himself.

“I’ll never forget it. I’d have liked to just stop everything right there and celebrate. But I knew we’d only come to the beginning, and you don’t celebrate at the beginning—even at the risk of never celebrating at all.

“I said, ‘All right. I’m going to lend you a thousand dollars. You take that, and the old cattle barn over yonder, and those two fields between it and the road—and let’s see what you can do. When you’re not working for yourself, you can work by the day for me.’ There were hard times then, and it nearly emptied me to get him the thousand dollars. But I did it. It was enough money to put pressure on him, which I aimed to do—and then, of course, stand pretty close behind him, to see that he didn’t get too badly into trouble.

“Well, he made it do. He never let me in on it at all. He saw my game, and was proud. And I waited, sort of keeping to the other end of the place, to see what he would do—scared again, of course, that he’d make some bad mistake. And then one morning he said to me, ‘Come look at my cattle.’ And I came over here with him, and we stood out there in the lot and looked them over. He’d bought six or seven cows and calves and a pretty good bull, and they were all right. He hadn’t broke any records, in judging or buying either, but they were all right. It was a fair start. There are forty-five head of these cows now, and the quality of them has improved right along.”

He raises his arm and points.

“Look. There’s one you ought to recognize. That’s the newest one. She’s the one you and Virgil brought from Indiana that night in the truck, not long after you were married. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes,” Hannah says. “I do.”

Mat turns and goes on back into the barn, Hannah following. He opens the door to an empty stall. “I’ll put some feed in now. You stand inside there, honey, where you can watch and won’t get tramped on.”

He empties several buckets of ground corn into the troughs and calls the cattle, and then goes up a ladder into the loft and begins filling the mangers with hay. She can hear him walking back and forth in the loft, the forked hay sliding over the floorboards and dropping down into the mangers. The cattle crowd to the troughs, latecomers throwing their heads up and wedging their way in. The calves, forgotten, play or stand or lie in the open spaces. For the time being, the old cows are held at the trough by pure violence of appetite. Hannah can hear them breathing, their rough tongues sweeping the bottoms of the troughs.

She feels a strange, threatened happiness. They have talked easily about Virgil for the first time in a month. Mat has told her things about Virgil that she never knew. She feels herself surrounded closely now by this place of his life, his love for the placid hungry lives of cattle.

Mat comes down, goes into the feed room, and comes out with two big buckets. Turning them upside down against the front of the stall, he helps her to sit down on one of them, and he sits on the other.

“You oughtn’t to be standing up so much,” he says. “I should have thought of it before.”

“I wasn’t tired. I’m having a good time.”

“Good. Well, you tell me what you need. Don’t wait for me to think of it.” He leans forward, putting his elbows on his knees and lacing his fingers.

“I remember the first crop of his own that Virgil ever tried to raise. He broke about two acres out back there on the ridge, and fenced it and laid the rows off to suit him. I’d told him as much as I knew about it, and let him go. Well, you know this is difficult land to farm. So much of it steep. Hard to keep it from washing. I expect I’ve seen half the topsoil go off of some farms around here in my time. More, maybe. We’ve been slow to have enough sense to farm this kind of land, and lack plenty yet. My daddy hurt some of these hillsides badly in his time. Made some bad mistakes. I tried to learn from his, and went right on and made some bad ones of my own. Anyhow, Virgil broke his ground farther over the brow of the hill than he should have. Like a boy, you know. Didn’t stop in time. But he got his rows laid off about right, and got his crop out—and I didn’t say anything, hoping he’d have luck and get that mistake free. Thought I’d show him later what he’d done wrong, soon as I could do it without hurting his feelings.

“But there was an awful rain one night after his crop had been out, I guess, two weeks. I heard it begin and lay awake listening to it, knowing what was bound to be happening. And the next morning I said, ‘Let’s go look at your crop.’ So we went, and walked all the way around it. It was hurt. Bound to have been. There’s no way to plow sideling ground so it’ll hold in a rain like that. ‘Virgil,’ I said, ‘this is your fault. This is one of your contributions to the world.’ That was hard for me to say. And he took it hard. I saw he was about to cry. And bad as I hated to do it, I let it work in him while we stood there and looked. I knew he was hating the day he ever thought of raising a crop, ready to give up. Finally I put my arm around him and I said, ‘Be sorry, but don’t quit. What’s asked of you now is to see what you’ve done, and learn better.’ And I told him that a man’s life is always dealing with permanence—that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I’ve tried to keep before myself. What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.”

He laughs, and looks at Hannah. “Every time I make a mistake, that gets more painful to believe.”

He shifts his position on the bucket, letting his eyes go back to the feeding cattle.

“I think of the pain I’ve given to my children. Especially to Virgil—now. You hope for a realization in them, finally, that the pain is given out of love, inept and blundering and blind and wrong as it can sometimes be. I don’t worry so much about Bess. She’s had a family of her own long enough to know the terrified love you can sometimes have for your children. But Virgil I feel like I owe an accounting to. There’s maybe only weakness in it. You want your good intentions recognized, even the failed ones. You want it known by the ones nearest you that your good intentions are a real part of your life, and your love for them.”

His eyes move over the ranked backs of the cattle, attentively, though Hannah cannot tell whether he is thinking about them or not. She studies his face, seeing in it something she has never seen there before, an old man’s sorrow for the imperfection of his life and of his fatherhood. She understands suddenly how a young man might be borne up, might justify everything, by the hope of perfection—and, growing old, must realize that he has done nothing perfect. She knows that Mat has allowed her to see, as Virgil never was allowed to, the pained underside of his severity. And she feels, as Mat must, the tragedy in the possibility that Virgil will never see it. She would like to be able to say something comforting, but realizes that she cannot. She cannot comfort even herself.

Still watching the cattle, as though nothing else has been said, Mat says, “Whenever I can, I take a Sunday afternoon and do what we’re doing now—go to each barn and feed, and then sit down and watch the stock eat. It’s a way to take time enough to see what I’m doing, and get a little pleasure out of it.”

“You haven’t been getting much pleasure out of it lately, have you?”

“No. For the last two or three weeks I’ve been here and seen them and fed them and gone before they could hardly get to the troughs. There’s no satisfaction in that. And I tell you, if a man doesn’t farm for his own satisfaction, he’ll have a hard time finding another good reason to do it.”

“But you do like it?”

“There’s not any other life for me. That’s why I wanted Virgil to have it, I reckon—I knew if he wanted it, it would be a good life for him. I’m not saying it’s not hard. But I can tell you that all my life, in spite of the worst, I’ve been inspired by this place, and by what I foresaw or hoped I could do in it. I’ve lived my life the way a hungry man eats.”

Mat stands up.

“I’m about to forget the main thing.”

He grins at the curiosity that comes into her face, but does not tell her what the main thing is. The resemblance between him and Virgil is suddenly strong. She watches him go into the feed room with his bucket and come back. He helps her up and opens the door to the next stall.

“Here’s a family I thought you’d like to see.”

Inside there is one of the cows, gaunt from giving birth, the afterbirth still hanging. And in the corner, on the clean straw, her calf is lying asleep, curled tightly, making a nest of itself.

“Oh,” Hannah says, and lets herself clumsily down beside the calf. “Look how little,” she says. She lays her hand gently on the red and white hide. The cow comes over and smells her.

Mat puts feed into the cow’s trough, and brings fresh water, and then he squats down beside Hannah.

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A boy. A bull.”

“He’s so clean.”

“He was pretty messy at first, but she licked him clean.”

Mat strokes the calf’s back briskly, roughing the hair. The calf wakes up, lifts its white head and looks at them, and then puts it down again. The white-lashed eyes stay open.

“And gentle. He’s not afraid of us at all.”

“Well, his mammy’s not, which helps. But that’s the wonder of anything newborn. He’s clean and unworried and not afraid. And dinner’s ready all the time. Here. Feel his hoofs. See. They’re already hard. When he was born, they were soft, like gelatin.”

“I never thought of that, but I see how necessary it is.”

“It’s all pretty well worked out. I’m always a little surprised every time I see it happen. He’s a nice calf. See how well marked he is?”

“He’s very nice. It’s a nice idea.”

“Which idea?”

“The idea of something newborn.” She smiles.

“One of the best.”

He helps her up and then picks up the calf and stands it on its feet. “Stand up there, old chap. Let’s see how you are.”

The calf balances shakily for a moment, its legs looking too weak, its head too heavy. Mat turns him loose. Unsure whether its legs are for propping or walking, the calf starts toward the cow. It reaches her finally, tries to nurse between her forelegs, nudges, blunders, staggers, collapses into a mess of legs, straightens itself, gets up, finds the tit at last. They hear its mouth smacking as the milk starts to come. Hannah laughs with pleasure and relief.

“If he can find his way back there a few more times,” Mat says, “maybe he’ll learn the way.”

He picks up his bucket and opens the door. “Well, let’s go. We’ve got the rest of the rounds still to make.” At the door he stops and turns around, looking back once more at the cattle. “When he went, you know, he wanted me to sell them—not trouble myself with them. I wouldn’t do it, and I’m glad I didn’t. They’re here.”

It is still clearing. When they come out of the dark barn the whole ridge is in sunlight. The green ridgetops before them are sprinkled heavily with dandelions, the woods along the draws and bluffs beaded with leaf buds. In thickets scattered over the slopes of the river valley are the clean white and pink of wild plum and redbud. The shores of the river have turned pale green with the new leaves of the willows. The shadows of clouds slide rapidly over the face of the country, dimming it, leaving it somehow brighter than it was.

Farther back there is another barn, a tobacco barn, where Mat has wintered a little bunch of steers. Leaving the truck where it is, he and Hannah walk toward this second barn. Mat is pointing out various houses and farms in the valley, and saying who used to live there, and who lives there now. Two or three times, as their perspective on the valley changes, they stop and look.

“When I was a boy,” Mat says, “the showboats used to come up the river in the summertime. You’d hear the calliope commence playing, and then you could hear the people holler for miles on both sides. And that night, when the show time came, they’d all be there, as many of them as could rake up the ticket money. We’d talk about it afterwards for a month.”

When they come to the barn Hannah stays outside, and Mat goes in alone. She walks on out along the top of the ridge, the sun on her, miles of sunlit country blooming around her. She is comforted by all that Mat has said to her, and by the country filling with spring.

She turns to the side, going through a gate and down the slope above the bluff into a small patch of woods in a shallow draw. Here over the dead leaves of the last year, the sunlight is webbed with the shadows of branches. On the far side of the little woods there is a white thicket of wild plum, and there are several redbuds at the woods’ edge, brilliant against the dark trunks of the taller trees. And blooming out of the dead leaves there are bloodroot, trillium, trout lilies, Dutchman’s-breeches, twinleaf, yellow and purple violets. Everywhere the fern leaves are uncurling. The May apples are coming up, the two leaves creased and bronze, bent and furled downward from the round flower-bud like a young animal folded to be born. The buds overhead stain the light. Through a rocky trough in the center of the draw runs a clear stream, dropping from one mossy ledge to another, the sound of it filling the grove. On the ridge above her, she can hear Mat calling the cattle. She wanders slowly over the dry leaves, picking violets.

And then it is not long before she hears him calling her. She answers him, and shortly sees him coming in among the trees, the netting of their shadows falling over him.

“Well, haven’t you found a nice place!”

“Isn’t it? Look at all the flowers.”

“Yes. And a pretty bouquet.”

The little branch keeps up its steady chattering over the rocks. They stand without talking.

Finally Mat says, “It’s a mighty nice place to have to leave. But I guess we’d better do it. Are you rested? You feel all right?”

She nods. They begin the climb back up over the ridge. Mat takes her arm. They step a little formally now, he supporting her, she holding her bouquet.

“I’m a great one for places. This farm’s just full of places I’ve picked out to spend a day sitting in, if I ever get time to do it. Cool places or quiet ones, with water running or an overlook. I’ve thought of some of them nearly all my life. And looks like I’ve never had time to sit down and be still for very long in a one.”

“Whoo,” she says.

She stops to rest and Mat stops beside her.

“Getting steeper all the time, ain’t it?”

She laughs. “Much steeper than it was coming down.” But she feels too heavy. She looks up at the rest of the climb with dread. She has got herself into a pretty foolish predicament for a woman eight months gone.

“You just rest all you need to,” he says. “Take your time. You’ll make it all right.”

“Of course,” she says. She looks straight into his eyes now and laughs. “I’m not worried. Think of all the calves and lambs and things that you’ve helped get born.”

“Oh, Lord,” Mat says, “that’s different.”

They both laugh.

“I can go on now,” she says.

“All right. Let’s angle around and over the point. That’ll be longer, but not so steep.”

He goes beside her, giving her his arm to lean on. They go slowly, taking a gradual upward slant along the face of the slope. High up, clear of the trees, the valley lying open again below them, they stop again to rest, standing facing the valley.

“Oh, I’ve been here before,” Hannah says. “Virgil brought me here once to show me where he’d like to build a house.” She stops, confused, having said that.

They turn a little away from each other, cautious.

“Well, ain’t it a nice place for one,” Mat says.

Around her she can see the stones Virgil laid down that night to mark the corners, scattered out of alignment now, but still there. The fear of great loss comes over her, the great wanting of what may be lost. She turns around and starts up on the slope. Mat catches up and takes her arm. They go on, without talking and without stopping, to the truck. Mat helps her in and gets in himself.

“How you making it?” he asks her.

“Better now. Much better.”

They look at each other now and smile, having made it so, for one time at least.

SOMETHING IN THE WORLD TO DO

Old Jack opened the door of the woodshed for the first time on a warm afternoon two weeks ago. And since then he has made it his place. When he first looked into it, it was full of cast-off furniture, scrap lumber, old fruit jars, tin cans, rusty tools, an old mattress, the smell of mildew.

He spent odd hours of three or four days cleaning it out, burned all that was burnable, stacked the rest neatly in a corner, swept the floor boards and walls, left it open in the warm afternoons to air. The results of his work, he admits, are not very impressive. The old shed is far gone. A man could take a broom handle and knock it down. Still, he finds the neatness he has made in it satisfactory. As in his room in the hotel, there is nothing here to show that he has appropriated it. He has put nothing in it except a little order. Between him and the ramshackle building there is only the pleasure of sitting in it on warm days, looking out at the big pasture behind the town. Sometimes he sleeps there, the sun shining in on him. Mrs. Hendrick has seen him going back there, has even made a little habit of watching his comings and goings from the kitchen window, but he always uses the back door of the woodshed, and so she has no certain idea what he is doing. She will, she supposes, sooner or later go out and see, but she tells herself she will have to wait and do it sometime when he will not see her—not that it would make a whit of difference to him, even she knows that, but she has a secret little flair for detective work, also plenty of curiosity that she could not satisfy so well in Old Jack’s presence as she can in his absence. She did get alarmed at the smoke he made, but so far she has—wisely, she thinks, and virtuously—held her peace.

Now Old Jack picks up a rusty scythe and, chipping and pecking with the end of the file, begins flaking the rust off the blade. What he is going to get around to today is the weeds. Already in the lot behind the hotel, growing up green among the last summer’s dead stalks, the weeds have begun to come. He whets the edge of the blade with the file, leaving the metal bright.

It has been a long time since he went to work early in the morning. Though he did not think he had, he has forgot the delicate flavors of the satisfaction he used to get out of that. The best of it, it turns out, is unrecallable. The realization fills him with a sense of loss that would be hard to bear if he did not have the scythe in his hand. He tests the cutting edge with his thumb, and is satisfied. The sun is just getting up into the branches of the old locusts around the woodshed and along the back fence.

He starts a narrow swath along the crumbling foundation of the hotel, cutting the creeper stems off at the ground as he goes, leaving the weeds, the green and the dead together, lying down behind him.

He gets tired quicker than he thought he would—though he has not been working at what you would call an old man’s pace. He goes back and pulls the creepers loose from the weatherboarding. By the time he does that he is short of breath, a little staggery. He goes back to the woodshed and sits down.

His weakness saddens him. He can remember when a little job like this would just be something to do after supper some night. But he might as well admit it: it is not anymore. And he will have to mend his licks. He will have to get back in that old man’s gait, and stay in it, if he aims to get anything done at all. “Where’s the fire at, old man?” he asks himself.

He whets his scythe and goes back. He is startled by the change he has made. He has done more than he thought. He can change the look of the world still. A kind of inspiration comes into him, the familiar lifting of the thought of what can be done here by a man. He finishes his first swath, and starts a new one. But now he is working more slowly—a pace he thinks maybe he can stand for an hour or two.

He is in the middle of this third swath when the kitchen window opens with a clatter and Mrs. Hendrick puts her head out.

“Mis-ter Beechum! You’ve got no business to cut them weeds! If I want them weeds cut, I’ll cut them myself!”

Old Jack accepts the challenge. He stops, and looks at her as if she is farther away than she is.

“Me and weeds never have lived in the same place together, old woman.”

He goes back to work, same pace. She goes straight to the telephone and calls Wheeler Catlett. And while Old Jack goes on slowly and happily at his work in the back lot, Wheeler is pleading his case with Mrs. Hendrick in the hotel dining room.

“Could you see that he was doing any harm, Mrs. Hendrick, by cutting those weeds?”

“Yessir! He’s doing harm, my opinion, cutting them weeds. Them’s my weeds.”

“Well, Mrs. Hendrick, it’s good for the old fellow to have something to do. And I’d think it would be to your profit to have those weeds cut.”

Mrs. Hendrick’s voice becomes tremulous. “He never even asked, is what I mean, Mr. Catlett. That’s what’s so insulting to me. Just went out there and sharpened my scythe and went to cutting them weeds just like he owned the place. Just a cutting and a cutting, and a calling me ‘old woman.’ ” She wipes her eyes with her apron. “Sometimes a widow woman, seems like, just don’t have no place to turn. If he’d asked me, Mr. Catlett, I’d have let him do it.”

“Well, Mrs. Hendrick, now that he has begun, won’t you be so kind as to let him go on? Don’t you think that would be best?”

“I reckon so. I just hope there won’t no more trouble come of it, Mr. Catlett.”

When Wheeler comes around the hotel, Old Jack’s back is turned to him. “Good morning, Uncle Jack.”

Something’s up, Jack knows right away. Whenever Wheeler comes in the morning, something is up. “Why hello, Wheeler. How are you, honey? I was just cutting a few of these weeds. The damnedest mess of them ever I saw. Just look a here,” he says, gesturing around him, “what that old woman has let grow up right in her door.”

“Shhh!” Wheeler says. Old Jack always refers to Mrs. Hendrick as “that old woman,” though she is at least twenty years younger than he is. “Uncle Jack,” he says, “don’t call her an old woman—at least not to her face.”

Old Jack smiles and lays his hand on Wheeler’s arm. “Don’t you worry about that, honey. Me and her get along.”

By the evening of the next day—working a while and sitting a while—Old Jack has finished the weeds on Mrs. Hendrick’s lot, and has made a good beginning on the weeds behind the store. It looks fairly good, he thinks, a big improvement.

In the next couple of days the frontier is pushed across Jasper Lathrop’s back lot, and on down behind the doctor’s office and the drugstore. A great litter of old cans and bottles is picked up and piled in an out-of-the-way corner. The burnable trash and the cut weeds are piled on top of the old crates behind Jasper’s store and burnt in a smoky fire that draws all the boys in Port William and a considerable number of the men.

Saturday morning after breakfast Old Jack goes out into his clearing and stands and looks. Childish as he suspects it may be, he cannot help feeling a little elated at what he has done. But along with the satisfaction there is growing an uneasiness, a sadness. It is finished, and what will he do now? Having escaped it a little while, he has again knocked square against the realization that there is mighty little left in this world for him to do. And this morning what he has done seems threatened by the possibility that it was done for nothing. What can he do now but sit and look at it? And know that the weeds will come back, and he will go.

As if in answer to a prayer that he has not even thought of praying, he sees Floyd Mahew’s boy driving a team of mules and sled along the fence, as he has morning and noon and evening all week, only today there is a breaking plow lying on the sled.

Something to be growing in it: the idea is born full grown into Old Jack’s head. He waves his cane.

“Oh, son! Whoo! Hello, boy!”

But the mules are coming at a brisk trot and the boy cannot hear over the rattling of the harness.

“Deaf and dumb!” Jack says. He waits until the team comes up even with him and calls: “Whoa!”

The mules stop. The boy falls forward, catching himself against the fore-standard of the sled, and looks around in some confusion until he sees Old Jack coming.

“Boy,” Old Jack says, “can you run that plow?”

“Yessir,” the boy says, grinning and nodding. It’s a Mahew grin, a Mahew face. The Mahews have always reminded Jack just a little bit of catfish. He gives the boy a good looking-over, not sure he is telling the truth. He is not a very big boy. “Well,” he says finally, “go on up yonder to the gate and come in here. I’ve got a little piece of work here I want you to help me with.”

The boy looks doubtful. “Uh, I better go on to work like my daddy told me to.”

“You’re Floyd Mahew’s boy, ain’t you?”

“Yessir.” Again the nod and grin.

“Well, I ain’t worried about him. You just drive up to that gate and I’ll help you get it open.”

The old gate into the alley along the upper side of the hotel has not been opened in maybe fifteen years. The slats are rotten, some of them broken. The whole thing has been bound together in place with baling wire.

They do finally get it open. The boy drives the sled into the alley. They unload the plow and hitch to it.

“I’ll drive, son, and you handle the plow. Can you plow a straight furrow?”

“Yessir. I’ll try.”

“What in the hell does that mean? ‘Yessir. I’ll try.’ Well, I’ll drive straight. You just keep your plow running level.”

“Yessir,” the boy says. “Uh. How long do you think this’ll take?”

“Ne’ mind! Don’t you worry about your daddy. Gee, boys! Take hold of your plow, honey.”

The boy takes hold, and they go across and back the long way of Mrs. Hendrick’s lot, leaving a straight, neatly turned backfurrow through the middle. The black earth bursts at the touch of the share and crumbles. Hard telling when it ever was broken, if it ever was. If it is not virgin ground it might as well be. It has been a long time since Old Jack has seen any dirt like it. He is delighted by the look and the smell of it, and by the feel of it when he stops and picks it up and crumbles it in his hands.

“Lord Amighty!” Old Jack says. “Look what dirt you’re plowing,” he says to the boy. “Did you ever plow any dirt like that before?”

“Yessir.”

“Nosir.”

“Nosir.”

“That’s what new ground looks like. You’ve never seen any of it on that place of your daddy’s.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve broke a fair amount of it in my time. You’ll not break but mighty little in yours.”

“Yessir.”

“Do you know why?”

“Nosir.”

“Because all of it, you might as well say, has been broke, and a lot of it used up. From my day to yours is a long time, and a lot more is used up, and not much to the improvement of the world, far as I can see.”

“Yessir.”

“Yessir, what? Yessir, Hell! Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yessir.”

Old Jack looks down at the boy, studying him, and then snorts. “Until you get enough sense to worry about it, I reckon I’ll have to. Well, look at that ground you’re turning and remember it.”

They’ve come to the end of a furrow, and they look at each other, each a little perplexed by the other.

“It’s something you ought to remember. Not many in your generation will ever see it.”

“Yessir.”

They begin the next furrow.

“Did you ever imagine what an improvement it would be to the world if everybody cut his own weeds?”

“Nosir.”

“Well, you won’t come to that with a boy’s head. But I’ll tell it to you. It’d be a hell of a big improvement.”

“Yessir.”

“What’s the biggest fish you ever caught?”

“About the size of that mule’s ear,” the boy says. “But I ain’t fished much.”

There’s a slam behind them, and when they look Mrs. Hendrick is standing on the stoop at the kitchen door, a wet dishrag dripping in her hand. She is red in the face, bent forward as if about to dive off the stoop.

“Just keep ahold of your plow, honey.”

“Stop! You all just stop them old mules right there!”

Jack addresses the mules quietly and gently: “Whoa, boys.” He turns slowly to face her.

“Mr. Beechum! What’re you plowing up my back yard for?”

“For the good of the world!”

Whack! she shuts the screen door. Wham! she shuts the kitchen door.

“Come up, mules! Gee! Come up!”

When Wheeler comes this time it is a good while before he can get in a word. Mrs. Hendrick tattles on Old Jack, describes the look on his face, quotes him a number of times so as to make obvious the outrageousness of his tone. She speaks of her own decent life, of her great sympathy for a lonely old man such as Mr. Beechum, and of the hardships and travails of widow women in this world. And Wheeler has to allow her some sympathy. She is having a rough time of it. She oughtn’t to have to put up with insults from Old Jack.

“Well,” Wheeler says. “I’ll certainly talk to him about the language he uses, Mrs. Hendrick, and I’ll ask him to show you more respect. But I’ll also have to tell you again what I told you the other day. I can’t see why you object to what he’s doing. I can’t see that it won’t be to your advantage to have a garden back there.”

“A garden?” she snaps. “How’d I know it was going to be a garden? Well, I just hope there won’t no more trouble come out of it, is all I hope.”

When Wheeler goes out back, the ground-breaking is finished. Floyd Mahew’s boy is gone, and the old gate has been shut and wired up. Old Jack is standing and looking.

“Hello, Wheeler boy!”

“What’re you going to plant here, Uncle Jack?”

“A little bit of a garden. Maybe raise that old woman something she can cook.”

“That’s fine,” Wheeler says. He had not known any better than Mrs. Hendrick that a garden was what Old Jack intended to raise.

“These here shirt-tail lawyers looking after my business, I’m liable to have to go back to working for a living, so I reckon I’d better keep my hand in.”

They laugh.

“Wheeler, did that old woman call you down here to complain about me?”

“That’s right.”

“The damned old thing hasn’t got any sense, Wheeler.”

“Not much. But you haven’t been giving much consideration to that.”

“You’re right, son. I haven’t been giving her a thought. And it’s causing you trouble, ain’t it? You reckon I’d better hunt another place to go?” He looks over his garden patch—not altogether liking that thought. “Or”—he grins—“we could buy this place and throw her out. Get us a couple of old women about eighteen years old to come in and keep house.”

Wheeler laughs. “No, Uncle Jack. I think the best thing to do now is let things be as they are. I just ask you, for my sake, don’t insult her, and try to show some respect for her rights in her own property.”

Old Jack sees that the crisis is over, and he turns away, wanting to change the subject. Good company is going to waste.

“I want you to look at that ground,” he says.

They pick up handfuls of the black moist dirt, letting it crumble through their fingers.

“It won’t take but mighty little working to get that ground ready to plant.”

They stand there a few more minutes, talking about the newness and richness of that neglected place.

And then Wheeler starts toward the street. Old Jack watches him go. He is going to have to begin making some kind of peace. He has been mighty unwilling to have that woman on his mind. But now he will let her be there—for the sake of peace, and for Wheeler’s sake, and his own.

He looks at his watch. It is three-quarters of an hour until dinnertime. The sun has begun to dry the surface of the turned ground. He paces the length and width of the plot, and then goes into the woodshed. He sits in his chair and takes out his notebook and pencil and figures how much seed he will have to buy.

A lot, it proves. They will have plenty to eat fresh, and plenty to can, and some to give away. He goes out to the street, his list fluttering in his hand, the ground waiting.

A PLEASANT PLACE TO SIT

April 22, 1945

Dear Nathan,

Here I’ve let a month go by without writing, in spite of getting two letters from you. We’ve been working mighty hard since I wrote last—daylight to dark, and seven days a week. Last week we worked right through Sunday, and didn’t know we’d passed it until Tuesday.

Well, this Sunday morning I decided I couldn’t put off writing any longer, so I slipped out early and walked to town. Thought I’d get where Jarrat can’t find me and I can’t hear him holler, and get this letter written. When it’s done I guess I’ll have to go back and let myself be found. I’m sitting here on the sidewalk in front of Jayber’s door. It’s a quiet fair morning, and a pleasant place to sit. Jayber was just finishing his breakfast when I got here. He came down and hung around and talked until I thought I might as well give up and go home. But he finally went back upstairs.

What Jayber was wanting to talk about was Old Jack Beechum’s doings up at the hotel. The old man has cleaned the weeds and trash off of all the back lots from the post office clean to the pool room. Then yesterday morning he got one of Floyd Mahew’s boys to break up a big garden patch behind the hotel. I didn’t know anything about it until yesterday evening. I’d finished cutting some ground at Mat’s and had loaded the harrow onto the sled and was starting home. It was, I imagine, an hour or so before sundown. I shut the gate and pulled out into the road, and here come Old Jack, waving his cane and hollering, “Whoo! Oh, Burley! Whoa there!” I pulled on up even with him and stopped. He wanted me to come out back and work that garden patch for him so he could plant it.

I went and did it. It didn’t take long. That ground worked like new ground, which I imagine it is—fine and black and loose as ashes. When I got it worked good, Old Jack brought out a sack full of garden seed and we laid off some rows and started planting, him dropping the seeds and me a covering. It was right remarkable to see that old man all buttoned up in a winter coat—for he tells me he never gets quite warm—going along dropping seeds in the ground. While we were planting the garden Jayber came by. He’d closed his shop for supper and come to hunt up Old Jack, since he hadn’t seen him for three or four days and had got to wondering if maybe he was sick. Well, he soon found out all he wanted to know about the old man’s health, and got put to work pretty suddenly too.

Nothing at all has been heard of Virgil Feltner beyond what I already told you. It’ll soon be two months now that he has been missing. I know that for Mat and them it has been a long wait and a long hope, and they’ve maybe only begun. Once in a while when you’re talking to Mat you’ll realize all of a sudden that he has quit listening, ain’t there, is way off somewhere in his trouble, and then you can see the pain in his face. That missing doesn’t give him much to take a hold of. These last seven weeks have aged Mat right sharply too. He nearly always seems steady, reined pretty tight. But it’s no trouble to look at him now and see that it has been a long time since he has been at rest in himself.

Nobody has seen hide nor hair of Gideon Crop either. Several of us are working down there, turn about, to help Ida keep things going.

You asked me to tell you what things look like now, and I’ll try it the best I can. It’s full spring now. The trees are leafed out. The big ones here in town reach over the road so that from where I’m looking the town seems sort of roofed with leaves. The yards are green and flowers are blooming in some of them. Now and then when I look up into town I see one or another of Minnie Lathrop’s old hens chasing a bug across the road. Uncle Stan has got his old Jersey tied to a stake in the empty lot next to the church. The grass is coming good everywhere and people will be putting their stock on pasture before long. Out home your Grandma’s old lilac is in full bloom and various ones of her flowers is blooming, or has bloomed. As fine a spring as you’d ever want to see.

Telling you about it makes me wish mightily that you could see it. Which, if the predictors are right, you may before too long. I think a mighty lot of you, old boy. Let me hear a little something when you get the time.

Your uncle,

Burley

Chapter 11

GREEN PASTURE

For the last time until next winter Mat has fed the herd of cows. Now, while they eat, he walks out across the barn lot and the small pasture in which the cows and calves have been kept all winter. It’s a bright clear morning, the first of May. From the ridgetop where he walks, he can see the white mist in the valley just beginning to rise into the sunlight and dissolve. Beyond the trampled close-eaten winter pasture the grass is heavy and green along the ridge and on the slopes above the woods. He opens the gate.

The winter, which has kept him going the rounds of the barns twice a day and more, is all behind him now, and Mat feels his life changing. As though this finishing has cleared the way, he can foresee the long hot days of the summer, when the stock will no longer be so dependent on him but the crops will. And from somewhere still far off in those long weeks, he feels the approach of suffering for him and his house.

Virgil has been missing now for nearly two months, and in all that time he and Margaret and Hannah have never spoken of the probability, growing stronger every day, that Virgil is dead, or worse, that they may never know. And along with everything else, Mat feels lonesome for Margaret and for their old life.

Lately he has returned many times to the thought of Gideon Crop’s vigil over the floodwater. It has become a kind of waking nightmare in which he wanders, imagining all that a man might be moved to by hopelessness and hope at the edge of a dark flood in which his best is lost. Often in the midst of these visions he will hear himself curse or groan.

Out of his understanding of that horror that speaks so to his own, he manages to find time every day or so to see Ida Crop, taking Margaret with him sometimes, other times going by himself. He has become dependent on her, as if her survival of her loss is a lesson to him that he will have somehow to learn.

Once, after she had made some mention of Annie, he asked her: “How do you stand it, Ida?”

And she said, “You’re thinking about your boy, ain’t you, Mr. Feltner?” She was looking away toward the creek. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I just have to sit down and bawl.” She gave him another one of her studying looks. “What I wish, I wish she was buried somewheres close in a little grave.”

He nodded. He realized that this was familiar to him.

“I tell myself that when Gideon gets back it’ll be better.”

She amazes Mat, and encourages him, though he comes on the pretense of encouraging her. Beyond her pain and endurance and will, it seems to him that there’s a hopefulness in her that is almost calm. It comes, he thinks, from the knowledge, not just that she is young enough yet to have more children, but that other women will get with child, other children will be born, it will go on. It seems to Mat that this must be one of the powers of women. He does not have it in him.

The cattle have cleaned up the feed he put in for them and are drifting out again into the sunlight. The cows have shed their winter hair and their close summer coats shine in the light. Mat goes into the barn and drives out the stragglers. Beyond the doors, working back and forth, he gathers the herd and starts it toward the gate. The cows are fat, their calves vigorous and in good flesh. Looking at them, he feels the satisfaction of success. The winter has been met and dealt with; ahead of them now is the grass.

Coming closer, the cows see that the gate is open and they go toward it at a trot, no longer needing to be driven. They enter the pasture and begin to graze. Mat closes the gate and leans on it, watching. The only sound now is that of the grass tearing.

CAUGHT

Before Ernest finished taking down the lower part of the old barn, seeds had already begun to sprout out of the dirt floor that the roof and walls had kept dark for years. Since he took off the roof, the work has gone slowly, involving much moving of ladders, a lot of temporary propping and shoring up as he worked around the weakened corners, days of great painstaking and difficulty in freeing and letting down the heavy timbers of the framing. And there have been rainy days when he could not work at all. But at last the whole lower half of the barn has been torn down, and Ernest has begun siding up the open end of the half still standing. Around the carefully sorted and stacked piles of old lumber and roofing, the weeds have begun to grow tall.

As soon as he finishes the barn, he will paint it. After that there will be the other jobs of repair and maintenance that Mat has asked him to do. On Mat’s visits to the little farm the two of them have gone the rounds of all the buildings, looking them over, deciding what ought to be done for the preservation of each one.

Every morning Ida brings him water in the half-gallon vinegar jug, and sees to it that he carries it back with him, freshly filled, in the afternoons. And every day at noon he goes up to the house and washes and sits by himself at the table while she brings the food to him as she did the first day—though in the mornings he still shows up at Dolph Courtney’s at opening time and buys his customary packet of sandwiches. He cannot bring himself to give up either Ida’s company, such as it is, or her hospitality. And because he is a man deeply in the habit of secrecy about himself, he cannot bring himself to give up his deceptions. When he knows that she will be feeding the Coulters or Mat or any of the others who are helping with the work of the place in Gideon’s absence, he finds it easy enough to go back to town at noon on the pretense of needing materials or tools.

He has misgivings at the thought that she feeds him by her own troubling and providing even though the work he is doing there is not necessarily for her. Aware of the delicacy of the question, and made awkward by it, he has asked several times if there is not some way that he can repay her for her kindness to him. And each time she has scoffed at the idea.

“I’ve got plenty of canned stuff in the cellar,” she told him once, “and meat in the smokehouse. Somebody just as well be eating it.”

Now and then when he sees she needs it, he will buy some staple such as salt or coffee or flour and bring it to her, and always she will take it with simple thanks and the observation that she was needing it, as if the whole business is perfectly natural and even ordinary. It would delight him to bring more, to buy and bring by the armload, but he knows that to buy more where there is already plenty would seem ridiculous to her.

Nothing has passed between them except her hospitality, the same as she would offer to anybody who might come there to work—not just her hospitality, as she offers it, but Gideon’s as well. Or you could say that it is not her hospitality that she offers at all, but only Gideon’s, her offering of it being necessarily more meticulous because he is not there to offer it himself.

But during the weeks that Ernest has been at work there, eating in her kitchen, studying her ways and looks and movements, she has come into his mind. In spite of her careless old dresses, her apparent unconcern about her looks, there is a certain beauty that she has, and a certain dignity and strength that draw him toward her. Wherever she moves at her work, in or out of his sight, he is aware of her. A kind of imagining sight and touch carries his mind to her against his will. He imagines himself living there with her, doing such farming as his lameness might allow. In this dream of his, his shop is lifted intact out of Port William and set down in place of Gideon’s old toolshed under the oak tree. Except for this holding on to the idea of the shop, one of the emotions of his dream is surprise at the ease with which his old life can be given up.

That her mind is not on him at all—that except for what she would think of as a decent and necessary kindness toward him, her attention is turned away from him, as though she is always listening for the approach of somebody else—this makes him all the freer to cultivate his dream.

There are times when he realizes vaguely that he is trapped, endangered, like an animal that has crept through a narrow opening and fed until it has grown too large to escape. The orderly interior of his shop is remote from him now, of little use to him. In these moments of understanding, he knows that something behind him in his life is being destroyed. Even if he could escape and make his way back to it, it would no longer serve.

DAYLIGHT

Old Jack never did have any trouble waking up. Now out of the light sleep of his old age he wakes more easily than he ever did. And he is hardly awake before he is up, cap already on, standing in the middle of the floor, scratching his stomach and getting his bearings. Unhooking his cane from the bed, he goes to the window and looks out. Above the pale whitening of dawn in the east the morning stars are bright. It will be a clear day.

Beyond the window the town is quiet. There is not a light burning anywhere. As usual he is the first one up, and he likes the feeling of that, has liked it all his life. Most of his days have begun in that silence, and it is still one of his needs. He slept with the window half-open and he opens it wide now and, turning back into the room, puts on his clothes. He makes his bed in the dark, and instead of sitting at the window to wait for daylight to come as he usually does, he goes out the door and starts down the hall.

Wheeler has promised to come by for him early this morning and take him out to spend the day at his farm. He has been planning this with Wheeler for a couple of weeks, but for various reasons it has had to be put off until now. Wheeler has a case to try in Frankfort today, so he will not have to go much out of his way. Jack could just as easily have asked Mat to take him, but Wheeler is his lawyer, not Mat, and he sees Mat every day anyhow.

At the top of the steps he can hear Mrs. Hendrick snoring in her room. He rakes his cane along the balusters lightly, and hears her stop and groan and turn over.

He decides not to bother with waking her. Let all the day be good.

He goes on down the stairs and back along the hall and through the kitchen and out the back door. Going out near the fence, he urinates, making of the necessity an opportunity to look at his garden, which is growing well. He cleaned it of weeds yesterday, and that cleanness and the dewy freshness of the morning seem to him to go together. In the grey light the young plants in their rows show dark against the ground.

He goes back into the kitchen and turns on the light. Pawing around in the old refrigerator, he finds bacon and eggs and, lighting the coal-oil stove, makes himself a breakfast, cooking plenty and helping himself to a bowl of cold biscuits that he finds in the dish cabinet. The bacon is not well done and the eggs are too greasy, but he eats heartily, offsetting the grease with half a dozen biscuits and a lot of water.

Last night he had Dolph Courtney make him some baloney sandwiches for his lunch today. He gets the packet out of the refrigerator now, turns off the kitchen light, and goes to wait on the front porch. The daylight is getting strong, though it will still be half an hour or so until sunup. Things have begun to stir at Mat’s, and up and down the street other houses have begun to show signs of life. Old Jack goes over to the edge of the porch and looks out the road toward Hargrave. He imagines that Wheeler is on his way. He lets his mind leave Wheeler’s house down at Hargrave and come up the road toward Port William at what he thinks is about thirty-five miles an hour, careful to observe all the landmarks as they go by. By the time his mind comes up out of the river valley and starts across the ridge to Port William it is making at least sixty, though if he knew it he would never let it go that fast. He lets it drive in over at Mat’s to take some message from Wheeler’s wife, and then back out and pull down in front of the hotel and park itself under the shade trees. But Wheeler still has not come in sight. Old Jack looks and listens out the road, but does not hear a thing. The east has begun to redden ahead of the rising sun, and he knows she will be right on up. He takes out his watch and—considering that it is late, and that how late does not matter—puts it back without looking at it. He has not spent a full day at home since he moved to Port William last fall, and now that the day has finally come he grieves for every lost minute of it. Standing there, watching the sky redden, thinking of how much daylight is already behind him, he is overcome by a kind of sad panic. He decides he had better call Wheeler’s house to see if he has left.

On the wallpaper over the telephone he has written in strokes an inch high:

WHEELER CATLETT

OFFICE 7–2854

HOUSE 7–3672

He dials the house number and waits, hopeful. He can just hear Wheeler’s wife answer the phone and say, “Yes, Uncle Jack. Wheeler left a good while ago. He ought to be getting up there about now.” It rings and rings. It does not take Old Jack long to guess what that means. Wheeler is not up. It is a fact that Wheeler sometimes sleeps as late as seven o’clock. That is the only bad fault Old Jack has ever found in Wheeler. He must have told him a thousand times, by various subtleties and hints, that a man cannot hope to get anywhere lying in the bed so late of a morning with the sun shining in his face.

“My Lord Amighty!” Old Jack says in disgust, as ashamed and humiliated and angry as if Wheeler was his own boy.

He lets her ring.

Finally the receiver clicks up on the other end.

“Hello!” Old Jack does not have much faith in the instrument, and he talks loudly.

Somebody speaks into the other end.

“Hello!”

“Hello.” The sound still seems to come from too far away.

“Who is that a talking?”

“It’s Wheeler, Uncle Jack. What’s the matter?”

“Wheeler, I’m ready, honey. It’s daylight. Are you coming?”

“I told you I’d be there, didn’t I? And I didn’t say when. I said pretty early.”

“Well?”

“Well,” Wheeler says, “the sun’s not even up!”

Old Jack was not aiming to let on what he thinks, but he cannot help it. “Damn it to hell, don’t tell me what the sun does in the morning! I know and you don’t!”

They’re both good and mad now.

“Well,” Wheeler says.

“Well what?”

“Never mind!”

“Well, are you aiming to come or not? I got business I want to take care of.”

“I’ll be there, Uncle Jack,” Wheeler says. “Just hold on. It’ll be about thirty minutes. Be ready.”

“Ready, hell!” Jack says. “I been ready!” And he hangs up.

He goes out and, seeing that Dolph Courtney has opened up and Ernest Finley has come for his sandwiches, starts down to the drugstore.

Old Jack going in, Ernest coming out, they meet in the door.

“Good morning, boy.”

“Morning, Uncle Jack.”

“Well, are you on your way to work?”

“Going to try it another day.”

“You’re all right, son, You’re a good ’un.”

Old Jack likes to see a man start his day’s work when the day starts. But instead of comforting him, the sight of a man getting up the way he ought to only makes him more bitter toward Wheeler—and everybody else in the country who is still lying in bed. He cannot get used to this new fashion of sleeping until the sun is three or four hours high. He cannot imagine how a man could ever do anything worthwhile in a day he had already slept the best part of.

“Morning!” Dolph calls from the back of the store where he is cooking his breakfast.

But Old Jack does not hear him. He has turned around to watch through the door glass while Ernest gets into the truck and starts to his work. All his life—when he was on his place, in his place—he and the ones who worked with him got up before the sun.

“If they stay with me they’ve got to get up!” he thinks, repeating in his mind words he has said many times aloud. He feels the emptiness of that boast now. Now the truth is that there is not a soul living—Wheeler included, damn him—who cares whether Old Jack gets up at daylight or not. And everybody knows that after he does get up there is not much he can do. But he demands that he get up. And once he is up, because his life has taught him, he can see what needs to be done. A man who has learned to see cannot help seeing.

“Ay, Lord!”

“What’s that, Uncle?”

Dolph’s gold tooth is shining in the middle of a grin.

“Too damn many people sleeping in the daytime,” Old Jack says.

He pauses, the necessity of speaking to Dolph making him realize that he is making the wrong point.

“And better off asleep, some of ’em.”

Old Jack’s anger has carried his indictment far beyond the point where it might apply to any fault of Wheeler’s. He is well aware of that and is comforted by it. Now, watching Dolph eat his breakfast—thinking how Dolph’s wife will come flopping up to Burgess’s store in her bedroom slippers about nine o’clock, eyes still half shut, hair full of curlers—Old Jack feels all of his anger go out of him, leaving only sadness that what he has said is true.

“Surely,” he says, “a man can get up and be ready when the time comes.”

He looks at Dolph and shakes his head. He might just as well be hollering down a groundhog hole. But he will say what he means.

“Look at Mat Feltner up there. His boy’s gone, he’s getting old, he’s troubled in his mind—and you’ll never see him hit a half-assed swat at a fly.”

Toot! Toot-toot!

Old Jack is on his way out, Dolph Courtney forgotten, before the horn stops blowing.

Outside he sees that it is not Wheeler at all, but somebody in a truck, already going out of sight up the road.

But before he has time to be disappointed Wheeler is there, his car coming up over the rise beyond Mat’s house, slowing up and stopping in front of the hotel. Old Jack waves his cane.

“Oh, Wheeler! Whoo! Hold on!”

Wheeler lets the car roll on down the street to where Old Jack is hurrying to meet him, and stops and opens the door. Old Jack gets in, puts his packet of sandwiches on the seat between them, puts the point of his cane between his feet, slams the door, laces his fingers over the crook of the cane.

“How’re you, Wheeler?”

“All right, Uncle Jack. How’re you?”

“Tol’bly well.”

“It’s a fine morning.”

“It is that.”

They are both over their anger and glad to see each other. Old Jack suddenly feels a lot better than tolerable. He is on his way home, his day begun. He glances over at Wheeler, who is looking mighty fine in his suit and clean white shirt, and feels a tremor of pride that he knows that fine man.

“Wheeler,” he says, “you’ll see that you’ll be in good shape today on account of getting up early. It gives you time to think over what you’ve got to say, don’t it?”

He could not help saying that, though now that he has said it he reckons maybe he should not have.

“Right!” Wheeler says, laughing. “I’ll be two times better than I usually am—if I can just stay awake until I get there, and find some breakfast.”

Laughing too, Old Jack says, “A real lawyer would have finished breakfast two hours ago.”

Well, he is glad he brought it up. There is no doubt now that their quarrel is over.

Wheeler, from his side of the car, has been watching Old Jack with amusement and growing sympathy. The old man is sitting there in his whopsided old cap and big coat and puttees, blood dried on his face from last night’s shaving, leaning toward the windshield, taking in everything, and it comes to Wheeler what this day means to him.

They drive out past the edge of town and turn right onto the Bird’s Branch road. The gravel road stays up high along the backs of the ridges, and as they go along they can see miles of the country, the points and ridges marked by long shadows in the red light of the sun still not far above the horizon. They go slowly into the turns and slants of the road, talking about the weather and the prospects of the year. Finally Wheeler asks:

“Have you seen Mr. Feltner lately?”

“I see him every day.”

“How do you think he looks?”

“Ay, Lord! He looks like a man that’s hurt.”

Wheeler, as if considering that, says nothing for a minute, looking down the road. And then he says: “Bess is worried about him, and so am I. He’s taking this mighty hard.”

“It’s hard on all of them.”

“Yes, but Mrs. Feltner and Hannah have the baby to think about and get ready for. That seems to be some help to them. But Mr. Feltner doesn’t—or won’t—have anything but his work. And he’s doing too much of that. I’ve never seen him tireder.”

“Ah! And everything he does is bound to remind him of what he hoped for his boy.”

“Yes.”

Old Jack touches Wheeler’s leg with the end of his cane to make Wheeler look at him.

“Do you think his boy’s alive?”

Wheeler doesn’t answer for what seems a long time, as though he is wishing Jack had not asked. “Not likely,” he says finally, “though we may not know for certain for a long time. And may never.”

Seeing that the old man is saddened by what he said, Wheeler says kindly: “Nothing anybody can do, Uncle Jack.”

But surely Wheeler knows better than to think that is any consolation. It is just the truth. And a man who is depending on the truth to console him is sometimes in a hell of a fix. To Old Jack, the sorrowful thing exactly is that there is nothing anybody can do.

“Not a thing in the world. And he’s as fine a one as ever set foot on the ground.”

They come to Old Jack’s place—a big white house set back from the road in a yard full of trees, clean well-fenced pastures and fields sloping away from it, barns and outbuildings all painted white too and in good repair. It is plain from the look of it that a man’s competent love for it has dwelt in it. Old Jack has neglected nothing, let nothing go.

Wheeler stops in front of the barn and names a time late in the day when he will be back. Old Jack gets out and stands watching and then listening while Wheeler drives out to the road and disappears and then the sound of his engine goes out of hearing over the next hill. Much as he likes to be with Wheeler, he is glad he has gone.

The sun has risen above its first redness now, and is slanting down clear and bright. The dew is still on. The pastures are in excellent shape, the grass thick and deep. In the fresh sunshine, amidst the green of the trees and the grass, the buildings are white and clean. Old Jack stands and looks, gathering it all in. The place itself comes back into his mind. They come together like the two halves of the same thing. There is smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, and he hears from somewhere out back of the barn the sound of harrow disks striking rock, which tells him that his new tenant is at work. That is a relief. He purposely gave no warning of his visit, the better to get an idea of this man’s way of doing, but he came half afraid of the pain it would cause him if this one too proved incompetent or lazy.

During his declining years Old Jack has had a number of tenants who contracted to raise the tobacco on the shares and to work by the day when he needed them and they could spare the time. Most of these were men living on neighboring farms who wanted to take on the extra work, and except for one, who was called to the Army after staying only a year, all of them have proved unsatisfactory in one way or another. Most of them, in fact, nearly worried Old Jack to death with their poor ways of doing—messing at their work or neglecting it, losing his tools or leaving them in the rain, forgetting to fasten gates, mistreating the stock. Sooner or later he would always get disgusted with them and make them go, or they would become sulky under the demands he made on them and quit. It was a bad situation, Jack knew, but nothing else seemed possible. And in spite of everything, because he was still living there, and was constantly watchful and busy, the farm stayed in good shape.

But when he had made up his mind to move to town, he and Wheeler decided that a more stable arrangement would have to be made. Old Jack left everything to Wheeler. A young man—the tenant for the past year on a neighboring farm—was recommended, was interested, and a contract was signed in January in Wheeler’s office. Since then, on his trips with Wheeler to the farm, and on chance meetings in town, Old Jack has seen his tenant maybe a dozen times, but only briefly, without having a chance to form a judgment of him. Until recently he has just trusted Wheeler’s continuing good opinion, knowing he would find out for himself sooner or later.

He has always liked the young man, but has wondered about him too. And he has wondered what will happen to his place now that he no longer lives on it. The question has troubled him. He would have come out two weeks ago if Wheeler had not stalled him, waiting for better weather.

Standing in front of the barn, he has already begun his exploration of the young man’s ways, looking into the fence corners and into the open sheds and at the back porch of the house. All that he can see is orderly. The tools that are not in use have been put into the sheds out of the weather. The gates and doors are all closed and latched. Rows of young vegetables are growing in the garden. A flock of hens is scratching around the henhouse in the sun. In one of the front fields he can see three milk cows grazing, and there are a couple of sows and pigs in one of the small pens below the barn. All that is as it should be. These people are not the kind who will be running to the grocery store to buy all they eat. That means a great deal, to Old Jack’s way of thinking.

The young man’s wife is carrying water from the well into the kitchen, and Old Jack imagines that she is heating water to wash clothes. The first time she came out she waved to him and called, “Good morning!” And he waved to her. Since then she has gone on with her work, paying no attention to him. It pleases him that she has started her work so early in the morning, and that she goes about it without stopping to talk. Though he has seen her only a few times, and then at a distance, he can tell that she recognized him, and that pleases him too. For a long time he can remember exactly the cheerfulness of her voice. He makes up his mind about her on the spot. She is a good woman.

Turning and going into the feed barn, he puts his packet of sandwiches up on a shelf inside the doors, and goes back through the clean-swept driveway, opening the stalls and looking in. All the stalls have been freshly bedded. The barn looks the way it ought to. He goes to the other barns and buildings. Everywhere there is the same orderliness. Everywhere he can see the signs of the presence of a good man, a good manager, a good head—a kind of intelligence that he recognizes and feels akin to.

He goes through the lot gate and, following a pair of wheel tracks worn in the grass, walks out along the broad back of the ridge. The tracks turn after a couple of hundred yards, cross a shallow swag, go through a grove of big white oaks, and come to a second gate, which opens into the broken field where he expects to find his tenant.

When he first comes into the field there is no one in sight. He sits down on a sled up the fence a few rods from the gate, and rests and waits. Before him lies the long, evenly worked strip of crop ground, sloping gently toward the woods on the lower side. Looking up and down the length of it, he sees nothing at first except a few black birds walking over the newly stirred earth. And then over the rise to his left a team of three horses, two blacks and a bay, comes into sight, stepping at a brisk pace, their heads nodding, a brown plume of dust rising behind the harrow as they draw it along. As they come nearer down the long field, Old Jack can hear the harness creaking, the rattling of the trace chains and the metal tripletrees. Now and then the disks of the harrow grate on a stone. The horses stride powerfully over the loose ground.

Knowing a good team when he sees one, Old Jack comes wide awake. He sits, leaning a little forward now, on the edge of the sled. He grins and shakes his head.

“Ay, Lord!” he says.

You can see that there is no deadhead sitting behind that team of horses. The man is driving, not riding. And though Jack has not heard him utter a word, the horses move in a way that shows they know exactly who they have behind them and what he expects.

With a great rattling and creaking and loud breathing the big team draws down toward Old Jack, and then even with him.

“Whoa! Whoa, boys!”

The tone of the young man’s voice is full of praise. He speaks as he might speak to three other men well known to him. The horses stop and stand. The young man turns to Old Jack, grins, raises his hand.

“Good morning, sir!”

He loops the reins over a lever and steps off the harrow, hurrying toward the sled. Old Jack, seeing how he hastens at his work, gets up and goes out across the harrowed ground to meet him—in a kind of panic trying to remember what his name is.

“How are you, Mr. Beechum?”

For the life of him, Old Jack cannot think of the young man’s name. Usually it does not matter to him what somebody’s name is. But he has begun to think a lot of this young fellow, and he would like to call him by name.

“I’m all right, son. You’re working a good team of horses.”

“They do pretty well,” the young man says.

But Old Jack can see that he knows they do better than pretty well, and that he recognizes the value of the compliment and appreciates it. Old Jack was a fine horseman and teamster in his day, and it is clear that the young man knows that.

They talk briefly about the weather and about the prospects for the crops. Old Jack asks a question or two, and the young man answers. He is a lean, hard-muscled fellow, clean-cut, with the curious ability to look neat in dirty work clothes. Respectfully and good-humoredly he fulfills what he considers to be his duty to his landlord, explaining what he has done and how he has done it and what he plans to do and what his thoughts are about the work of the farm. And beneath the pleasantness with which he does this explaining can be felt his confidence in his own work and his own judgment. A good head. Old Jack gets the impression that his opinions and approval are not being asked for, and instead of being angered by the young man’s independence as he would have expected, he finds that he is delighted. It is a meeting of two of the same kind. While he was taking the measure of the younger man, his own measure has been taken. That tickles him. When his last question has been answered, he raises his hand.

“You go right ahead. Satisfy yourself, and you’ll satisfy me.”

Old Jack never said that to anybody before. He looks at the young man, wondering if he understands, and sees that he does.

The young man nods. “I thank you.”

Starting back toward the harrow, he says, “Well, will you be around a while, Mr. Beechum?”

“About all day, son,” Old Jack says, waving. “I’ll be talking to you.”

He watches the young man swing up onto the harrow seat and take the reins in his hands.

“Come up, Prince! Dan!”

The horses step at once into the pace they were going in when they stopped. The young man does not look back. As though no interruption has taken place, the great hooves lift and fall, the harrow disks slice through the ground, the plume of dust rises into the sky.

Old Jack stands and watches until the man and team reach the end of the field and make the turn and start back, and then he goes to the sled again and sits down. The terms of an unexpected happiness have begun to work themselves out in his mind, the possibility of an orderliness in his history that he has not dared to hope for, a clean transition from his life to the life of another man. It is as though he has come to a window looking out onto a lighted country where before was only darkness. While the young man makes the long rounds of the field, the old one continues to sit there on the sled and watch.

After a while he sees the wife come through the gate carrying a water jug. Seeing him, she comes on up the fence and offers him a drink, which he accepts and thanks her. She smiles.

“He went out this morning and forgot to bring it,” she explains. “I thought he might be thirsty.”

“It’s a fact, honey,” Old Jack says. “He might.”

He cannot remember her name either.

When he has drunk and thanked her again, she takes the jug and goes out across the worked ground to meet her husband, who stops the team and takes a long drink. Putting the top back on the jug, he says something to her. Old Jack is too far away to hear what he says, but he can see his white teeth as he smiles. The wife does not come back to where Old Jack is, but goes directly to the gate. As she looks at him and waves, going out, he raises his hat to her and bows.

After she goes, the sun growing warm against his back, he drops off to sleep, leaning forward a little over his hands, which are folded on the crook of the cane.

When he opens his eyes he is looking at the ground between his feet. And then, as often when he wakes up after sleeping in the daytime, he feels go through him the ache of panic, afraid he has slept through something he should have been awake for. He raises his head. The field and the sky dazzle and sway in the brilliant light. A crow is calling loudly in the woods. He cannot at first realize where he is, and when he does his reasons for being there appear strange to him. He feels as though he is falling from a place where he has kept himself dangerously balanced.

And then he sees the team coming toward him a long way up the field, sits forward, and watches attentively, studying the motion of the horses and the harrow, the steady rising and spreading of the dust cloud behind them. And gradually the familiarity of these things comes back to him. The field steadies and grows quiet under the daylight. He begins to hear the small sounds made by the harrow. The band of freshly worked ground along the edges of the field has grown wider.

He is suddenly ashamed of himself for sleeping while right before his eyes a good man is at work. He does not want to be sitting there when that young man comes by, does not want the young man to see that he has waked up and wave to him, cannot stand the thought of himself waving back as though he does not mind being useless. He gets up and with a show of purposeful haste, which he does not feel and which disgusts him by its falseness, goes to the gate and lets himself through.

He finds himself now in the predicament of hurrying off toward the barns without the slightest notion of what he will do when he gets there. He supposes there were several more things he planned to see to, but it is annoying to have to think of them now only to save face, and his annoyance keeps him from being able to think.

But before he has gone much farther, his mind has completely changed its subject. He has left the wheel tracks and begun to wander, though he keeps the same general direction. He goes out through the grove of oaks, down across the small wet-weather stream at the bottom of the swag, and up the opposite slope to the high point of the ridge. Now and again he stops and stands a long time, looking. He is studying his land, the shape of it, the condition of the growth on it, with the interest in it that he has had all his life.

When he gets back to the barn lot he takes another look around, measuring the work there against his new estimate of the workman. There is little that needs doing. Such small evidences of neglect as he can find are attributable to the hurry of the spring work. He finds a loose board in the granary door, and nails it tight. He does a little straightening up in the harness room, though it is not really necessary. He finds a couple of hoes and an axe and a scythe that need sharpening, and he sharpens them. He cuts a few weeds that have begun to grow up along the lot fence. Hearing the ringing of loose trace chains, he looks up and sees the young man coming in with the horses. He looks at his watch and then at the sun. It is dinnertime.

He hurries to put his hoe away, and to open the lot gate ahead of the team. He gets it open just in time and the horses come through without having to stop. The young man is riding the lead horse, the bay one, and leading the others. As he rides by Old Jack he smiles and raises his hand.

“Thank you, sir!”

“That’s all right, son.”

Taking the horses on around to the well in front of the barn, the young man jumps to the ground and begins pumping water into the trough. Old Jack stands in the barn door and watches. Seeing the good team of horses drink after their hard morning’s work makes him happy. They drink a long time, pausing now and then to raise their heads and stand with a far-off gaze in their eyes, mouthing the cool water. When they are finished the young man leads them into the barn and puts them in their stalls.

“Give them plenty of corn,” Old Jack says, not to be bossing, but as a tribute to the horses.

When the young man comes out of the barn, Old Jack is making himself comfortable on an upturned bucket beside the well, his lunch packet on his lap, a can of fresh water on the ground at his feet. He is about to untie the string on the packet when the young man stops him.

“Mr. Beechum, come on to the house, now, and have a bite with us.”

“Naw. I thank you, son. I can make out fine on what I brought.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want you to do that. We were sort of looking for you to eat with us, and I expect there’s plenty fixed.”

Old Jack figures that is not entirely true, but he accepts, glad to escape the baloney. He gets up and puts the packet back on the shelf in the barn.

They go together across the lot and through the yard, where the morning’s wash is drying on the line, and up onto the back porch. The young man opens the screen door, and Old Jack goes ahead of him into the kitchen.

“Hello! Come in! How are you?” the young wife says to him.

“Fine. Fine, thank you,” Old Jack says to her, again bowing and smiling. “And how’re you?” Because she is young and pretty and is kind to him, he speaks to her with the indulgent tenderness with which he would speak to a little girl.

He looks at the table and sees that it is, sure enough, set for three. As he washes and dries his hands, he takes a look around the kitchen, finding it a good deal changed from the way he remembers it—though he has to admit that it looks nice the way it is, better certainly than it did during the years after his wife’s death when he did his own cooking in it, letting the windows and the paint grow dingy and the finish wear off the linoleum. Again, as in the morning—while he stands there pretending to look out the window, and the young man washes—he feels a mixture of pleasure and pain, only this time the pain is different and more intense. Around the barns and in the fields all has been scrupulously kept as it was when he left it, because it had been left in good shape and because he has licensed no changes. But here, clearly, where an old life deteriorated and came to an end, a new strong one has begun. Though he doubts that he will ever have occasion to see for himself, and knows that he does not want to, he imagines this change to have taken place in all the rooms of the house. The thought saddens him and freshens in his mind all his old feelings toward his wife and his daughter. There in the old kitchen in which he has eaten nearly all the meals of his life, he feels the loss of what has gone by and he wishes he had not come.

But now the cheerful voice of the young wife is asking if he wouldn’t like to sit down. The meal is ready.

He and the young man go to the table. The wife finishes bringing the food and sits down with them. They pass the dishes to Old Jack, urging him to take as much as he wants of everything. They are doing all they can to put him at ease, trying to relieve the awkwardness they feel in their understanding that this house is his home, though he has come back to it as its guest. Young as they seem to him, they do put him at ease. Their manner toward him is respectful, but without any of that self-effacing humility which as landlord he has learned to expect, and to distrust.

The meal is ample and well prepared, and Old Jack eats with the keen pleasure that good company and the work of a good cook always give him. He compliments the wife on her cooking, and compliments the husband on his wife, calling the young couple “son” and “honey.” He has racked his brains but he cannot remember their names.

While they eat the young man asks how long it has been since a crop was raised in the field he has been working in during the morning. Telling him, Old Jack is reminded of the last crop grown there—a good one—and he tells about that. Prompted by the young man’s questions and his interest, Old Jack remembers and tells more about his younger days than he has thought of in a long time, in the course of the conversation twice filling and emptying his plate.

During the meal he has not ceased to study both the young man and the wife, and he is more than satisfied with what he sees. Everything about the young man speaks of his decent pride. Though he works for another man, he has the ways of a man who intends one day to work for himself. He has resigned himself to nothing inferior. And the husband’s character, it seems to Old Jack, is answered in the character of the wife.

His vision of the morning returns to him. He can see this place passing out of his own good keeping into that of the younger man—can see him at work and alive here long after he himself will be dead. He turns to the young man, intending to tell him that he can depend on his goodwill and can trust him—that he will help him to have what he wants. But he cannot speak. He looks out the window, getting hold of himself, and then he says: “Son, you’re a fine boy. And you’ve married a fine girl. I’m going to stick to you.”

After he has eaten, the young man gets up from the table and goes to the barn, leaving Old Jack to eat a second piece of pie. After a little they hear him going out the lot gate with the team.

Old Jack finishes his pie, scraping the last traces of filling off his saucer. Getting up, he thanks the wife, complimenting her again at some length. She tells him she is glad he came, and that he must feel welcome to come any time. Seeing that she is already busy clearing the table, he does not detain her with more talk, but tells her good-bye and starts to the barn. As he crosses the back porch he sees, lying on a shelf beside the milk buckets, the morning’s mail: a newspaper, an advertising circular of some sort, a post card. The post card is addressed to Elton and Mary Penn. As soon as he gets to the barn he takes out his notebook and writes their names in it. He moves the bucket from the well over against the front wall of the barn, then sits down on it, and goes to sleep.

When he wakes up this time he is not confused, but rested. He can see from the lengthening of the barn’s shadow out into the lot that he has slept a long nap. The middle of the afternoon has come.

He gets up and walks to the back of the place to look at his steers that have lately been put out on grass. He finds them and spends an hour watching them graze. They are doing well. There is plenty of grass and plenty of water. It is the kind of sight a man can look at for pleasure. But feeling the day going on, he starts back. He cannot remember now what time Wheeler said he would pick him up, and he does not want to be late.

On the way back he stops on the top of a rise and from that distance watches the young man and the team go the length of the field—a man who needs no boss in order to work well, but will require more of himself than another man will be likely to require of him. By the excellence of the young man they are made free of each other, though that freedom is a bond between them.

It seems to him now that the day is finished, and turning, putting it behind him, he hastens on to the barn. Not finding Wheeler there, he does not stop, but goes on through the lot, past the house, down the long yard to the road, and turns toward town. He is filled with a sense of loss that now gives no pain. The young man at work behind him, his bed at the hotel ahead of him, it seems to him that he knows better than he ever has from how high he is going down.

When Wheeler meets him half an hour or so later he has walked considerably more than a mile.

“Why didn’t you wait?” Wheeler asks, leaning across the seat to open the door for him.

“Why didn’t you come on when you was supposed to?” Old Jack says, guessing from the tone of Wheeler’s voice that he must be late.

Wheeler laughs, but says nothing.

Old Jack gets in and arranges himself and slams the door. The car moves off.

“Aw, Wheeler, I was taking a look at the country. Thought I might see some old woman about eighteen years old smiling at me as I went by.”

They come to a driveway and turn around.

“But none did.”

“Well,” Wheeler says, “what do you think of Elton Penn?”

“I think he’s a good one.”

“Uh-huh,” Wheeler says.

He has held a high opinion of Elton a long time, but Old Jack would not take his word.

They go along in silence for a minute, and then Old Jack says, speaking of his daughter and son-in-law: “Wheeler, as soon as I die they’ll sell that farm.”

Taken by surprise, Wheeler only nods. He thinks so too.

“And when they sell it, I want you to see that that boy gets a chance to buy it, if he wants it. I want you to help him get hold of the money, and stand behind him. Will you do that?”

“I’ll do it,” Wheeler says.

“Maybe I’ll last long enough to help him a little myself.”

A BIRTH

Mat spent the morning at odd jobs and errands, the endless little tasks of management that keep him going back and forth between his own land and Roger Merchant’s as the season and the work advance. After dinner he harnessed a team and spent the second half of the day helping Burley Coulter work the tobacco ground. The Coulters, in spite of long days and seven-day weeks, have fallen behind in their work, and Mat has been giving them odd half days whenever he can. Today, driving the slow rounds of the field, he was glad to have been needed.

When they quit at dusk, because he will be coming to work there again tomorrow, Burley stabled his team at Mat’s. And as often lately when they have been together during the afternoon, Mat asked Burley to supper.

Supper has been over a long time now, and the two of them are sitting in the wicker chairs on the back porch, each smoking one of Mat’s cigars. The dishes washed and put away, the kitchen is dark. The evening is quiet. Only now and then Mat and Burley can hear down in town a shout or an outburst of laughter. They are tired, no longer talking. The only communication between them is the alternate slow glowing and dimming of the cigar ends, the release into the darkness of invisible fragrant smoke. The sky is clear, filled with brilliant stars; against it can be made out the massive, faintly stirring tops of the maples and, nearer, the shape of a hanging flowerpot and the drooping foliage of a begonia. As often after a day’s work, Mat’s left shoulder is hurting; he shifts restlessly in his chair, trying to find a comfortable way to prop his arm. All day he has carried the thought of loss. His body has grown heavy with the desire to sleep, but he dreads going to bed, afraid that once there he will lie awake, afraid of the thoughts that will come then. His discipline now is to think of nothing, to look at the darkness, pleased to be sitting there smoking with Burley.

Footsteps come back through the house; the screen door opens and closes quietly.

“Mat?” Margaret says.

“Here we are,” Mat says.

Burley gets up. “Here’s a chair, Mrs. Feltner.”

“No, thank you Burley. Mat,” she says, “Hannah’s pains have started.”

“Have!” Mat gets up. “Well, call the doctor.”

“I did. He said to take her on down to the hospital. He’ll come as soon as he can.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine. Get the car.”

“All right,” Mat says. It seems to him there is something else he ought to ask, but he hears the door open and shut, and Margaret’s steps go back through the hall. He starts off the porch toward the shed where he keeps the car, Burley following a step or two behind.

Burley has begun to wish he was on his way home. There may have been a time when he could gracefully have taken his leave, but he does not know when it was. And so he tags along, a friendly stranger, at what he hopes is an obviously respectful distance. If Mat would say something—or, better, give him something to do—that would ease him. But Mat does not say anything, his footsteps hurrying on into the darkness, and Burley subtracts himself by another couple of steps. Keeping distance between them like a stretcher, they cross the barn lot.

Mat throws open the doors of the shed, and feels his way in between the wall and the side of the car. The car is an old black coupe, bearing the marks of use that has been long and casual and hard—not much better fitted to the occasion, he thinks, than the truck. Turning on the lights, he hastily sweeps out the dirt, gathering up odds and ends of paper and clothing and flinging it all into a corner. It seems to him that lately all he has done is make the rounds from one mess to another, always a little late. A sort of guilt creeps into him that he has done so little to prepare for this arrival. But he sees the uselessness of that.

He backs out, turns, and drives out to the road. It is not until he stops in front of the house that he remembers what it seems he never really saw: Burley standing in the beam of the headlights, holding the gate open for him, his hand raised in what might have been blessing or farewell.

The women are waiting. He picks up Hannah’s suitcase and takes her arm. Behind them, Margaret shuts the door.

As they leave the lights of the town behind them, beginning the descent into the river valley, the two women begin to talk. To Mat, though he does not trust himself to guess what they are feeling, their voices sound unsure. Glancing down into the light of the dashboard, he sees that they are holding hands, and his heart labors suddenly with love for them both.

Coming into Hargrave, they go slowly through the quiet streets, in and out of the pooled light of the streetlamps, and the sound of the car’s engine, resonant in the silence, reaches ahead into the echoes of itself.

At the hospital Mat lets the two women out near the front door and goes on to park the car. When he comes into the lobby Margaret is standing alone beside the admissions desk.

“Where’s Hannah?”

“They’ve already taken her to the labor room.”

That they have hurried her away before he could even tell her good-bye strikes Mat as outrageous. Because he is tired and afraid—or so, later, he will explain it—he is suddenly beside himself with sadness and anger.

“God damn it!” he says. “They run this place like a jail.”

“Mat?” Margaret says, and he stops, sorry.

Margaret smiles and says, “For Heaven’s sake!”

The old nurse sitting there pushes some cards toward him. Her face wears a look of complacent disgust; her worst suspicions have been confirmed many times, and she is used to it.

“There’s a waiting room near the delivery room on the second floor,” she says as if to the general public. “You may like to wait there.”

Except for them the room is empty. Margaret sits down and turns on the shaded lamp beside her chair. “Mat, you’re worn out. Why don’t you go on home now? I’ll be fine. As soon as anything happens I’ll call you.”

“No ma’am,” he says. “I’m in this for the duration. What would I do off by myself? I couldn’t sleep.”

Margaret takes her embroidery out of her purse, puts on her glasses, and sets to work. “Well, sit down then, and make yourself at home.”

“Shouldn’t we call Bess and Wheeler?”

“I don’t think so, Mat. Not tonight.”

He figured so. She is too practical to call for unnecessary help. All they have to do is wait, and they can do that by themselves.

“Well. All right.”

But he does not make himself at home. It is not in him to yield to this impersonal place. He shifts about the room, looking at the pictures on the walls, looking out the windows, rattling the change in his pocket. He still has his hat on. Because it is, to him, so insistently a waiting room, a timeless space wedged into time, far from any place where he would be at home, it seems to exclude some thought that he needs to think. Whatever might be done cannot be done here. He thinks of Hannah suffering in this alien place, kept apart from them, with such defiant love as makes him an enemy to all the world but her.

From a door saying DO NOT ENTER a nurse comes into the waiting room. As Mat turns to question her, she goes through the swinging door on the opposite side. He wonders if the doctor has come. Surely, he thinks, if he was here they would have seen him come in. Coming aware that he is cursing under his breath, realizing what a doubtful hold he has kept on his feelings, he makes himself sit down. Though he has wished to be dependable and useful, he has failed even to be quiet. The thought shames him, reminding him of other times when he has failed of that steadiness that he most required and expected of himself, and would most have prided himself in had he been capable of it. The only sounds now in the silence that has come over them are the cries of nighthawks flying above the hospital and the town.

Suddenly, without the sound of the approach of footsteps from the other side, the forbidden door is flung open and Dr. Markman comes in, looking the same as he always does—hair in his eyes, tie loosened, rumpled suit looking as though the pockets might be filled with wrenches or fish or garden seed.

“Well,” he says, “how the old folks bearing up?”

“Tolerably well,” Mat says.

“How’re you, Margaret?”

“I’m fine. How’s Hannah?”

“She’s all right. And going to be all right, too. There is no need to worry.” He looks at his watch. “Well, I’m going to try to nap for a couple of hours. This is probably going to take a while.”

“When do you think it’ll be, Doc?”

“Oh, about morning. Hard to say.”

He goes back through the door he came out of, and it is quiet again. Now that the doctor has gone, Mat can think of half a dozen questions he should have asked. He wishes he had asked to have word sent from time to time. But that chance is gone now. It could be a long time before they will hear anything more. He tries to read, but only stares at the blurring print, not seeing it, his mind filled with anxiety in which the cries of the nighthawks circle and approach and recede like thoughts. Finally he gives up, and folds his hands. His shoulder is aching again. He is both painfully tired and wide awake. They are in the midst of what they must go through.

Margaret’s head is again bent over her work, and he watches her now, for several minutes as intent on the movement of her hands as she is. Finally, leaning forward, he says: “I wish somebody would come out and tell us something.”

“I’m sure they will, if there’s a reason to.”

He looks at his watch. It is only two o’clock. He gets up again and stands at one of the windows.

Years ago Anvil Brant’s old father, having come in his last years to the troublesome habit of waking up hours before daylight, sat in Burgess’s store listening to a conversation about spring weather and the lengthening of the days. “Days and nights both getting longer,” he said. “I can tell it.” Mat remembers that now and laughs and tells it to Margaret. “I know what he meant,” he says.

“Morning will come,” Margaret says. “It always does. And the baby will be born.”

“It won’t be as long as it has been, anyhow,” he says, but that doesn’t comfort him. “Well,” he says, “I believe I’ll go see if I can find some coffee somewhere.”

“Do you think you’ll find a place open?”

“Oh, I expect so,” he says, doubting it, but determined to go. “Do you want some coffee?”

“I suppose not. Maybe I’ll go to sleep.”

What he is hoping is that while he is gone the baby will be born, and that he will come back to find all well and the waiting finished. Once down the stairs and out the door, he walks rapidly through the sleeping streets of the town, the silence broken only by the cries of the invisible nighthawks still circling in the air over the trees and the roofs and by the echoing beat of his own footsteps.

He comes to the main street and turns along it. The lights are brighter here and more frequent. From time to time, a car or a truck passes. Mat walks nearly the whole length of the street, finding no place open. He is nearly ready to turn around and start back when, just before the approach to the bridge, he sees a lighted sign: MORT’S DINER.

Going in, he sees at the end of the counter a waitress in a soiled white dress, sitting on a high stool, head propped on her right hand, sound asleep. He is still standing in the door, holding the screen open. So as not to embarrass her he lets it slam behind him. Looking at the signs on the walls, pretending not to have seen her, he notices that she wakes and, hurriedly picking up a wet rag, begins mopping the top of the counter. He goes over and sits on one of the stools opposite her.

“Good evening,” she says. “What for you?” She looks and sounds like she must have been asleep a long time.

“Hello.” He smiles. “Long nights, aren’t they, to have to work by yourself?”

She studies him a moment, and then says: “Well, he ought to be here before long. He usually comes right about this time.”

Irritated at first to have been cast so automatically in that role, Mat sees that the girl’s assumption implies a compliment to herself that she must need—she is remarkably homely, and sleepiness does not improve her. Careful this time not to smile at her, he says: “I’ll have a cup of coffee.”

She fills a cup for him, slides it across the counter, and pushes sugar and cream toward him. She sits down again, propping her head up as before with her hand, though now her eyes stay open. On a shelf behind her a small radio is playing dance music, turned low.

The coffee is both stale and strong, the taste of it a shock.

“Pew!” Mat says to himself, setting the cup down. But to the girl he says: “Now there’s something to wake a man up. You’d have trouble sleeping through a drink of that.”

She merely looks at him, her face long, bony, blank. Whether the look is meant to express indifference or suspicion, or is just empty, he cannot tell.

The music fades off the radio. The clipped neutral voice of an announcer comes on with a news report. Though Mat listens, especially to the war news, when it is over he cannot remember anything that was said.

He realizes how tired he must be. His mind, though almost unbearably wakeful and restless, is failing to connect one time to another. That he is there in the diner, staring down into his half-emptied cup, seems strange to him, hardly believable. His own two hands seem to have reached into the circle of his vision out of a dream.

Deliberately, he forces his mind back to Hannah and the baby about to be born, maybe already born. And he goes back to the hospital, hastened by imaginings of what may have happened during his absence.

When he steps into the waiting room, Margaret is sitting with her eyes shut, her head leaned against the chairback. At first he supposes that she is asleep, and he walks quietly. But she sits up and opens her eyes.

“Were you asleep?”

“No. Resting.”

“Has anything happened?”

“No.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“Not yet.”

He looks at his watch. It is a quarter after three.

He sits down, the quiet of the room grows round him again, and it is as though he never left. He only feels tireder, more exposed to what is happening and will happen. For the first time all night he admits into his mind the awareness of the pain surrounding him in the rooms of the hospital. He submits to the fact of it, nerves bared to it, knowing that it surrounds him in ever-widening circles that finally take in the world. Over the roof the nighthawks circle and cry, their voices like small stones striking together under water.

Without expecting to, he falls asleep. The familiar ache sits on his shoulder now like a red bird, not moving.

He dreams he is at work, harrowing a broken field. He can see nothing. He can see a cloud of bright dust rising thickly from the disks of the harrow. He can smell and taste the dust. His eyes are gritty with it. And then the dust seems to draw in and around him until he can no longer see it. He becomes aware of the compactness of his body. He can see his hands holding the reins as he drives the long, slowly shortening rounds of the field. He can see all the surface of the worked earth. He is aware of a point like an eye in the center of the field that his circling will finally bring him to, and where it will end. The dust rises around him again, blotting his sight, to become what next he does not know.

It grows dark. He is aware of water near him, and trees around him, the sound and feel of a cold rain falling steadily, though he can see nothing. For a long time he has been walking in this dark place, stopping to listen, and going on. Unable to see, never knowing exactly where he is in the double strangeness of a familiar place made strange, he must cover all the great dark breadth of the water with his listening, though he expects to hear nothing. He is without hope. He may never have had hope. But he is torn by such grief and love for the child lost or dead that he does hope.

Now in the darkness the sound of the laboring of a powerful engine seems to approach him and grow louder. Now he feels beneath his body the lurching and swaying of a heavy machine. For some time he cannot bring himself to realize who he is or what he is doing. And then there comes a little more light and he does see. With the blade of a bulldozer he is trying to scrape up enough dirt from a frozen, rocky slope to fill a grave. The grave is as big as a field. Young men, soldiers, lie in rows in it, awaiting the covering earth. They lie on their backs, unspeakably submissive to the approach of the great machine. He has a hurt in his shoulder, but whether it is a wound or the claws of a red bird perched there, he cannot tell. He knows with sorrow who he is. He knows that there is a face among all those of the dead that he cannot bear to see. The engine pulses steadily on.

“Mat.”

He knows that the voice calling him is outside the dream.

“Mat.”

It is Margaret’s voice, near, but outside. Now her hand has taken hold of his arm.

“Mat! Mat, wake up!”

He thrusts himself forward, opening his eyes, breaking through, and out, into the room. Margaret is leaning over him, her hand still on his arm.

“Mat?” she says.

“Hm?”

“Are you awake now?”

“Yes. I believe so.”

Elbows on knees, he rubs his hands over his face.

“What in the world were you dreaming?”

“I declare, I can’t remember,” he says, lying. “I can just remember it was a bad one.”

Out on the river, half a mile or more away, he can hear the engine of a towboat laboring up against the current. Though he is awake, he still feels the dream near him, and the sound of the engine still carries its fear.

It slowly fades into the distance, and he sees that the dawn light has begun to grow, drifting through the windows into the heights and corners of the room, dimming the lamp. He grows aware that the birds are singing. The trees, the streets, the air over the town are filled with their voices. They seem to spend themselves recklessly in singing, as though willing to die of it. He gets up, goes to the window, and stands looking out. He can see two rows of houses set back to back, their yards and gardens fenced in neat rectangles, big shade trees growing in them so that not far off he can no longer see the ground but only the billowing green treetops, broken into here and there by the slants and angles of roofs. In the nearest garden there are flowers blooming, irises and peonies, purple and pink and white. The people in the houses seem not to have wakened yet. As far as he can see up and down the street there is no one in sight. Thin shelves and strands of mist stretch over the back lots and among the roofs and the still tops of the trees. As he watches, the mist slowly takes the stain of the rising sunlight.

And then, into the forgotten room behind him, he hears a door swing open.

“Oh!” Margaret says.

He turns, blinking to accustom his eyes to the dimness, and sees, lying half upright in the doctor’s gloved hands, naked and red, still wet from the womb, a newborn child.

“Look, Mat,” Margaret says. “It’s Hannah’s baby. A little girl.”

Mat is looking, afraid to open his mouth, not knowing whether he would laugh or cry. The baby works legs and arms helplessly in the air, twists its body, manages a weak yell, and keeps yelling. The joy he heard in Margaret’s voice swells in Mat now, leaving hardly room for breath.

Dr. Markman, hair in his eyes, a day and night’s growth of whiskers on his face, stands there holding the baby, grinning like a fisherman.

PART FOUR

Chapter 12

GOING DOWN

“It’s Hannah’s baby,” Margaret said.

Nor did Mat call it or think it Virgil’s. Tenderness for Hannah cried out in him too at that moment, and he thought of her.

But from those words, it seems to him, though joy crowded upon him for a while, he began a second descent into sorrow that carried him down more steeply than the first.

Though in his joy he spoke of Virgil to himself, he did not speak of him to Margaret or to Hannah. He does not dare to risk the possibility that Virgil is alive, because he does not dare admit the possibility that he is dead. There is a shame in that, and it has killed his joy.

Going to Hargrave with Margaret to bring Hannah and the baby home, Mat feels a growing premonition of dread. He can foresee the coming days as clearly as if they had already happened. The life of the house will change, accommodate itself to the needs of the new life, and then in a few days the new will be learned, what once was unexpected will become a habit—and they will go on as before. Mat dreads that leveling-off. He has begun to look forward without hope.

On the drive home he keeps mostly silent. Margaret and Hannah are in good spirits, happy in the thoughts and plans that surround the child. Mat is aware that his silence must be noticeable to them, must seem unkind. But fated to go down into the intelligence of death—already going down—he feels himself beyond the reach of all that might lift him back. All the force of his life seems to have withdrawn into his own body, to survive or perish there beyond the help of anyone but himself. Beside him, lying in the crook of Margaret’s arm he can see the baby’s head, covered with bright down. Aware as he is of the potency of hopelessness and death in himself, the sight of that head is almost more than he can bear.

Once they are home, the women and the baby safely inside, he leaves without a word.

DANGEROUS GROUND

In the guest room the new order is quickly established. Hannah is helped into bed, the baby given to her to nurse and then put down in the cradle to sleep. Tiptoeing and whispering, Margaret and Nettie put things away and straighten the room.

They have hardly finished and slipped out, closing the door quietly behind them, hoping Hannah will sleep too while the baby is asleep, when there comes a knocking on the kitchen door so loud it seems to rattle every loose thing in the house.

“Oh, Lord!” Margaret says to Nettie. “Now who’s that?” She hurries off in the direction of the racket, hoping whoever it is has not come to visit.

It is Old Jack, making a great show of wiping his feet on the doormat, though they are not muddy.

“Good morning, Uncle Jack,” Margaret says. “How are you? Come in.”

“I’m all right,” Old Jack says. But he stands there, leaning his hand against the wall, slowly scrubbing his left shoe against the mat, as if he has come just to wipe his feet. The trouble is that he is making a formal social call, and he does not know quite how to manage it. But now he hastens to mend his manners.

“How’re you, honey?”

“Just fine, Uncle Jack.”

“Honey,” he says, “I come to see the baby. Where’s he at?”

“It’s not a boy, Uncle Jack, it’s a little girl.”

“I knew it,” he says. “Excuse me, honey.”

At the door of the room Margaret tells him, “Be quiet now, Uncle Jack. The baby’s asleep.” She looks in, whispers to Hannah that company has come, and then goes in, beckoning Old Jack to follow.

He does go in quietly, following Margaret to the cradle, where he stands a long time, leaning over, looking down at the baby. Then, making a vague gesture toward it with his right hand, as if starting to touch it and remembering not to, he goes around the bed to the side where Hannah is lying. Smiling up at him, she gives him her hand, and he takes it, pulling off his cap and bowing as he speaks.

“What do you think of the baby?” she asks him.

“I think he looks mighty nice. Mighty nice.”

Hannah makes the sort of bright conversation with him now that she usually does, asking him questions, talking of pleasant, inconsequential things. He stands beside her, nodding, answering, smiling, admiring. Now that he is no longer cramped by any obligation to speak of it, the tenderness he feels toward her and toward the baby becomes plain. This place of mothering and renewal, though he cannot approach it in words, draws him to be in it, to lighten and warm himself in the idea of it.

The conversation pauses. Old Jack turns away, and Margaret starts to the door to accompany him out. But then, coming to a chair near the foot of the bed, to the surprise of both women Old Jack sits down, turning the chair sideways to the bed, back to Margaret, facing the front window. He comes to rest, hands folded on the crook of the cane.

“Uncle Jack,” Margaret says, allowing the hint to become broad in the tone of her voice, “I expect Hannah may want to rest now. She has just had a long drive, you know.”

Ignoring her, Old Jack turns to Hannah.

“Honey, you go right on to sleep if you want to. It won’t bother me atall.”

“Well,” Margaret says, trying again, “I expect she’d like to have it quiet.”

Old Jack nods. “I won’t make a sound.”

Though she would like just now to be left to herself, Hannah smiles and nods to Margaret: Let him stay. And Margaret goes out, shutting the door.

Having understood that Hannah needs to sleep, Old Jack is careful not to look at her or make a sound. It was not, anyhow, to make conversation that he came. He has come in Hannah’s honor. But also, since Mat came to tell him that the baby was born, he has thought of the absence of Virgil. And he stays now because of that, sitting in that vacancy, though he knows that he cannot fit or fill it.

He sits still for a long time, gazing out the window. Glancing up finally toward the head of the bed, he sees that Hannah is still awake. She smiles, and so does he, but still without looking directly at her. Digging in the pocket of his coat, he pulls out a sack of candy. It is a variety he particularly favors: coconut inside hard frosting, mixed pastel shades of green and pink and yellow, a penny apiece. When he bought the dime’s worth from Milton Burgess this morning, he had a sort of vision of himself giving the sack to Hannah.

“I brought you this little bunch of candy, honey,” he would say. “It’s mighty good.”

And she would say to him: “Why, thank you, Uncle Jack. That’s mighty sweet. They are mighty good.”

Holding the twisted neck of the sack, he sets it flat on the palm of his extended left hand, and then looking at it—the neck of it twisted and crooked over, the brown paper wrinkled and mussed from being carried an hour in his pocket—realizes that it is not right. It is damned exactly wrong. Cursing himself and Milton Burgess for their lack of a pretty box, he fails to be able to offer it to her.

It is a bad moment. He would give a hundred dollars to have that sack back in his pocket, but the expedient of simply putting it there somehow seems the least plausible of all possibilities. She would surely think that was strange—that he would pull a sack of something out of his pocket, and sit there with it stuck out in his hand, and then put it back in his pocket. Though he may have to settle for being thought an old fool, he would rather she would not think he is crazy. Meanwhile the sack sits like some kind of bad-smelling pet on the flat of his hand. Looking out the window, he is pretending for the time being that he does not know it is there. But realizing that she is watching him, he reaches out with his right hand, untwists the neck of the sack, takes out one of the candies, and sticks it into his mouth. Only slightly modifying the cramped posture of offering, his eyes fastened on the window as if there is something of absorbing interest going on out there, he eats all ten pieces one after another.

Hannah watches him helplessly. If she had understood quickly enough, she could have asked to have a piece of the candy, and so made it all right. But as soon as she realized that candy was what it was, he had already begun eating it. Pretending to pay no attention, she watches him.

Now, as from the extremity of his embarrassment, she grows aware of his caring for her. She understands, with shame at her misapprehension, that he is not there because he is flattered by her small attentions; he has come to offer himself. In all her life she has known nothing like it. She sees how free he leaves her. His love for her requires nothing of her, not even that she find it useful. He has simply made himself present, turning away, as he has now, to allow her to sleep if she wants to. She feels enclosed by this generosity as by a room, ample and light. Turning on her side, she does sleep.

When Margaret tiptoes to the door half an hour or so later, opens it softly, and looks in, Hannah is still sleeping, and Old Jack is sitting at the foot of the bed, gazing out the window, his hands folded on the cane as before. In the cradle the baby too lies quiet, still asleep, her breathing slightly moving the blanket, one of her hands opened in the air like a leaf, at rest. Margaret stands for several minutes, looking in, moved by the sight of them, they are so quiet.

By and by, not long after they have begun expecting him, Mat comes in. He goes into the hall, hangs his hat up, and comes on into the kitchen, where he begins running water into the wash pan.

Margaret watches him, aware of the change in him. She knows that since the morning of the baby’s birth, when like lovers they seemed to meet and gather in the same joy, something has been breaking between them. This morning she felt it in his silence.

And Mat is aware of it too. He knows that he is in retreat from her. He knows how lonely that must make her, and he pities her—but as if from a great distance, helplessly. It seems to him simply that their lives have gone out of control, and he is grieved and resigned.

Leaving the house in the morning, he plunged into his work, abandoning himself to it and to his expenditure of himself in it. And once it was set forward again he began to sense powerfully the movement of it, its using up of time, and he became grimly exultant in it. Nothing that happens can touch him now. He is out of reach, set apart by the certainty of death. The solitude of his knowledge rings in his mind, hard and insistent as a bell.

Looking at his back bent over the sink, Margaret feels something inside her spring up in pursuit of him. And at the same time she feels herself turning in opposition against him.

“Your Uncle Jack is here for dinner,” she says.

He finishes drying his face and turns to her. She meets his eyes, and is defeated by them, her pain revealed to him. He stands there grinning at her, a brittle light in his eyes, daring her to tell him one thing that will be worth telling.

She is angry, and hurt, near to crying. Mat sees it, and is sorry, but still he exults, as if he would ride his loneliness over her very body.

Past bearing it, she turns away. Taking hold of herself, making her voice matter-of-fact and easy, she says, “You can go tell him dinner’s ready. Hannah and the baby may still be asleep, so be quiet.”

He walks through the house, his body feeling lightened and quickened. He feels charged with his own life, compact and resistant, his hands awake at his sides. The strength of his refusal presses out around him against the walls of the house.

Coming into Hannah’s room, he sees that she has waked up. He nods, smiles, asks how she feels, leans over to look at the baby. And Hannah, too, notices the change in him, and it troubles her.

Going up behind Old Jack’s chair, Mat touches him on the shoulder and tells him that dinner is ready. When Old Jack looks around, smiling, glad to see him, Mat has already turned his back.

As they eat, Margaret and Old Jack defend themselves with silence against Mat’s silence, turned watchful against him, wondering at him.

When the meal is finished, Mat goes out.

“Making tracks, ain’t he?” Nettie says.

And getting no reply from Margaret, she too understands that they are on dangerous ground. She thought so.

HE’S DEAD

On Sunday afternoon Mat is sitting in the living room, reading the paper. Hannah not long ago finished nursing the baby and carried her in. Now Margaret holds her in the rocking chair, rocking slowly and humming some quiet song almost as tuneless as the back-and-forth creaking of the rockers. Hannah sits on the couch, watching, a faint unconscious smile on her lips. It is restful and peaceful, and it goes on that way a long time, the quiet seemingly deepened by the small sounds that occur in it—the creaking of the rockers, Margaret’s breathless humming, the rustling of the paper as Mat turns the pages.

Finally, suspecting that the baby is still awake, Margaret whispers, “Is she asleep, Hannah?”

“No,” Hannah says, “her eyes are still wide open.”

Margaret shifts the baby down onto her lap. She lies there quietly, wide-eyed.

“Won’t Virgil be proud of her when he comes back!” Margaret says, her voice resonant with the thought.

And an anger begins in Mat that he seems to have been waiting for, and that he welcomes. “Don’t, Margaret.”

He speaks quietly, making an effort to do so, but his voice tightens and hardens with his anger. “Don’t talk like that anymore. That’s not doing us any good.”

The two women look at him.

It is not until then that he fully realizes what it is he has to say. A kind of panic hits him, a kind of sickness. But his words are empowered by anger as they never could have been by grief.

“Virgil is dead. He’s not going to come back. He’s dead, Margaret. Hannah, he’s dead. Say so.”

He gets up, and without looking at them again goes out the back door.

“So be it,” he tells himself. “It had to be.”

He knows that remorse over what he has done is held off only by anger, that he will suffer from it. But he also knows that his anger is clearer than his sympathy. And he is glad it is done, relieved that they have come to the worst at last. It is upon them now. They have begun to bear it at last. So be it.

Feeling his anger begin to leave him, he walks faster, going back through the chicken yard. He feels himself going down into sorrow, his body filling with the pain of it, anger yielding to love—for Margaret, for Hannah, for Virgil dead and lost.

“So be it. It had to be.”

He goes into an old wagon shed at the back of the yard, closing the door behind him. In the dimness streaked with dusty slats of sunlight he sits on the ground against the wall and rests his head on his knees.

When he leaves the shed, done with his weeping and quieted, he feels that he reenters his life at a new place, farther on. He will not live again in Virgil’s life.

It is getting late, the light weakening and reddening, the shadows beginning to run together. He opens the corncrib and shells corn for the hens, scattering the grains. The hens gather around him, their feathers white in the glow.

Chapter 13

HARD AT IT

June 7, 1945

Dear Nathan,

I’m ashamed to hand you the same poor old excuse every time, but it’s the truth that I haven’t had a chance to write. It’s raining this morning, and in spite of the rush we’re in I have to admit I’m just a little bit grateful for a chance to rest my old bones.

We’ve been hard at it, trying to get the tobacco set. We’ve got out only about an acre of our crops here at home. And at Mat’s we’re not but a little better than half done. So we’ve got a long pull still ahead of us.

Also, sort of between times and when we can, we work some down at Gideon’s and Ida’s. Gideon is still unheard from, but we’re keeping the place going. And Ida keeps the slack taken up when we’re not there. When we are there she works right along with us.

There’s a lot of talk in Port William just now about her and Ernest Finley. Ernest has been working down there all spring, carpentering and painting on those old buildings of Roger Merchant’s—working there a good deal of the time without another man in a mile of him. So you can see what a fine chance that is for them rattle-mouths there in town. And I don’t reckon you need me to make a list of what is being said. It don’t cost them anything to see the visions they see.

They don’t know Ida, for one thing. And for another, they don’t know Ernest. You don’t have to be around Ida long to know that she’s as mindful of Gideon as she ever was. If I ever seen a woman whose ways gave the signs of belonging to one man, it’s her. And I’m just about certain that Ernest don’t even know how to make the sort of proposition the talkers are accusing him of.

Which don’t mean that everything is right. There’s some things I believe I do know that haven’t turned up yet in the talk. I do pretty surely know that Ida cooks dinner for Ernest on the days he works down there, just like she cooks for us when we’re there. And I know for certain that he never eats there when we do—always fixes it so he won’t be there at dinnertime on those days. Which means, as near as I can figure, that Ernest has Ida on his mind in a way he don’t want us to see. I know Ida’s a woman who can take up a lot of space in a man’s mind, like a big bed in a little room. And all this worries me. There seems a possibility of pain in it.

I wrote you, I think, that Hannah Feltner’s baby was born down in the hospital at Hargrave three weeks ago. I’ve stopped by to see them three or four times, and Hannah and the baby are doing fine. It’s a girl. They’ve named her Margaret. A couple of times when I’ve been there Mrs. Feltner and Hannah have started wondering who she looks like. They never decide. You can see they want her to look like Virgil, but are afraid to say either she does or she doesn’t. So both times I just out and said, “Well, it looks like to me she favors her daddy a good deal.” I figure I wasn’t really lying. The baby is Virgil’s, and looks like she’s bound to get so she favors him some sooner or later.

Well, old Nathan, be careful. I’m always thinking about you. And thinking the world of you. Don’t forget it, whatever you do.

Your uncle,

Burley

P.S. I meant to tell you—the other day we went out to salt the cattle, and we salted them and stood there watching them. And your daddy turned and stood looking out over our ridges towards the river. And directly he said, “Well, I reckon it must be night now over yonder where Nathan is, and he must be asleep.” He don’t speak of you often, but I wanted to tell you how plain it was to me, the way he said it, that he keeps you in his mind.

It’s night now. I’ll have to end sure enough this time.

A WIDOW ALONE

Hannah’s pregnancy was like a long lovemaking, a long continuance of Virgil’s body in her own. And then, with the birth, they were divided. Now she feels her body going to waste. Her mourning over Virgil is also a mourning over herself—is the same. She feels his absence within herself, a vacancy, as though some vital part of her own body was removed in her sleep.

On the Sunday afternoon two weeks after Mat forced on them the fatal words “Virgil is dead,” finding herself alone in the house, Hannah puts the baby to sleep, and climbs the stairs and goes into the room that was hers and Virgil’s. It is the first time she has been there since the birth of the baby. As she comes into it, the room is familiar, but it is a familiarity from which she is now estranged. She stops just inside the door, the quietness of the house grown big around her.

Like a swimmer, filling herself with breath and determination, she goes into the room and moves in it, resting her hands from time to time on the furnishings, the dresser, the chairs, the table, the bed. She walks with her arms folded tightly across her breasts, reaching down sometimes to touch one or another of the furnishings. She stops before one of the windows, and stands looking out northward over the tops of the ridges, the opening of the river valley, the ridges going on to the horizon on the far side. The country is in the full green of summer. For several minutes she watches it attentively as if listening to it. In the windless clear sunlight of Sunday afternoon it lies before her, shining. But the room is waiting, and finally she withdraws her mind into it, and turns and watches her steps go back across the rug.

She goes to the closet and opens the door. Hanging there are clothes that now belong to the past—her winter dresses from the time before she needed maternity clothes, Virgil’s civilian suits and overcoat and, folded on the shelf overhead, several suits of his work clothes. She kept their clothes there together after Virgil’s departure, one of the rituals of her hope.

But now she begins slowly to take the suits off their hangers and fold them, making a neat pile of them on the bed, finality in every move she makes. It is not possible to stop or go back. She seems not even to work by her own will. Beyond any power of hers, Virgil’s death claims all that is his. Handling his clothes, as though her fingers touch through the fabrics their own palpable remembrance of his body, her body becomes vibrant with loss as a struck bell.

She goes and finds two empty boxes and some string, packs in the suits and the work clothes and all the clothes of his left in the dresser drawers, closes the boxes and knots the string around them, carries them one at a time up into the attic, and sets them down in the musty darkness under the slope of the roof.

She comes back down, turning off the light at the foot of the attic stairs, and returns to the room. It is only then that it occurs to her that she has nothing more to do. The room is filled with brightness, dazzling after the darkness of the attic. She stands, looking around. And then her widowed dresses hanging alone in the closet declare her misery to her, and she sits down on the bed and cries. After some time, hearing the baby wake, she gets up and wipes her eyes and shuts the closet door and goes down.

She takes the baby up, changes her diaper, and then wraps a blanket around her and goes out by the back door. Once outside, she feels better. Lately the house has seemed to her the very embodiment of her plight and her grief, filled with innumerable marks and signs declaring Virgil’s absence, her loss, the life she will never have. But now, lying around her in the sunlight, the country seems purified of all deaths, past and to come. No griefs cling to it.

She goes through the yard and the chicken yard and starts up the rise of the ground behind the barn. She goes at a slow wandering pace that does not take her directly up the slope, but here and there over the face of it, looking around her as she goes, feeling sudden pleasurable intimacies with the sunlight, the curving hill, the clover and grass at her feet.

She does not free herself of the thought of Virgil. Intimations of him are still all around her. But out here the remindings of his life remain peculiarly intact, as though only stopped, not changed, by the thought of his death. Something of him seems still to be present in the life of the place. She senses him almost palpably, just outside her reach.

She remembers walking up this way, carrying a water jug, one hot July afternoon in the summer before the war. They were shocking hay on top of the ridge, Virgil and the others. After helping wash and dry the dinner dishes, she picked up the jug and went out. Stopping by the cistern at the barn to pump the jug full, she carried it to the field to them, climbing slowly, oppressed by the heavy brilliance of the heat. She came to Virgil first, and handed the jug to him, and he tilted it and drank. She stood watching him—his shirt and the waistband of his pants dark with sweat, his face and throat and bare arms glistening with it, the green hay-chaff sticking to his skin and his clothes. He finished and handed the jug to the next man. Smiling at her, he made some casual remark to her that she cannot remember, and went back to work. What came to her then—and comes to her now—was the sense of the abundance of strength in him that accepted the heat and the tiredness of that day with a kind of joy.

Like an answer or echo to the life that so filled and moved him then, she feels grow and quiver in herself the pain of the subsiding of his body, of stillness coming over him. But also, as she climbs steadily upward, bringing more and more into sight that country so charged with her memory of him, there is a strengthening in her of the sense that what he was still is. And with a kind of yielding, she receives him into herself, not to be lost again.

She walks along the ends of the tobacco rows, in which the young white-stemmed plants have begun to grow again after the transplanting. The field has just been plowed, and the earth between the rows is dark and fresh. The small plants are erect and green. Looking at them, she feels the world going on, her life continuing with all that is alive.

The baby becomes restless, and she walks more swiftly now, climbing straight on to the top of the ridge. At the highest point she sits on a pile of posts in the shade of a walnut tree. She lays the baby on her lap, and leans over and smiles down at her. The baby lies still, appearing to look up through the airy mass of the leaves.

“Look up at the sky,” she says. “See the sky?” But the baby’s face crumples and she begins to fret and then to wail. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Hush now.” She opens her blouse and lifts the small reddened face to her breast. Once the milk begins to come, the baby relaxes against her, beginning a tiny breathless singsong.

Settling herself, Hannah lets her head rest against the tree, looking up through the yellow-green of the leaves at the sky. She becomes conscious now of the stirring and murmuring of the life of the place—the voices and comings and goings in the town below her, the humming of insects among the blooms of the fields, now and again the far-off bleating of Mat’s sheep somewhere back of the hill. The light has begun to cool. On the slope below her the swallows are curving over the still face of the pond.

The baby finishes nursing and sleeps. Having buttoned her blouse and made the baby comfortable on her shoulder, she resumes her stillness.

A small yellow-striped fly, known around Port William as a steady-bee, comes and stands still in the air in front of her. It moves several times back and forth sideways, from one standing-still place to another, remaining at each one several seconds before moving abruptly and exactly to the other. And then it comes down and lights on the back of her hand, its clear wings outspread. Its pointed curved abdomen pulses up and down, tapping at her skin. She waves it off, and it goes two or three feet away and stops in the air again as though watching her.

Again she leans her head back and looks up into the tree. The black branches fork, taper, diminish, supporting the luminous, airy globe of leaves. The sky shows raggedly through, and now and then the winged black speck of a bird appears in one of the openings, wavering and turning in the high blue an instant. For a long time Hannah sits there, not thinking of herself, or of the child slackened against her in sleep, but filled with awareness of the tree, its green and gold hung in the light above her.

Finally, as though waking, she lifts her head and looks around. The steady-bee is not there anymore, and the air is cooler. Before her the town is a silhouette against the low sun. The half-dark of the evening has begun. The weedy dampness of nightfall is beginning to rise out of the hollows. The silence has altered, deepened, but the sounds that take place in it now are more distinct and clear: a voice calling cattle, a dog barking, a voice shouting “Hush!”—and the silence returning deeper than before.

The melancholy of it comes over her, and she shudders. The place, in its submission to the night, now seems to withdraw from her and to leave her alone.

She hears Mat’s old truck come into the lot, and she gets up. Gathering the baby firmly against her, she hurries down the long slope to the barn.

HAUNTED

In the depth of Mat’s grief there are stretches of days in which he loses track of time. He seems to work through these days almost without consciousness, coming aware of himself at odd moments with a kind of shock, a fearful sense of the strangeness of everything—held to the place and his work only by old habit. These are times of heavy dreamless sleep, from which he can hardly force himself awake.

There are other times of almost unbearable clarity and activity of mind, when he can hardly sleep for thinking, when he wakes knowing he has been thinking in his sleep.

At these times his thoughts more and more take the form of talk between himself and Virgil—Virgil having become obsessively the other person of his thoughts. He is haunted by Virgil as though he summons him from the dead in order to explain himself. Becoming aware of his thoughts in the midst of his work, or lying awake at night, he will find himself already explaining—telling how he felt when Virgil did this or did that, telling what his plans were, telling some clarifying fragment of their history. And Virgil listens, smiling in sympathy and understanding. “That’s all right,” he says. “Yes. I know.” Mat can rarely visualize more than his face. Now and then a hand appears—a muscular hand, strongly veined—and touches his cheek or temple, or scratches thoughtfully in his hair.

Chapter 14

A FAMOUS ESCAPADE

On the Thursday of the second week of July, Andy and Henry Catlett come to the Feltner house for a visit. Their usual early arrival having been delayed this summer by first one adult circumstance and then another, they carry their bundled clothes into the house with an impatience born of the certainty of missed excitements.

“Well,” Henry says, dropping his bundle at the foot of the stairs, “where’s Uncle Ernest?”

“At work,” Margaret tells him. “Way down there on the creek.”

“Where’s Grandad?”

“At work too. I don’t even know where.”

“Take those clothes upstairs and put them away,” Bess says.

They do as she says, and then come back down and kill time listening to the women’s conversation in the living room. But that is tame and disappointing compared to what they hoped to be doing by now. They sit there, settling deeper and deeper into the bitter sense of having come too late.

Finally, as their mother is getting ready to leave, they hear the rumbling of a wagon out toward the barn. Margaret glances at them and smiles, giving permission, and they head for the back door.

When they come to the barn, Joe Banion has just driven his team and wagon into the lot, and stopped to go back and shut the gate. The boys call to him, and he grins and raises his hand.

“Hello, buddies.”

He shuts the gate. They run up to him.

“Let us go with you. Where you going?”

“Just over yonder to the wagon shed to put away the wagon.” He laughs at the disappointment in their faces, and says, “But I reckon you can ride with me that far.”

“What you going to do after that?” Henry asks.

“Going to unhitch the mules.”

He climbs slowly up onto the wagon and helps them up after him.

“Let me drive,” Henry says.

“Ain’t going far. Just over to the shed.”

“Well, let me drive just that far.”

Joe hands him the lines. “Now you let them go slow and do what I tell you.”

Henry clucks to the team. “Come up.”

They don’t move.

“Come up! What’s the matter with them, Joe?”

“They ain’t used to you, buddy. I expect they don’t believe what you say.”

Henry shakes out one of the lines and swats the off mule hard across the rump.

“COME UP, you son of a bitches!”

In a second or two a good many things happen. The mules throw their heads up and plunge forward. Andy falls backwards, rolling, onto the bed of the wagon. Joe lurches back two or three steps, and then stumbles forward, grabbing the lines with one hand and Henry’s arm with the other.

“Whoa, Jack! Whoa now! Sit down, Henry!”

The mules run the length of the lot, the wagon bouncing and pounding and rattling behind them. Joe manages to get control of them as they come near the fence, and he brings them around, making a long turn, settling them down to a trot, and then to a walk, and finally bringing them to a stop about where they started.

“Whoa now.”

He turns and looks down at Henry, who is sitting pop-eyed on the boards behind him.

“Now, buddy, that don’t do. And you know better. We all like to got killed. The mule ain’t going to stand to be insulted that way—specially not by a stranger.”

“I ain’t any stranger,” Henry says. “He’s my grandaddy’s mule.”

“That Jack mule don’t care who your ancestors is, boy. He ain’t no respecter of persons. President of the United States whap him for no reason, he’d better have his ass close to the wagon, ’cause he’s going to travel.”

“You said ass,” Henry says.

“Well, what was that you called them mules?”

Joe drives across the lot and backs the wagon into the shed and gets down to unhitch, the boys crowding up beside him.

“Ge’ back! Ge’ back!” Joe says, cross sure enough now.

“We ain’t doing anything but watching.”

“And you liable to see something, too. She show you the bottom of her foot. Now you all behave or I’ll have to tell Mr. Mat.”

He knows that Mat’s displeasure is more fearful to them than the possibility of being kicked, and so he knows he will not have to tell on them.

They get back, and stay out of the way while Joe does up the lines and leads the mules to the barn and waters them and takes their harness off and puts them in their stalls.

At quitting time Burley Coulter comes down from the tobacco patch, bringing his team to the barn, riding one mule and leading the other. He comes through the gate and around the barn to the cistern. The mules walk up to the water trough and lower their heads, and Burley drops to the ground. He looks at Andy and Henry, and grins.

“Hello, boys.”

They tell him hello, grinning back, expecting him to say something funny. There is something fine, Andy thinks, in the way he stands there, one hand still holding the mule’s hame, and takes off his old felt hat and scratches his head with the same hand and puts the hat back on—good-humored and at ease, done for the day.

The mule standing next to Burley has raised his head, and stands gazing out across the lot, his muzzle dripping. Burley gives him a little nudge with his elbow. “Drink!” The mule wearily lowers his head again and drinks. “He knows when his daddy’s talking to him.”

The boys giggle. “You ain’t his daddy,” Henry says.

“Well, I am. But he got most of his looks from his mother.” He looks at Joe. “I seen you all was having a race down here,” he says. “Who won?”

Joe shrugs and shakes his head. “That Henry there can tell you. Don’t ask me.”

“That Henry,” Burley says, “he’s a driver.”

“I’d really have got them going,” Henry says, “if Joe hadn’t took away the lines.”

“You’d have got them going, all right,” Joe says crossly. “You’d have got us killed, and hard telling what else.”

Duty-bound to keep Henry reminded of the seriousness of his offense, Joe makes a final attempt to frown. But watching the face of the little boy, which since the mules ran off has been big-eyed with startlement and impudence, he begins to struggle to keep his mouth straight. His eyes begin to fill at the corners with a little glistening. And suddenly he seems to wilt, bending over and slapping his knee, and then rearing back. They watch him, Burley with amusement and the boys with relief, knowing that his laughter implicates him and he won’t be likely to tell on them now—if he ever meant to, which they doubt.

And now they all laugh, allowing it to be as funny as it was. Joe tells what Henry said, and how he swatted the mule, and how the team started, and how scared he was, and how he got them turned and then stopped, and how Henry looked. And Burley tells how it looked to him from up on the hill, and describes the motions each one made. The boys stand there, laughing, looking from one of the men to the other, proud to have been in such a famous escapade, and knowing better than to show it. If they were to seem too cocky about it, they know, the laughter would stop, and Burley or Joe would have to say in a dutifully sober tone: “Well, it’s damn lucky nobody got killed. You boys ought to be careful.”

In the midst of the laughter, Joe throws up his hand and says: “Shhh! Mercy sakes alive, here comes the boss!”

Not wanting Mat to learn what has been going on, though not wanting either to admit that to the boys, Joe and Burley get busy in a hurry—with a burlesque of caution that makes Andy and Henry laugh again. Joe starts out to the gate to call the milk cows. Burley leads his team back into the driveway and begins taking their harness off. The boys go down across the lot and open the gate for Mat, who looks up the hill and sees them and waves.

He has unhitched the mules and is walking behind them, the slack of the lines looped in his hands. Shifting both lines into one hand and stopping the mules as the boys run to him, he hugs first Andy and then Henry.

“Hello, Andy! How’re you, hon? Hello, Henry boy!”

“We’ve come to stay, Grandad,” Henry says.

“Well, good! I’m glad you have.”

Burley is putting his mules into their stalls. Mat does up the lines and waters his team, and for a few minutes there is a steady hustle of activity as Burley helps to unharness Mat’s mules and put them away. Joe drives the cows in and Burley and Mat put in hay and corn for the teams.

And then they are finished. In the silence they can hear the mules eating their corn, the ears rattling in the troughs.

“Well, Mat,” Burley says, “looks like you got about all the help you need now.”

And Mat smiles and says, in what seems to the boys a very loving and proud way: “Yessir. It looks like I have.”

The four of them stand in the driveway, looking out at the red sunset, Mat holding the boys’ hands. And then Burley slips his hat off and scratches his head in that way Andy admires, and settles his hat back on, and lights a smoke. “Well, Mat, I’ll see you tomorrow. Take it easy, boys.”

THE PRESENCE OF GRIEF

After Virgil went to the war, Andy, as soon as he learned to write, wrote him letters, and Virgil replied—letters full of the familiar old foolishness, and promises of fine things they would do when the world got straightened out. And he sent him a soldier’s hat, a knife, and other odds and ends picked up with a fine sense of what would be of interest.

Andy got into the habit of thinking, whenever he was displeased or lonely, and whenever he wanted to do something he was not big enough to do by himself, that if Virgil were there it would be different. Virgil, in his absence, became the hero of the boy’s daydreams—the embodiment, in perfection, of whatever power he lacked at the moment. In all the conflicts Andy got into with his teachers and playmates and parents—and there were quite a few, for he has always been a moody, headstrong sort of boy—he imagined Virgil as his defender, the dealer of whatever justices and vengeances his injuries required.

But the letters stopped, and he was told that his uncle was missing in action—which meant, his mother said, that they were all worried about him, but maybe everything would turn out all right. Andy took that to mean that there was not much to worry about. It had been his experience that most grownups’ worries were without consequence. He adopted a certain caution in speaking of his uncle to his playmates, and he developed a new curiosity in observing the grownups of his family—which revealed nothing to him except that they were all filled with an anxiety that they tried to keep hidden from each other and from him.

And then, not long ago, after he had made some idle remark about his uncle, Bess took him aside and told him that they believed now that Virgil was dead. They had no reason to hope that he might be alive. She ended by saying that he should not tell Henry. He was old enough, and should know, but Henry might not understand.

But Andy does not understand either. He is in the bewilderment, the bad luck special to children, of experiencing the effect without any of the clarification or relief that might come with some understanding of the cause. For weeks he has felt himself surrounded by the grief of the family, but he has not yet felt any grief of his own. He has continued, in a sort of guilty secrecy, to believe that Virgil is somewhere and somehow still alive. And he has kept on praying for his safe return.

Lying in bed in the dark, he is aware of the presence of the grief of the household, and aware of the difference between that and the pleasantness of it, so familiar and comforting to him, and kept there, he knows, partly for his own sake. His consciousness widens slowly out of the bounds of the room and the house into the night overlying the world. And he feels himself to be present, placelessly, in all the far and wide of that darkness, filled with a vague troubling over all he feels but does not know.

At last tiredness seems to place and shape him there in the bed in the room. The sweet familiarity of the house presses around him again, and he falls asleep.

A RAMBLE

“Come in,” Aunt Fanny says. She is sitting in a rocking chair behind the cold drum stove, rubbing an ointment of some kind on her fingers. She looks up inquiringly at them, squinting hard through her round brass-rimmed glasses, blinded by the brightness of the doorway until they shut the door, and then she raises her hands and opens her mouth in a broad show of pleasure and surprise.

“Awww, well I declare to goodness, if it ain’t Miss Bess’s little boys! How’s your mother, honeys?”

“Fine,” Andy says.

“And your daddy’s fine, I reckon, too? Well, ain’t that nice. Sit down, children, and talk to me. Let me look at you. My, ain’t you growed! I’m so glad to see you. Yes indeed! Just a while back I say to Joe, ‘Well, now it’s summer and I expect little Andy and Henry’ll be to see me, if I live and nothing happen and all go well with the world!’” She gives a long cackle of laughter and says, “Yes indeedy.”

The boys sit down together on a wicker settee placed between the door facing and the side of an iron bed, both of them a little abashed and awed having come into a different kind of life, though it is familiar to them from many other visits.

Aunt Fanny is Joe Banion’s mother, older than anybody knows. She sits a little wearily in her chair as old women often sit, her short, squat, ample body bunched into the angle of seat and back like a heap of cushions, her bowed knees set wide apart. Her hair has been gathered and braided into perhaps a dozen short erect grey pigtails. Her mouth contains only a few widely spaced amber-stained teeth. Her lower lip bulges slightly with the snuff packed inside it. A coffee can, her “spit-can,” is set at the end of one of the chair rockers at her feet. Her shoes—work shoes, probably a cast-off pair of Joe’s—have been so ventilated for the easing of corns and bunions as to have the look of sandals. Her long dress reaches to the tops of her shoes, and over it she wears a starched white apron. She is a woman of much pride. Her manners, though peculiarly her own, are impeccable. She is an accomplished seamstress, and the room is filled with her work: quilts, crocheted doilies, a linen wall-hanging with the Lord’s Prayer embroidered on it in threads of many colors. In the house she is nearly always occupied with her needle, always complaining of her dim eyesight and arthritic hands. Her dark hands, though painfully crooked and drawn by the disease, are still somehow dexterous and capable. She is always anointing them with salves and ointments of her own making. The fingers wear rings made of copper wire, which she believes to have the power of prevention and healing. She is an excellent gardener. The garden beside the house is her work. She makes of its small space an amplitude unlike anything else in the town: rows of vegetables and flowers—and herbs, for which she knows the recipes and the uses.

That is the daylight aspect of Aunt Fanny. But there is a night aspect too. And to Andy the garden, the quilts on the bed, or the quilting frame always seem threatened, like earthquake country, by an ominous nearness of darkness in the character of their maker. Aunt Fanny has seen the Devil, not once but often, especially in her youth, and she calls him familiarly by his name: Red Sam. Her obsessions are Hell and Africa, and she has the darkest, most fire-lit notions of both. Her idea of Africa is a hair-raising blend of lore and hearsay and imagination. She thinks of it with nostalgia and longing—a kind of earthly Other Shore, Eden, or Heaven—and yet she fears it because of its presumed darkness, its endless jungles, its stock of malevolent serpents and man-eating beasts. And by the thought of Hell she is held as endlessly fascinated as if her dearest ambition is to go there. She can talk at any length about it, cataloguing its tortures and labyrinths in almost loving detail. Her belief in Heaven is just as firm, but she simply depends on that and lets it go. It is Hell that draws her mind to its tightest focus, and entices her into the depths and rhapsodies of prophetic vision. Next to Hell, she is drawn by visions of the End of the World and the Judgment Day. And what most frightens the two boys in her talk of these things is not so much the horrors themselves as the old woman’s delight in them, as though in telling of them she affirms, beyond any power of small boys to doubt, that these truly are the foundation of the world. She seems to give a respectful credence to the statement that God is love, only to hurry on to explore with real interest the possibility that God is wrath. She can read from the Book of Revelation with a ringing of conviction in her voice that can make the Creation seem only a stage-setting for the triumphant thunderation of the End. Stooped in the light of a coal-oil lamp at night, following her finger down some threatening page of the Bible, her glasses opaquely reflecting the yellow of the lamp, her pigtails sticking out like compass points around her head, she looks like a black Witch of Endor.

She possesses a nearly inexhaustible lore of snakes and deaths, bottomless caves and pools, mysteries and ghosts and wonders. One of her stories can populate a month of nightmares. There have been nights when, after listening to her, Andy and Henry have been unable to go the dark way home by themselves, and Joe has had to hold their hands and lead them up the hill toward the happy lights of their grandad’s house. But though they are frightened by her ominous knowledge, they are as fascinated as she is by the dark spaces between days and stars that she opens toward them and fills with the designs and impendings of dire purpose.

But her daylight aspect is as bright as the other is dark. Now, as she sits there in the chair among the substances of her life, anointing her hands, the world seems firm enough around her. Her dark company of visions and devils and spirits seems to have withdrawn from her and from the daylight like so many bats and owls.

“How’s your rheumatism, Aunt Fanny?” Andy asks.

“Aw, honey, it’s bad.” She laughs, as though to affirm that hers is a faithful pain and can be depended on. “Oh yes, it don’t get no better. This ointment just keep it from getting worse.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s not worse.”

“Oh yes, just bad, not worse. I rub my hands and put heat on them, set with them in the sun, and they stay so I can use them. I say to Joe a while back, ‘Well, if I live and nothing happen and all go well, I believe they’ll last me.’ That’s what I say, and I believe they will. Eyes too. Old eyes and old hands. Old feet too, and old knees. Old everything. But I believe they’ll all last me, long as I’ll need them. I pray so, and trust the Lord. All you can do, honeys.”

She laughs again, and screws the top back on the jar of ointment, and gets heavily up.

“What’re you going to do this morning?” Andy asks. He is suddenly anxious. Sometimes she is too crippled to do anything, and it is always disappointing to have the good possibilities held back by old hands or old feet or old knees. But this morning the prospects are better than he hoped.

“I been thinking I’d go on a ramble.”

“Can we come?” Henry asks.

“You mind and behave, you can come.”

“We will.”

“No squibbling and squabbling, I mean. And you walk behind me so you won’t be trampling up everything before I can get to it.”

“All right.”

They follow her into the kitchen, where she ties on a faded blue sunbonnet and hunts up a basket and a sharp paring knife.

“I’ll carry those for you,” Henry says.

“Or I will,” Andy says.

“I’ll carry it, I expect,” Aunt Fanny says. “You all just keep busy watching yourself.”

She loops the handle of the basket over her arm, and they set out, pulling the back door shut behind them and going through the still long shadow of the house into the open daylight.

Aunt Fanny moves at a slow, hobbling, off-balance gait which seems unlikely to carry her as far as the yard fence. But it does, and is, if not fast, indomitably steady.

She goes along a cow path down the steep side of the hollow behind the house, and across the rocks of the streambed, and up the other side, giving a great shaking to the saplings she catches hold of to help herself along. The boys follow her uneasily, expecting her to give up what seems the enormous effort of the going and turn back.

But she advances steadily, leaving one yard and then another of the steep path behind her. And by the time they have come out of the trees into the sun again on the far side, and turned and followed the edge of the woods some distance around the point of the next ridge, the boys have begun as usual to accept, as she does, that her old feet and old knees will last. By now their shoes and the hem of the old woman’s dress are wet with dew.

They walk a little behind her, respectfully staying out of her way. She leads them in long slow zigzags between the fringe of the woods and the open pasture on the ridge, now and then stooping and cutting and dropping into the basket some herb or mushroom or flower. She makes no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly: when she zigs she apparently gives no thought to the possibility that it might be better to zag.

“Why do you want to skip so much?” Andy asks her. “Why don’t we go down there?”

“That ain’t how you ramble,” she says. “You got to be getting and going both at once. You ain’t supposed to get everything, but just only enough. Take some and leave some.”

“Aunt Fanny,” Henry says, “I thought those old toadstools were poison.”

“Some is, some ain’t. Them bad ones you want to stay away from. I heard about a man ate one of them once. They say he just died painful. Whooee! Say he died screaming the Devil was coming after him. Seen him!”

For a moment the story seems to cast a shadow over them, as though a dark tree has suddenly grown up beside them. But she hushes and moves on. They leave the shadow then, and when Andy looks back he sees only the sunlight shining there. Ahead of him, the sun bright on her bonnet, Aunt Fanny walks, studying the ground.

She seems to see everything. Invariably she sees what she is looking for before the boys can see it, in spite of their efforts to be of use. It is as though over a spot of the ground where nothing is she bends, and miraculously there is something—a white round mushroom, and she cuts it off and drops it into the basket, cackling gaily at the boys’ amazement.

Watching her, Andy is again aware that hers is a kind of life different from any other that he knows. He is made happy by her pleased easy taking of the good things that the world provides without effort, that nobody else wants, that most do not even see. Aunt Fanny’s basket, as it slowly fills with the clutter of her discoveries, comes to have for him the excitement of a chest of treasure found in a cave. That these things have grown out of the ground into their secret places apart from anybody’s intention, and that she takes them familiarly and freely without attempting to take them all, that they are the harvest of a ramble and not a search or a labor, all this bespeaks a peaceableness between her and the world.

In their zigzagging between pasture and woods they gradually turn the curves of the long S of their ramble, going around the point of the first ridge and up along the wooded hollow on the far side, and then crossing the hollow and going down around the point of the next ridge. They scare up two or three rabbits. Once, ahead of them, they hear a squirrel barking, and hear the rushing in the treetops as it retreats deeper into the woods. In the open pasture on one side of them the meadowlarks are singing, and on the other the patches of underbrush along the edge of the woods are stirring and rustling with the movements of redbirds and towhees and sparrows. Aunt Fanny walks steadily on, here and there stooping and cutting and naming and dropping into the basket a sprig of this, a few leaves or a bloom of that.

At last they turn straight up the side of a ridge and go through a gate and past the cattle barn on the far place and through another gate, and down the next slope. They can see the river valley below them now.

Above the woods on the bluff there are two tall stone chimneys and the heaped foundation stones of a house. This was the first house that Mat’s people built and lived in after they came to Kentucky. The last member of the family to live there was Mat’s Great-Aunt Milly, who, crippled by some childhood disease, died there, an old maid, when Mat was about fifteen. After that, until it was torn down a generation later, it was lived in by one or another of the Negro families who worked on the place. Aunt Fanny was born and raised in a cabin that used to stand behind the house, and later lived for a while in the house itself.

“Here we are where you used to live,” Andy says to her, hoping for a story.

But she only says, “That was long gone years ago,” and laughs as if to convey her familiarity with the darkness that has swallowed all that time.

They continue their rambling down through the ragged, half-dead locusts of what used to be the yard, and make a sort of loop on the hillside below the house site, skirting the upper edge of the woods. The basket filled at last, they sit down to rest on the hearthstones of the eastward chimney, leaning back into the cool, stony-smelling shadow.

“A mighty fine place to rest yourself,” Aunt Fanny says. “So pretty and nice.”

“Tell about you all sitting on the porch,” Andy says.

“Old porch,” she says, gesturing with the paring knife, “used to go all the way across the back of the house. And a mighty fine setting place too. After the hot days we’d go out there and set till bedtime. Be a breeze. And we’d talk, and now and then see the lights of a steamboat on the river and hear it whistle. Mighty fine to do. Oh yes, I remember them old gone times. I can see them clear.”

She subsides, and pokes with satisfaction into the contents of the basket.

“Tell about Aunt Milly’s ghost.”

She glances up and is silent for a moment, as if examining her memory for a good starting place.

“Well, not long after Miss Milly died, the house we was living in begun to leak and get in bad shape. And Mr. Mat’s daddy Mr. Ben says, ‘Ain’t got money to fix it now. Move in the big house.’ So we moved in. And wasn’t long after that till we begun to hear things at night. Hear them crutches walk. Be laying in the bed at night, and all quiet, and here they’d come, down out the old attic, step at a time down the stairs, and on down the next stairs, just like they used to sound when she was alive and walking on them. And then they’d just wander, in and out the rooms, out on the porch, and up and down. We nailed the attic door shut, and here they come again same as ever: thunk-a-tunk. And sometimes it’d sing:

Whooooo is that all dressed in red?

Must be the children that Fee Fo fed.

Whooooo is that all dressed in green?

Must be the children that Fee Fo seen.

“And it’d go on that-a-way, singing in all the colors there was, whooing like a hoot owl:

Whooooo is that all dressed in blue?

Must be the children that Fee Fo slew.

Whooooo is that all dressed in black?

Must be the children in Fee Fo’s sack.”

To Andy, again, there seems to have grown up beside them a dark tree, veiling the sun. And within that darkness he seems to see as with an owl’s vision the hobbling wraith of his great-great-great-aunt in its mournful wandering in the old house—and to sense beyond the house, in a windy, ever-deepening darkness, the tireless walking of Fee Fo.

When Aunt Fanny intones the mournful drawn-out singing of the ghost, Henry shudders.

“Didn’t that scare you?” he asks.

“Didn’t that scare me! Lord, honey, you wake up in the middle of the night, and you hear that thunk-a-tunk and that singing, it’ll make the hair stand up offen your head! It sho will!” She laughs, and the little boy shudders again. “When you shiver like that,” she says, “somebody’s walking on your grave.”

“I haven’t even got any grave.” Henry says. “I ain’t dead.”

“Well, maybe you ain’t got one yet that you in, honey, but you got one that you going to be in.”

The darkness of the old woman’s knowing hangs over them, and they fall silent, the boys wanting to know more, yet dreading the answers too much to ask the questions. Andy wants to ask her about his Uncle Virgil—is he dead? Was whatever grave he may have come to appointed to him in his childhood, or when he was born, or at the beginning of the world? But he knows that her answer will be one he will have to struggle with. And he does not ask.

Aunt Fanny gets up presently, and they start home. Again they seem to Andy to move out of a dark place back into the sunlight.

The ramble over now, they go by the straightest way. Aunt Fanny puts the paring knife in the basket, and sets the basket on her head. The dew has dried long ago. The waverings of heat have begun to stand over the fields.

When they come back into the dimness and wood-smoke smell of the kitchen, Aunt Fanny hangs up her bonnet, and they sit down at the table. The boys watch as the old woman brings the cluttered gatherings of their ramble finally to an orderly harvest. Piece by piece she sorts out the contents of the basket. When she gets done she has lying on the newspapers spread out before her a bouquet of flowers, two or three small piles of herbs, a small clutch of mushrooms like a nest of eggs. She sits there looking a moment, and then gets up and puts the flowers into water, and goes into the next room and sits down with snuff and spit-can to rest.

The boys remain with her, sitting again on the wicker settee, hoping to prolong the pleasure of the morning. But she seems to them to accept the end of the ramble too complacently, talking now of sleeping a few winks after dinner, and of the cool of the afternoon when she will go out to work in her garden. And gradually the excitement leaves them, and they begin to wish to go, only kept there by politeness. They stay until the ringing of the dinner bell calls them up the hill to eat.

As they walk up through the blossoming pasture toward the barn, the look of things seems changed. As always, the old woman’s talk has alerted them to the presence somewhere of their graves, to the welling up of death and night into the world. The coloring of the day seems to stand tremulously on the surface of a darkness from which neither it nor they will ever go free.

A RESULT

Late Monday morning, August sixth, the president announces that on the day before, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Mat, who was at work in the garden, happened to come to the house with a bucket of tomatoes just as the news came on the radio. And so with Margaret and Hannah and Nettie he hears most of the story, the correct voice of the newsman reciting what there is to tell, standing the event nakedly among them in the room, leaving it there without explanation or comment. Or at least, in the silence after the radio is snapped off, such explanation as was given seems overwhelmed by the event itself.

After he finishes his work in the garden, he hitches his team to the mowing machine and goes until sundown in the unending rounds, cutting the weeds and tree-sprouts that rise against him year after year in the opened fields.

Better than any other work he loves the mowing. He goes through the long afternoon, watching with a kind of ardor the tall growth in its flowing backward fall over the chattering teeth of the cutter bar, the slow uncovering of the shape of the long ridge. It is, as always, one of the heights of his intimacy with the place, and he does not flag in his attentiveness. When the sun has reddened and cooled and come down, throwing deep shadows into the hollows, he turns the team toward the edge of the field, and speaks, stopping them. He throws the machine out of gear and, getting stiffly down, raises the cutter bar and bolts it upright. He takes up the reins again, lifts himself back onto the seat, speaks to the team, and the iron wheels begin to turn in the direction of the barn, soundlessly for the first time in hours, over the cushion of mowed grass.

And through all that time he has been followed by the unfinished knowledge of the bomb and the destroyed city. He has felt his mind borne, like a man in a little boat, on the crest of history, in a violence of pure effect, as though the event of the war, having long ago outdistanced its cause, now escapes comprehension, and speeds on. It has seemed to him that the years of violence have at last arrived at what, without his knowing it, they had been headed for, not by any human reason or motive or wish but by the logic of violence itself. And all the events of the war are at once altered by their result—though he cannot yet tell how or how much.

THE SENSE OF TIME PASSING

The next afternoon Mat and Joe take the two boys and walk back on the ridge to help Jarrat and Burley clean up the barn there in preparation for housing the tobacco crop. They scrape and rake and then sweep the dirt floor, making the place safe for the coke fires that will be used to cure the tobacco—in the process moving and rearranging the tools that have been stored there in the course of the summer’s work, and the troughs and gates and pens that will be used when the sheep are fed and sheltered there during the winter. They work steadily but—since the crops have long been laid by—without hurry. With a sort of conscientiousness they allow the boys to play at the work, knowing that earlier or later in the year such indulgence is not possible. When one of the boys gets in the way, they get him out of it with a patient kindness that becomes one of the pleasures of the afternoon: “Better work over yonder on that side now, old chap.” “Let me get a hold there, honey boy. That’s still a little above your breakfast.”

After one heavy lift Burley sings:

How many biscuits can you eat?

Forty-nine and a ham of meat

This morning.

And does a dusty double shuffle down the driveway that gets the boys so tickled that even Jarrat laughs. And then, as if reluctant to give up the free high spirits of that laughter, Joe shuffles and stomps around his broom handle, singing:

Mamma, Mamma, what a pain I got.

Take me to the pothagate shop.

Get me something, don’t matter what,

So you ease this pain I got.

The afternoon is hot, and they go out now and again to rest at the shady end of the barn and breathe the clean breeze there. They talk and smoke, easing themselves, feeling ahead of them the hurry and strain of the harvest.

“Not many days until we’ll be into it,” Jarrat says at one point. “Be here before we know it.”

And that is the theme of their talk. The sense of time passing. The sense of the future as a reality they will not quite accept until it is upon them.

WHAT IS LEFT

Tired after the hot day, they have been sitting quietly on the front porch since supper, Margaret and Hannah in the swing, Henry in Mat’s lap, Andy on the floor with his back against one of the posts. The katydids have begun their annual life, and in the twilight the sugar maples in the yard are filled with their singing, a harsh foliage.

“What are they saying, Grandad?” Henry asks. He knows, but being a questioner he likes the question.

“Some say Katy did,” Mat says. “Some say Katy didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Some are katydids, and some are katydidnts.”

“What do they care if she did or not?” Andy asks.

“It’s one of the eternal questions. You’re liable to ask it yourself one of these days.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Henry says.

“I do,” Andy says.

“You do not.”

“Andy,” Mat says, “if you go up to one of those trees and lay your hand against it just lightly they’ll hush.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They will.”

“Is that true?” Hannah asks.

“Try it.”

And so Hannah and the boys leave the porch and go across the yard to one of the larger maples. Andy lays his hand against the trunk, and in the throbbing canopy of the singing there opens a globe of quiet the size of the tree. Andy steps back and stands with Hannah and Henry, looking up. Mat and Margaret sit watching them. For some time, while the katydids in the tree start singing and again Andy lays his hand on the trunk and stops them, nobody speaks. And then Margaret asks:

“What are you thinking about, Mat?”

The question startles him, for he gathers from the tone of her voice that she knows what he is thinking, and asks with daring and with fear.

“Loss,” he says.

Hannah stands with the two little boys, looking up into the darkening tree, holding the boys’ hands in hers, her back to the porch. Maybe because she stands so with the two boys, who wait only for the katydids to sing again, Mat is deeply touched now by the look of her. It seems to him that loss is in the way she stands.

He looks at Margaret, meeting her eyes.

“Loss. It singles us out.”

She is smiling at him, shaking her head. And he realizes that the singleness he is talking about never has belonged to her. She has been without even the comfort of that—not single and whole, but broken. He grows ashamed of his bitterness. He too is broken, as he has been, and has known, all along—that singleness of his an attempt, typical of him, to prescribe terms to the world. The loser prescribes no terms.

“Mat, when we’ve lost it all, we’ve had what we’ve lost.”

“But to lose it. Isn’t there anything in you that rebels against that?”

She looks steadily at him, considering that—whether unsure of her answer or unwilling to answer too readily, he cannot tell. He is aware that Margaret is trying him, drawing deliberately at the bindings between them, as he has tried her with his singleness.

“No,” she says.

“None at all?”

“Virgil,” she says, as if to remind or acknowledge what they are talking about. “From the day he was born I knew he would die. That was how I loved him, partly. I’d brought him into the world that would give him things to love, and take them away. You too, Mat. You knew it. I knew so well that he would die that, when he did disappear from us the way he did, I was familiar with the pain. I’d had it in me all his life.”

A tone of weeping has come into her voice, though not openly, and Mat does not yet move toward her. The weeping seems only the circumstance of what she is saying, not the result—an old weeping, well known, bearable by an endurance both inborn and long practiced. The dusk is thickening so that their eyes no longer clearly meet, though they still look toward each other.

“But I don’t believe that when his death is subtracted from his life it leaves nothing. Do you, Mat?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

“What it leaves is his life. How could I turn away from it now any more than I could when he was a little child, and not love it and be glad of it, just because death is in it?”

Her words fall on him like water and like light. Suffering and clarified, he feels himself made fit for her by what she asks of him. He shakes his head.

She is clearly asking him now, and he gets up and goes and sits down beside her. He puts his arm around her.

“And, Mat,” she says, “we belong to each other. After all these years. Doesn’t that mean something?”

It is a long time before he answers. The night has nearly come. He can see only the drifting white blur of Hannah’s blouse under the dark hovering of the tree.

“I don’t know what it means,” he says finally. “I know what it’s worth.”

Chapter 15

THAT’S FINE

Early Monday morning, the thirteenth of August, Ernest is driving up the creek road to work for perhaps the hundredth time. The valley is deep in fog. Since he plunged down into it out of the sunlight on the upland, he has been able to see only a few feet of the road, and he has driven slowly, now and then turning on the wipers to clear the windshield.

The metal bed of the truck is filled with loose tools, odd scraps and remnants, a dozen and a half empty paint buckets. As the truck works its way slowly over the rough road, it is accompanied by a clattering and jarring and rattling absurdly disproportionate to its speed.

Riding in the littered cab in the midst of that commotion, Ernest becomes conscious at a certain point that Ida will have heard him coming by now. And at the thought of her time seems to establish its continuity again from the moment the evening before when as usual he let her out of the truck at the mailbox, and watched her in the mirror until she was out of sight. He imagines Ida hearing the sound of the truck and turning her head toward it a moment, confirming her recognition of it, before going on with her work as before. That is not what he wishes she would do—he wishes that, hearing that sound, she would smile; he wishes that she would put down her work and come out to meet him—but it is what, with a desperate realism, he imagines her doing. The sight and nearness of her still raise in him an insurgence of heat and want. And the most passing thought of her still wakes the dream of household and farm, in which she moves as troubling and elusive as an unborn spirit. But desire and dream are hounded through his mind now by awareness of their futility. The whole structure has begun to be undermined by his understanding that it is licensed only by Ida’s innocence of it and by his failure to bring it to the test of any reality.

But the sense of futility has grown in his mind to the sort of restrained terror that he would feel working without a rope on the incline of a high steep roof. It is the middle of August already, the downward slope of the summer. He has come in sight of the end of his work on the valley farm. And the return to winter work in the enclosure of his shop, which once so strongly appealed to him and which he would look forward to with such a deep presentiment of pleasure, has become unimaginable. He feels himself set loose and at large in the world, freed of all the limits of habit or duty or pleasure that might have held him back, pursuing through the boundlessness of his own fantasy his fleeting, hopeless obsession, pursued by a disaster to which he is blind. Like one of the damned, who with an indomitable loyalty even in Hell suffers only the thought of his irrecoverable sin, Ernest goes back each morning, always one day nearer the last, to his burning.

He drives up onto the bench where the house sits and stops in the yard. After he has turned off the engine, he sits still, listening. At first there seems to be no sound at all. And then he becomes conscious of the trees dripping. That is the only sound. Ida is nowhere in sight. He does not know whether she is at the barn or in the house. He cannot see to the barn. The house looks shut and quiet like a house at night. Now his own silence has begun to hold him. He waits for a sound.

But hearing none, he reaches over and unfastens the glove compartment, takes out a package of cigarettes, and flips the door shut. He lights a cigarette and gets out and goes around to the back of the house. There is an old shed there where he keeps paint and brushes and the few tools he still has a use for.

He is in no hurry. He cannot begin painting until the sun burns through and dries things off. He stands in the door, looking into the shed at the clutter of his stuff, finishing his smoke.

When he is done with it he steps inside. He spends a few minutes rearranging things, collecting his tools where they are scattered on the floor, gathering up the empty buckets and piling them in with the others in the bed of the truck. He carries out a new bucket of paint and sits down in the doorway and opens it. He stirs it carefully, taking his time, watching the pigment rise and blend and smooth out, and then sets the top back on the bucket. He takes his brushes out of the can where they have been soaking overnight and works the turpentine out of them.

He carries his ladder around to the side of the house where the sun will strike first, and sets it up. Taking a putty knife and a wire brush, he climbs the ladder and begins scrubbing away the old paint that has cracked and loosened around an upstairs window. For a good many minutes he works with concentration. As he works down from the top of the window, his eyes come below the level of the half-drawn shade. He leans sideways and looks in.

It is a child’s room—Annie’s room—and the sight of it is a revelation to him. He braces his right hand on the sill and looks closely. The room is neat, the bed prettily made with a patchwork quilt spread over the counterpane. But he can tell, without quite knowing how, that it has not been entered in some time. The door opposite him, that must go into the hall, is shut. The shades of the other two windows are tightly drawn. Only this one is partly raised. He understands, as if by an instinct born of his long preoccupation with her, that though Ida wanted the room closed, needed to have it closed, she could not bear to leave it dark.

What is revealed to him, what dawns on him with a kind of shock as he stands there looking into the room, is Ida’s life, the complexity of it, the uncountable details of its making and being. There are secrecies and intimacies of it that are as forbidden to him, as far beyond his reach, as if he had never known her. The drive of his feelings has so oversimplified her that he has forgot, if he ever allowed himself to know, that there was bound to be such a room, and that it was bound to be closed to him. The recognition seems depthless, and it fills him with a nameless heavy fear. And yet he stands there, cramped and unmoving, looking into the room, caught by the mystery of it.

There is an almost sexual intimacy about looking into that room. And yet his strangeness to it is so strongly proclaimed by everything in it that it is not an intimacy at all but an invasion. And his sense of himself as a stranger is immediately joined to a sense of Gideon’s belonging there. Gideon would know, and his knowing, though he might suffer it like death, would make him free in that room, and in Ida’s life. In that knowing he would be carried toward Ida, toward such a giving and having as Ernest will never know.

He becomes aware that he has heard the yard gate open and shut. Seized by shame and the dread of being caught, he begins scrubbing at the loose paint again, not changing his position at all, bluffing through the pretense that he only leaned over that way in order to do his work. He does not look around. And then he can hear footsteps come up near the foot of the ladder and stop. He can feel the nearness of her.

“Don’t fall,” she says.

He does not stop work, and he does not look down at her. “I won’t.”

“Well, you might, leaning over that way.”

“That’s part of it too,” he says. “It takes some stretching and some bending over.”

“I guess it must. I don’t know much about it.”

As he straightens and begins working in a different place, he glances down at her. She is standing within three or four feet of the ladder, a bucket of milk on the ground at her feet. She is wearing a pair of four-buckle overshoes that must belong to Gideon. She is no longer looking up at him, but has turned, and is standing with her back to him, gazing absently out into the fog, which is thinning a little. He can see the yard fence now, rusty wires and spider webs beaded with clear drops. He knows that she has stopped because she gets lonesome and wants somebody to talk to, but he also knows that she will not say anything to him that she would not say to Mat or the Coulters or anybody else who might come to work.

“I like to never found them old cows,” she says.

“Huh!”

“They’d laid down in that fog and I couldn’t see them—of course—but I couldn’t hear them either. Not a sound of a bell.”

“I thought they usually come in by themselves. Didn’t think you had to hunt them.”

“They do. They wasn’t a hundred feet from the barn this morning. I just couldn’t see them or hear them. If that old spotted one hadn’t got up and started her bell to ringing I’d be looking yet.”

“Well. I swan.”

She’s silent a moment, and then he can hear the bail of the bucket rattle. “I reckon I’d better get on.”

She goes around to the back porch. He hears her set the bucket down and, after a pause to take the overshoes off, go into the kitchen. Very shortly she comes out again and strains the milk and carries the filled crocks to the cellar. Though he goes ahead swiftly with his work, he is almost wholly attentive to the sounds she makes, translating them into visions of her as she moves among her tasks.

He scrubs out all the nooks and seams and edges on that end of the house, and moves his ladder again to the starting place. Going back to the shed, he tosses knife and brush into the pile of tools. The fog has begun to thin, and the pale disk of the sun to show through, but it will be some time yet before the wall will be dry. He sits down in the shed door and lights a smoke.

Ida comes out, carrying a water bucket. “A bad morning to paint.”

“Yes. Too wet.”

She goes to the well and pumps the bucket full and lifts it off the spout, turning toward him again. “This old fog. It makes you feel a thousand miles away.”

She goes back inside, leaning a little against the weight of the bucket, her free arm raised for balance, but stepping quickly up onto the porch and across it and into the kitchen.

Her footsteps go rapidly across the linoleum two or three times, and then he hears her washing dishes. She washes her breakfast dishes, the skillet and coffee pot, the milk buckets and strainer. She comes out and empties the dishwater over the yard fence and goes back. This time, preoccupied, she does not look in his direction, and he feels a secrecy in his presence there, a flickering of shame. But he listens again as she begins preparing their dinner.

He hears her footsteps recede toward the front rooms. Now she will straighten the house, sweep, make her bed, and go out to work in the field until time to finish up dinner. There is an almost unbearable sweetness in his knowledge of all this. He has come to follow her through her days with the pleasing anticipations and recognitions with which one reads a familiar and much loved passage, but with anxiety, too, as though the passage is but a fragment, leading to the verge of a revelation that is not told, or lost.

Suddenly, somewhere deep inside the house, he hears her begin to sing. He has never heard her sing before. The sound—muted, wordless, whole phrases inaudible—comes to him with the same sort of shock he felt when he looked into the child’s room. Any suggestion of change in her, or in his idea of her, is fearful to him—mainly perhaps for the reason that he has no way to respond to it. No matter how either of them may change, nothing changes between them. No matter what may happen, he is doomed to go on as always, obeying the void appearances of his old self and his old ways.

She quits singing. Presently he hears her footsteps return toward the back of the house.

His attention has been so fixed on Ida that he is alarmed to see that he is sitting in the full light of the sun. He does not know how long it has been shining on him, but he should already have been at work. The day seems to have slipped a little beneath him. What is he doing?

Shame gathers him up and with clear force turns him toward his work, and he submits to it with the relief of a man who has arrived at a critical solution, righted himself. Standing high on the ladder, for the better part of half an hour he concentrates with deliberative self-mastery on spreading white paint over the weathered cornice.

But as he reaches and turns at his work and turns back and leans to dip his brush, he can glimpse the wheel tracks of the road going down from the house to the barn. And his mind, as though it has gone wild and will not be brought to confinement again by the bait of a simple regularity, begins to stray out into the place.

His work, since spring, has followed the incline of that road upward from the barn to the house, repairing and painting the buildings along the way. He has made a difference in the time he has been there. But beyond the vestige of workmanly satisfaction it gives him to look back at it, there is a sense of irrevocable loss. Each one of those buildings represents one of the little periods of his life. Around each one in its turn his life formed a pattern. He has had an intimate knowledge of each one—has been attentive to the condition of every board and nail. And each has stood in its place in the transforming light of his dream.

But it was an intimacy purely professional, purely temporary. There is not one that he has had reason to go back to. And he has not been back. He will not go back. That is the condition of his trade. He has scarcely ever worked in a place that he did not come in some way to like. But then the liking was dependent on the work, and ended when the work did. Here the use of his skill, which always before has transcended and carried him past his jobs, has failed him. He is not able to relinquish this place as he passes through it. He cannot think of work beyond this work, a place beyond this place.

He has lost track of Ida’s whereabouts when he hears her speak to him.

“Mr. Finley.”

She stands at the foot of the ladder, ready to go to the field, holding a large white envelope. He can see the address written on it, heavily, in pencil. An ache of premonition swells in the pit of his stomach. He lays his brush across the mouth of the bucket, and takes a step down.

“I wanted to show you this. I got it yesterday. I’m sorry to make you get down.”

“That’s all right. I had to anyway.”

He sets the bucket on the ground and props his crutches under his arms. She hands him the envelope.

It is one of those stamped envelopes that you buy at a post office. There is no return address, and he cannot read the postmark. The handwriting of the address is awkward, blunt, black, deeply impressed in the paper. Looking down at it, Ernest stands as though shadowless, in an inescapable brilliance. He has begun to sweat.

“You want me to read this?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

She is smiling, facing him with her hands clasped behind her. He would not be surprised to see her suddenly dance up and down. She reminds him just now of a young girl and that again makes her strange to him. Again he is aware how far his knowledge falls short of her.

He removes from the envelope a large sheet of lined paper and unfolds it. Again there is no address, there is no date. As on the envelope the black angular script is sunk into the paper as if by the weight of it: “Dear Ida, I am straightened up. I am coming home.”

Had that been all, the meaning might have revealed itself slowly, and might have been bearable. But Gideon had trouble spelling straightened. He spelled it twice—first “stratened” and then “straytened”—before he got it right. And somehow the record of that struggle—there are no erasures: the words are simply crossed out with a single deep stroke of the pencil—gives Ernest as immediate a sense of Gideon’s presence, wherever he is, as he has of Ida’s, who is standing within his reach. It seems to him that if it were not for the crutches, if he were not propped there like a tripod, he might fall. But he keeps staring down at the letter, the writing having disappeared into the bright whiteness of the page. He feels Ida becoming impatient for his response.

“That’s fine,” he says.

“Ain’t that fine?”

“Yes indeed. That’s good.”

Not a foot and a half from his hand he can see her, wearing the bonnet and the man’s shirt she has put on, as she usually does, to work in the field. That close, it seems to him that he can feel in the hair roots along the back of his hand the swelling and rounding of her breasts, soft under the faded blue cloth of that shirt that he knows to be Gideon’s.

“You’re surprised, I reckon, to be hearing.”

“No. I knew he’d be back. I didn’t know when.”

“You don’t know for sure yet. He didn’t say.”

“Well, it’ll be pretty soon. Soon as he can get here.”

She reaches and takes the letter out of his hand.

“I just wanted to show somebody.”

“Why sure,” he says. “I’m glad you’re going to be happy now.”

That is as far as he can go. He stands there on the high stalk of his pain.

She folds the envelope twice and buttons it in one of the shirt pockets.

“Yes,” she says. “Maybe I sort of will now.”

He seems to get through the rest of the day by holding on to the handle of the paint brush. He dangles from it, the place vanished around him as if sunk into the blinding whiteness of Gideon’s letter. He holds to the handle of the brush, spreading whiteness, as one would hold to the last hand’s-breadth of a swinging rope.

ANOTHER RESULT

Mat has washed his hands and come out to sit on the back porch to wait for supper. He quit work early, as he has for the past several days, and has been sitting there already for more than half an hour. Margaret is waiting for Ernest to come now before setting the food on the table.

On the arms of the rocker Mat’s hands have gone into a kind of sleep. The sun, ready to set, casts a last flush of reddish light against the westward end of the barn. He has been watching that light rise toward the peak of the gable. And the light does rise and crest and depart, reaching out over the rising edge of the night. He can hear Andy and Henry playing in the front yard. And now he hears Margaret cross the kitchen and stop in the door.

“Where do you suppose Ernest is? He’s never this late.”

“I don’t know. I reckon he’ll be along in a minute.”

“Do you suppose that old truck could have broken down somewhere?”

“Could have done it.” The more Mat thinks about that possibility, the more likely it seems.

“Well, maybe I’d better drive down that way.” He gets up regretfully, fishing in his pocket for his switch key. As he steps off the porch, he hears Margaret come out of the kitchen and sit down to wait in the chair he left.

He starts down through town toward the little farm in the creek valley. But as he gains speed he catches sight of Ernest’s truck parked in the alley between the post office and Jasper Lathrop’s store. He stops and backs up and pulls his truck in behind Ernest’s.

The presence of Ernest’s truck cancels the only probable explanation of his lateness. As Mat walks the few steps back out to the street, it occurs to him that, so far as he can remember, this is the first time in twenty-five years that he has not known within a reasonable guess where Ernest is and what he is doing. Mat feels an uneasiness in that thought that he did not expect. But he puts it aside and goes out to the street. He will look in the drugstore.

As usual this time of the evening, the drugstore is deserted. Dolph Courtney is sitting at one of the tables in the thickening twilight of the place—until a customer comes in he will not turn on a light—picking his teeth and watching the street. Mat opens the screen door and looks in.

“You seen Ernest, Dolph?”

“Not since this morning. Why? You looking for him?”

Mat turns away at once and lets the door spring shut behind him. He starts to cross over and ask at Burgess’s. And then he sees Jayber Crow and Burley Coulter coming up the street from the barbershop. Maybe Ernest went to get a haircut, he thinks, and got held up there. The logic of that makes him quickly happy, and just as quickly evaporates; Ernest would not be in the barbershop with Jayber gone.

“Jayber,” he asks, as the two men come up in front of the drugstore, “have you seen Ernest?”

A little to Mat’s surprise, both men’s faces immediately show the concern that he has begun to feel himself.

“Not for two or three days,” Jayber says.

Feeling their eyes on him as he goes, Mat walks up the street and back through the alley to Ernest’s shop. The door is shut, and he knocks.

“Ernest?”

There is no answer.

He works the latch and gives an experimental push to the door. It is not locked. He shoves it open and steps inside.

The big westward window over the workbench has filled the shop with a pinkish backwash of light from the sunset. And whether because that makes the lower three or four feet of the room proportionately darker, or because he is already warned by some glimpse, for a good many seconds after he steps through the door Mat does not see Ernest. But the room is filled with an intimation of what he will see. And a part of his mind is saying to him as if in a whisper: “You should not have come.”

“Ernest?”

And he sees then.

Against the far wall, a little out from the end of the workbench, Ernest is sitting on the floor, his head bent forward. His arms hang down wearily at his sides, the left hand and part of the forearm hidden in a freshly cut hole in the floor. The crutches, one resting on top of the other, lie beside him.

Mat crosses the room and, kneeling, picks up Ernest’s right hand and feels for the pulse. There is none. For maybe a full minute he kneels there, the dead wrist in his hands seeming to infuse its quiet into him and into the room. His mind, as if in a fit of avoidance having leaped clean over the fact of Ernest’s death, begins to grope at the problem of how to tell Margaret. The simplicity of it seems its difficulty—that he will have to go, without qualification or offer of hope, and tell Margaret: “Ernest is dead. He killed himself.”

His mind flinches again and turns back. “Why didn’t I know?” He leans and draws Ernest’s left hand up out of the hole in the floor. The wrist is cut deeply open, as Mat knew it would be. There are no more surprises.

He looks around for the auger and keyhole saw that Ernest used to cut the hole in the floor and sees them hanging in their places. And he sees on the right leg of Ernest’s pants the two dark narrow stains where he wiped the blade of his knife before returning it to his pocket. On the floor, a foot or so to the right of him, there is a neat pile of ashes and the extinguished butt of a cigarette.

Mat gently lays Ernest’s right hand back on the floor and bends his left arm so that the bloodied hand will rest in his lap. He lifts him, gathered in his arms as one would lift a child, touched beyond tears by the vulnerability and innocence of the abandoned body still pliant and warm, carries him to the workbench, and lays him down.

Chapter 16

SIX FEET

“Dang tootin!” Uncle Stanley says. “Man just up and put a end to hisself that way! Crazy. Bound to been!”

He is sitting on the lower lip of Ernest Finley’s grave, his feet dangling in the hole. To his right the top of Jayber Crow’s bald head can be seen at intervals as he straightens to throw out a spadeful of dirt. The grave is nearly as deep as it needs to be; they have been at work—or Jayber has—since early in the morning. On the headstone of Ernest’s mother’s grave, the nearest neighbor to the one he is digging, Jayber has put his hat and shirt, giving it the rather startling appearance of a man rising out of the ground.

It is a sweltering day and the ground is hard. The shade of a tall cedar a little to the west of the grave is still turned tantalizingly in the wrong direction. Jayber’s earth-stained undershirt is soaked with sweat. He hasn’t grown used to the work of gravedigging, and maybe he never will. Nothing in his experience as scholar and barber could have prepared him for the agony involved in loosening and spading out that much dirt.

“Six feet is a lot deeper than I thought it was,” he confessed to Uncle Stan from the bottom of the first one he dug.

“By grab,” Uncle Stanley said, “things look different from down there, don’t they, son?”

And that is the truth. There is a suggestiveness about the whole business that, though it seems not to affect Uncle Stanley, Jayber has never become immune to. Each time, as he digs his way down and grows tireder, he grows bluer. And today the mood is intensified by a particular sorrow, for as well as anybody did, Jayber knew Ernest and liked him.

He is tired now and hot and full of the misery of mortality, and about one time in three as he heaves the loaded shovel upward from the floor of the grave he makes an utterance which much against his will sounds like a groan.

At the foot of the grave Burley Coulter is standing in his best clothes, his face set in disinterested amusement at the argument that has been going on, to his knowledge, for at least half an hour. He cleaned up and walked in to town in the middle of the morning with the intention of going to Mat’s house. But when he came by there the house was quiet, nobody in sight; he grew doubtful after all that the family would want to be bothered with outsiders at that time of day. And so he walked on past and out the road to the graveyard, where he knew he would find Jayber.

“Bound to be crazy,” Uncle Stanley says, “feller do that to hisself. It’s a dad-burned insult to humanity.”

“Oh,” Jayber says, “if you haven’t got the most unpardonable old mouth!”

“Says which?”

“I said, are you sure about that?”

“Durn right!”

Burley would really like to go on back to town. He is never very comfortable in Sunday clothes anyway, especially not in the hot sun watching somebody else work. His plan was to come out and talk a few minutes with Jayber, finding out—if Jayber knew—how Mat and his people were, and then go back to town and eat a sandwich at Dolph Courtney’s, and then go to Mat’s.

But since he came up and said good morning, he has not said another word. He was prepared neither for Jayber’s low spirits nor for the antagonism between Jayber and Uncle Stanley—two good reasons to be sorry he came and to wish to be gone. But he has stayed. Coat slung over his shoulder, hat pushed back, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled above his elbows, his tie loosened, his collar slowly wilting, he has stood there in a sort of fascination at the goings on, with a perishing hope that things will take a turn for the better. At one point he intended to stay until the job was finished, so he and Jayber could go to Mat’s together. But now he has about decided not to wait.

“He said,” Uncle Stanley says, with a downward backhanded wave in Jayber’s direction, “he said he thought we’d just as well quit after the sun got hot, and finish up early tomorrow morning in the cool. But I told him, dad whack it, that ain’t no way to do. In this work you’re dealing with the Powers, by grab, and you can’t diddle around with them. Why, what if somebody else dies tonight? And somebody’s liable to.”

“It could be you,” Jayber says. “And what about that?”

“Maybe two of them will. And then look at the digging piling up on you. Says which?”

“I said, Well, if you aren’t going to kill yourself, that’s one we don’t have to worry about.”

“You dad-blamed tootin,” Uncle Stanley says. “I ain’t.”

This quarrel has been in progress a good deal longer than the half an hour that Burley has been listening to it. It began, in fact, at the moment Jayber made the first cut into the sod. The old man sat down with his back against a headstone.

“I been studying about it,” he said, “and be durn if I can see why that young feller wanted to kill hisself.”

“Is that a fact?” Jayber said, thinking that would make an end to it.

But in the course of his studying about it, Uncle Stanley had evidently discovered in himself a righteous argument against suicide, and he wouldn’t let it drop.

“Be durn if I think he had any right to do it.”

“Well, it was his life, wasn’t it?”

And that started it.

“It weren’t his to put any such of an end to.”

“How do you know that? And what right do you have to say that he didn’t have that right?”

“Because I believe it. It may be Scripture, I reckon. If it ain’t, it ought to be.”

“Well, maybe he believed another way.”

And so it has gone. Ignoring the obvious futility of it, Jayber accepted the challenge. And untouched by all the shrewd and telling logic of Jayber’s questions, Uncle Stan has insulted both Ernest’s life and Jayber’s intelligence with as much passion as if suicides were threatening to overthrow the government. And Jayber has continued to ask the questions, at first with an exasperated patience, and then, as he dug deeper and grew tireder and sadder, with anger.

“If you’re so hot on suicide,” Uncle Stanley says, “why don’t you just take that there rock and knock your blame self in the head? I’d have to say you had a point then. Go on! Bust your durn head!”

Jayber straightens up in the hole and points his finger at him.

“One thing, old man. Just remember one thing. You can only speak for yourself. You never know what the other man has to go through.”

“Well,” Burley says—he has had all he can stand, he is leaving now—“we’ve all got to go through enough to kill us.”

IT’S OVER!

Much of the Feltners’ house has been rearranged to make space for the coffin and flowers and undertaker’s furnishings in the living room. A large part of the furniture belonging to that room has been carried out and crowded into other rooms or stored in outbuildings. This was accomplished before midnight last night, Burley and Jayber and Frank Lathrop helping Mat with the work. And toward noon today the coffin was brought in, flowers were placed around it, and a number of folding chairs set up. The effect of all this, because it seems to substantiate the greater and subtler change, is as persistently disturbing as if it had been the result of some natural calamity.

Against custom—against the ill-concealed wishes of the undertaker, who was proud of his work—the coffin has remained closed. “It seems best that way,” Margaret said. And that was all she said.

Early in the afternoon, as the day grew hotter and the house more crowded, Mat invited the men to come out on the porch, where there was a breeze. And they have sat there until now, smoking and carrying on the allusive conversation of men who know much in common. Now there are only five of them—Mat and Old Jack and Burley and Jayber and Wheeler Catlett—the rest having gone home to eat or do their chores. The stillness of suppertime is beginning to settle over the town. The five men on the porch, all friends and comfortable with each other, have ceased to talk, each occupied in that wide quiet with his own thoughts. Through the openings among the treetops they can now and again catch sight of hurrying swifts.

Across the street Frank Lathrop’s door suddenly is flung open, and Frank appears, doing a sort of dance across his porch. He seems headed for the street, but as he reaches the edge of the porch, coming aware of those watching him, he stops and, looking sheepish and confused, turns and walks back into the house.

All five of the men on Mat’s porch have watched him with the same sense of improbability. Now that he has gone back into the house, none of them says a word, mystified and embarrassed at the impropriety of such a display then and in that place. The sight of Frank dancing for joy, oblivious to the mourning he danced in the face of, will stay in Mat’s mind a long time.

But Frank’s behavior does not go long without an explanation. Less than a minute later a door slams somewhere down in town, and they hear a young strident voice crying:

“It’s over! It’s over!”

And that voice is quickly joined by others. Doors are thrown open, footsteps run in the street. From the lifting of that first voice, the commotion in the town builds toward a crest it will not reach for hours.

Nobody has to ask what it is all about. Even those who failed to hear the bulletin on the radio recognize it at once, as though they have waited for it familiarly for four years.

Within fifteen minutes after the first shout, crowded automobiles have begun to come in from the countryside. In front of the stores the street has begun to fill with erratically parked cars and trucks and milling people. And the bells have begun to ring—dinner bells, the church bell, cow bells—their sounds finally meshing into one sound beating and quaking in the air. Frank Lathrop comes out of his house again, and without looking across at Mat’s house turns down the street, soon disappearing into the crowd. The makings of a bonfire have begun to pile up in the street in front of Jayber’s barbershop.

Against that tumult Mat’s house holds its quietness. Like everybody else the men on the porch are grateful that the end has come, but they do not speak of what they feel. Perhaps Ernest’s silence makes too heavy a claim upon them. Or perhaps if Mat should openly welcome the event they would speak gladly of it, would quietly celebrate it there among themselves. But Mat is thinking, with maybe more bitterness than he could disguise in speaking, of what this would mean to him if he could now expect Virgil to come home.

The noise of the crowd seems to rise into the air over their heads and remain there and accumulate like smoke. But except for its racket, the crowd is orderly and peaceable, perfectly contained by the one aim of making as big a to-do as possible. As nightfall approaches there begin to be cries of “Light her up! Let’s have a light!”

Jayber gets up. “Mat, I hate to go, but I reckon if they’re going to light that fire I’d better.”

“That’s all right, Jayber.” Mat walks with Jayber out to the steps. The fire has been lighted. The flames are already high, casting a flickering globe of light over the crowd. “I expect you’d better, too.”

Burley’s starting to get up now. “I’d just as well be going myself. It’s getting late.”

“Stay, Burley, if you will,” Mat says. “We’ll have some supper in a little while, and there’s plenty for you.”

So Burley sits down again, and in a few minutes Bess comes to the door and calls them to supper. As they get up and start into the house, they can hear somebody beginning to tune a fiddle.

And long before their quiet meal is finished they hear through the open kitchen door two guitars spring into a wildly pacing beat, and then the curving and looping figures of the fiddle. Presently a cracked breathless old voice begins calling a dance.

“That’s Bill Mixter and his boys and Uncle Stanley,” Burley says.

At the head of the table Old Jack eats without looking up and without joining the talk. Though he has been at Mat’s since morning, he has hardly spoken three sentences, and much that has been said to him he has not heard. He has been preoccupied, despondent, as if, added to all the other deaths he has known, Ernest’s makes too many.

His silence makes them aware of him. Margaret, who is sitting on his right, lays her hand on his arm.

“Uncle Jack used to be quite a dancer,” she says. “He used to never miss a dance.”

That makes a claim on his attention and he smiles and shakes his head.

“Ay, Lord! I could work all day and dance all night. I had a good bay mare then that I used to drive to a buggy—a steady sensible thing, and you could trust her. I’ve woke up many a Sunday morning, sitting in the buggy with the reins in my hand, and that mare standing at the barn door.”

They laugh. As though following a change of meaning in what he has told, he shakes his head again, and goes on. “I had a lot of music in me then. I couldn’t stay still where it was. Couldn’t stay still if I knew there was some somewhere I could get to.” He pauses. “But that was a long time ago.”

But then as if hurrying to qualify the sorrow of that, unwilling to imply to them that that ought to stand as his judgment on his life, he looks at Hannah and smiles.

“And the pretty girls,” he says. “I’ve always had a great admiration for pretty girls.”

When the meal is over the men go back to the porch. Now they can see the dancers around the fire—figures in silhouette, or lighted by the wavering light of the flames, and against the faces of the buildings their enormous wildly leaping and prancing shadows. When the women are finished with the dishes they come out too, to be in the breeze there. Nobody pretends to ignore the celebration, simply because it cannot be ignored, it has so filled and claimed the town. But watching that bright scene, lifted and moved and contained by the hurrying beat of the music, they are conscious of their separateness from it.

Smoking one of Mat’s cigars in the quiet, Burley is beginning to have trouble keeping still. In spite of his loyalty to Mat and his persistent good intentions, Ernest’s death has moved far out of the center of his attention. What he is thinking about is Nathan: If he has lived until today he will be coming home. He will be here. As Burley has sat and thought about Nathan coming back, an exultation has grown in him. The music has begun to get into his head, and his mind is wandering. Where he wants to be is down there where they are dancing, where he can find somebody to talk and laugh with. Half a dozen times already he has caught himself grinning and patting his foot. In a sort of dutiful shame at the vagrancy and disloyalty of his mind, he has so far made himself stay on. But he is beginning, by the same involuntary running of his thoughts, to supply himself with good reasons for going.

He has been here since noon, and that surely is long enough. Mat and his people probably would be glad if he did go. The house has been full of company all day, and Mat and them surely will be glad to see the last one go. Also he is tired, and he really ought to go on home and get some rest—after mixing around just a minute or two down there in the crowd. Also he is making himself a living insult to the dead just by sitting there and wanting so badly to leave.

At last he picks up his hat from the floor beneath the chair, and stands up.

“Well . . .” he says.

“Don’t go, Burley,” Mat says, and Wheeler says, “Burley, don’t be in a hurry.”

“Well,” he says, lying desperately, “I got a thing or two needs seeing about out home.”

He is staring intently down at the hat, which he can hardly see in the darkness, fussing at the shape of it with his hands.

Understanding his need to escape, or just sensing his discomfort, Margaret comes to his rescue: “We understand about that, Burley. I appreciate your coming. All of us do.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Feltner.” He goes to the steps and starts down. “I’ll see you folks.”

REDOUNDING AND SUBLIME

He walks off down the dark street toward the dancers and the fire. As he goes farther away from Mat’s house and his mind comes free of the embarrassment of his escape, he walks faster, free to do what he cannot resist.

On either side of the fire the road is choked with the dark bodies of automobiles that have simply been driven as far toward the dancing as possible and stopped. There is something exciting about the massive disorder of the cars jammed in the road, the light of the flames glancing off fenders and hoods. The crowd claps and shouts and talks and laughs, massing in toward a circle surrounding the dancers who surround the fire. From that tightly pressed and vividly lighted circle the crowd frays outward into the dark, smaller groups and couples scattered along the walks under the trees and in the spaces between automobiles.

As Burley passes voices begin to call to him—“Hey, Burley!” “Come over here, Burley”—offering a drink maybe, or a good place to sit and watch, or some bit of talk. But he only raises his hand to these without stopping, not bothering even to make sure who is talking. He is impelled toward the very center, toward the music and the fire. He cannot rest until he gets there.

Now he can see the musicians standing on the bed of a truck turned at a right angle off the road in front of Jayber’s shop, making a high platform just at the edge of the circle of bystanders. Bill Mixter and his two boys and Uncle Stanley are on the truck bed under the shadowy and greenly flickering foliage of the sugar maples. The three musicians stand in a close triangle, their heads inclined inward. Bill Mixter bends a little forward over his fiddle, his eyes hidden under the visor of his striped cloth cap. The two sons, slats of oiled hair loose over their ears, stare fixedly ahead at the same invisible point over the crest of the fire. They have been playing almost without letup for an hour or more. They are sweating, beating their rhythms with their feet on the worn boards, listening to themselves, paying no attention whatever to the dancers or to the crowd. Uncle Stanley is four or five feet in front of them, as near the edge of the truck bed as he feels safe, beating his hands, patting his feet, uttering the calls and songs at the top of his voice. He is as much aware of the crowd as the musicians are oblivious to it. He is in a state approaching transport—in his element. Now and then he does a shuffling turn, his feet flying in a way that threatens to snap his spindly old legs, and the crowd laughs and cheers. He sings:

“Old Dan Tucker was a fine old man,

He washed his face in the frying pan . . .

And got it all greasy.”

The crowd whoops.

“Yes!”

“Sing it, Uncle!”

“Swing your partner and promenade!” he says, and steps back with a wide sweeping gesture of his right arm as though turning the dancers around the fire.

“Haw! Look a thar now!”

After watching the labor on the truck bed for a few minutes Burley pushes on to the very edge of the crowd around the fire, and only then is able to stop with the sense of arrival. He is restrained from hunting a partner and going on into the dancing by a doubtfulness of the propriety of that so soon after leaving a place of mourning, but he is also aware of being fifty years old. He has not danced for a long time. And so he just stands, as near to the dancing as he can get without being in it, feeling the impulse of the music sway in the crowd around him. It comes into him too, and he begins clapping his hands and patting his feet. He has loosened his tie, and now he takes off his coat and hangs it over his left shoulder. His hat, as usual when he is resting or enjoying himself, is pushed back off his forehead. He is grinning, forgetful of everything. The music has departed from its occasion. Simply present and sufficient, it has freed itself of beginning; it involves no premonition of an end. It only continues, in profound union with the dancers—pulsing and urging, turning, whirling, tramping, and circling—the ground, the air, the dark leaves of the trees, the glancing firelight brought to a tranced obedience to it.

With a few sharply declarative strokes of Bill Mixter’s fiddle, seeming to tie a swift bowknot in the air, it stops. The silence hangs in the air and then descends slowly over the crowd. While it lasts they hear Bill Mixter laugh quietly and, turning to look, see him and his boys putting their instruments down. Bill Mixter walks over to the edge of the truck bed to take a cup that somebody is holding up to him over the heads of the bystanders. The crowd begins to murmur, loosening and dividing within itself.

Let down from the music, the scene becomes ordinary. As he looks around him, it seems to Burley that he is in a place altogether different from where he thought he was. The crowd is made up mostly of women and girls and boys, and men his age and older. The young men, who ought to be the force and grace of it, are not there. Among the dancers, who still stand resting where the music left them, are a number of pairs of girls and young women who have been dancing with each other. It looks to him more aimless than he thought. Some that are not here never will be. And what does it mean? Has what they are celebrating happened yet? Or will it ever?

There has come to be a fierceness in his thoughts, and no happiness. No, this is not where he was headed, or where he thought he was headed. He turns, and finds he has been standing in the midst of a group of school-age girls, who have been much amused by the involvement of such a grey head as his in such regardless exuberance. Thinking of it, he finds it amusing himself. He grins.

“Hello there, girls. You all look mighty pretty tonight.”

They giggle, backing out of the way to let him pass.

He wanders through the crowd, watching for Jayber, making two slowly widening turns around the fire. The music soon starts again, but it is as though it plays now in a more distant place, and he is headed away from it, outside the crowd that forms and tightens again around the circling dancers. Coming by the truck where the musicians are playing, he pauses and studies the bunch of men gathered in front of Jayber’s shop. About every third one there, he estimates, has had more than enough to drink, and the rest have had plenty.

“Uh-huh!” he thinks.

Grover Gibbs wheels out into Burley’s path and gives him a prolonged vacant grin, as though trying to hold his attention until he can think of a greeting suitable to the occasion. Finally he gives up and executes a knowing wink.

“Howdy do, Grover.”

“Mighty fine, old friend. Mighty good. Glad to see you, Burley, old friend.”

He lands a great clap of affection on Burley’s left shoulder blade. Burley steps around him and starts on. “I’d say you’re feeling friendly, Grover.”

“I do,” Grover says. “Yes sir! Yes sir !”

Burley goes around the corner of the barbershop, and there finds Whacker Spradlin with his wagon and cream can. Whacker stands, in his usual perfection of drunkenness, between his wagon and the wall of the shop, swaying to the music.

“Uh-huh !” Burley thinks, not now in the tone of making a discovery, but of finding that things add up as expected.

He goes on past the stairway that climbs the outside of the building to Jayber’s living quarters, beginning to be certain now that he is close on the track. But certain as he is, it still scares him when a hand reaches out from behind the building and takes hold of his arm.

He feels a bottle pushed against his breastbone, and Jayber’s voice says: “Take a shot of that, pistol. It’ll do you a certain amount of good.”

A piercing giggle follows that statement out of the shadow, and Burley recognizes the silhouette of Big Ellis against the white of the wall. He is glad to be with them. Comfort comes over him. He holds the bottle up against the sky.

“Why, hello, Mammy,” he says, and drinks.

“We were looking for you,” Jayber says.

“Well, I thought you’d never find me.”

Big Ellis giggles.

“How’re you, Big Ellis?”

“Fine. Better. Glad to see you, Burley.”

Burley corks the bottle and hands it back. “Thanks.”

“Well, just hold on to it,” Jayber says. “When we want it, we’ll ring.”

Big Ellis laughs. “Jayber says this is penthouse style. When we want anything, we ring.”

“Well, kind of keep your eye on me,” Burley says. “I ain’t used to this high society.”

He leans against the wall, holding the bottle by the neck until whoever wants it next will ring for it. It was a large drink that he took, and he feels the heat of it spreading through him. The celebration is far behind him now. Where they are it is quiet. They have ahead of them the dark slant of the pasture, and above them in the blackness the tremendous blooming of the stars. As Burley looks up, one suddenly loosens itself somewhere in the depths of the black, and falls. It makes a brief streak on the sky, so quick, so short, so arbitrarily placed that he immediately forgets where he saw it. For a moment that seems to matter a great deal. And then, as he recovers the sense of himself there where he is, it quits mattering.

The next one who wants a drink turns out to be him. He rings.

“By all means,” Jayber says.

Burley drinks, and again feels the warmth sink into him and spread, opening slowly, a lethargic summer blossom.

After a protracted silence Jayber begins to talk.

“As I was saying,” he says—and Burley will never know whether he was saying it earlier or just thinking it—“drinking is not ordinarily accomplished in circumstances most conducive to its highest development and enjoyment because of the preponderations of conglomerations of commotions commingling with assorted distractions indigenous to those places in which it customarily takes place—which is to say: bars, roadhouses, bootlegging establishments, et cetera, et cetera, all of which encourage the forgathering together of sundry rowdies, roughnecks, spongers, fiddlers, weepers, know-it-alls and big talkers, who create a concoction of meaningless distractions enough to give a sober man the headache, which if he is sober he’ll perceive immediately, forthwith, and at once, not to say suddenly, that this is not a satisfactory place even to get drunk in—you got, that is to say, to be drunk to stay in such a place, even though it’s no kind of a place to be drunk in, which you’ll perhaps understand better if I explain . . .”

Big Ellis rings, and Burley passes the bottle.

“Believe I’ll just have to greet her as she comes by,” Jayber says, hardly interrupting himself.

And he greets her and passes her on, and goes on talking.

Burley tries dutifully to listen, though it seems to him that he must have begun listening too late and has not caught up yet. He seems to have been delayed by astonishment at such a stream of talk beginning to flow so fully and without warning right there next to him. He does not see that it makes any sense. He thinks it may, if he could just catch up.

He rings. The bottle is passed. Jayber greets her going by, and continues:

“. . . book I’ve been projecting for some considerable time to be titled The Esthetics of Sin, by which (the sin of the title) I mean not the larger ones invented and propounded and promulgated by Moses, brought down from some mountain whose name I, at the moment, forget—a sign, I suppose, that I’m aging—but those small ones, made sins perhaps only by being so insistently so called by the clergy, so called perhaps only by virtue of the fact that they are so pleasant, or at least so lively, as to threaten distraction from the Protestant thought of Heaven—the aforementioned Heaven being, as is well known, inhabited only by dead people, or perhaps a few missionaries and their wives, a great conjugal conflagration occurring there nightly, I assure you—the sins presently under consideration being, to wit: loving, drinking, thinking, playing or singing or dancing for no pay and only pleasure, being idle when not sick, loving the world both as it is and as it might be—et cetera, et cetera—these having been, though certainly not neglected among us here, certainly not much refined, I intend to include in my book a chapter on each, defining, praising, prescribing, and elaborating upon the whys, whens, whethers, wheres, hows, and who-withs—for have I not seen with mine eyes the half-baked marriage feasts—for is not the abuse of the mortal the abuse as well of the immortal, and the abuse of life the abuse of life everlasting, and the abuse of the earth the abuse of Heaven?—for is it not upon this dust that the word and the law tread and leave their tracks?—and is it not upon this little that the great shall be lifted up?—Sinai—Sinai was that mountain’s name . . .”

He goes on, almost without inflection or pause. There comes a time when this sentence untangles itself out of Burley’s mind and goes on, leaving him quiet where he is. He experiences a moment of amazement at it—at the abundance and rapidity and strange force of it. The little sense he has been able to catch from it has seemed to him true and eloquent. But he hears it depart with relief. Listening to it has been a great strain on him. If it had stayed tangled up in his brains much longer it was going to give him the headache.

He stands propped against the back of the shop in blissful immobility, seemingly without the effort of standing, as though hung by his collar from a hook in the wall. He looks up at the stars. It seems to him there are more now than there were. And into his deep quietness come moments when he parts from the feeling that they are “up there,” and he feels himself and the shop and the town to be up there too, the world one of them, among them. Now and then he sees one fall. Now and then he or Big Ellis will ring and the bottle will be passed, and Jayber greets her as she goes by. Sometimes the bottle comes to Burley when he does not remember ringing at all.

At some point in Jayber’s sentence the bottle gets metamorphosed into the maid of the penthouse where they are staying. And every time she passes in the hall Jayber pleads with her to lay down that pile of dirty sheets and come away to a better land. But she will only give him a little kiss on the mouth and go on wherever she was going. And once in his talk Jayber sings, his voice very sweet and quavery as though he is not thinking of the maid at all, but another girl far away:

When your baby starts to stepping,

Lord, you nearly lose your mind.

Later Burley comes aware that Jayber has fallen quiet, not finished with that sentence surely, but just for the time being washed ashore by it. Later still, seemingly without having intended to, or making any effort at all, they are all three standing in a row at the front corner of the shop, looking out into the street. The crowd is smaller now, but the fire is still burning, the dancers are still dancing, and the musicians play on as before. Uncle Stanley is singing in the same strident voice:

Going up Cripple Creek, going in a run,

Going up Cripple Creek to have a little fun,

The girls up Cripple Creek are just about half—

Always a bulling, but they never have a calf.

Standing in the shadow against the wall of the building, Whacker is still swaying ponderously to the music as though the whole festivity is run by a pendulum hidden secretly among its works, and he is it.

The better part of the remaining crowd having by now come under the influence of Whacker’s merchandise, there is a great deal of loud laughter, all conversations are being conducted in shouts, everything moves by plunges and jolts. Dancers, swinging, launch their partners out into the crowd, never to find them again, and continue dancing, alone or with some bystander snatched out of the crowd at random.

“Gentlemen,” Jayber says, “we cannot pursue our high aims amid this tumult.”

And the three of them turn and trot around to their place at the back of the building, feeling they go high at each step, floating and gliding like balloons between kicks at the ground. They ring and drink to celebrate their return, and stand in their old places and watch the stars, and watch the stars fall.

“You can’t remember where they fall from,” Burley says.

“It don’t matter,” Big Ellis says. “You don’t have to put ’em back.”

“Well, it just looks to me like a fellow ought to keep track of something like that. Kind of sad that he don’t. He can’t, I reckon. But it’s sad. A whole star fall spang out of the blooming sky, and not a word in the paper, not a monument, not a plaque, not any kind of a notice at all.”

“Don’t matter. Plenty of them up there. Keep track of one that’s still hanging.”

“Most of those stars,” Jayber says, “are many light-years away—I forget just how many, and a light-year is how far light can travel in a year, and I think that’s about a trillion or so miles or so, and . . .”

“Light don’t travel,” Burley says. “It just shines wherever it’s at.”

“It does travel. You just can’t see fast enough to see it.”

“If it ever moved I’d see it.”

“Well, where does it go when it goes out?”

“Hah!” Burley says. “Where? Where does a fire go when it goes out?”

“That’s what I mean! Where does the beam of a flashlight, for instance, go when you turn it off?”

“That’s what I mean! Where does music go when it stops playing?”

Big Ellis is finally getting uneasy about the tone of the conversation.

“Jayber sure is a mighty smart fellow,” he says, “ain’t he, Burley?”

“That’s right,” Burley says. “All right. I agree. No question about it, light travels. What do you do about it?”

“Nothing,” Jayber says. “Nothing you can do. You just know it because you have to, because you know it travels and you know it goes, and you know it flies about a trillion miles a year through all that blackness on its way from there to Port William, that is to say right here, where we’re at, to wit, and the light of some maybe never has got here yet, and we’re looking at the light of some maybe that burnt clean out and black a hundred years ago. And them that we see falling perhaps fell and went out a long time before we saw the light of them falling, for it’s farther up there than your eyes will believe . . .”

“Hush, Jayber,” Burley says. “Don’t talk like that. It’s too sad. Don’t say no more. Let’s just be right here where we are.”

“Right, colleague,” Jayber says.

And then a thought comes to Burley that seems to have been approaching him, and that he seems to have been waiting for, ever since he came. Now that it has come it seems to clarify a great deal, and is a relief to him.

“What we’re celebrating is celebration,” he says. That started out to be clear, but did not wind up clear. Somewhere before the end his statement came apart like a flimsy basket and let most of his meaning spill out. “We’re not celebrating any happening or anything,” he says, “but just celebrating.

“We’re not shellerbrating any thing,” he says, “because of how things have of being what they are. They ain’t over apt to stay celebrate-able. Because they ain’t.”

“Which is to say,” Jayber says, “as aforesaid. And to wit.”

“Because,” Burley says, “to cellerbreak things ain’t hardly barrelable because they won’t always stay cellerellable.”

“And the celebration of celebration,” Jayber says, “will make celebrities of us all. You really had the cerebral horsepower behind that one, old chap.”

“I thank you,” Burley says. “I ’preciate it.”

They fall silent again, and except when one of them rings and the bottle is passed they stay still for a long time.

And then Jayber, raising his hand toward the stars pontifically as to bless the universe, intones:

“Et ceterah. Et ceterah.”

And they are quiet for a long time after that.

After a while they turn up again at the edge of the street. The town is deserted, quiet, and, except for the embers of the fire, dark.

“I declare,” Burley says. “I believe the dance is over.”

“And nobody told us,” Jayber says.

“I be durn,” Big Ellis says, saddened and amazed.

Detached from thought or motive so that they learn what they are doing with surprise, Burley and Jayber are out in the street doing an Indian dance around the fire. They dance silently, staggering, but with great solemnity and pomp. They hear a whoop from Big Ellis, and hurry back over to the shop.

“Look at this little fellow I found here,” Big Ellis says.

In the dark against the side of the building they make out the hulk of Whacker Spradlin, sitting flat on the ground.

“Passed out,” Burley says. “Passed clean out. Such as never seen before.”

Jayber nudges Whacker with the toe of his shoe. No response. He shoves the big straw-hatted head and it falls forward. He lifts one arm and then the other and lets them fall; they lie where they drop. He kneels on Whacker’s stomach and lifts the brim of the straw hat and looks into his face. He draws Whacker’s two heavy hands together and laces his fingers over the bib of his overalls, and pushes his head back against the wall and covers his face with the hat.

Straightening up, swaying forward and back, Jayber peers down at his work, and turns gravely to his associates.

“He’s dead, gentlemen.”

Though Whacker quite audibly and visibly breathes, the longer they look at him the clearer it seems to them that he is dead. There is something about the way he sits with his straw hat stuck over his face, loudly breathing, yet clearly and indisputably dead, that is surely one of the funniest things ever seen in Port William. For several minutes they weave and stagger and laugh, slapping their knees and each other’s backs. Jayber then strikes a tragic pose and beckons them to hush. Accompanied by giggles that leak out of Big Ellis as if under high pressure, he declaims:

Death doth sit upon him like a fly

Upon the carrion flower, fairest of the field.

To how sad metamorphosis are we come

When such a weighty beggar shall be brought low

To stop the bunghole of the world.

Flights of buzzards wing him to his rest!

A great spluttering giggle bursts out of Big Ellis; as if propelled by the recoil of it he falls backwards and lands sitting up, facing Whacker, still giggling. “He’ll stink! Big as he is, he’ll stink till New Year’s.”

“He’s stinking already,” Burley says. “You don’t have to be no undertaker to tell that.”

Jayber at once stands himself erect at Whacker’s shoulder, and pounds on the wall. “Meeting come to order!” And as Big Ellis quiets down he proceeds: “Fellow members of the Port William Sanitation Commission. It has been duly noted, I believe—I believe I speak for you gentlemen as well as myself—et ceterah!—that by the cooperation of the winds of fate and the tide of victory there has been washed upon the shores of our fair city the mortal remains of this erstwhile creature, the nature of which in its previous state remains somewhat—uh—questionable, not to say dubious, if not doubtful. However, gentlemen, having been entrusted by our fellow townsmen with the removal of any and all vagrant corpses as shall occur within the jurisdiction—that is to say, to wit, the say-so—of the aforesaid Port William, I move we go forward with the business. For let us be mindful of our mighty motto, for mightier there is none: Keep—Our—City—Clean. Is there a second to the motion?”

“Second the motion,” Burley says.

“Noted. And you, honorable sir,” Jayber says, addressing himself to Big Ellis, “I assume you vote with the majority.”

But Big Ellis is lying on his back, laughing.

“He does,” Burley says solemnly.

“Then it is unanimous. And, sir, have you not a suitable conveyance close by?”

“Big Ellis,” Burley says, “you know where you left your car?”

“If it ain’t gone, I do,” Big Ellis says.

“The commissioner attests,” Jayber says, “that if his conveyance has not strayed, wandered, decamped, fled, flew or absconded from the place he left it, he knows where it is. Let us then adjourn until said commissioner shall seek out, and return with, said conveyance.”

He gavels mightily on the wall, and then helps Burley help Big Ellis get up. As soon as he is up, Big Ellis’s feet try to walk away and leave the rest of him hanging there between Burley and Jayber, and they all fall in a heap. They lie as they fell for a considerable time, as though asleep, or resting, or waiting to see what they will do next.

After a while Burley says, “If I knew which way is up, I’d get up.”

“You see any stars?” Jayber says.

“No.”

“Well, turn over.”

“Ah!” Burley says. “That’s them.”

He gets up, and Jayber gets up, and again they help Big Ellis to his feet.

“The idea is to keep your feet on the bottom,” Burley says, “and your head on top. Watch this.” He gives a walking demonstration, first one way, then the other.

“That’s good, Burley,” Big Ellis says. “Really good!”

“You think you got the hang of it now?”

“Yes-sir-ree!” Big Ellis says. “Turn me a-loose! I’m a tomcat! I’m a ring-tailed twister!”

“You know where you going?”

“Yes I do! To my car.”

“You know where you are?” Jayber says.

“Yep. Right here.”

“Jayber’s shop,” Burley says. “Don’t get lost.”

“Never was lost in Port William but once in my life,” Big Ellis says. “And that was three or four years ago.”

He goes off into the dark; his footsteps fade into the silence.

Burley and Jayber stand and wait. They lean against the building and wait. They sit down and wait.

“Well, he’s either lost, or gone to sleep, or parked his car clean outside town,” Burley says, “—or something.”

The roaring of an engine rises in the darkness not thirty yards up the street. There is a long scream of gears, the engine roars again, and they hear the tires beginning to move over the gravel.

“Turn on the lights!” Burley shouts.

As if he was only waiting to be told, Big Ellis turns them on—to reveal that he is backing rather rapidly away from them, heading—as nearly as they can tell—straight for Milton Burgess’s store.

“Whoa!” Burley shouts.

Again, as if grateful for the advice, Big Ellis obeys. The tires slide a little and dust rises into the beams of the headlights.

“Put her in forward!”

Big Ellis puts her into something different—high maybe—and brings her back down the street at a canter.

“Whoa!” Burley says. “Now cut the wheels over this way, and back her easy.”

With the help of much loud instruction and a good deal of trial and error, Big Ellis succeeds finally in backing the car up onto the sidewalk. They open the trunk, and then gather around the still inert and snoring corpse of Whacker.

“And now, gentlemen,” Jayber says, “with deep respect, with reverence, with kind and loving thoughts of the dear departed, let us bear the body to the grave.”

All three of them tugging at Whacker’s shoulders and arms, with great heaving and grunting, they manage to turn him away from the wall and drag him perhaps a foot before they have to stop to rest. Letting him lie full length on the ground, they stand swaying over him, getting their breath. He lies in massive repose, like a hill, his belly cresting higher than their knees. They no sooner begin to rest than they begin to anticipate and dread the weight of him, but after many struggles and stops to rest they manage to lift and drag and push him over to the car, and cram him into the trunk.

“What we going to do with his feet?” Burley asks.

“The wagon,” Jayber says. “Where’s his wagon?”

They find the wagon and unload it and tie it to the bumper and put Whacker’s feet in it.

“And that’s a meaningful and moving and beautiful example of the funeral director’s art,” Jayber says, “if ever I saw one—and I have saw a few.

“Driver!” he says.

Big Ellis, giggling, goes around and gets into the driver’s seat. And then for many seconds nothing happens at all.

“What’s matter?” Burley says.

“You all coming?” Big Ellis says. “Get in.”

“No!” Jayber says. “We got to carry this out with due propriety, and a due sense of what is fitting, and with due solemnity, and with dignity. He must have a procession, a cortege. You drive ahead, Big Ellis, at a slow, a stately, an elegiac, and a dirgeful pace. And we will walk behind.”

Big Ellis starts the engine. He guns it fiercely to test its mettle and discipline it thoroughly beforehand. He throws it into gear. The car makes three hunching lunges and dies with a cough in the middle of the road.

“Low, sweetheart,” Burley says. “Put her in low.”

Big Ellis gets her in the right one this time, and the procession moves off, Big Ellis driving at an elegiac and a dirgeful pace, followed by the red wagon carrying Whacker’s feet, followed by Burley and Jayber, each with an arm around the other for consolation and for help in walking, their hats dangling in lamentation from their free hands.

“A famous cortege, if ever I saw one,” Jayber says. “Drum!” he says.

And Big Ellis begins to beat with his fist against the car door the ponking concussions of a funeral march.

“Oh, a redounding and a sublime cortege,” Jayber says. “Nothing is so redounding and resounding in the history of a town as a good calamity or a classy funeral or an event of that stripe. God knows they happen seldom enough.”

Inspired by the thought of mending the history of Port William with a funeral of unimpeachable class, he lines out the chorus of a dirge:

We are hauling,

We are hauling

His aaaaass

To the graveyard.

And they sing it a second time together. Jayber chants:

We’ll haul him to the graveyard,

And there lay him down.

And they all sing:

We are hauling,

We are hauling

His aaaaass

To the graveyard.

We’ll bury this peckerwood

In six foot of ground.

We are hauling,

We are hauling,

His aaaaass

To the graveyard.

They have raised around them by now a great barking and howling of dogs. Citizens’ voices are shouting out of the darkness. House lights are snapping on. People are coming out onto lighted porches in their night clothes. But nobody follows except four or five dogs who, though they make a loud boast of barking and growling, keep a respectful distance.

Through it all the members of the cortege maintain an invincible solemnity and dignity. They sing their chorus many times over with the strength and loudness of deep conviction. In the pauses Jayber makes hieratic and indecipherable gestures in the air with both hands, intoning: “Et-t-ceterah. Et-t-ceterah. Et-t-ceterah.”

As they bear down on the outskirts, he becomes inspired again, and sings some new verses, holding his right hand in benediction in the air each time Burley and Big Ellis come in on the chorus:

The forementioned peckerwood

Was a mountainous bootlegger.

And if the grave don’t fit him

We will have to dig it bigger.

Do not scoff, my townsmen.

We all need a grave to fit us.

They sing the chorus, Big Ellis pounding the car door, the dogs barking, Whacker’s feet keeping their perfect repose in the wagon.

Yes, that old dark and silent

Ground is finally going to get us.

Jayber is shaken and a little sobered by the turn his song has taken. “A true grave digger’s tune,” he tells himself. And he tells himself, “Once a preacher, always a preacher.” But now that he has sung his way into it, he reckons there is nothing to do but dig in and sing his way out of it.

If you think that stops the story

And puts an end to the matter

Burley and Big Ellis bawl the chorus.

Maybe so. But maybe there’s a glory

Where you’d rather we’d all gather.

There is something incorrigible about his mind. He has always known it. No matter how near home he sets his mind to work, it always beelines for the final questions. His thoughts return to the verge of this life, the place of their defeat, with fascination and with strange delight. Is it noble faith or cowardice that, though he cannot see that all loves do not end in the dark, he cannot believe they do?

It can’t be seen with the naked eye,

And the grave’s not a telescope

They sing the chorus. The end in sight, Jayber begins to be conscious of the darkened country lying quiet beyond their singing and the commotion of the dogs.

To see a land beyond the sky.

But, brothers, we will hope.

That movement of his mind completed, he feels himself returning, fully and gladly present again with the others. As he listens to his companions singing the chorus, the sense of the rarity and extravagance of the occasion comes back to him, the sense of the rarity of their comradeship, and he laughs aloud and sings with them. They are approaching the graveyard now, and the dogs, as if having pursued to the limit of their jurisdiction, have quit following.

Their turning off the road at the graveyard gate seems to Jayber to mark a culmination of large significance, and he calls to Big Ellis to stop.

“A few appropriate words will be appropriate at this time,” he says.

“Gentlemen,” he says, “that was a procession, I dare say, without equal, and will not be forgotten, I dare say, in the lifetimes of those now living—it being in any case an accomplishment—a glorious achievement in the pride of which we may all rejoice—a triumph—a gilded pinnacle in the history of this noble city, this alabaster village, this fairest flower, this yaller rose of the valley of the green Kentuck. Can you say amen?”

“AMEN!”

“Forward!”

In solemn triumph they advance between the stone pillars of the gate and up the hill, Big Ellis’s headlights picking out the white of the headstones under the cedars. They have hushed their singing.

At the top of the rise they follow the road as it turns to the left and goes among the graves along the ridge.

“Right here,” Jayber says. “Whoa!”

Big Ellis gets out, and in the red glow of the taillights, as quietly as they can, they begin the job of getting Whacker out of the trunk. Getting him out is for some reason harder than getting him in. At each straining heave they move him only inches. As they tug and haul on his great arms and legs, they are intimidated by the size of him.

“What a tub of guts!” Jayber says. “He must weigh five hundred pounds.”

“He don’t miss it far,” Burley says.

They laugh.

“Shhhhh!”

“We look just like devils in this red light,” Big Ellis whispers.

They are all stopped a moment by the thought of that.

Burley whispers: “We’d look like the devil if it was daylight.” And straightening from their labor, they laugh. They are wavering helplessly now between hilarity and a strict silence that they feel to be demanded of them by the silence around them—not so much the heard silence pierced by the voices of insects as the imagined perfect silence of the dead. And though in their silences they are beginning to be troubled by what seems to them their disturbance of the dead, that seems to make what is funny even funnier.

They finally get Whacker out and lay him on his back on the wagon, his head dangling over one end and his legs over the other.

“Now . . .” Jayber whispers.

But he does not finish, for they become aware that Big Ellis’s old car, relieved of its burden, has begun to roll. It has eased off slowly, rocking a little over the bumps, following the road down the gentle slant of the ridge.

“Oh, Lordy!” Big Ellis says. “It’s got a hant in it!”

They stand transfixed, chilled to the bone by what, in that place under those circumstances, seems a certainty.

Finally Jayber says, making a blind leap in the direction of rationality: “You didn’t put on the brake, Big Ellis.”

And Burley says: “Oh mercy ! All that crockery!”

And all three of them begin to run after the car, which has a good head start and is rolling faster.

As they run they whisper violently to each other: “Run!” “Hurry!” “Watch out!” “Oh, Lordy!” And running in the dark, their feet pounding the uneven gravel, they stagger and lurch, bumping into each other, ricocheting both ways out of the road. And somehow they gain on the car, which keeps its even pace straight ahead in the wheel-ruts. Then where the road makes a right angle turn to the left, the car keeps going straight, climbs over the low embankment, which checks its speed, and comes to a stop against a large granite tombstone whose markings show with sudden clarity in the beam of the headlights. And then the three pursuers fetch up against the tombstone too. Leaning down between the stone and the car, Burley inspects for damage.

“Not a dent, not a scratch.”

And then they all sit down to get their breath. They sit facing the car whose headlights peer steadily at the tombstone, almost touching it, for all the world like a nearsighted person trying to make out the inscription.

As soon as they have rested, they get up and walk back to where they left Whacker. Following Jayber’s whispered orders, Burley and Big Ellis each pick up one of Whacker’s legs, and Jayber taking the tongue of the wagon, they start slowly down among the stones toward the newly dug grave of Ernest Finley. All the way there they labor in conscientious quiet, keeping the wagon uneasily balanced as with great effort they lug it over the mounds.

They halt it at the end of the grave and begin the difficult and perilous business of lowering Whacker down. Gravity is too much in their favor now, and they accompany their work with much grunting and whispered cautioning as they roll Whacker over on his belly and start him in feet first and backwards.

“Oh, me!” Big Ellis whispers. “I believe the grave will be the end of us all.”

And leaving Whacker bent like a hinge over the lip of the grave, they let go and laugh, rolling on the ground until, intimidated by their noise, they fall silent again.

Now, Jayber getting down into the grave to pull and the other two lifting at Whacker’s shoulders, they work him carefully backward and downward. But it is not until Whacker’s balancing-point slides over the edge that they realize that instead of leading they are being led. For Whacker is going on his own now, and they lack the strength to pull him out—or to hold him, either, for very long. Down in the grave Jayber fights off the impulse to turn loose and run, knowing there is no place to go; he takes his stand where he is, shoving at Whacker’s great buttocks for dear life, his voice rising up quick and small from under his burden.

“Hold him, boys, hold him! Take hold and rear back!”

Burley and Big Ellis do take hold and rear back, with the strength of desperation, but there is nothing to do, seeing that Whacker is bound to go, except slow him down. But the farther he slips into the grave, the faster he goes. His arms are too large even at the wrists to take much of a grip on, and Burley and Big Ellis finally hold him only by his fingers. Below them in the grave they can hear Jayber grunting, yielding ground inch by inch as the big man comes irresistibly down.

But they do at last get him laid down in the bottom of the grave without letting him fall. The big head comes to rest between Jayber’s feet. They pitch in his hat and Jayber places it over his face and folds his hands, and steps up onto the mound of his stomach and is hauled out.

And now the difficulty and danger of their labor only serve to increase their sense of accomplishment. They feel that they have achieved a rare distinction. Up on the hill they can see Big Ellis’s car lights growing dim, the battery nearly played out, but that seems not to matter now.

“Well, it did fit him,” Big Ellis says.

Burley laughs. “It’s not exactly what you’d call roomy, is it, Jayber?”

“No,” Jayber says, “ ’tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”

“Durn if that ain’t fine, Jayber. Say some more.”

“Say some more, buddy.”

Jayber straightens himself at the head of the grave and raises his hand. And as though seized by meanings he cannot resist, he speaks slowly and with feeling:

Water into water, earth into earth,

Breath into breath, light into light,

Singing into singing, birth into birth,

Thought into thought, sight into sight,

Let this man’s makings be unmade,

Let stillness be, let peace come

To this place that was a man.

Stooping, he lifts in his cupped hands some dirt from the mound at the grave’s edge and lets it sift slowly in.

Overtaken and sobered by Jayber’s words—Jayber as much as the others—they stand with their heads bowed after he has finished. Apart from anything any of them could have intended or expected, Jayber’s words have transcended drunkenness and farce. The meaning of the time has been lifted far above the snores that come with astonishing power out of the grave. Jayber’s words have returned them to the occasion they started with—the end of the war, the dying, the deaths—the graves of the millions that, beyond knowing, peace has come to.

A PASSING DIRGE

Mat wakes up in one of the folding chairs in the dim light of the lamp left burning at the head of the coffin. He wakes to resume the heaviness of Ernest’s death, cramped from sitting asleep in the hard chair, the old pain lying deep and keen in his shoulder. He knows he cannot have slept long.

Slowly, so as to make no noise, he straightens himself in the chair, feeling with that movement how tired he is. This is the second night in a row that he has passed with little sleep—and, he might as well say, no rest. Seeing from the slight paling of the windows that dawn has begun, anxious for the night to be over, he reaches up and turns off the lamp, letting the grey of the sky seep into the room. It is not as light as he thought it might be.

His awareness of the room fades. All his attention is caught now by the pain in his shoulder. The pain is like a four-inch sliver of hot light burrowing in under his shoulder blade. Or like a bullet; the pain of a wound would be the same as other pain. It could be borne. A man gets used to pain, he thinks. He learns it. It gets to be familiar to him, a part of what his life is and feels like. And what good does it do him? It teaches him to make light of the pains that are less, and to respect those that are greater. It teaches him what he can stand. And what good does that do him? He needs to know what he can stand because the chances are he will have to stand as much as he is able. That is what is ahead of him—to suffer and to stand it. And so is there virtue in standing it? Maybe. Surely. But there are limits too, and suffering kills. Ernest stood a great deal, and kept quiet, until there came a greatness of it that he could not stand. And that—what it takes to kill a man, what his limit is—is his mystery. The mystery of his death that becomes the mystery of his life. In the flow of his strange half-dream, Mat becomes conscious of his own mortality upon him. And he does not care.

He rouses. The light has grown stronger. The outlines of the room have begun to emerge out of the shadows. Changed to accommodate Ernest’s coffin and the ceremonies of his death, the room has an austerity that seems to Mat not only to stand for the sadness of all else, but to be in itself a cause for sadness. He longs for it to be the way it was.

In the paling gloom he can make out the figure of Old Jack slumped in another of the uncompromising chairs, still asleep, his hands resting on his knees, the cane propped against the seat between his legs.

They sat out on the porch until after midnight, listening to the music and the noises of the crowd. After Wheeler had started back to Hargrave, it was decided that the three women would go to bed, leaving Mat and Old Jack to sit through the rest of the night beside the coffin. Old Jack had insisted on staying, over the protests of Bess and Hannah, who thought he ought to rest.

“All I do is rest, honey,” he said to Hannah.

He and Mat sat in the living room and talked, Mat sitting at the head of the coffin with his back to it, and Old Jack facing him, as they still sit. Mat, as though to lead his own mind as far from that room and that night as possible, turned the conversation toward the past. The old man spoke of the names and landmarks and happenings of a time before Mat’s birth, and Mat listened, his mind drawn back before its own beginning, held and quieted by the vision of another time, and by the sense of the continuance of the land, the place, through all that has happened on it and to it—its history of little cherishing and much abuse. For as always it was finally the land that they spoke of, fascinated as they have been all their lives by what has happened to it, their own ties to it, the wife of their race, more lovely and bountiful and kind than they have usually deserved, more demanding than they have often been able to bear.

After the house grew quiet, Old Jack’s interest in the talk began to flag, and soon he quit talking altogether. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, and then nodded, and his head dropped forward. With a kind of anger he shook himself, and roused. Looking up at the lamp by Ernest’s coffin, he scratched his head, and in the midst of scratching dozed off; his hand came slowly down and found a resting place on his thigh. His face, tilted forward, was shadowed, but the lamplight gleamed in his white hair.

Mat remained wakeful a long time. In the silence then he seemed to have reached the end not just of talk but of thought as well. He felt the pressing in of it—the silence of Ernest’s death, the ever-waiting silence that surrounds all speech.

He was still sitting there in that suspension when he heard the approaching clamor of Whacker’s funeral procession. At first it seemed only a fitful last resurgence of the festivity, an indecipherable mingling of shouts and laughter, but as it drew nearer he made out the measured heavy beat of a dead march and, above it, the strained wailing of a dirge.

Mat’s first impulse was to take the irreverence of it as an affront. And for that reason, though it seemed to him he recognized the voices, he did not get up as the clamor drew near to try to see who was making it. But as the procession drew even with the house, he felt himself irresistibly drawn into the spirit of it. That following the giddy jubilance of its victory celebration the peaceful sleep of the town should be broken, not by any song of victory or thanksgiving, but by voices singing a dirge—that seemed to him to be fitting. For in his mind, at least, and the minds of the others who had sat in silence on the porch, hadn’t the night been burdened with the knowledge that the dead have lost and are absent from victory?

But that they went by singing, voices raised in the rhythm of loss and grief with unabashed glee, seemed to Mat to change the night, to start it toward something else—though he was not able to say what.

He shifts in his chair, needing to be up and stirring now that he is awake. There is no longer a comfortable way to sit. But he does not want to disturb the sleepers, and the silence still presses on him as with a weight.

He thinks of the women and the baby, still asleep. And then there comes to him not only the thought of Margaret but the sense of her, lying asleep, alone in their bed in the dim room. He longs to go in and lie down beside her and take her in his arms.

Though he does not go to her now, the longing to do so makes a small cell of happiness in his mind. It has been a long time since his thought has gone so freely toward her.

AMONG THE DEAD

Lying on his back among the headstones and mounds of the graveyard, Burley wakens, changed by his sleep, his head filled with a throbbing dull ache. He lies still for some time before he opens his eyes.

He can hear the roosters crowing, close and far, and birds singing. He has got to get up. They have got to get out of there before the whole town is awake and watching. A kind of panic seizes him and he uncrooks his arm from over his face and begins to blink and squint, trying to accustom his eyes to the light. At every blink the light floods into his head, glinting and scratching.

Finally he becomes able to hold his eyes open, and with a summoning of will pushes himself up. He sits there unsteadily, the ground for a moment threatening to dump him over onto his face. He props himself, and again risks opening his eyes.

Somehow, as if in a dream, the possibility that the runaway automobile might have done great damage among the brittle slabs overpowered the knowledge that it did none, and now he looks around him in surprise and relief to see that the dead still lie undisturbed. The place is flooded with the weak first sunlight of the morning, and the dead are absent from it.

As gently as he can he lies down again, easing his head back into the crumpled crown of his Sunday hat. He will be sorry about the hat, he knows, when he gets around to thinking about it. He has the wakened dreamer’s sense of escape from something he might well have done. That eases a little of his anxiety, but not all. He will not escape so easily from what he did do. For now he thinks of the betrayals involved in his participation in the profane clamors of Whacker’s funeral. He feels an urgent need to get up and get the others up and clear out, and at the same time an overpowering wish to lie there with his eyes shut, and never move. He is thirsty. The only good thought in reach is the thought of water. His head throbs.

“Oh me,” he says.

“Are you awake, Burley?” Jayber asks.

“Sort of.”

“I’m afraid I am too.”

“Jayber, we’ve got to get up and get out of here.”

“I know it. We don’t want to get caught here, or be seen leaving either, if we can help it.”

“Yeah.”

But neither of them moves, and they say nothing else for some time.

And then Big Ellis sits up. He shakes his head and says, “Shoo!” Looking around him he grins. “Resurrection morning, ain’t it?”

As though to confirm the unsuspected truth of that, Burley points down the slope. “Look!”

Over the mound of loose dirt they see the broken crown of Whacker’s straw hat slowly rising. His shoulders appear over the mound, and he stands up. And then, as though to sleep in a grave is no more remarkable than to sleep in a bed, he picks up the tongue of his wagon and moves off down the slope toward the gate.

They watch him go, hardly believing that without help he could have drawn his bulk up the sheer six-foot walls of that hole. There is something apocalyptic about it, both ludicrous and sobering. Jayber says:

Unfazed by the grave,

He doth awake and walk.

“He’ll never get a better funeral,” Big Ellis says, “if he lives to be a hundred.”

And then, with all the force of a crucial realization that comes too late, it dawns on Burley that the possibilities have been out of control from the beginning. Suppose Whacker hadn’t been able to get out by himself. They certainly had no idea how to get him out. Suppose he had got sick down there, or died. Suppose they had forgot him and left him there—as it surely did look like they were going to—and they had come bringing Ernest.

He plunges to his feet.

“Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!”

They get up and follow him among the stones to where the car sits, doors and trunk still open, and in the daylight still appearing to labor myopically at the granite inscription. They set the wheels and, heaving mightily at the cost of much pain to their heads, push it back over the embankment into the road.

“Well,” Big Ellis says, “looks like there’s no place to go now but home.”

“Get in the middle, Burley,” Jayber says. “You’ll be getting out last.”

But Burley feels a sudden reluctance to go with them. He wants to part from them now. Wants the night’s doings to be finished now, and done with. Here is a day started, it seems to him, that is going to ask a lot of him, and he wants to get himself set for it.

“You all go on,” he says. “I’m going to walk. I think it’ll do me good.”

Jayber gets in, but as the car starts to roll he says: “Wait! Listen!” The car stops and he opens the door and leans out. “Listen,” he says. “I don’t think anybody actually saw who it was making all the racket last night. So if we make it out of here without getting caught, it was all done by Unknown Citizens. You see?”

They see.

“Big Ellis,” Burley says, “when you come around to where the drive forks, if you’d back out to the road from there it might look like you’d just pulled in to turn around.”

Big Ellis nods. The car rolls forward, picking up speed, lurches as Big Ellis throws it into gear, and, as the engine starts, grumbles off toward the gate.

Burley stands there, watching them go. He should be going himself, but he does not move. As soon as he has seen them back out and turn and go out of sight toward town, the weight of his guilt comes down on him, too heavy to bear away. At the time when Mat may have needed him, and when he should have been sorrowful himself for the death of Ernest, and when he should have been attentive in some decent way to Tom’s memory and the hope of Nathan’s return—at that time of all times, that one and only and now past and unchangeable time, where was he?

Drunk. Bawling and singing and laughing at the funeral of a live drunkard. In the graveyard, insulting the peace of the dead.

And he lay down and slept among them. Among the dead in their graves he lay down and slept. And what awful quiet came on him then?

He stands there, his suit and shirt wrinkled and dusty, his good hat battered into early old age, the knot of his tie slipped down to the third button of his shirt and jerked tight, his head full of pain and regret and difficult thoughts. He looks at his long shadow pointing down the gravel track ahead of him, and he knows for certain that he will die. He foreknows the stillness that, whichever way he walks, he is coming to. A tremor shakes him from head to foot.

Even as he starts toward the gate he is strongly tempted to go the other way, to go home across the fences and through the fields. But he rejects that. The day summons him into the clear and that is where he is going to go.

“No,” he says to himself, “I may have to brazen, but I ain’t going to sneak.”

He sees his shadow move its long leg, sees its foot separate from his foot, light flowing between. There will be a time when he will come here and not leave, but this is not the time.

PART FIVE

Chapter 17

STRAIGHTENING UP

Home again, Burley hangs his desecrated coat and hat on the yard fence and goes straight to the barn. He attends to the few chores that need doing there, and then, having put it off as long as he can, he goes outside to the pump. He cups his hand under the spout and pumps and drinks. And having filled himself, his thirst far exceeding his capacity, he douses his face and pumps water over his head. He keeps pumping, breathing in great spluttering gasps. Pumping on his head, the water flowing through his hair, around his ears, down the sides of his face, streaming off his eyebrows and nose and lips and chin, splattering and darkening the dry boards of the well top—that seems to him the finest quenching of his life. Bent, dizzy under the spout, hanging on to the pump with one hand to keep from falling, pumping with the other, he glimpses his brother approaching around the corner of the barn.

He does not want to talk to Jarrat this morning and so he keeps pumping, hoping that Jarrat is just on his way someplace and will go on. But Jarrat does not. He stops and leans against the barn wall and watches.

“That looks like a hell of a hard way to drown.”

Burley straightens up, shuddering as the cold water runs down the collar of his shirt. Blinded by vertigo, he quickly sits down on the edge of the stock trough and props himself with both hands.

“Huh?” he says. Though it does not matter, he feels caught, feels guilty and most uncertain of himself and of Jarrat. For the thousandth time, surely, he is the wayward younger brother, confronted by the righteousness of the older. Or is that how it is going to be this time? He risks a quick glance at Jarrat’s face, and discovers to his surprise and relief that Jarrat is grinning at him.

“I said there ought to be some easier way to drown.”

“There ought,” Burley says, and he laughs. He looks directly at Jarrat now. “Did you know the war’s over?”

“I heard the commotion start up out there at town and figured that was what it was. And I came over here then and heard the news on your radio. I didn’t reckon you would mind.”

“I didn’t.”

“I listened a right smart while, sort of waiting for you to come back.”

Burley feels a pang of disappointment—of loss. That was the first time in years, maybe since the death of their mother, that Jarrat had come to the house just to visit—and him not there. There could have been nothing finer, nothing he would have liked any more, he realizes with grief, than to sit in the old living room with Jarrat late into the night, listening to that good news come in on the radio.

“Well, I stayed pretty late at Mat’s and then me and Jayber and Big Ellis spent the night with some folks there in town. Just to keep from having to come home so late.”

He can see—with relief, actually—that Jarrat does not believe a word of it. But he appears to be amused. He watches Burley with a skeptical, critical gaze that Burley knows will not neglect or misinterpret anything. But there is amusement in it too. Some change has come over him. Is it, Burley wonders, the war ending? Or what is it?

“It was hard to sleep, I reckon, in all that racket.”

“Well,” Burley says, “the folks we spent the night with, they was quiet.”

He wishes Jarrat would go on home now. Or go somewhere.

“What time is Ernest’s funeral?” Jarrat asks.

“Two-thirty, I think. Are you going?”

“I thought I’d go a little beforehand, and speak to Mat and them.”

“Mat’ll appreciate that.”

“Well, I’ll be seeing you,” Jarrat says. He shoves himself away from the wall with a little thrust of his shoulder and starts home.

“Be seeing you,” Burley says. And then he says, “Come again! We’ll listen to the radio!”

As soon as Jarrat is out of sight Burley eases himself to his feet and, after a careful start, walks to the house.

He builds a fire in the kitchen, puts on the coffee pot and a kettle of water, and sits down at the table to wait. His encounter with Jarrat has left him with a trying consciousness of his misery. To save trouble he just admits that he is totally corrupt and unsalvageable, and yields to the misery of that too. “Oh, me!” he says.

The smell of the coffee rouses him. He sits watching the spout steam until it has boiled long enough, and pours himself a cup.

It seems to him that from the minute he sits back down at the table and leans over the fragrant steam of that cup, he begins—surely, this time—to mend. He drinks it hot, sitting by the raised window, watching the wind in the grass down the hillside. The grass is green in the sun, and the wind combs it, laying it down, rippling it like water flowing over it.

“Eat! Put something in your stomach!”

Those are his mother’s words, and they return to him in her voice, the weary, determined inflections of her old Sunday-morning efforts to sober him up and set him straight, revealing the strain between her persistent faith that this would be the last time and her suspicion that it would not. They come back familiarly and painfully, his inheritance from her.

To silence them he gets up and obeys. He poaches two eggs, and toasts some light bread, and pours another cup of coffee. That puts some strength into him. That he will make it through until bedtime begins to seem likely. He begins to welcome the duty of going to Mat’s and being there to do what he can. What there will be for him to do he does not know. Maybe nothing. For a few minutes he wishes, like a boy, that there might be some task of great difficulty that Mat will ask him to do—something to redeem all the failures, past and to come, of his best intentions.

He washes his dishes and makes things neat. And then, stripping off his clothes, he bathes and shaves and combs his hair. Everything he does now makes him feel better. This is the starting place. From here a lot can be imagined and hoped for.

Standing naked in the breeze from the window, combed and shaved and thoroughly scrubbed, feeling better already than he expected to feel before tomorrow, he applies himself to the question of what to do about his suit. He picks up first the pants and then the coat, turns them this way and then that, and hangs them back on the chair post. He shakes his head. “Looks like they been slept in on the ground, boy.”

His hat turns out to be more or less salvageable. He whacks the dust out of it, and scrubs it lightly with a damp rag, and molds it into shape, and puts it on. His shoes, after being rubbed a little with a rag, look very well too.

Carrying a shoe in each hand he goes through the house and up the stairs to his bedroom. Opening a bureau drawer, he finds a pair of socks quickly enough, and puts them on. Digging into another drawer, he finds at the very bottom an extra white shirt, put away hard to tell how long before his mother died. It has begun to turn a little yellow, but he shakes it out and holds it up. It will do, and he puts it on. He gets out his newest work pants and puts them on. He will have to go without a coat, but surely, he thinks, the weather is hot enough to justify that. He puts on his shoes. Rummaging in the closet, he finds his other necktie and stretches it out on the bed and studies it critically. It is a broad, bright red silky one with a large yellow flower on it. Too pretty for a funeral, he thinks, but he has no choice. Standing close and then far back, he examines himself in the mirror, and is reasonably satisfied. He is not what you would call finely dressed, but he has contrived an appearance of discomfort that ought at least to vouch for his proper sense of the occasion.

Ready at last, he leaves the house with the sense of having perfected a narrow escape. He is still pretty shaky, and his head still hurts; he can surely remember mornings when he left home in better health. But he has begun to have a decent feeling in his mind.

At the same time he keeps mindful of where he is going: to Mat’s house, to Ernest’s grave, sorrow and darkness. He is going, faithfully and uselessly, to be a comforter where there can be no comfort, and a friend where friendship is powerless—a duty a man cannot do gladly for another except for the love of him. And he goes bearing the thought of the death of Tom, which now begins its long outlasting of its cause. The words of Jayber’s elegy still stand in his mind, seeming to open and contain the depth of his grief.

But he goes into the light too. The sun is getting high and hot. He has already sweated through his shirt, and unconsciously has unbuttoned and turned back the cuffs. Several times he has caught his hand ready to loosen his collar and necktie, but so far he has resisted that. From the graveled track of the lane high on the ridge, he can sometimes see the river valley lying below him, and across the upland the town’s gables and rooftops among the trees. All the country is astir with the wind, and he can feel it flowing steadily against him as he walks. Overhead big white clouds fly rapidly from the southwest; their hundred-acre shadows slide invincibly over the ups and downs of the land. Along the river the water maples, leaves blown underside-up, are silver and brilliant.

It seems to him that time has now begun to shorten toward Nathan’s return. Though still from far off, he feels approaching him a good day, the best of all. And then, in that deep wheel track on the ridge, he stops and deliberately savors the air. It is the first morning of another time.

A HOMECOMING

As soon as he has thanked the driver and the car door has slammed behind him, Gideon resumes the stride in which he has crossed the intervals between rides. He turns into one of the pounded wheel tracks of the creek road, and is soon out of sight of the blacktop.

When he left in the early spring, the valley was still leafless and open to the eye as in winter. Now the road burrows through the foliage. And though the morning shade is still deep, the air is already close and hot, and he begins to sweat. The foliage along the roadsides bespeaks the length of his absence. And he walks faster, filled with the anxiety of one who is late.

He comes out into the open bottom. There is a field of corn now to the left of the road. As he reaches the end of that he can see the house. A thread of smoke rises straight up from the kitchen chimney. Though the fields of the bottom are in full sun, the shadow of the hill still lies over the house. Ida comes around the house from somewhere in the back, carrying a bucket. Seeing him, she stops and looks while he walks perhaps fifteen steps, before she sets the bucket down, and runs down the slope of the yard and down the lane and along the path across the bottom. When he comes to the footbridge she is standing at the other end, waiting for him, smiling at him as he crosses the springing planks.

“Gideon, I seen you coming. I looked, and there you were coming up the road.”

He comes to the end of the bridge and steps down.

Ida looks away, and back at him. She asks: “You been gone a long way?”

“Yeah. I have, Ida.”

“I imagine you’re hungry, ain’t you?”

“I ain’t eat yet this morning.”

“Well, come on to the house.”

He puts his face down into his hands. She comes to him then, reaching out to him.

“Well. Don’t, Gideon. Come on to the house.”

For some time after he is quiet he continues to stand there the same way, his face covered. Finally, at her urging, he allows her to take his hand and lead him toward the house, although still he does not look at her.

“Did you come riding or walking?”

“First one then the other. Sometimes folks give me rides. Sometimes I had to walk.”

“Hard as you look, it’s a wonder you ever got to ride at all. You look worn out, Gideon. I bet you haven’t taken any care of yourself at all.”

“I can’t tell you, Ida. It ain’t to be talked about.”

“Can you remember the last time you shaved?”

They cross the bottom and climb the slope to the house and go around to the back and into the kitchen. Ida pulls a chair away from the table and places it near the stove as though Gideon might be cold.

“Sit down in that,” she says.

And he does, obediently, watching her as she begins stirring around him. She makes the old room jolt and clatter as if all its uses have been roused in it at once. She shakes the ashes out of the stove, and pokes the fire, and puts in fresh wood. She scoots the teakettle over the fire, and fills another kettle and puts it on, and fills the coffee pot and puts it on. She goes out and brings in a fresh bucket of water. She sets him a place at the table. She fills a large wash pan with hot water and sets it steaming on the floor at his feet.

“Wash,” she says. She puts the soap down by the wash pan, brings him a wash rag, hangs a clean towel on the back of his chair. “Get them filthy clothes off. And them old shoes.” She gathers up his shoes and his shirt as he takes them off. As she stands there watching him, waiting, he hesitates. His hands seem to grow clumsy at the buckle of his belt, and then stop altogether. He looks out the window, and down at his feet, and at last, with great effort, at her.

“Ida,” he says, “I ain’t bothered any women while I been gone.”

For the first time since they met at the bridge, she smiles at him.

“Well, ain’t you something! I reckon you must be feeling pretty botherish by now.”

“I reckon I am.”

“That don’t surprise me.”

For many seconds they look at each other.

He takes off the rest of his clothes. She gathers them up with the rest and flings them through the door onto the back porch. She brings back clean clothes for him, and lays them on the edge of the table within his reach. She brings shoes for him. And then she busies herself at the stove.

When he has washed and put on pants and shoes, she says to him: “Shave. Get them whiskers off.”

He does, and puts on the clean shirt, and combs his wet hair. He comes to the table as she is taking his breakfast from the stove. She looks at him.

“Well, well, it is you. Sit down. Eat.”

INTO THE WOODS

As seems bound to happen now and again, in spite of Mat’s watchfulness against it, one of his young cows got with calf late. Uncertain of the breeding time, he has been watching her for a week. This morning when he went to count the cattle she was not in the bunch. He knew what that meant, but other obligations were pressing him, and after walking the length of the high backbone of the pasture he gave up the hunt until later.

It is not until the afternoon that he can come back. He leaves his truck at the pasture gate, and this time, instead of walking the high ground as he did in the morning, he turns along the fence and follows it down toward the woods. It is a brilliant day, the air warm and still. In spite of his worry about her, the job of searching for the cow is suited to his mood and to the weather, and he is happy in having it to do.

The leaves on the branches, and falling, and on the ground, are so golden that going in under the trees is to enter not the shade but a doubled sunlight. Though there is no wind, the leaves fall steadily, flashing in the air, with a constant pattering against trunks and branches and the ground.

Mat considers his course, and goes down to where the bluff steepens, and turns again, following the contour of the slope. He might, he knows, be wrong by ten feet or a hundred. If he is, he will have to come back at a different level—and go again at yet another, if he is wrong again. He feels too stiff in the knees to zigzag up and down the bluff, and so there is nothing to do but choose a line and follow it. He takes his time, picking his way with care, keeping close watch on the woods above and below.

And it happens that within half an hour he comes upon the cow grazing among the thicket growth over a little patch of ground that not too many years ago was cleared and cropped. He quickly sees that she has calved, and he approaches cautiously, not wanting to scare her off for fear he will not then be able to find the calf. But he does not go many feet before he is seen, and he stops. He can tell by the set of her head that she is alarmed, preparing to run.

“Sook,” he says quietly. “Sook, cow.”

At that she does run, head and tail up, crashing into the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing and out into the woods.

“You crazy bitch!”

She is out there in the woods, walking away from him now, bawling. Mat goes on into the clearing and, again more quickly than he expected, finds the calf curled up in some long grass in a patch of sumac. It lies perfectly still, obeying like its mother an instinct still wild in it. For the moment it is wild, and Mat is aware of that wildness, and aware of himself there, about to be the first man it will see, about to cross yet another time the gap between his kind and its.

“Here you are,” he says to it, to be saying something before he touches it. “Your old lying mammy said you weren’t, but I knew.”

He has come up beside it and leaned over it. And now he slips his hands under its belly and raises it to its feet. It stands up, pretty wobbly, but all right—a bull calf, well marked, big enough. “Well,” he says.

Leaving it spraddled on its weak legs, he goes back into the woods. As soon as he is gone the cow, having circled around, comes anxiously back into the clearing, and goes straight to the calf. Mat sits down with his back against a tree, and watches, pleased with them and with himself.

After nuzzling the calf briefly as she came up to it, the cow has paid him no more attention. She stands over it, head and ears up, watching Mat. Her whole aspect has changed from when he saw her a day ago. Instead of the complacency of a domestic animal, she now has the alertness of a deer. After standing shakily for some time on its spraddled legs, the calf more or less collapses into the grass, but though her whole body is tense with awareness of it she never looks at it. She has not moved at all. And Mat himself has not moved. Into the tensely quieted space between them the yellow leaves fall.

Finally Mat gets up and turns away. But instead of starting back the way he came, now that he has done what he came to do, he goes on into the woods. He has got ahead of his plans. There is nothing else that he intended to do today. He is going on now for the pleasure of the going. Since leaving the cow and the calf, he has continued to make an effort to be quiet. He picks his way with care, walking slowly along the flatter ground above the bluff. Now and then to his left there is an opening among the treetops and he can see down out of the woods to the river and the fields in the bottoms, and those openings keep him aware of being on a height and on a verge.

The age of the woods varies with the lay of the ground. On some of the gentler slopes the trees are young, and in these places there are neat piles of rock, showing that once, where trees are now, there were crops, and the rocks were picked up out of the furrows and carried to the edges of the field and put down. Those steep fields did not last long. Mat believes or imagines he worked in these places as a boy. He knows he is bound to have worked in some of them, but it is hard now to be exact about which ones. The character they took from human use is gone from them. The trees have wholly claimed them. The piled rocks, covered with lichens and moss, have grown natural again.

He comes to where a stream has cut its way into the hill. The ground tilts sharply as the bluffs turn in to the crease of the ravine, and here the woods is old. In the face of the bluff on the far side of the ravine there is a sort of amphitheater, its floor, relatively flat, affording a gathering place for a stand of great beeches, whose silver trunks branch into the gold masses of their leaves. Their brilliance, as Mat comes around the hill’s shoulder, stops him for a moment before he crosses over and goes in under them.

He sits at the foot of one of the big trees at the edge of the grove, leaning back against the trunk. He faces the way the stream falls, the stream passing below him and to his left, the grove of beeches extending back into its enclosure to his right. In front of him there is an opening through which he can see a part of a bend in the river—within the bend of the water the bend of the trees along the bank, within the bend of the trees straight rows of corn shocks in a field. Around him the woods is free of undergrowth, and the tree trunks rise cleanly up into the foliage. There is a little water running in the stream, so that here, in addition to the sound of the leaves falling, there is the steady trickling and splashing that the water makes coming down over the rocks. Mat sits with his back against the tree, his hat on the ground beside him, sorting out and examining one by one all the aspects and attractions of the place. It is one of those places that, many times in his life, he has thought would be a good place to rest, and now to be resting there makes him happy.

Below, across the stream, there is a place where the slope gentles. And as he looks down there, Mat begins to see, scattered among the big trees, the familiar cairns of rocks. They mean that that place too was once cleared and broken and planted in crops. The trees on it are much older than he is. The work that was done there was done long before his time, and no doubt before his father’s—the axe-work and the burning, and the jumper plows breaking for the first time the black leaf-mold. And before that the big trees standing without age or history, whose silence and whose shaking in the wind Mat imagines now, shivering as he does.

And afterwards, now, the trees rise on the slope again. And the dead who made that clearing are as forgotten as the forest they destroyed. As he sits looking at the heaped rocks, guessing the little he is able to guess about them, there comes to Mat the sense of a lost and dead past, a past perfect, without even the force of a memory. And though he resisted the thought, fearing it would sadden him, it does not sadden him. There in the presence of the woods, in the sounds of the water and the leaves falling, he does not feel the loss of what is past.

He feels the great restfulness of that place, its casual perfect order. It is the restfulness of a place where the merest or the most improbable accident is made a necessity and a part of a design, where death can only give into life. And Mat feels the difference between that restful order and his own constant struggle to maintain and regulate his clearings. Although the meanings of those clearings and his devotion to them remain firm in his mind, he knows without sorrow that they will end, the order he has made and kept in them will be overthrown, the effortless order of wilderness will return.

The leaves brightly falling around him, Mat comes into the presence of the place. It lies clearly and simply before him, radiant as though a light in the ground has become visible. He has come into a wakefulness as quiet as a sleep.

Making It Home (1945)

HE HAD crossed the wide ocean and many a river. Now not another river lay between him and home but only a few creeks that he knew by name. Arthur Rowanberry had come a long way, trusting somebody else to know where he was, and now he knew where he was himself. The great river, still raised somewhat from the flood of that spring and flowing swiftly, lay off across the fields to his left; to his right and farther away were the wooded slopes of the Kentucky side of the valley, and over it all, from the tops of the hills on one side to the tops of the hills on the other, stretched the gray sky. He was walking along the paved road that followed the river upstream to the county seat of Hargrave. On the higher ground to the right of the road stood fine brick farmhouses that had been built a hundred and more years ago from the earnings of the rich bottomland fields that lay around them. There had been a time when those houses had seemed as permanent to him as the land they stood on. But where he had been, they had the answer to such houses.

“We wouldn’t let one of them stand long in our way,” he thought.

Art Rowanberry walked like the first man to discover upright posture—as if, having been a creature no taller than a sheep or a pig, he had suddenly risen to the height of six feet and looked around. He walked too like a man who had been taught to march, and he wore a uniform. But whatever was military in his walk was an overlay, like the uniform, for he had been a man long before he had been a soldier, and a farmer long before he had been a man. An observer might have sensed in his walk and in the way he carried himself a reconciliation to the forms and distances of the land such as comes only to those who have from childhood been accustomed to the land’s work.

The noises of the town were a long way behind him. It was too early for the evening chores, and the farmsteads that he passed were quiet. Birds sang. From time to time he heard a farmer call out to his team. Once he had heard a tractor off somewhere in the fields and once a towboat out on the river, but those sounds had faded away. No car had passed him, though he walked a paved road. There was no sound near him but the sound of his own footsteps falling steadily on the pavement.

Once it had seemed to him that he walked only on the place where he was. But now, having gone and returned from so far, he knew that he was walking on the whole round world. He felt the great, empty distance that the world was turning in, far from the sun and the moon and the stars.

“Here,” he thought, “is where we do what we are going to do—the only chance we got. And if somebody was to be looking down from up there, it would all look a lot littler to him than it does to us.”

He was talking carefully to himself in his thoughts, forming the words more deliberately than if he were saying them aloud, because he did not want to count his steps. He had a long way still to go, and he did not want to know how many steps it was going to take. Nor did he want to hear in his head the counted cadence of marching.

“I ain’t marching,” he thought. “I am going somewheres. I am going up the river towards Hargrave. And this side of Hargrave, before the bridge, at Ellville, I will turn up the Kentucky River, and go ten miles, and turn up Sand Ripple below Port William, and I will be at home.”

He carried a duffel bag that contained his overcoat, a change of clothes, and a shaving kit. From time to time, he shifted the bag from one shoulder to the other.

“I reckon I am done marching, have marched my last step, and now I am walking. There is nobody in front of me and nobody behind. I have come here without a by-your-leave to anybody. Them that have known where I was, or was supposed to, for three years don’t know where I am now. Nobody that I know knows where I am now.”

He came from killing. He had felt the ground shaken by men and what they did. Where he was coming from, they thought about killing day after day, and feared it, and did it. And out of the unending, unrelenting great noise and tumult of the killing went little deaths that belonged to people one by one. Some had feared it and had died. Some had died without fearing it, lacking the time. They had fallen around him until he was amazed that he stood—men who in a little while had become his buddies, most of them younger than he, just boys.

The fighting had been like work, only a lot of people got killed and a lot of things got destroyed. It was not work that made much of anything. You and your people intended to go your way, if you could. And you wanted to stop the other people from going their way, if you could. And whatever interfered you destroyed. You had a thing on your mind that you wanted, or wanted to get to, and anything at all that stood in your way, you had the right to destroy. If what was in the way were women and little children, you would not even know it, and it was all the same. When your power is in a big gun, you don’t have any small intentions. Whatever you want to hit, you want to make dust out of it. Farm buildings, houses, whole towns—things that people had made well and cared for a long time—you made nothing of.

“We blew them apart and scattered the pieces so they couldn’t be put together again. And people, too. We blew them apart and scattered the pieces.”

He had seen tatters of human flesh hanging in the limbs of trees along with pieces of machines. He had seen bodies without heads, arms and legs without bodies, strewn around indifferently as chips. He had seen the bodies of men hanging upside down from a tank turret, lifeless as dolls.

Once, when they were firing their gun, the man beside him—Eckstrom—began to dance. And Art thought, “This ain’t no time to be dancing.” But old Eckstrom was dancing because he was shot in the head, was killed, his body trying on its own to keep standing.

And others had gone down, near enough to Art almost that he could have touched them as they fell: Jones, Bitmer, Hirsch, Walters, Corelli.

He had seen attackers coming on, climbing over the bodies of those who had fallen ahead of them. A man who, in one moment, had been a helper, a friend, in the next moment was only a low mound of something in the way, and you stepped over him or stepped on him and came ahead.

Once while they were manning their gun and under fire themselves, old Eckstrom got mad, and he said, “I wish I had those sons of bitches lined up to where I could shoot every damned one of them.”

And Art said, “Them fellers over there are doing about the same work we are, ’pears like to me.”

There were nights when the sky and all the earth appeared to be on fire, and yet the ground was covered with snow and it was cold.

At Christmas he was among those trapped at Bastogne. He had expected to die, but he was spared as before though the ground shook and the town burned under a sky bright as day. They held their own, and others, fighting on the outside, broke through.

“We was mighty glad to see that day when it come,” he thought. “That was a good day.”

The fighting went on, the great tearing apart. People and everything else were torn into pieces. Everything was only pieces put together that were ready to fly apart, and nothing was whole. You got to where you could not look at a man without knowing how little it would take to kill him. For a man was nothing but just a little morsel of soft flesh and brittle bone inside of some clothes. And you could not look at a house or a schoolhouse or a church without knowing how, rightly hit, it would just shake down into a pile of stones and ashes. There was nothing you could look at that was whole—man or beast or house or tree—that had the right to stay whole very long. There was nothing above the ground that was whole but you had the measure of it and could separate its pieces and bring it down. You moved always in a landscape of death, wreckage, cinders, and snow.

And then, having escaped so far, he was sitting by his gun one afternoon, eating a piece of chocolate and talking to an old redheaded, freckle-faced boy named McBride, and a shell hit right where they were. McBride just disappeared. And a fragment came to Art as if it were his own and had known him from the beginning of the world, and it burrowed into him.

From a man in the light on the outside of the world, he was transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a man in the dark on the inside of himself, in pain, and he thought that he was dead. How long he was in that darkness he did not know. When he came out of it, he was in a place that was white and clean, a hospital, and he was in a long room with many beds. There was sunlight coming in the window.

A nurse who came by seemed glad to see him. “Well, hello, bright eyes,” she said.

He said, “Why, howdy.”

She said, “I think the war is over for you, soldier.”

“Yes, mam,” he said. “I reckon it is.”

She patted his shoulder. “You almost got away from us, you know it?”

And he said, “Yes, mam, I expect I did.”

The uniform he wore as he walked along the road between Jefferson and Hargrave was now too big for him. His shirt collar was loose on his neck, in spite of the neatly tied tie, and under his tightened belt the waistband of his pants gathered in pleats.

He stayed in hospitals while his life grew back around the wound, as a lightning-struck tree will sometimes heal over the scar, until finally they gave him his papers and let him go.

And now, though he walked strongly enough along the road, he was still newborn from his death, and inside himself he was tender and a little afraid.

The bus had brought him as far as the town of Jefferson on the north side of the river, letting him out in the middle of the afternoon in front of the hotel that served also as a bus station. From there, he could have taken another bus to Hargrave had he been willing to wait until the next morning. But now that he was in familiar country he did not have it in him to wait. He had known a many a man who would have waited, but he was old for a soldier; though he was coming from as far as progress had reached, he belonged to an older time. It did not occur to him, any more than it would have occurred to his grandfather, to wait upon a machine for something he could furnish for himself. And so he thanked the kind lady at the hotel desk, shouldered his bag, and set out for home on foot.

The muddy Ohio flowed beneath the bridge and a flock of pigeons wheeled out and back between the bridge and the water, causing him to sway as he walked, so that to steady himself he had to look at the hills that rose over the rooftops beyond the bridge. He went down the long southward arc of the bridge, and for a little while he was among houses again, and then he was outside the town, walking past farmsteads and fields in unobstructed day. The sky was overcast, but the clouds were high.

“It ought to clear off before morning,” he thought. “Maybe it’ll be one of them fine spring days. Maybe it’ll do to work, for I have got to get started.”

They would already have begun plowing, he thought—his father and his brother, Mart. Though they had begun the year without him, they would be expecting him. He could hear his father’s voice saying, “Any day now. Any day.”

But he was between lives. The war had been a life, such as it was, and now he was out of it. The other life, the one he had once had and would have again, was still ahead of him; he was not in it yet.

He was only free. He had not been out in the country or alone in a long time. Now that he had the open countryside around him again and was alone, he felt the expectations of other people fall away from him like a shed skin, and he came into himself.

“I am not under anybody’s orders,” he thought. “What I expect myself to do, I will do it. The government don’t owe me, and I don’t owe it. Except when I have something again that it wants, then I reckon I will owe it.”

It pleased him to think that the government owed him nothing, that he needed nothing from it, and he was on his own. But the government seemed to think that it owed him praise. It wanted to speak of what he and the others had done as heroic and glorious. Now that the war was coming to an end, the government wanted to speak of their glorious victories. The government was made up of people who thought about fighting, not of those who did it. The men sitting behind desks—they spent other men to buy ground, and then they ruined the ground they had and more men to get the ground beyond. If they were on the right side, they did it the same as them that were on the wrong side.

“They talk about victory as if they know all them dead boys was glad to die. The dead boys ain’t never been asked how glad they was. If they had it to do again, might be they wouldn’t do it, or might be they would. But they ain’t been asked.”

Under the clouds, the country all around was quiet, except for birds singing in the trees, wherever there were trees, and now and then a human voice calling out to a team. He was glad to be alive.

He had been glad to be alive all the time he had been alive. When he was hit and thought he was dead, it had come to him how good it was to be alive even under the shelling, even when it was at its worst. And now he had lived through it all and was coming home. He was now a man who had seen far places and strange things, and he remembered them all. He had seen Kansas and Louisiana and Arizona. He had seen the ocean. He had seen the little farms and country towns of France and Belgium and Luxembourg—pretty, before they were ruined. For one night, he was in Paris.

“That Paris, now. We was there one day and one night. There was wine everywheres, and these friendly girls who said, ‘Kees me.’ And I don’t know what happened after about ten o’clock. I come to the next morning in this hotel room, sick and broke, with lipstick from one end to the other. I reckon I must have had a right good time.”

At first, before he was all the way in it, there was something he liked about the war, a reduction that in a way was pleasing. From a man used to doing and thinking for himself, he became a man who did what he was told.

“That laying around half a day, waiting for somebody else to think—that was something I had to learn.”

It was fairly restful. Even basic training tired him less than what he would ordinarily have done at that time of year. He gained weight.

And from a man with a farm and crops and stock to worry about, he became a man who worried only about himself and the little bunch of stuff he needed to sleep, dress, eat, and fight.

He furnished only himself. The army furnished what little else it took to make the difference between a man and a beast. More than anything else, he liked his mess kit. It was all the dishes a man really needed. And when you weren’t cooking or eating with it, you could keep things in it—a little extra tobacco, maybe.

“When I get to Ellville,” he thought, “I won’t be but mighty little short of halfway. I know the miles and how they lay out end to end.”

It had been evening for a while now. On the farmsteads that he passed, people were busy with the chores. He could hear people calling their stock, dogs barking, children shouting and laughing. On one farm that he passed, a woman, a dog, and a small boy were bringing in the cows; in the driveway of the barn he could see a man unharnessing a team of mules. It was as familiar to him as his own breath, and because he was outside it still, he yearned toward it as a ghost might. As he passed by, the woman, perhaps because he was a soldier, raised her hand to him, and he raised his own in return.

After a while, he could see ahead of him the houses and trees of Ellville, and over the trees the superstructure of the bridge arching into Hargrave. All during his walk so far, he had been offering himself the possibility that he would walk on home before he would sleep. But now that he had come nearly halfway and Ellville was in sight, he knew he would not go farther that day. He was tired, and with his tiredness had come a sort of melancholy and a sort of aimlessness, as if, all his ties cut, he might go right on past his home river and on and on, anywhere at all in the world. The little cluster of buildings ahead of him now seemed only accidentally there, and he himself there only accidentally. He had arrived, as he had arrived again and again during the healing of his wound, at the apprehension of a pure emptiness, as if at the center of an explosion—as if, without changing at all, he and the town ahead of him and all the long way behind him had been taken up into a dream in which every creature and every thing sat, like that boy McBride, in the dead center of the possibility of its disappearance.

In the little town a lane turned off the highway and went out beyond the houses and across the river bottom for perhaps a quarter of a mile to a barn and, beyond the barn, to a small weatherboarded church. It was suppertime then; the road and the dooryards were deserted. Art entered the lane and went back past the gardens and the clutter of outbuildings that lay behind the houses. At the barn there was a cistern with a chain pump. He set down his bag and pumped and drank from his cupped left hand held under the spout.

“Looks like I ought to be hungry,” he thought. “But I ain’t.”

He was not hungry, and there was no longer anything much that he wanted to think. He was tired. He told himself to lift the bag again and put it on his shoulder. He told his feet to walk, and they carried him on to the church. The door was unlocked. He went in.

He shut the door behind him, not allowing the latch to click. The quiet inside the church was palpable; he came into it as into a different element, neither air nor water. He crossed the tiny vestibule where a bell rope dangled from a worn hole in the ceiling, went through another door that stood open, and sat down on the first bench to his left, leaving his duffel bag in the aisle, propped against the end of the bench. He let himself become still.

“I will eat a little,” he thought, “ ’gainst I get hungry in the night.”

After a while he took a bar of candy from the bag and slowly ate it. The church windows were glazed with an amber-colored glass that you could not see through, and though it was still light outdoors, in the church it was dusk. When he finished the candy, he folded the wrapper soundlessly and put it in his pocket. Taking his overcoat from the bag to use as a blanket, he lay down on the bench. Many thoughts fled by him, none stopping. And then he slept.

He woke several times in the night, listening, and, hearing no threat out in the darkness anywhere, slept again. The last time he woke, roosters were crowing, and he sat up. He sat still a while in the dark, allowing the waking quiet of the place to come over him, and then he took another bar of candy from his bag and ate it and folded the wrapper and put it in his pocket as before. The night chill had seeped into the church; standing, he put on the overcoat. He picked up his bag and felt his way to the door.

It had cleared and the sky was full of stars. To the east, upriver, he could see a faint brightening ahead of the coming day. All around him the dark treetops were throbbing with birdsong, and from the banks of the two rivers at their joining, from everywhere there was water, the voices of spring peepers rose as if in clouds. Art stood still and looked around him and listened. It was going to be the fine spring day that he had imagined it might be.

He thought, “If a fellow was to be dead now, and young, might be he would be missing this a long time.”

There was a privy in back of the church and he went to it. And then, on his way out of the lane, he stopped at the barn and drank again at the cistern.

Back among the houses, still dark and silent among their trees, he took the road that led up into the smaller of the two river valleys. There was no light yet from the dawn, but by the little light of the stars he could see well enough. All he needed now was the general shape of the place given by various shadows and loomings.

“I have hoofed it home from here a many a night,” he thought. “Might be I could do it if I was blind. But I can see.”

He could see. And he walked along, feeling the joy of a man who sees, a joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light. The quiet around him seemed wide as the whole country and deep as the sky, and the morning songs of the creatures and his own footsteps occurred distinctly and separately in it, making a kind of geography and a kind of story. As he walked the light slowly strengthened. As he more and more saw where he was, it seemed to him more and more that he was walking in his memory or that he had entered, awake, a dream that he had been dreaming for a long time.

He was hungry. The candy bar that he had eaten when he woke had hardly interrupted his hunger.

“My belly thinks my throat has been cut. It is laying right flat against my backbone.”

It was a joy to him to be so hungry. Hunger had not bothered him much for many weeks, had not mattered, but now it was as vivid to him as a landmark. It was a tree that put its roots into the ground and spread its branches out against the sky.

The east brightened. The sun lit the edges of a few clouds on the horizon and then rose above them. He was walking full in its light. It had not shone on him long before he had to take off the overcoat, and he folded and rolled it neatly and stuffed it into his bag. By then he had come a long way up the road.

Now that it was light, he could see the marks of the flood that had recently covered the valley floor. He could see drift logs and mats of cornstalks that the river had left on the low fields. In places where the river ran near the road, he could see the small clumps of leaves and grasses that the currents had affixed to the tree limbs. Out in one of the bottoms he saw two men with a team and wagon clearing the scattered debris from their fields. They had set fire to a large heap of drift logs, from which the pale smoke rose straight up. Above the level of the flood, the sun shone on the small, still-opening leaves of the water maples and on the short new grass of the hillside pastures.

As he went along, Art began to be troubled in his mind: How would he present himself to the ones at home? He had not shaved. Since before his long ride on the bus he had not bathed. He did not want to come in, after his three-year absence, like a man coming in from work, unshaven and with his clothes mussed and soiled. He must appear to them as what he had been since they saw him last, a soldier. And then he would be at the end of his soldiering. He did not know yet what he would be when he had ceased to be a soldier, but when he had thought so far his confusion left him.

He came to the mouth of a small tributary valley. Where the stream of that valley passed under the road, he went down the embankment, making his way, first through trees and then through a patch of dead horseweed stalks, to the creek. A little way upstream he came to a place of large flat rocks that had been swept clean by the creek and were now in the sun and dry. Opening the duffel bag, he carefully laid its contents out on the rocks. He took out his razor and brush and soap and a small mirror, and knelt beside the stream and soaped his face and shaved. The water was cold, but he had shaved with cold water before. When he had shaved, he took off his clothes and, standing in flowing water that instantly made his feet ache, he bathed, quaking, breathing between his teeth as he raised the cold water again and again in his cupped hands.

Standing on the rocks in the sun, he dried himself with the shirt he had been wearing. He put on his clean, too-large clothes, tied his tie, and combed his hair. And then warmth came to him. It came from inside himself and from the sun outside; he felt suddenly radiant in every vein and fiber of his body. He was clean and warm and rested and hungry. He was well.

He was in his own country now, and he did not see anything around him that he did not know.

“I have been a stranger and have seen strange things,” he thought. “And now I am where it is not strange, and I am not a stranger.”

He was sitting on the rocks, resting after his bath. His bag, repacked, lay on the rock beside him and he propped his elbow on it.

“I am not a stranger, but I am changed. Now I know a mighty power that can pass over the earth and make it strange. There are people, where I have been, that won’t know their places when they get back to them. Them that live to get back won’t be where they were when they left.”

He became sleepy and he lay down on the rock and slept. He slept more deeply than he had in the night. He dreamed he was where he was, and a great, warm light fell upon that place, and there was light within it and within him.

When he returned to the road after his bath and his sleep, it was past the middle of the morning. His steps fell into their old rhythm on the blacktop.

“I know a mighty power,” he thought. “A mighty power of death and fire. An anger beyond the power of any man, made big in machines equal to many men. And a little man who has passed through mighty death and fire and still lived, what is he going to think of himself when he is back again, walking the river road below Port William, that we would have blowed all to flinders as soon as look at it if it had got in our way?”

He walked, as before, the left side of the road, not meaning to ask for rides. But as on the afternoon before, there was little traffic. He had met two cars going down toward Hargrave and had been passed by only one coming up.

Where the road began to rise toward Port William up on the ridge, a lesser road branched off to the left and ran along the floor of the valley. As Art reached this intersection, he heard a truck engine backfiring, coming down the hill, and then the truck came into sight and he recognized it. It was an old green International driven, as he expected and soon saw, by a man wearing a trucker’s cap and smoking a pipe. The truck was loaded with fat hogs, heading for the packing plant at Jefferson. As he went by, the old man waved to Art and Art waved back.

“Sam Hanks,” he thought. “I have been gone over three years and have traveled a many a thousand miles over land and ocean, and in all that time and all them miles the first man I have seen that I have always known is Sam Hanks.”

He tried to think what person he had seen last when he was leaving, but he could not remember. He took the lesser road and, after perhaps a mile, turned into a road still narrower, only a pair of graveled wheel tracks. A little later, when the trees were fully leaved, this would be almost a burrow, tunneling along between the creek and the hillside under the trees, but now the leaves were small and the sun cast the shadows of the branches in a close network onto the gravel.

Soon he was walking below the high-water line. He could see it clearly marked on the slope to his right: a line above which the fallen leaves of the year before were still bright and below which they were darkened by their long steeping in the flood. The slope under the trees was strewn with drift, and here and there a drift log was lodged in the branches high above his head. In the shadow of the flood the spring was late, the buds of the trees just opening, the white flowers of twinleaf and bloodroot just beginning to bloom. It was almost as if he were walking under water, so abrupt and vivid was the difference above and below the line that marked the crest of the flood. But somewhere high in the sunlit branches a redbird sang over and over in a clear, pealing voice, “Even so, even so.”

And there was nothing around him that Art did not know. He knew the place in all the successions of the year: from the little blooms that came in the earliest spring to the fallen red leaves of October, from the songs of the nesting birds to the anxious wintering of the little things that left their tracks in snow, from the first furrow to the last load of the harvest.

Where the creek turned away from the road the valley suddenly widened and opened. The road still held up on the hillside among the trees, permitting him to see, through the intervening branches, the broad field that lay across the bottom. He could see that plowing had been started; a long strip had been back-furrowed out across the field, from the foot of the slope below the road to the trees that lined the creek bank. And then he saw, going away from him, almost out to the end of the strip, two mule teams with two plowmen walking in the opening furrows. The plowmen’s heads were bent to their work, their hands riding easy on the handles of the plows. Some distance behind the second plowman was a little boy, also walking in the furrow and carrying a tin can; from time to time he bent and picked something up from the freshly turned earth and dropped it into the can. Walking behind the boy was a large hound. The first plowman was Art’s father, the second his brother Mart. The boy was Art’s sister’s son, Roy Lee, who had been two years old when Art left and was now five. The hound was probably Old Bawler, who made it a part of his business to be always at work. Roy Lee was collecting fishing worms, and Art looked at the creek and saw, in an open place at the top of the bank, as he expected, three willow poles stuck into the ground, their lines in the water.

The first of the teams reached the end of the plowland, and Art heard his father’s voice clear and quiet: “Gee, boys.” And then Mart’s team finished their furrow, and Mart said, “Gee, Sally.” They went across the headland and started back.

Art stood as if looking out of his absence at them, who did not know he was there, and he had to shake his head. He had to shake his head twice to persuade himself that he did not hear, from somewhere off in the distance, the heavy footsteps of artillery rounds striding toward them.

He pressed down the barbed wire at the side of the road, straddled over it, and went down through the trees, stopping at the foot of the slope. They came toward him along the edge of the plowland, cutting it two furrows wider. Soon he could hear the soft footfalls of the mules, the trace ends jingling, the creaking of the doubletrees. Present to himself, still absent to them, he watched them come.

At the end of the furrow his father called, “Gee!” and leaned his plow over so that it could ride around the headland on the share and right handle. And then he saw Art. “Well now!” he said, as if only to himself. “Whoa!” he said to the mules. And again: “Well now!” He came over to Art and put out his hand and Art gave him his.

Art saw that there were tears in his father’s eyes, and he grinned and said, “Howdy.”

Early Rowanberry stepped back and looked at his son and said again, “Well now!”

Mart came around onto the headland then and stopped his team. He and Art shook hands, grinning at each other.

“You reckon your foot’ll still fit in a furrow?”

Art nodded. “I reckon it still will.”

“Well, here’s somebody you don’t hardly know,” Mart said, gesturing toward Roy Lee, “and who don’t know you at all, I’ll bet. Do you know who this fellow is, Roy Lee?”

Roy Lee probably did not know, though he knew he had an uncle who was a soldier. He knew about soldiers—he knew they fought in a war far away—and here was a great, tall, fine soldier in a soldier suit with shining buttons, and the shoes on his feet were shining. Roy Lee felt something akin to awe and something akin to love and something akin to fear. He shook his head and looked down at his bare right foot.

Mart laughed. “This here’s your Uncle Art. You know about Uncle Art.” To Art he said, “He’s talked enough about you. He’s been looking out the road to see if you was coming.”

Art looked up the creek and across it at the house and outbuildings and barn. He looked at the half-plowed field on the valley floor with the wooded hillsides around it and the blinding blue sky over it. He looked again and again at his father and his young nephew and his brother. They stood up in their lives around him now in such a way that he could not imagine their deaths.

Early Rowanberry looked at his son, now and then reaching out to grasp his shoulder or his arm, as if to feel through the cloth of the uniform the flesh and bone of the man inside. “Well now!” he said again, and again, “Well now!”

Art reached down and picked up a handful of earth from the furrow nearest him. “You’re plowing it just a little wet, ain’t you?”

“Well, we’ve had a wet time,” Mart said. “We felt like we had to go ahead. Maybe we’ll get another hard frost. We could yet.”

Art said, “Well, I reckon we might.”

And then he heard his father’s voice riding up in his throat as he had never heard it, and he saw that his father had turned to the boy and was speaking to him:

“Honey, run yonder to the house. Tell your granny to set on another plate. For we have our own that was gone and has come again.”

Not a Tear (1945)

DICK WATSON was my grandfather Catlett’s farm hand, and he was my friend. When he died, I did not go to his funeral. I was in school. It occurred to nobody that I should have gone, but I should have. I wish I had.

My father and Grandpa Catlett did go to the funeral and so I know about it. Maybe other white people were there too, about that I don’t know. But it is important to know that at least two were there. This would have been the fall of 1945, and so everybody there belonged to the old division of the races we came to call “segregation.” They had been born in it, had lived in it, partly at least had been made as they were by it. And yet that formal and legal division, applied after all to people who were neighbors, made within itself exceptions to itself. And so they came together, the white with the black, in duty to Dick Watson, at one in loss and in sorrow.

“Well, sir, it was perfect, Andy. It was just right,” my father said to comfort me, for he knew I was grieving. “That preacher was splendid.”

From time to time he recited parts of the sermon to me as he remembered it, for he could not forget, and I have not forgot. I will try to line it out as the preacher sounded it. “It was not a speech,” my father said. “It was a song.”

Standing above the open coffin in which Dick’s body lay in his Sunday clothes in its stillness and Aunt Sarah Jane who sat in the black dress of her sorrow nearby, the preacher gestured broadly with his opened hands, all the while looking at the people, as if to see if they knew already what he was going to say. He said:

This ain’t him.

He ain’t here.

This ain’t no more our brother,
our beloved. For he
ain’t here. Where he is
all is well.

All is well with Dick Watson.

All is well.

He has come to a door
to a mansion
didn’t have to knock
to get in. He had heard
that voice.

He has heard, O Lord,
thy voice.

“Brother Watson, come in.

Well done.

Well done, thou good
and faithful servant.

Well done. Enter
into the joy of thy Lord.”

“Something like that,” my father said. “For one man can’t do it by himself. He has got to have help. He has got to have inspiration, and help too from the other people.”

The sermon took a while. The people took up the preacher’s phrases and sang them back to him. They called out to him to encourage him:

“Amen!”

“Yes!”

“Amen!”

They shouted to him to go ahead, to preach it, for he had it right.

At first some of the people were crying, and Grandpa cried with them. And then, as the voice of the preacher called them, a sense of triumph grew among them, and the tone shifted. Heaven and earth drew together. The preacher said:

Blessèd!

Blessèd are the poor
in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessèd!

Blessèd are they that mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Children,
don’t cry no more.

Sister Sarah Jane,
don’t cry no more.

Our brother,
where he is,
he don’t hear no crying.

For his burden is lifted.

For freedom
has come to him
and rest.

For where he is
ain’t no crying there.

Not a sigh.

Not a tear.

The preacher stood then with his hands again opened. A beautiful voice sang back from among the people: “Nooo, not a tear.” The other agreeing voices quieted and fell away. While the preacher regarded the people with his hands still lifted, my father said, an immense quiet came upon them, and the freedom of Dick Watson in that moment was present to them all.

They sang a hymn, they said a prayer, and then they let him go.

CHRONOLOGY

NOTE ON THE TEXTS

NOTES

Chronology

1934

Born Wendell Erdman Berry on August 5 in Henry County, Kentucky, the first child of John Marshall and Virginia Erdman Perry Berry. Father, born November 8, 1900, near Lacie, Kentucky, earned a bachelor’s degree at Georgetown College in central Kentucky in 1922, and then worked as secretary to Congressman Virgil Chapman while earning a law degree from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He graduated in 1927 and later that year opened a private legal practice in Henry County. Mother born November 6, 1907, in Port Royal, in Henry County. She attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, a Methodist women’s college tied to the all-male Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, graduating with a degree in English in 1930. Both families can trace roots back to early years of Henry County’s history; both families also owned slaves before the Civil War (at time of Berry’s birth, there are many children of both slaves and slaveholders in the community). Parents married on July 14, 1933.

1935

Brother John Marshall Jr. born October 13.

1936

Family moves to New Castle, Kentucky, where father practices law and helps with paternal grandfather’s farm, the “Home Place.”

1938

Sister Mary Jo born March 18.

1939

Sister Martha Frances born July 22.

1940

Enters New Castle Elementary School in Henry County. Over the next few years, mother introduces Berry to books about King Arthur’s knights and Robin Hood, as well as The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, and The Yearling. Later will read Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, and Green Grass of Wyoming.

1941

The Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association, representing burley tobacco farmers in Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia with an average farm size of 150 acres, which had been founded in 1921, is revived under the New Deal, establishing parity prices and production control as protections for farmers. Father is one of the principal authors of the program and serves as counsel and vice-president and later president.

1942

Uncle Morgan Perry serves in the navy medical corps during World War II, and because of his knowledge of agriculture, is placed in charge of the garden of the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor.

1944

On July 3, uncle Wendell Holmes Berry, with whom Berry was extremely close, is shot at a defunct lead mine property, where he had been working with a crew salvaging lumber and roofing, after a quarrel with Floyd Martin, one of the owners of the property, and dies the same day.

1948

Finishes the eighth grade at the New Castle School. Enters Millersburg Military Institute in Millersburg, Kentucky, at the same time as his brother, John, Jr. Berry will remember, “It was very confining and military, of course. I never liked the military part of it. I did have some good teachers there, and I began there to read more seriously than I had before. I began to have a favorite subject: literature.” Father speaks before Congress on behalf of the Tobacco Program. In high school, begins tentatively to write poems.

1952

Graduates from Millersburg Military Institute. In the fall, enters University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky. Co-edits freshman magazine, Green Pen.

1953

Takes “Introduction to Literature” from Thomas Stroup. Begins bringing Stroup poems for criticism. Later takes classes from Hollis Summers and Robert Hazel. Reads T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In May, publishes first essay, “The Wings of the Future,” in Green Pen, about the survival of society in the light of two world wars and the entrance of the U.S. into the Korean conflict; he writes that it is the “American debt to tomorrow” to ensure that a democratic form of government succeeds over Soviet-style communism. During a composition class, the instructor Robert D. Jacobs introduces Berry to the term “agrarian” and to the 1930s manifesto of the twelve Southern Agrarian writers (who include Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren), I’ll Take My Stand, a work that will be significant (both in influence and in reaction) to the development of Berry’s thought.

1954

Publishes first poem, “Spring,” and first short story, “Summer Crop,” in the spring issue of Stylus, the university literary magazine. Becomes editor of Stylus. At a writers’ conference at Morehead State College in Kentucky meets writer James Still, whose work will become an influence (Berry will later write, “His short stories, I think, are as near to perfect as any writing I know”). In fall, meets James Baker Hall, who will become a close friend, in a creative writing class taught by Hollis Summers, for which Berry writes story “The Brothers” (later part of Nathan Coulter).

1955

Wins Stylus’s Dantzler Award for short story “The Brothers.” In fall, meets Tanya Amyx (born April 30, 1936, in Berkeley, California), a French and music major and daughter of University of Kentucky art professor Clifford Amyx and textile artist Dee Amyx. “The first time I ever saw Tanya,” Berry would later remark, “she was standing by [a] wooden newel post in Miller Hall at the University of Kentucky. Years later, they started to remodel the place. I went over and said, ‘Look. When you tear that post out, I want it.’” (The post is now in the Berrys’ home.) With fellow student Edward M. Coffman, travels to Kenyon College to meet John Crowe Ransom.

1956

Wins Stylus’s Dantzler Award for short story “The Chestnut Stud.” Meets fellow student Gurney Norman. On May 16, submits term paper on I’ll Take My Stand: “The Regional Context: A Consideration of the Southern Agrarians as Southerners.” Graduates from the University of Kentucky with a bachelor’s degree in English. In summer, Berry and James Baker Hall join literature seminars at Indiana University School of Letters; Berry takes course in Joyce and Yeats from Richard Ellman, and course in modern poetry from Karl Shapiro. “The Brothers” wins first prize in the Carolina Quarterly’s 6th Annual Fiction Contest and is published in its summer issue. In the fall, enters the master’s program in English at the University of Kentucky.

1957

In February, poem “Rain Crow” is published in Poetry magazine; in the next five years, his work will be published in Poetry five times. Meets writer Ed McClanahan during a graduate course. Completes MA in English. “Elegy” wins the Farquhar Award for Poetry from the University of Kentucky. Two short stories, “Whippoorwills” and “Apples,” are published in Coraddi: Arts Forum 1957. Marries Tanya Amyx, May 29. In summer, they live in a cabin built by Berry’s great-uncle Curran Mathews, called “the Camp,” on the Kentucky River near Port Royal, which was used as a family retreat from the 1920s. In the fall, they move to an apartment in Georgetown, Kentucky; Berry begins teaching freshman composition and sophomore literature at Georgetown College, father’s alma mater, while Tanya continues to study at the University of Kentucky.

1958

Daughter Mary Dee born May 10 in Lexington. Awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University; in August, family moves to Mill Valley, California, to live while he studies creative writing at Stanford University under Stegner (about whom Berry will later write, “My debt to him is probably greater than I know”) and Richard Scowcroft; fellow members of the fiction seminars include Ernest J. Gaines (also a Stegner fellow), Ken Kesey, and Nancy Packer. Lives with family in small house owned by Tanya’s aunt and uncle, Ann and Dick O’Hanlon, which would later become part of the O’Hanlon Center. Works on novel Nathan Coulter: “I had about half of it written when I went out there, and I just continued to work on it.” Introduced by Holman Hamilton, one of Berry’s history professors at the University of Kentucky, to Craig Wylie of Houghton Mifflin, to whom Berry submits the manuscript of Nathan Coulter. Houghton Mifflin purchases an option on the book for $250.

1959

Accepts appointment as Edward H. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University for one year.

1960

In January, begins writing second novel, A Place on Earth. First novel, Nathan Coulter, published in April by Houghton Mifflin. In spring, family moves back to Kentucky, living on the “Home Place” in Henry County, and also farming with Berry’s friend and neighbor Owen Flood.

1961

Receives a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Will later write of Henry County that summer: “I began to understand that so long as I did not know the place fully, or even adequately, I belonged to it only partially. That summer I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here.” In August, leaves with family for a year in Tuscany and southern France to study and write: “the land in Tuscany has had about 2,000 years of good care. And it looked like it when I was there. . . . The sight of that changed my mind about what was possible in land use.”

1962

Meets critic and translator Wallace Fowlie when both stay at La Napoule Arts Foundation near Cannes. Awarded Vachel Lindsay Prize by Poetry magazine. Returns to Kentucky from Europe in July. Son Pryor Clifford (Den), born August 19 in Lexington. In the fall, moves with family to New York to take up post as assistant professor of English and director of freshman writing at New York University’s University Heights campus in the Bronx. Rents apartment in New Rochelle, New York. Meets Bobbie Ann Mason.

1963

Family moves to loft at 277 Greenwich Street, New York City, downstairs from poet Denise Levertov (whom Berry had met the previous fall, although they had corresponded since 1958, when Levertov wrote Berry about a poem he had published in Poetry) and writer Mitchell Goodman. Tanya arranges playdates for daughter Mary and a fellow student at St. Luke’s School, the daughter of James Parks Morton, later dean of St. John the Divine. Spends summer in Kentucky. Dismantles the Camp, which has flooded several times over the years, and rebuilds it higher on the bank of the river. Works on novel A Place on Earth. Reads Henry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands, an important influence (“It showed me what it might mean to be a responsible Kentucky writer living in Kentucky, and it affected me deeply”). Returns to New York for fall semester. Meets poet Donald Hall, who becomes friend and correspondent, at a cocktail party on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Offered and accepts position as professor of English at the University of Kentucky to begin in the fall of 1964, where he will teach creative writing and other courses.

1964

In May, visits Levertov and Goodman’s Maine farm, where he reads in typescript Hayden Carruth’s poetry collection North Winter (Berry will later begin a correspondence with Carruth that will last until Carruth’s death in 2008). Leaves New York for Kentucky soon after. A poem about Kennedy’s assassination, November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three (with drawings by Ben Shahn) published by George Braziller in May. Begins commuting weekly from Lexington (where family lives) to the Camp to write. Meets Kentucky artist Harlan Hubbard and his wife Anna by chance while on a canoe trip on the Ohio River; later writes that their homestead “differed from Thoreau’s economy radically in some respects, and also advanced and improved upon it. The main differences were that, whereas Thoreau’s was a bachelor’s economy, the Hubbards’ was that of a married couple.” First poetry collection The Broken Ground published by Harcourt, Brace & World in September (a New York Times review will begin: “The quiet but sure and melodious voice of Wendell Berry makes ‘The Broken Ground’ an immediate pleasure”). In November, purchases the Lanes Landing property as a weekend place, a twelve-acre hillside farm adjacent to the Camp and bordering his maternal grandfather’s farm on the west side of the Kentucky River. Berry’s editor at Harcourt, Dan Wickenden, introduces him to the work of organic farming pioneer Sir Albert Howard.

1965

Awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. On July 4, moves with family to Lanes Landing Farm, where they will continue to live and farm year round. “I remember a moment—in 1965, or a little after—when I realized that I didn’t have to be a writer; there were other kinds of work also that required artistry and offered satisfaction. From here, looking back, I can see what a defining moment that was. I had, in effect, decided not to be a ‘professional’ writer, but instead, in the literal sense, an amateur: I would work for love.” Over time, expands the farm until it consists of about 117 acres in two tracts; at first, raises only food for the family. In July, sees first strip mine above Hardburly, Kentucky, while visiting writer Gurney Norman; Norman introduces him to Kentucky lawyer, writer, and environmentalist Harry Caudill and Caudill’s wife Anne, who will become lifelong friends, at a meeting of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People. Will one day write, “Gurney has been my Virgil on the upper end (the mountain end) of the Kentucky River watershed, where he is at home. I’m at home on the lower end.”

1967

In summer, makes first notes for a work that will become The Unsettling of America after reading about the report of President Johnson’s “special commission on federal food and fiber policies” that defined the nation’s greatest agriculture problem as a surplus of farmers. Novel A Place on Earth published by Harcourt, Brace & World in September. Receives Bess Hoken Prize from Poetry magazine. Becomes president of the Cumberland Chapter of the Sierra Club in Kentucky. Begins work with farmers and landowners to oppose a dam across the Red River Gorge that would destroy the gorge’s unique topography and ecosystem. In December, visits Trappist monk Thomas Merton at Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, with Ralph Eugene Meatyard and his wife Madelyn, Tanya, and Denise Levertov.

1968

On February 10, delivers speech, “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” during the Kentucky Conference on War and the Draft in Lexington, Kentucky: “I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.” In fall, takes leave from University of Kentucky to become visiting professor of creative writing at Stanford University during fall 1968 and winter 1969 quarters; lives with family in Menlo Park. Colleagues at Stanford include Wallace Stegner, Ed McClanahan, and Ken Fields. Meets writer John Haines when he gives a reading at Stanford. During the Christmas holiday, writes The Hidden Wound, an extended meditation on race and memories of two older black people who were his friends during his childhood. Poetry collection Openings published by Harcourt, Brace & World in October; The New York Times reviewer calls it a book “to win the respect of anyone who cares about contemporary verse.”

1969

Returns with family to Kentucky. Essay collection The Long-Legged House, of which the title essay is about the history of the Camp, published by Harcourt, Brace & World in April; other essays concern place and belonging, agriculture, community, small farming, the Vietnam War, and consumerism. The same month, poetry collection Findings published by The Prairie Press. Wins first prize in the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards. Receives grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

1970

On March 7, speaks at the march at the state capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky, to protest the war in Vietnam; his speech notes government disdain for the will of the people and the huge expense of the war: “With the very earth dying under our feet, with the air full of pollution; we are spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives to assure the success of tyranny in Vietnam.” At the first Earth Day celebration at the University of Kentucky, delivers speech “Think Little.” Publishes essay “The Regional Motive” in the autumn issue of The Southern Review, a response to the Southern Agrarians; in it, he is critical of those Agrarians who had moved to northern universities, saying that it “invalidated their thinking, and reduced their effort to the level of an academic exercise.” (Receives letter from Allen Tate in response, and when the essay is included in A Continuous Harmony in 1972, Berry appends an apologetic footnote; he later writes that “whatever the amount of truth in that statement, and there is some, it is also a piece of smartassery.”) Poetry collection Farming: A Hand Book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in September. Meets writer and farmer Gene Logsdon, who becomes a friend and ally, after Logsdon reads Farming: A Hand Book. The Hidden Wound published by Houghton Mifflin in September.

1971

The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge published by University Press of Kentucky in April, with photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard; it is a response to the plan to dam the Red River, which Berry had opposed since 1967. (Congress will withdraw funds for the project in 1976. In 1993 the river is designated by Congress in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System Act.) Elected Distinguished Professor of the Year by the University of Kentucky. Receives the Arts and Letters Literary Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

1972

With his brother John Berry Jr. and the Save Our Land Committee, helps in the successful opposition to the Jefferson County Air Board’s plan for an international jetport in Henry and Shelby Counties. In the fall, takes a one-year sabbatical from the University of Kentucky; his courses are covered by Ed McClanahan. Essay collection A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in September. Meets bookseller and future publisher Jack Shoemaker when Shoemaker visits Port Royal after reading The Long-Legged House.

1973

The Country of Marriage published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in February, his fifth poetry collection, with thirty-five poems, including the title poem, “Prayer After Eating,” and “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Buys neighboring forty-acre farm that had been sold to a developer, bulldozed, and graveled; begins process of repair and restoration. Invites writer and photographer James Baker Hall to take photographs during a tobacco harvest (they will be published with an essay by Berry in 2004). Begins correspondence with poet and essayist Gary Snyder, and after a few months Snyder travels to Port Royal to visit Lanes Landing. In November, brother elected to the Kentucky senate, in which he will serve until 1981.

1974

Serves as Elliston Poetry Lecturer at the University of Cincinnati for winter 1974. Novel The Memory of Old Jack published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in February (The New York Times Book Review calls it “a slab of rich Americana” and Library Journal says the novel is “worthy of a place among the best pieces of prose written by American writers of this century”). Meets Maurice Telleen at a draft horse sale in Waverly, Iowa, whose Draft Horse Journal will publish many of Berry’s stories. Gives speech on July 1 at “Agriculture for a Small Planet Symposium” in Spokane, Washington, which will form the basis for the first chapters of The Unsettling of America: “I was asked to talk about ‘Labor Intensive Micro-Systems Agriculture.’ That’s not my language, and it’s not the sort of language I wish to use because it’s the way people speak when they don’t want to be understood by most people. I’m not sure what to make of these particular phrases, but they seem to suggest a very methodological or technological approach to agriculture. Part of my purpose here is to suggest that any such approach will necessarily be too simple.” Mentions critically Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s “adapt or die” policy. Speech helps encourage the Tilth movement, a regional network of organic farmers in the Northwest (still active today). Poetry collection An Eastward Look published by Sand Dollar Press in the fall, Berry’s first publication with editor Jack Shoemaker. Wins the Emily Clark Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review.

1975

The Memory of Old Jack wins the Friends of American Writers Award. A poetry pamphlet, Horses, published by Larkspur Press in Kentucky in April; another, To What Listens, published by Best Cellar Press. Poetry collection Sayings and Doings published by Gnomon Press in December.

1977

Serves as writer-in-residence for the winter quarter at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Poetry collection Clearing published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in March. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture published by Sierra Club Books in August and dedicated to Maurice Telleen, the editor of Draft Horse Journal. Donald Hall reviews both volumes for The New York Times, writing, “Berry is a prophet of our healing, a utopian poet-legislator like William Blake.” Resigns from the University of Kentucky to become contributing editor at Rodale Press, including its magazines Organic Gardening and The New Farm.

1978

With Tanya, buys first flock (six ewes and one buck) of Border Cheviot sheep, a Scottish breed, which they will raise for the next four decades. In November, debates Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz on the agricultural crisis at Manchester University, North Manchester, Indiana: “As I see it, the farmer standing in his field is not simply a component of a production machine. He stands where lots of cultural lines cross. The traditional farmer, that is the farmer who first fed himself off his farm and then fed other people, who farmed with his family, who passed the land on down to people who knew it and had the best reasons to take care of it—that farmer stood at the convergence of traditional values, our values: independence, thrift, stewardship, private property, political liberties, family, marriage, parenthood, neighborhood—values that decline as that farmer is replaced by a technologist whose only standard is efficiency.”

1979

On June 3, opposes and with eighty-nine others is arrested during nonviolent protests against the construction of the Marble Hill nuclear power plant on the Ohio River near Madison, Indiana. The company eventually abandons the effort to finish it. Poetry collection The Gift of Gravity published by Deerfield Press.

1980

Fired from Rodale Press: “I think this was because I was more for small farmers than I was for organic farmers. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever been a very good employee.” Ernest J. Gaines visits the Berrys in Kentucky. Begins working with editor Jack Shoemaker, who had left bookselling to cofound North Point Press in Berkeley, California, in 1979, with William Turnbull. (Most of Berry’s books will henceforward be published with Shoemaker.) Poetry collection A Part published in October. Joins with brother and other residents of Henry County along with the group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth in a successful effort to oppose the building of a hazardous chemical waste incinerator in the county. Publishes poetry pamphlet The Salad. On November 11, writes to Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute, after reading Jackson’s book, New Roots for Agriculture. Visits Jackson in December to write an article about The Land Institute for The New Farm magazine. The two begin a long correspondence and friendship.

1981

Recollected Essays: 1965–1980 published in August. Essay collection The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural, dedicated to Gene Logsdon, published in November. Both volumes are reviewed in The Washington Post by Larry Woiwode, who calls them “reference works of the body and soul.” Granddaughter Katie Jean Smith born, December 16.

1982

Poetry collection The Wheel published in October.

1983

Speaking at Oberlin College in February, meets David and Elsie Kline, an Amish couple from Holmes County who had read The Unsettling of America and came to hear him speak. Kline (with Meatyard, Telleen, and Jackson) is one of the only four agrarian friends Berry has from outside of Henry County for the next decade. Essay collection Standing by Words published in October, which The Christian Science Monitor review calls “nothing short of splendid.” Publishes substantially revised and shortened version of 1967 novel A Place on Earth in March; in a new introduction, writes that the original book was “clumsy, overwritten, wasteful.”

1985

Co-edits with Wes Jackson and Bruce Coleman Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship, published by North Point in February; Berry’s contribution is the essay “Whose Head is the Farmer Using? Whose Head is Using the Farmer?” Granddaughter Virginia Dee Smith born, March 6. Collected Poems 1957–1982 published in May; The New York Times reviewer writes that Berry “can be said to have returned American poetry to a Wordsworthian clarity of purpose.” Publishes substantially revised version of Nathan Coulter in May. Helps found Community Farm Alliance, a group of Kentucky farmers, bankers, businessmen, and clergy members organized to help small farmers shift from tobacco to other products. Begins correspondence with writer John Haines.

1986

The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership published in March. Receives honorary doctorate from the University of Kentucky. In November, delivers lecture “Preserving Wildness” at the first Temenos Academy Conference in Devon, England.

1987

Returns to the English Department of the University of Kentucky, now teaching courses for “future teachers and farmers or anyone preparing to work in practical and comprehensive ways with young minds or with nature”; courses include “Composition for Teachers,” aimed at public school English teachers; “Readings in Agriculture,” which assigns Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth, as well as Sir Albert Howard, J. Russell Smith, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon; and “The Pastoral.” Publishes Home Economics: Fourteen Essays in June; the Christian Science Monitor, in reviewing it, calls Berry “the prophetic American voice of our day.” Serves as writer-in-residence for the interim term at Bucknell University. Receives the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award and the Kentucky Governor’s Milner Award in the Arts. In the fall, “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer” published in the New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly and reprinted in Harper’s ; the essay inspires many critical responses. Sabbaths: Poems published in September, the first of what will become a sustained project of poems on the themes of work and rest, fields and woods. The Landscape of Harmony: Two Essays on Wildness and Community, including the lecture “Preserving Wildness,” published by Five Seasons Press, United Kingdom, in September. Poetry collection Some Differences published by Confluence Press in December.

1988

Novel Remembering published in October and reviewed favorably in the Los Angeles Times.

1989

Receives Lannan Foundation Award for non-fiction. Poetry collection Traveling at Home published in November. Delivers the Blazer Lecture on the life and work of Kentucky artist and author Harlan Hubbard at the University of Kentucky.

1990

Granddaughter Tanya Christine Smith born, February 19. Essay collection What are People For?, dedicated to Gurney Norman, published in March; it includes the oft-repeated line, “Eating is an agricultural act.” (Berry later calls this quote as repeated without context, “an oversimplification he is now damned sorry to have written.”) Bill McKibben publishes a major profile of Berry in The New York Review of Books, writing that “wherever we live, however we do so, we desperately need a prophet of responsibility; and although the days of the prophets seem past to many of us, Berry may be the closest to one we have. But, fortunately, he is also a poet of responsibility. He makes one believe that the good life may not only be harder than we’re used to but sweeter as well.” Inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Berry’s Blazer lecture, Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, published by University Press of Kentucky in November.

1991

Standing on Earth: Selected Essays published in the United Kingdom by Brian Keeble’s Golgonooza Press in April. Publishes poetry collection Sabbaths 1987 with Larkspur Press in October. Father dies, October 31. North Point Press closes, and Berry follows Shoemaker to Pantheon.

1992

Receives the Victory of Spirit Ethics Award from the University of Louisville and the Louisville Community Foundation. From late August to late September, teaches a course at Schumacher College in South Devon, England, on “Nature as Teacher: The Lineage of Writings Which Link Culture and Agriculture”; writers assigned include Shakespeare, Sir Albert Howard, and Wes Jackson. On September 8, meets Charles, Prince of Wales. “It was a much easier meeting than I expected, for he is intelligent, considerate, and talks and listens well. He is an ally, is deeply concerned about what is happening to rural life and to civilization,” Berry wrote in a letter to Wes Jackson. Fidelity: Five Stories published in October to favorable reviews, including in The New York Times and The New Criterion.

1993

Granddaughter Emily Rose Berry born, May 2. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays published in October; The New York Times writes that the book “in its eight essays distills the author’s radically conservative views (in the good senses of both words).” Receives The Orion Society’s John Hay Award for nature writing. Quits his job at the University of Kentucky.

1994

Receives T. S. Eliot Award for creative writing from the Ingersoll Foundation. Poetry collection Entries published in May. Watch With Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch published in August. Berry follows his editor to Counterpoint Press, which Shoemaker cofounds in Washington, D.C., with Frank H. Pearl.

1995

Grandson Marshall Amyx Berry born, June 22. In October, long poem The Farm (one of the Sabbath series) published by Larkspur Press and the essay collection Another Turn of the Crank published by Counterpoint.

1996

Co-authors Three on Community with Gary Snyder and Carole Koda, published by Limberlost Press in April. Receives the Harry M. Caudill Conservationist Award from the Cumberland Chapter of the Sierra Club. Novel A World Lost published in October.

1997

Mother dies, January 3. Father-in-law Clifford Amyx dies, July 30. Two More Stories of the Port William Membership published by Gnomon Press. Receives the Lyndhurst Prize for individuals making a significant contribution to the arts. Speaks at a benefit for The Garden Project in San Francisco, November 10.

1998

Gives keynote address, “In Distrust of Movements,” at the Northeast Organic Farming Association conference. A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997 published in April. The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry published in October.

1999

Receives the Thomas Merton Award from the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice in Pittsburgh. On November 10, joins Gary Snyder and Jack Shoemaker in reading and conversation at a Lannan Foundation event in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

2000

Wins Poets’ Prize for The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. In May publishes Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition; Bill McKibben, reviewing it for The Washington Monthly, writes, “it’s hard to imagine that the millennium has seen a more important book than this slim volume from our finest essayist.” Novel Jayber Crow published in September; The New York Times reviewer writes that “by the end this melancholy barber has won both our attention and our hearts.” In October, teaches one-week course at Schumacher College in England on “Community, Sustainability and Globalisation.”

2001

In response to the events following 9/11, writes “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” which is published on October 30 by The Land Report; in December it is joined by two other essays, “The Idea of a Local Economy” and “In Distrust of Movements,” and published by The Orion Society in paperback as In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World. Publishes Sonata at Payne Hollow: A Play with Larkspur Press.

2002

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, edited and introduced by Norman Wirzba, published in April. Berry follows his editor to Shoemaker & Hoard, which Shoemaker cofounds with Trish Hoard.

2003

On February 9, essay “A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States,” critical of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy, published as a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. Essay collection Citizenship Papers published in August. Citizen’s Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership in an Age of Terror: Essays, co-authored with David James Duncan, published by The Orion Society. Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cathedral Heritage Foundation in Louisville, Kentucky.

2004

That Distant Land: The Collected Stories published in February. Receives the Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award in Orlando in June, shared by David James Duncan, awarded by the American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Round Table, for Citizen’s Dissent. Mother-in-law Dee Rice Amyx dies, July 3. Awarded the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, as well as the Soil and Water Conservation Society Honor Award from the Kentucky Bluegrass Chapter for dedicated efforts toward the preservation of unique rural and cultural resources. Writes essay for Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy, to accompany photographs by James Baker Hall; published by University Press of Kentucky in September. Novel Hannah Coulter published in September. Poetry collection Sabbaths, 2002 published by Larkspur Press.

2005

Receives O. Henry Prize for short story “The Hurt Man.” Given: Poems published in May. Inducted into the University of Kentucky Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. Blessed are the Peacemakers: Christ’s Teachings about Love, Compassion & Forgiveness, selections of the gospels compiled and introduced by Berry, published in October. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays published in October. Essay “Not a Vision of our Future, But of Ourselves,” about the earth’s destruction due to coal mining, included in Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop But It Wasn’t There, published by Wind Publications in October. Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, December 29.

2006

In August, speaks at “One Thing to Do About Food: A Forum” with Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Peter Singer, and others. In October, gives the keynote address for the thirtieth anniversary of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Novel Andy Catlett: Early Travels published in November.

2007

Visits Ernest J. Gaines in Louisiana. Shoemaker and Charlie Winton acquire both Counterpoint Press and Soft Skull Press; merges both with Shoemaker & Hoard to re-form Counterpoint.

2008

On February 14, at the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth’s annual I Love Mountains Day, delivers speech at the Kentucky state capitol in Frankfort calling for nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to protest mountaintop removal in Kentucky. In May, awarded honorary doctorate by Duke University. The Mad Farmer Poems published by Counterpoint in November. Children’s book Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World published in December. Receives the Cynthia Pratt Laughlin Medal from the Garden Club of America.

2009

On January 4, publishes an op-ed in The New York Times with Wes Jackson, “A 50-Year Farm Bill,” calling for legislation that would address soil loss, pollution, fossil fuels, and the preservation of rural communities. On January 23, releases public statement against the death penalty through the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: “As I am made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life before birth, I am also made deeply uncomfortable by the taking of a human life after birth.” On March 2, joins protests in Washington, D.C., against mountaintop removal and burning of fossil fuels. On April 3, awarded the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Cleanth Brooks Medal for Excellence in Southern Letters. Essay collection Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food with an introduction by Michael Pollan, published in August. Poetry collection Leavings published in October. In November, joins public letter signed by forty Kentucky writers to Kentucky governor and attorney general asking for a moratorium on the death penalty. On December 20, removes personal papers on loan to the University of Kentucky Archives as a result of the University’s too close relationship with the coal industry. (In August 2012, those papers will be donated to the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort.)

2010

Receives O. Henry Prize for short story “Stand By Me.” Essay collections Imagination in Place (including reflections on Wallace Stegner, Gurney Norman, Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, John Haines, James Still, Gary Snyder, and Kathleen Raine) published in January, and What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, with a foreword by Herman E. Daly, published in May.

2011

In mid-February, joins nineteen other activists protesting mountaintop removal in eastern Kentucky by occupying the office of Governor Steve Beshear in Frankfort for a weekend. The governor agrees only to tour coal communities to see the damage. The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, a personal tribute to the poet, published in February and is reviewed in The New York Review of Books. On March 2, awarded National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at the White House. On May 4, speaks at the Future of Food conference at Georgetown University: “the future of food is not distinguishable from the future of the land, which is indistinguishable, in turn, from the future of human care.” Daughter Mary Berry establishes The Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, to continue the work of Berry and his father and brother toward healthy and sustainable agriculture.

2012

Great-granddaughter Charlcye Anne Johnson born February 7. Receives O. Henry Prize for short story “Nothing Living Lives Alone.” New Collected Poems published in March; Christian Science Monitor hails it as “a welcome complement to the rest of his work.” Receives the Steward of God’s Creation Award at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C, April 22. Delivers the 41st Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on April 23: “We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.” It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays published in September. A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership published in October. On October 17, receives the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award for efforts toward a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food system, in New York City. On October 30, receives the inaugural Green Cross Award, given by the Bishop of California, for increasing cultural engagement in environmental issues.

2013

In April, elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Berry Center and St. Catharine College in Springfield, Kentucky, establish The Berry Farming Program, an undergraduate, multidisciplinary degree inspired by Wes Jackson and Berry’s philosophy and work, and designed for students from generational farm families. The program accepts its first students in the fall (St. Catharine College will close in 2016, and the following year the Berry Farming Program moves to partnership with Sterling College in Vermont). This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected & New 1979–2013 published in October. On October 17, awarded the Freedom Medal from the Roosevelt Institute’s Four Freedoms Awards in New York City. Daughter Mary marries Steve Smith, October 26.

2014

Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, edited by Chad Wriglesworth, published in June with reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, and other publications. Terrapin and Other Poems, with illustrations by Tom Pohrt, published in November. Poetry collection Roots to the Earth, with woodcuts by Wesley Bates, published by Larkspur Press.

2015

On January 28, inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, the first living writer to be so honored. Our Only World: Ten Essays published in February. Poetry collection Sabbaths 2013 published by Larkspur Press.

2016

Receives O. Henry Prize for short story “Dismemberment.” On March 17, receives the Ivan Sandof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in New York City, presented by Nick Offerman. A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 together with “The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: A Long Conversation” published in June. On September 25, delivers the Strachan Donnelley Lecture on Conservation and Restoration at the 2016 Prairie Festival in Salina, Kansas, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of The Land Institute and the tenure and retirement of Wes Jackson as president. Brother John M. Berry Jr. dies, October 27. Speaks in conversation with Wes Jackson, and moderated by Mary Berry, at the 36th Annual Schumacher Lectures, October 22. Great-granddaughter Wendy Jean Johnson born, October 29. In December, speaks with Eric Schlosser at the twentieth anniversary of the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.

2017

The World Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, selected by Paul Kingsnorth, published by Allen Lane in the United Kingdom in January. Contributes to Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future by Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, published by Princeton Architectural Press. The Art of Loading Brush published by Counterpoint in October.

Note on the Texts

This volume contains four novels—Nathan Coulter (1960, 1985), Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006), A World Lost (1996), and A Place on Earth (1967, 1983)—and twenty-three stories by Wendell Berry set in and around the fictional farming community of Port William, Kentucky, arranged in order of their narrative chronology, beginning during the Civil War and ending with World War II.

After publishing his first three novels (including two in this volume) with Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt Brace, Berry began working in 1980 with Jack Shoemaker, the editor who had cofounded North Point Press in Berkeley, California, in 1979 with William Turnbull. Beginning with the revised 1983 edition of A Place on Earth, all of Berry’s novels and story collections were edited by Shoemaker, and Berry followed him first to Pantheon when North Point closed in 1991; then to Counterpoint Press, which Shoemaker cofounded with Frank H. Pearl in Washington, D.C., in 1994; then to Shoemaker & Hoard in 2002, which Shoemaker cofounded with Trish Hoard, and in which Berry became an investor; and finally back to Counterpoint, which merged with Shoemaker & Hoard when Shoemaker and Charlie Winton purchased both Counterpoint Press and Soft Skull Press in 2007. Counterpoint Press now publishes all of Berry’s novels and story collections. None of Berry’s fiction has been published in British editions.

As Berry’s earlier work was reissued, he made revisions in the novels and stories, often to bring details of names, relationships, and geography into agreement with the rest of the Port William works; Berry said he wanted to be sure “the outhouse was always on the same side of the river.” In 2004, for the publication of his collection That Distant Land, Shoemaker & Hoard hired Berry’s daughter Mary Berry, who made notes of characters, relationships, and geography, from which the family tree and the map of Port William, printed as endpapers in the present volume, were created. Editions published after 2004 were brought into agreement with the family tree and the map. This edition uses as its source the latest Counterpoint Press texts, which incorporate corrections made throughout previous editions. Further information about the composition and publication history of each novel follows, in the order of their appearance in the present volume.

Berry worked on his first novel, Nathan Coulter, while at the Stanford Creative Writing program on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. It was published in March 1960 by Houghton Mifflin in Boston. In 1985 it was significantly revised for publication by North Point. Many of the small changes in the revised edition were made to match details of the town and characters in Berry’s later work; for example, in the first edition of the novel, Port William is never named, and the character Kate Helen Branch is known as Kate Helen Sutter. The most significant change was to cut the last twenty-two pages of the novel, which by 1985 were no longer in line with Berry’s thinking about Nathan’s later life. In the deleted pages, Nathan sleeps with his neighbor Gander Loyd’s young wife Mandy on the night his grandfather dies. After Mandy confesses, Gander tries to kill Nathan at his grandfather’s wake, and Nathan leaves home. The revised Nathan Coulter was later included in Three Short Novels (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), along with Remembering and A World Lost.

Berry originally intended Andy Catlett: Early Travels to be a short story. The first page of his longhand draft is dated February 3, 2005. It was published in 2006 by Shoemaker & Hoard. The present volume incorporates a correction made by the author: on page 450, “The old rails, some of which had probably been split from chestnut trees before the blight, had been ricked up beside the woods to be out of the way and for use mostly as fuel” has been changed to “The old rails had been ricked up beside the woods to be out of the way and for use mostly as fuel.”

The manuscript of the first draft of A World Lost is dated 1993; Berry inscribed his own copy of the first edition with the dates of his various drafts, giving June 9, 1993, for the date on which he began the first draft. He evidently laid the draft aside after completing it, and did not begin work on the second draft until January 30, 1995. He finished the second draft on April 3, 1995, and it was published in 1996 by Counterpoint.

Berry began writing A Place on Earth in early 1960 and worked on it during his travels to Italy and southern France on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961–62, and then in New York City in 1962–64, when he taught at University College of New York University; and finally in Kentucky, after he returned there in 1965. It was published by Harcourt, Brace in New York in 1967. Berry made significant cuts for its publication by North Point in 1983, shortening the book by about one-third; in his introduction to the 1983 edition, he called the original book “clumsy, overwritten, wasteful.” The cuts eliminated scenes and story lines, as well as exposition and explication of meanings, often deleting transitions that provided explication of a scene and creating a more spare style, frequently with minor revisions in phrasing. For example, where the first edition used multiple descriptive images or adjectives, the revised edition often eliminates all but one; in chapter 1, for instance, “The ear-flaps of his corduroy cap have come untied; they flail out at warped angles from the sides of his head, dangling their strings, like the wings of some disgruntled bird, or wings attached to the helmet of an old Viking” was revised in the 1983 edition so that the sentence ends with “disgruntled bird.” The revised edition cuts passages explaining the background of various characters, including Whacker Spradlin, Gideon Crop, Burley Coulter, and Ernest Finley, and eliminates a chapter giving the history of Mat Feltner’s boyhood, courtship, education, and marriage. The first edition contained many journal entries in which Mat Feltner worked out his feelings about his son Virgil’s disappearance in the war. These were all cut from the revised edition. Berry also added titles to each section, renumbered the chapters, and spelled out all contractions. A later edition, identical to the revised 1983 edition, was issued by Counterpoint in 2001.

Berry collected all of his short stories in two volumes: That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004) and A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012). Those two volumes are the sources of the texts used here. The original publication information for each of the stories follows (in the order of their appearance in the present volume):

“The Girl in the Window,” The Threepenny Review 120 (Winter 2010), pp. 14–17. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 3–13.

“The Hurt Man,” The Hudson Review 56.3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 431–38. Collected in That Distant Land, pp. 3–11.

“Fly Away, Breath,” The Threepenny Review 113 (Spring 2008), pp. 28–29. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 14–20.

“A Consent,” The Draft Horse Journal (Autumn 1990), pp. 132ff. In 1993 it was published as a limited edition chapbook of 1,000 copies by Larkspur Press, Monterey, Kentucky. Collected in Watch With Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch (New York: Pantheon, 1994), and later in That Distant Land, pp. 25–37.

“Pray Without Ceasing,” The Southern Review 28.4 (Autumn 1992), pp. 679–714. Collected in Fidelity: Five Stories (Pantheon, 1992), and then in That Distant Land, pp. 38–76.

“Watch With Me” was first published in Watch With Me. Later collected in That Distant Land, pp. 77–123.

“A Half-Pint of Old Darling,” The Draft Horse Journal 30.2 (Summer 1993), pp. 182ff. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 124–136.

“The Lost Bet” was originally published as a chapbook, How Ptolemy Proudfoot Lost a Bet, by Dim Gray Bar Press in 1992 in a limited and numbered run of 100 copies. Collected in That Distant Land, pp. 137–144.

“Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows,” Oxford American 77 (Summer 2012), pp. 44–47. It also appeared in The Draft Horse Journal (Winter 2013), pp. 108ff. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 21–26.

“Thicker than Liquor” was first published in The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership (San Francisco: North Point, 1986), and then in That Distant Land, pp. 145–163.

“Nearly to the Fair,” The Draft Horse Journal 30.3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 149–57. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 164–180.

“Burley’s Coulter’s Fortunate Fall,” The Sewanee Review 116.2 (Spring 2008), pp. 264–73. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 27–36.

“The Solemn Boy,” The Draft Horse Journal (Summer 1994), pp. 184ff. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 181–195.

“A Jonquil for Mary Penn,” The Atlantic Monthly (February 1992), pp. 73–79. Collected in Fidelity, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 196–209.

“Turn Back the Bed,” The Draft Horse Journal (Winter 1989–90), pp. 130–37. Collected in Watch With Me, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 210–220.

“A Burden,” Oxford American 66 (Fall 2009), pp. 66–70. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 37–47.

“A Desirable Woman,” Hudson Review 61.2 (Summer 2008), pp. 295–314. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 48–68.

“Misery,” Shenandoah 58.3 (Winter 2008), pp. 111ff. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 69–80.

“Andy Catlett: Early Education,” The Threepenny Review 117 (Spring 2009), pp. 6–7. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 81–87.

“Drouth,” The Threepenny Review 128 (Winter 2012), pp. 8–11. It also appeared in Farming. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 88–97.

“Stand By Me,” The Atlantic Fiction 2008 Issue (August 2008), pp. 18–23. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 98–112.

“Making It Home,” The Sewanee Review 100.1 (Winter 1992), pp. 1–17, under the title “A Homecoming.” Collected in Fidelity, and then in That Distant Land, pp. 221–236.

“Not a Tear,” The Threepenny Review 128 (Winter 2012), p. 30. Collected in A Place in Time, pp. 113–115.

This volume presents the texts of the original printings chosen for inclusion here, but it does not attempt to reproduce features of their typographic design. The texts are presented without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are often expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 91.40, firstcomers; 131.1, Women’s; 148.10, go; 224.17, stubborness; 269.22, shirt tail; 354.35 (and passim), O. R.; 360.20, uncle; 367.39, uncle; 369.29, Gibralter; 372.24, passive or; 374.19, their; 381.37, Milby’s; 385.5, for in; 386.17, Russet’s; 397.22, uncle; 403.28, Women’s; 403.31, uncle; 404.5, athiesm; 419.6, uncle; 422.34, uncle; 437.3, uncle; 445.27, uncle; 458.1, Standardbred; 475.20, was then; 491.34, Boys ’; 512.27, uncle; 543.30, grownup; 550.15, uncle; 551.4, uncle; 561.1 (and passim), R. T.; 608.2, uncle; 608.7, uncle; 671.34, ”the far; 677.8, nearly; 685.9, ”We’ll; 687.28, work Burley; 703.2, of house; 731.5, be goes; 752.19, We are; 754.12, be had; 778.5, ”Mat; 780.22, out it; 783.14, “‘Whoa! Jarrat; 810.19, steam; 821.29, asks,; 863.17, goodbye; 865.28, says,; 874.10, Nettie,; 889.36, ‘cause; 894.11, world!’ She; 902.1, day, before; 956.9, be would.

Notes

In the notes below, the reference numbers denote page and line of the hardcover edition (the line count includes headings). No note is made for material included in standard desk-reference books. Quotations from Shakespeare are keyed to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Biblical quotations are keyed to the King James Version. For references to other studies and further information than is included in the Chronology, see Wendell Berry: Life and Work, ed. Jason Peters (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007); and Conversations with Wendell Berry, ed. Morris Allen Grubbs (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

8.37 the so-called Home Guard] Union-sympathizing militia units from Kentucky; they participated in many skirmishes during the Civil War as well as a few battles.

26.24 Hargrave] Corresponds more or less to Carrollton, Kentucky, originally called Port William. Carrollton is at the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers, about ten miles from Berry’s Port Royal, Kentucky.

38.7–9 Breathes there the man . . . my native land”?] From “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805).

38.12–13 “Thanatopsis”] Poem (1817) by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878).

38.14 “A Psalm of Life,”] Poem (1838) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882).

38.15 “The Fool’s Prayer,”] Poem (1879) by American poet Edward Rowland Sill (1841–1887).

38.15 “To a Waterfowl,”] Poem (1818) by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878).

38.15–16 “To Daffodils,”] Poem (1648) by English lyric poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674).

38.16 “Concord Hymn,”] Poem (1837) celebrating the Battle of Concord during the Revolutionary War by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), originally titled “Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836” and containing the line “the shot heard round the world.”

38.16 “The Choir Invisible,”] “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” poem (1867) by English novelist George Eliot (1819–1880).

38.16–17 “Wolsey’s Farewell to His Greatness,”] Henry VIII, III.ii.418–440.

38.17 Hamlet’s Soliloquy] Hamlet, III.i.55–89.

38.17–18 “The Epitaph” from Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,”] Concluding three stanzas from the 1751 poem by English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771).

38.20–21 loved to the depth . . . her soul could reach.] “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43),” poem (1850) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861).

38.23 the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.] From “Invictus” (1875) by English poet and critic William Ernest Henley (1849–1903).

38.24 be given liberty or death.] From a March 23, 1775, speech calling for putting the American colonies in a state of defense, made by Patrick Henry (1736–1799) to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

39.2–3 ‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin’ by James Whitcomb Riley] Wellknown dialect poem (1883) by American poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916), author of “Little Orphant Annie” (1885).

40.11 “In the Gloaming”] Popular song (1877) by English composer Annie Fortescue Harrison (c. 1851–1944), with lyrics from an 1874 poem of the same title by English author and poet Meta Orred (c. 1846–1925).

78.20–21 “Pray without ceasing.”] 1 Thessalonians 5:17.

116.16 a coker’s] Term for a coal miner or a person living in a coal-mining region, derived from coke, a fuel made from coal.

123.3 “Couldn’t you stay awake?”] Cf. Matthew 26:40.

126.22 “The Unclouded Day.”] Hymn (1879) by American Midwest circuit preacher the Reverend Josiah Kelly Alwood (1828–1909).

130.18–19 the constitutional amendment . . . liquors”] The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting alcoholic beverages was ratified on January 16, 1919, and took effect on January 16, 1920. It was repealed in its entirety on December 5, 1933, by the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment.

130.20 the women’s suffrage amendment] The Nineteenth Amendment, prohibiting both states and the federal government from denying citizens the right to vote based on sex, passed Congress on June 4, 1919, and was ratified on August 18, 1920, the culmination of a women’s suffrage movement that had lasted over seventy years.

131.1 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union] A temperance organization dedicated to social reform founded in 1873 that supported the Eighteenth Amendment and worked for reform in women’s suffrage, labor, and sanitation, and also supported world missionary work.

137.3–4 a local brand known as Old Darling] The only whiskey distillery in Carroll County, Kentucky (which contains Carrollton, the basis for Hargrave; see note 26.24); it was originally known as Whitehead and Company before being purchased by Andrew Darling in 1880, who created the Old Darling brand.

138.1–2 These will come to no good . . . hen] Irish proverb often erroneously believed to be from the Bible. A Scottish version dating from 1721 reads, “A crooning cow, a crowing Hen and a whistling Maid boded never luck to a house.”

138.7 “Old Joe Clark”] Southern American folk song (c. 1900) chronicling the life of Joseph Clark, a Kentucky mountaineer and moonshiner who fought with the 7th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry for the Union army in the Civil War and was murdered in 1885.

138.12 “Soldier’s Joy”] Fiddle tune of Scottish or Irish origins dating from the 1760s.

162.6–7 “The lion and the lamb . . . lead them.”] Cf. Isaiah 11:6.

183.38–184.21 There’s a land . . . beautiful shore.] From “In the Sweet By-and-By,” a hymn (1868) by Sanford F. Bennett (1836–1898) with music by Joseph P. Webster (1819–1875).

186.19 “Molly Darling”] Popular song (1871) written by Kentucky lyricist William Shakespeare Hays (1837–1907).

193.30 the Odd Fellows] An international fraternity founded prior to 1730 in London that promotes philanthropic and charitable efforts.

211.6–7 Surely the people is grass.] Isaiah 40:7.

235.18 “Not a single sparrow falls without He knows about it,”] Cf. Matthew 10:29.

236.19–21 enough fishes to feed a multitude . . . no loaves.] Cf. Matthew 14:13–21.

244.21–22 “He ain’t the boss, . . . boss is done.] In his essay collection The Hidden Wound (1970), Berry wrote: “When I would be playing where the men were working in the fields—I suppose in response to some lapse of tact on my part, some unconscious display of self-importance or arrogance—one of them would sing or quote:

He ain’t the boss, he’s the boss’s son,

But he’ll be the boss when the boss is done.”

250.11–12 that’s where He called them from. From fishing.] Cf. Matthew 4:18–22.

258.17 The Lord looketh on the heart.] 1 Samuel 16:7.

263.26–28 “Down along the woodland, . . . and the roar . . .”] “The Wabash Cannonball,” late nineteenth-century American folk song first published in 1882 by composer J. A. Roff.

269.1–2 Down in the Valley Where the Green Grass Grows] The first line of a schoolyard jump rope rhyme, a version of which goes: “Down in the valley where the green grass grows, / There sat Mary, sweet as a rose. / Along came Johnny, kissed her on the cheek. / How many kisses did she get?”

272.27 looking sweet as a rose] See previous note.

276.11–12 the thorns and thistles that the ground has brought forth.] Cf. Genesis 3:18.

276.24 ‘Yellow Rose o’ Texas’] American folk song dating from the early nineteenth century, adopted as a marching song by the Texas brigade during the American Civil War.

278.37 Laocoön] A Trojan priest who attempted to warn the city against the Trojan horse; in the Aeneid, Virgil gives him the line “I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts,” the origin of the phrase “beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” As punishment for his warning, Poseidon sent two sea serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons. Laocoön is often depicted as struggling against the intertwined snakes.

281.24–28 “one of the least of these my brethren” . . . the penalty.] Cf. Matthew 25:31–46. The penalty for neglecting to care for “the least of these my brethren” is eternal punishment.

286.32–33 Bird can’t fly with one wing] Proverbial phrase of Irish origin for accepting a second drink.

299.5 “Mother Machree”] Song (1910) written for the Broadway musical Barry of Ballymore (1911) with lyrics by Rida Johnson Young (1875–1926) and music by Chauncey Olcott (1858–1932) and Ernest R. Ball (1878–1927).

299.5 “There’s a Cradle in Carolina”] Song (1927) by American singer-songwriter Gene Austin (1900–1972).

299.6–7 “Nothing but Something Cool.”] According to Berry, “My son and I encountered our beloved neighbor Melvin Ford on an extremely hot day. He asked, ‘Did you ever hear a song called “Nothing but Something Cool”?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, it was a good song.’”

313.37 A small Packard] Luxury automobile produced from 1899 to 1956 in Detroit.

315.25 the time of D. Boone.] Daniel Boone (1734–1820) is a folk hero, an early explorer of Kentucky, and a founder of Boonesborough, Kentucky, in 1775.

320.32 “he that hasteth with his feet sinneth”] Proverbs 19:2.

328.12–13 Now they were stricken in age, . . . manner of women.] Cf. Genesis 18:11.

349.14–15 as numerous as the sand that is upon the seashore.] Cf. Genesis 22:17.

351.31 “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds,”] Hymn (1782) by English pastor and theologian John Fawcett (1740–1817).

365.31 love that “hopeth all things,”] 1 Corinthians 13:7.

368.31–32 “Like Jehorum, . . . without being desired.”] Cf. 2 Chronicles 21:20.

369.20–25 While I draw . . . myself in Thee] From “Rock of Ages,” a hymn (1763) written by Anglican priest Augustus Toplady (1740–1778), and usually sung to a hymn tune by American composer Thomas Hastings (1784–1872).

379.5–6 ‘Whosoever looketh on a woman . . . heart.’] Matthew 5:28.

389.7 the seventh of December 1941] On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The United States entered World War II as a result, declaring war on Japan on December 8.

415.24–25 Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur] American musician and poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) published The Boy’s King Arthur in 1880, a retelling of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) in modernized language.

416.20 actuated, like Daniel Boone, by a desire for elbow room] Cf. “Daniel Boone,” humorous poem (1924) by Arthur Guiterman (1871–1943), in which “Elbow room!” forms a refrain.

421.11 Betty Crocker] Character created in 1921 by the Washburn-Crosby Company for use in advertising campaigns for their milling business; in 1928 Washburn-Crosby merged with five other milling companies to form General Mills. General Mills began issuing Betty Crocker cookbooks in 1930.

422.30 wartime speed limit] A nationwide speed limit of 35 miles per hour was introduced in December 1942 in order to save both gas and rubber, by limiting the wear on tires.

427.5 which mule was in the lead] The “lead” mule was on the left.

427.7 how many inches made a hand?] Four inches, based on the width of a human hand.

427.8 gee from haw?] Commands instructing a draft animal to turn right and left, respectively.

431.35 “Sambo” and “Massa.”] “Sambo” was used as a stereotypical name for African Americans from as early as the Civil War. It stems from the Latin American Spanish word “zambo,” meaning a person of mixed African and Native American ancestry.

431.39 “little black Sambo,”] The Story of Little Black Sambo, best-selling 1899 children’s book by Scottish writer Helen Bannerman (1862–1946), one of the first positively portrayed black heroes in children’s literature; since the mid-twentieth century it has been accused of racism.

438.7 Paradise Lost ] Epic poem (1667) by John Milton (1608–1674).

444.25 a song about Old Aunt Dinah] Aunt Dinah is a character appearing in numerous traditional American folk songs, which may have been derived from pre–Civil War slave ballads.

445.1 V-2 rockets] The first long-range guided ballistic missiles, developed by Germany during World War II by Werner von Braun (1912–1977) and Walter Dornberger (1895–1980), which had a much higher target accuracy than previous missiles.

449.19 ‘Katy bar the door,’] American idiom suggesting that trouble lies ahead, originating perhaps from “The King’s Tragedy,” a poem (1881) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) that chronicles the tale of Catherine Douglas, a lady-in-waiting who tried to prevent the assassination of King James I of Scotland in 1437.

452.13 the Swiss Family Robinson] Novel (1812, translated into English 1814) by Johann David Wyss (1743–1818) about a shipwrecked Swiss family.

456.18–19 Renfro Valley ] Renfro Valley Barn Dance, a country music stage and radio show that debuted in 1937 in Cincinnati and from November 4, 1939, aired from Renfro Valley, south of Berea, Kentucky. It later moved to Dayton, Ohio.

456.19 Wings over Jordan] Radio show, founded as The Negro Hour in 1937, based in Cleveland and featuring African American songs and stories, as well as lectures and sermons. Its name was changed to Wings Over Jordan in 1938 when it was picked up by CBS for national distribution. It was cancelled in 1947.

458.3–4 Phoenix Hotel] Prominent landmark in Lexington, established in the 1820s, although a tavern had been located on the site since 1800. During the Civil War, it was used as a headquarters at various times by both Union and Confederate generals. One of the earliest American horse races, the Phoenix Hotel Stakes, was first run in Lexington in 1831, and many other races were named for the hotel up to the 1930s. The hotel was demolished in 1981.

460.10–12 “Sleep is nature’s . . . Night Thoughts.] Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742–45), Night I, l. i.

465.6 the Kaiser’s head on a pole.] Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, abdicated in November 1918 at the end of World War I after losing the support of the German army and spent the rest of his life in exile in the Netherlands. He did not die until 1941. In The Hidden Wound (1970), Berry wrote of Aunt Georgie, an African American woman who lived on his grandfather’s farm: “She used to tell a story about the end of the First World War, of people dancing wildly through the streets, carrying the Kaiser’s head impaled on the end of a fence rail. . . . Was it some celebration she had seen in Louisville, at which the Kaiser had been mutilated in effigy? Was it something she had read or imagined? I don’t know. I assumed then that it was really the Kaiser’s head, that she had seen that barbaric celebration herself, and that it was one of the central events of the history of the world.”

465.34–35 like seeds upon fertile ground.] Cf. Matthew 13:8.

479.17–18 “Layos to catch meddlers.”] Proverbial phrase in the eastern and southern U.S. meaning “None of your business.” A “layo,” or “layover,” is a pit covered with boughs constructed as a trap for bears or other animals.

487.17 “Blue Eyes,”] American folk ballad “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” also known as “Broken Ties,” popularized by the Carter Family folk music group, which first recorded it in 1929.

490.23–25 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . E. W. Kemble] Mark Twain hired E. W. Kemble (1861–1933) to illustrate the first edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain found the illustrations for the first twelve chapters “forbidding & repulsive,” but of the illustrations for the last eight chapters, he wrote, “This batch of pictures is most rattling good. They please me exceedingly.”

490.37 The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Little Men] For The Swiss Family Robinson, see note 452.13. Treasure Island, 1883 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson; Little Men, 1871 novel by Louisa May Alcott, the sequel to Little Women (1868–69).

490.38–39 Little John and Friar Tuck and Much the Miller’s Son] Three of Robin Hood’s Merry Men.

490.39 A Christmas Carol ] A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas (1843) by Charles Dickens.

514.3–4 a time when we’ll not know the summer . . . trees.] According to Berry, a “saying” modeled on biblical prophecy.

514.27–29 “great voice, as of a trumpet, . . . last.”] Revelation 1:10–11.

524.27–35 Turkey in the straw . . . take it out! ”] Local variant of “Turkey in the Straw,” an American folk song of disputed origin that was popularized by blackface performers in the early nineteenth century.

538.1–2 The dead rise and walk . . . thought ] From Berry’s poem “The Bed,” section 3, ll. 3–4, published in Clearing (1977).

540.36 “Rock of Ages.”] See note 369.20–25.

562.27 Redwood] Chiefly Scottish English, “red-wood” can mean stark, raving mad.

564.1–4 Missed the Saturday . . . anymore.] “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” jazz standard (1940) by Duke Ellington (1899–1974) originally titled “Never No Lament,” for which songwriter Bob Russell (1914–1970) added lyrics and a new title in 1942.

581.25–26 “Bell-Bottom Trousers,”] Song (1944) by Lithuanian American bandleader Moe Jaffe (1901–1972) based on a nineteenth-century English folk song, “Rosemary Lane.”

581.27–28 “One Dozen Roses.”] Hit 1942 song with music by American bandleader Dick Jurgens (1910–1995) and songwriter Walter Donovan (1888–1964), and lyrics by Roger Lewis (1885–1948) and Country (Joseph H.) Washburn (1904–1974).

600.16 ‘Yellow Rose o’ Texas’] See note 276.24.

600.28–29 “nature’s sweet restorer.”] See note 460.10–12.

601.5–7 “The time will come . . . budding of the trees.”] See note 514.3–4.

609.6 blind tiger] Speakeasy.

626.21–22 Custom cannot stale her infinite variety.] Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.234–35.

626.28–29 “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,”] See note 564.1–4.

708.1–2 the great flood of 1937] The Ohio River flooded in January and February 1937 and killed 385 people, displacing one million from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky.

756.1–2 as faithfully as the prophet’s raven.] Cf. 1 Kings 17:6.

821.2–3 It was poplar lumber they had to build with then.] Due to aggressive logging, the American yellow poplar or tulip poplar, the state tree of Kentucky, almost disappeared as “old growth” at the turn of the twentieth century. It was prized for strength and light weight as well as its resistance to termites.

894.17 Aunt Fanny] In The Hidden Wound (1970), Berry wrote: “The character of Aunt Fanny in my book A Place on Earth is to some extent modeled on Aunt Georgie” (for whom see note 465.6). He continued, “But the purpose of Aunt Fanny in that book is not to represent Aunt Georgie, and she comes off as a much simpler character. Aunt Fanny had spent all her life in the country, but Aunt Georgie had lived for some time in the city, and her mind, in its way of rambling and sampling, had become curiously cosmopolitan. Like Aunt Fanny, she had an obsession with Africa, but I think it must have started with her under the influence of the Back to Africa movement.”

895.40 Witch of Endor] Cf. 1 Samuel 28.

903.33–35 How many biscuits . . . This morning.] From “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat?,” a traditional fiddle tune first recorded by country musician Humphrey Bate (1875–1936) in 1928.

926.23–24 “Old Dan Tucker . . . frying pan ] From “Old Dan Tucker,” an American folk song of unknown origin dating from the early nineteenth century, with lyrics potentially written by blackface performer Dan Emmett (1815–1904).

931.36–37 When your baby . . . your mind.] From “You Nearly Lose Your Mind,” song (1942) by American country singer-songwriter Ernest Tubb (1914–1984).

932.7–10 Going up Cripple Creek, . . . a calf. ] From “Cripple Creek,” an early twentieth-century Appalachian fiddle tune.

935.22 Flights of buzzards wing him to his rest!] Cf. Hamlet, V.ii.360: “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

944.22–23 “ ’tis not so deep . . . ’twill serve.”] Romeo and Juliet, III.i.96–97.

970.8 among those trapped at Bastogne.] Part of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, American troops were surrounded by German forces from December 21 to 26, but managed to hold Bastogne, a key road junction in the southern Ardennes, and disrupt German attempts to reach the Meuse River near Dinant.

984.11–14 Well done, thou good . . . thy Lord.] Cf. Matthew 25:23.

984.31–36 Blessèd are the poor . . . be comforted.] Matthew 5:3–4.