‘Five year, and hit was that a-way. Hit was a way of live-en, if’n hit’s in a man’s heart. And I ne’er had no complaint. I was easy in my heart and mind, lak ne’er a-fore in my time of doen and strive-en. I’d a-been thar yit, I reckin, if’n I had’n a-took sick, and hit bad. Hit was in the summer of ’ninety, and we was in the high country, but hit looked lak sumthen went outer me. I wasn’t good fer nuthen. Looked lak I couldn’t raise my hand, the pith gone out of me. I’d jist set on the ground, and look up at the sky, how thin and blue hit was over them mountains. Then the fever come. Hit taken me, and I said, “Willie Proudfit, you gonna die.” That’s what I said, and the words was in my head lak a bell. Then hit come to me, how other men was dead, and they taken hit the best they could and the bitterness, and I said, “Willie Proudfit, what air man kin do, you kin do.” But the fever come agin, and I said, “You gonna die, and in a fer country.”

  ‘The Indians done what they could. They give me stuff to drink, black and bitter hit was, outer yerbs and sich, but hit ne’er done no good. I’d burn up with fever, then I’d lay and look and ever thing in the world was diff’rent to me. Wouldn’t nuthen stay on my stomach, looked lak. And then the fever agin. The Indians treated me good. A man couldn’t a-ast more. But the Lord had laid a powerful sickness on me, and I said, “Willie Proudfit, you gonna die.”

  ‘But no, ain’t no man knows what the Lord’s done marked out fer him. And many’s the pore, weakid man done looked on the face of blessedness, bare-eyed, and ne’er knowed hit by name. Lak a blind man a-liften his face to the sun, and not knowen. Hit was a blessen the Lord laid on me, and I praise hit.

  ‘Them Indians seen I was witheren up, lak a tree in the sun done had the axe at hits root. Because they done called me brother and give me a name, they done ever thing they could. They built the medicine house, made a fire thar, and set me in the medicine house, and tried to take out the evil. Not jist one day, they was tryen to git the evil out. They set in thar and some of ’em had their faces all covered up with masks made outer leather and painted, and they waved eagle feathers on me to bring out the evil, and sometimes they put stuff on my head and my feet and my knees and my chist, stuff they done mixed up, and sometimes corn meal. Sometimes hit was sand on my head. And sometimes they washed me with suds, just lak soap suds, they done made outer yerbs, and done dried me with corn meal. And agin they done put pine branches on me, and put stuff on the fire fer me to breathe and one thing and ernuther, and me too nigh gone to keer. And sometimes they done made pictures outer colored sand on the floor, and feathers and beads and sich, and they was singen and hooten, sometimes. To git out the evil. And they put me in them sweat houses, little houses not much bigger’n fer a man to lay in, and covered with dirt and sand, and pictures in colored sand, and a curtain outer deerskin fer a door. But hit had to be skin off’n a deer they done run down and smother with a man’s hand, not shot or cut fer the killen. They put me in hit, and rocks they done got red hot, and sweated me. And one night they was dance-en all night hit looked lak, and singen, naked and painted white, I recollect, and the fires was burnen big.

  ‘But the fever done had me sometimes, and hit was lak a dream. I was a-goen, and nuthen to lay holt on. And I didn’t keer. The time comes and a man don’t keer. They taken me out and laid me on the ground. Hit was night. I knowed that, then I was a-goen. I might been gone, fer all I know. They ain’t no sayen.

  ‘I might been gone, when hit come to me, what I seen. I seen a long road come-en down a hill, and green ever whar. Green grass layen fresh, and trees, maple and elm and sich. And my feet was in the road, and me a-move-en down hit. They was a fire in me, and thirsten. Hit was a green country, and the shade cool, but the fire was in me. I come down the hill, and seen houses setten off down the valley, and roofs, and the green trees standen. I taken a bend in the road, and thar was a little church, a white church with a bell hangen, and the grass green a-fore hit. Thar was a spring thar, by the church, and I seen hit and run to hit. I put my head down to the water, fer the fire in me, lak a dog gitten ready to lap. I didn’t take no water in my hand and sup. Naw, I put my face down to the water, and hit was cool on me. The coolness was in me, and I taken my fill.

  ‘No tellen how long, and I lifted up my head. Thar a girl was sitten, over thar nigh the spring, and she was a-looken at me. I opened my mouth but nary a word come out. Hit looked lak the words was big in me to busten, and none come.

  ‘Then hit was finished and done, and I’d ne’er spoke. The dream, if’n hit was a dream. No tellen how long I laid thar, but I come to, hit was mornen light, gray, fer the rain was fall-en. I didn’t have no fever. I laid thar, and my head was full of what all I’d been a-dreamen. They taken me in, and a-fore night I et a little sumthen, and hit stayed on my stomach. My strength come back, not fast, but hit come. All the time I was a-thinken what I’d seen, the church and the green trees standen, and the spring. Ever day. I’d seen hit, I knowed I’d seen hit, but I couldn’t give hit the name. Then I knowed. Hit was the road come-en down to Thebes, in Kentucky, when I was a kid thar, and the church setten thar whar hit takes a bend. I ne’er seen hit since pappy done up and taken outer Kentucky fer Arkansas when the war come and he was on-easy in his mind, but hit come to me plain as day, and I said, “I’m a-goen thar.”

  ‘My strength come, and I done hit. I told them Indians goodbye, and they taken my hand. I come to Santa Fe, and up Oklahoma, lak I said, and on to Arkansas. I was gonna see my pappy, and my mammy, if’n the Lord had done spared ’em. I come in Arkansas at Fort Smith, and on east, whar my folks had been. My mammy was dead. Been dead a long time, folks said. And my pappy, he was dead too, but not more’n goen on a year. He was kilt, with a knife. A feller from up Missouri kilt him. He was setten down at a store one night, at the settlement, and ever body was talken and goen on. They was a-talken about the war, and how hit come. The feller from up Missouri, he was cussen the rebels, and my pappy said, naw, not to be a-cussen ’em that a-way, they didn’t do hit, no more’n no other man. They had a argument, and the feller from up Missouri, he cut my pappy, and him a old man. The feller from up Missouri taken out, and was gone, no man knowed whar. And my pappy died, layen thar on the floor. I seen the place he was buried, and my mammy. Nobody knowed whar my brothers was gone, been gone a long time. Strange folks was a-live-en in the house my pappy’d done built long back, the house I’d seen him start builden that day he’d stood thar and looked whar hit was gonna set, sayen, “Lord God, Lord God,” right soft, and then, sudden-lak, to ma, “Henrietta, gimme that-air axe!” I seen hit, the logs notched clean and set tight, and the chimney true, ne’er sunk nor slipped yit.

  ‘I sold the place fer what I could git. I ne’er hemmed and hawed. Then I come on, on here to Kentucky, acrost Tennessee. I come on to Thebes. Hit was a hot day, when I come, but summer not on good yit. I come over the hill, down the road, and thar was the grass and the trees standen green. Lak hit is, and lak hit come to me that time. I taken the turn in the road, and thar was the church. New Bethany church, hit is. And the spring, and I run to hit, on-steady and nigh blind, with what come on me when I seen hit. I put my face down to the water. I taken my fill.

  ‘I lifted up my head, slow. And thar she set.’

  His voice stopped. In the silence, in the marshy ground down the creek the frogs were piping. Then he said: ‘Hit was Adelle.’

  ‘Yes,’ his wife’s voice said, quietly, from the shadow where her chair was, ‘I was setten thar, in the shade of a sugar-tree, and I seen him come down the hill.’

  Chapter sixteen

  IT WAS twilight when Mr. Munn, standing in the side yard, where the woodpile and chopping-block were, happened to lift his head and see the buggy coming up the lane by the creek. Without haste, he propped the axe against the chopping-block, and bent over to pick up an armful of stove-lengths from the bed of old chips and rotting bark. Then he went to the kitchen.

  Adelle Proudfit was still there, drying dishes. The lighted lamp was on the table by the stacked dishes. Mr. Munn leaned, and let the wood slide off of his arm into the box with a subdued thudding. Then he turned to her. ‘There’s somebody coming up the road,’ he said, ‘in a buggy. They’re probably pulling up now.’

  She looked at him, as though about to speak, but he continued: ‘I’m just going to step out back. It’s probably somebody to see Willie, but I’ll just get out back till they’re gone. I’ll be in easy calling.’

  He moved rapidly from the house toward the fringe of undergrowth at the base of the bluff. He was looking back at the lane, but nothing now was visible there. The buggy was probably standing at the gate, hidden by the bulk of the house. He did not go up the bluff, but stopped in the first depth of shadow. He sat on the ground, his back propped against the trunk of a cedar. The earth, matted with the long accumulation of fallen needles, was resilient beneath him. He fixed his eyes upon the house, and waited.

  The light was fast draining out of the sky, now, and the darkening bulk of the house, against the darkness of the rise at the other side of the creek, was losing its definition. But the windows showed their rectangles of yellow light against that general obscurity. At last, he thought that he could make out the crunching of wheels over gravel, the sound of the buggy moving off down the lane. But he could not be sure, and now it was too dark to see.

  Some little time after he had thought he heard the sound of the wheels crunching gravel, he saw a figure emerge from the shadow of the house and move toward him. Even before it approached the edge of the undergrowth, he was sure, from some scarcely discernible trick of posture or a momentary impression of a long, gliding gait, that it was Willie Proudfit. Mr. Munn did not move.

  Willie Proudfit stopped at the edge of the undergrowth, and spoke softly: ‘Perse, Perse.’

  ‘Yes?’ Mr. Munn answered.

  ‘Hit’s all right.’

  Mr. Munn came from the secure darkness of the cedars, and stood beside the other man.

  ‘Hit’s a lady,’ Willie Proudfit said.

  ‘A lady?’

  ‘Doc MacDonald sent her.’ He paused. ‘To see you. That’s what she said.’

  Mr. Munn turned his eyes from the man beside him to the house, where light showed at the windows. A sluggish resentment stirred in him: like the resentment of a person who in half sleep is disturbed at some aimless, undefined noise. He passed his tongue over his dry lips, then said, ‘A lady?’

  ‘Mr. Bill Christian’s girl,’ the other man answered. ‘I ne’er knowed him but by name.’

  They moved toward the house. Willie Proudfit was saying: ‘A feller brung her in a buggy from Ashby’s Crossen over to Thebes, and then brung her out here. But Dellie, she’s make-en her stay the night, and that-air feller’s done gone. I didn’t ketch his name. He ne’er come in. I went out and ast him to git out and come in, but he said, naw, he ——’

  She stood in the middle of the floor, quietly, giving him the impression, somehow, that she might have been standing in that position for a long time. He came in through the now darkened kitchen, and as he approached the next room and saw her standing there, framed in the opening of the doorway, he thought how, that first day in the hotel room, while the tumult of the crowds rose from the street, he had suddenly seen her stand in the middle of the floor, like that, and had been struck by her quietness, the sense of an inner steadiness. She stood there now, as he approached, and the lamplight fell across her face, shadowing one half of it, seeming to define and sharpen, as by a hint of the potentiality of time, the structure of the bone beneath the flesh.

  He went through the doorway. Her eyes had been fixed on him as he approached — he was sure of that — but she did not move.

  ‘Hello, Lucille,’ he said, and went toward her, holding out his hand. He saw Adelle Proudfit standing over near the table where the lamp was.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and gave him her hand. ‘How are you?’ she asked. She seemed to be studying his face, fleetingly but intently. Seeing that, he was embarrassed, as though she might penetrate to a secret guilt.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I’m getting along fine.’

  She seemed about to speak, but did not. She withdrew her hand from his, startling him, for he had been unaware that he still held it. Then, as though collecting herself, she explained: ‘We wanted to know how you were getting along. That’s why I came. Doctor MacDonald told me where you were’ — she was speaking with a tone of dispassionate precision, as though delivering a memorized and only half-understood message. ‘He thought that I’d better come, and not somebody else; if he came somebody might guess.’

  ‘I appreciate it,’ he replied, ‘you coming. And Doctor MacDonald wanting to know how I was getting along.’ His voice sounded stale to his ears.

  She turned toward Adelle Proudfit, saying: ‘Mrs. Proudfit was so nice to ask me to spend the night. I’m going back tomorrow. We just wanted to know ——’

  ‘Naw, naw,’ Willie Proudfit protested. He had entered the room and was leaning against the wall near the kitchen door. ‘Not tomorrow, and you come-en all that way to git here. Ain’t no sense, not visiten a spell.’

  ‘No,’ his wife interrupted, ‘we’d be proud to have you visit.’

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ Lucille Christian said, ‘tomorrow, but I appreciate your asking me. A whole lot.’

  Her voice stopped, and she stood there, unmoving, but with no air of expectancy. Mr. Munn felt a compulsion to break the ensuing moment of silence, which seemed, suddenly, endless. But he could think of nothing to say. Then, almost with gratitude, he heard Willie Proudfit suggesting, ‘— but let’s set out on the porch, hit’s cool out thar.’ Then Lucille Christian turned toward Adelle Proudfit, and took a step toward the front door. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s been awfully hot today, worse than usual for this time of year.’ They went out on the porch, Willie Proudfit last, carrying a rocking chair. He placed the chair for Lucille Christian.

  They sat on the porch, in the darkness, for more than an hour. They talked slowly, with little pauses between the conclusion of one speech and the beginning of the next. In those pauses there was the sound of frogs down in the low ground, and the dry, unwearying insistence of the insects in the trees by the lane. Their voices would rise and fall, slowly but in a living rhythm, one responding to another, fulfilling it; but the meaning in those voices would seem to escape Mr. Munn, unless, by a sudden effort, he forced himself to attend to them, word by word. That dry, rasping sound from the insects in the dark trees yonder, that unpatterned, unrelenting, interminable sound, drew him, and enveloped him. It was as though it was in him, finally, in his head, the essence of his consciousness, reducing whatever word came to him to that undifferentiated and unmeaning insistence.

  Lucille Christian and Willie Proudfit did most of the talking. She asked him how his crops were, and he answered her, unhurriedly, in detail, naming the dates of the planting of each field, and recalling what the weather had been like at each stage in the season. And he asked her how Doctor MacDonald and his folks were.

  ‘They’re pretty well,’ she said, ‘except for Professor Ball. He’s failing, they say. I haven’t seen him in a long time, but that’s what they say.’

  ‘And yore pa?’ Willie Proudfit asked. ‘I hear’d he’d not been so well off, and I was meanen to ast you.’

  She did not answer for a moment, then replied slowly: ‘He’s all right. Thank you.’ Then, in a voice that was suddenly brisk, as though she had gathered herself for the special effort, she added: ‘But there’s been a lot of sickness round Bardsville. You know how it seems, some years.’

  Yes, Willie Proudfit agreed, it looked that way some years. And he asked her how other things were down near Bardsville. She answered him, then began to ask him about people whom she had heard about in this section, where their places lay, how much land they had.

  Now and then Adelle Proudfit filled out some detail for him, or named a name. But Sissie did not speak the whole time, and Sylvestus only once. When, for the first time, the heat lightning flickered along the horizon, silhouetting the mass of the hillside breaking toward the valley, Lucille Christian said: ‘Look, lightning. Maybe we’ll get some rain tomorrow.’ Then Sylvestus stirred in his chair at the end of the porch. ‘Naw,’ he said heavily, ‘begging yore pardon, but hit ain’t gonna rain. That-air lightnen, hit’s the devil’s promise.’

  ‘We need it,’ Lucille Christian remarked.

  ‘Hit’s a drout,’ Sylvestus said, ‘a-ready, and sweat fer nuthen.’

  Shortly afterward he rose from his chair, and without a word moved away into the darkness.

  The talk stopped as he walked away. Then Adelle Proudfit declared: ‘He oughtn’t to be a-goen off lak that. Not and him worken daytime the way he does.’

  ‘Hit comes on him,’ Willie Proudfit said, ‘to be up and a-walken in darkness. Sometimes.’

  Shortly after that Adelle Proudfit said that she reckoned it was time for them to go to bed, she knew Miss Christian must be tired, and all, coming so far. Inside, she turned up the lamp, and got a thin straw ticking and some sheets out of a closet. ‘I’m gonna lay down the pallet for Sylvestus. He laks to sleep on the porch, summers.’ She went out on the porch, while the others stood, not speaking, in the area of light around the lamp. They heard her calling, outside, once or twice, the name of her nephew. Then she came back into the room. ‘He’s done gone, looks lak. But sometimes, he don’t answer no way, studyen on sumthen.’

  They said good night, and separated. Lucille Christian went into the little room where Sissie slept. It was a little lean-to room, like the one where Mr. Munn had been staying.

  Mr. Munn lay awake for a time. He felt that he ought to be thinking about himself, about what he was going to do, and where he was going to go. And about Lucille Christian’s coming. But he was tired. He had not felt tired when he lay down, but as soon as those questions came into his mind, a lethargy took him, and he could not even frame them for himself. They were things to be accepted, not answered and solved. Those questions had almost ceased to make their demands upon him. Her coming had revived them. The resentment which had surprised him when Willie Proudfit came out to the concealment of the underbrush and told him that she was there, again rose in him. Then it, too, subsided and dissolved in that lethargy. Very faintly, he could hear the sound the insects made in the trees out there along the lane. Then his thoughts, he himself, had been absorbed into that dry, insidious vibration, which was a kind of life, but life reduced to its most sterile and unaimed rhythm, the ticking, as it were, of the leaves drying in the hot air, the ticking of the dry earth. Then he had drowsed off.