And now it is gone: the cottage gutted by fire and the bricks carried away, the log barn rotted into the ground, the other buildings gone by fire or wind or rot, the elm and the fruit trees gone. All gone, and the ground grown over with grass. Perhaps he alone remembers it. It stands clear in his mind, light and fragrance around it.

  To the few who were led by business or good fortune through the gate in the picket fence in the summertime, the cottage’s surroundings seemed to recall ancient happy memories or dreams. One walked between two huge mock orange bushes inside the gate and emerged deep in flowers. A walk of square-hewn limestone slabs led to the doorstep and turned to go around the side of the house under the branches of apple trees. In the back, in the angle between the bedroom and the porch of the kitchen ell, there was a brick pavement with a well in its center. In the heat of the day this area, like the house itself, was shaded by the great elm that stood on the other side of the kitchen. Beyond, to the left, there was a fenced poultry yard with a row of plum and cherry trees down the middle, and to the right, divided from the poultry yard by a hedge of lilac bushes, a vegetable garden. The whitewashed outbuildings gleamed in the sun. The order and abundance of the place seemed the emanation of a deeply indwelling artistry. Whatever this woman touched flowered and bore. A peculiar thing was that those infrequent ones who came there, though they praised flower and vegetable and fruit, never asked her how she grew them. It was as though they suspected, in the unfaltering dark eyes that seemed to judge their praise, the knowledge of some mystery that they could not choose to know. Many who came there went away thinking, “I would like to live in such a place.” And not a few who came there thought, “Once, long ago, I must have lived in such a place.”

  Jack had known her distantly from the time of her marriage to the doctor. That is, when he saw her he knew who she was. Beyond that he accepted the town’s verdict that she was “odd.” And then, in the fall, a year or two before the doctor’s death, he cut his leg severely with a corn knife. Will Wells was still with him then. They had put in a long day, cutting the standing corn and bundling it into shocks. It was getting on toward dark. Jack, faltering in the work’s rhythm, perhaps because of the cold, made a misstep and slashed his left leg across the calf, just below the knee. For some time he tried to ignore it and go on—the moon was full and early risen, and they had thought to keep on into the evening. But the wound would not stop bleeding. They could hear the blood squelching in his boot. Such bindings as they could contrive all failed to stanch it. Finally Will gave into the moonlight the laugh he laughed when he sensed the futility of a thing.

  “Mr. Jack, you best go get that seen to.”

  “I reckon I had,” Jack said. And leaving Will to finish the shock they had started and then do up the chores, he went to the barn for his horse and rode to Dr. McInnis’s.

  He hitched his horse at the fence and went to the door and knocked. Footsteps—not the doctor’s—approached through the house. The door opened on the silhouette of a woman poised against the glow of an oil lamp on the table in the room behind her.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to see the doctor.”

  “He’s been out. He’s eating supper. What’s the matter?”

  “I cut my leg.” He points.

  And then this woman, instead of doing any of the several things that he would have expected—instead of calling the doctor, or inviting him to come in, or telling him to wait—this woman steps out of her own light and bends down and opens the cut in his pantleg and looks briefly, knowingly, at his wound. Her hands go to him unhesitatingly, without apology.

  “I’d say you whacked it a good one. You’d better come on in.”

  He follows her into the sitting room, watching her with interest now, and pleasure too, though she remains a shadow between him and the light.

  “Sit down.” She points to a straight-backed chair near the hearth where a log fire is burning. “I’ll get the doctor.”

  After a minute or so she follows the doctor into the room. The doctor is still chewing his last bite of supper. He has his satchel in his hand. Rose is carrying another lighted lamp, which she sets on the mantlepiece. By its light for the first time he looks at her face—her good, lean, dark face; its impulsive flashings of teeth and eyes—and finds her looking back at him, grinning.

  “I guess you had to miss a lot else to hit that, didn’t you ?”

  He grins back. “I did for a fact”

  The old doctor pulls up a chair to face Jack’s and sits down. “Let’s see it.” No greeting, no recognition, as usual. He has come to uncompromising terms with his lot. The sick and the maimed come to him, and he does what is necessary, or he does what is possible, or he does what he knows how to do. That the various complaints and wounds are borne by particular creatures is merely incidental, as is, by now, the creatures’ ability to pay.

  Rose brings a pan of hot water and some clean rags, and the doctor, who has greatly lengthened the cut in Jack’s pantleg with his knife, begins to wash the wound. Rose gives Jack a table glass half full of whisky. He takes a sip.

  “Drink it,” she says, and he does.

  “Here,” the doctor says without looking up, and Rose stoops to help him. He instructs her with monosyllables and grunts as he cleans the cut and goes to work with his suture. He sews the gaping flesh together, as brusquely unconcerned as if he were sewing up a hole in a sack, but with marvelous accuracy and speed for such shaking old hands. The stabs of the needle transform Jack’s body into a new substance dilating with pain. He holds tightly to the chair seat and keeps still, because of the whisky or the pain or both filling with anger. When the stitching is over at last, he lets it out: “That’s my leg, old man!”

  At that Rose, who is tearing rags to make a bandage, looks straight into his eyes and laughs. And then, the whisky loosening him, he laughs. “Oh my God,” he says, “that was one of ’em!”

  The doctor binds the wound and knots the ties of the bandage. And only then, holding the bound leg in both hands as though testing or savoring the completion of yet another job, does he look at Jack’s face.

  “Now Goddamn it, son, listen to me. Stay off of that leg for a week.”

  Jack gets up and pays him and leaves, his split pant-leg flapping. He rides home, light with whisky and pain, the country all around him astir with the cold wind, the full moon at his back.

  He did not stay off the leg for a week. He went back to work the next morning, limping. The leg healed as he insisted it would. And he bore Rose McInnis in his mind.

  How things were for a while after that he does not remember. He remembers the old doctor’s death, and the speculative and inquisitive conversation that the town carried on afterwards about Rose and her “oddness.” And then he began to meet her eyes again. In one or another of the stores or along the road as he was riding by, he would look up and she would be looking at him. And it was the other way around, too: sometimes when she looked up he would be looking at her. How this should have been or how it came about he does not quite know. Were they slowly approaching each other by some deep-held intention? Or were they drawing together unintentionally, as two trees will lean toward each other and finally touch, reaching toward the same opening? Only that there was great need there is no doubt. That there was great desire, that she bore toward him the hunger for which he hungered, there is no doubt.

  Did not the intention reside in the fact? Perhaps it was as simple as that. How, with her eyes’ swift clarities upon him, could he have thought what his intention had been? He was quiet enough within himself now to offer and respond. Since his escape from the flooded stream he had been changed. He had ceased to resist his old failures. He no longer asked from his marriage what he knew was not in it. Now he contained his loneliness in himself and stood free.

  And so when he felt himself sought for and found by Rose’s eyes, he was entirely present before her. And she stood entirely before him. She stands before him now, as then, a woman with the stature of a young tree, with a good straight look in her eyes, inviting him to desire her and to think well of himself. He holds himself deep in his mind, in his competent flesh of those old days, in her presence. Her memory surrounds him, a fragrance or an ecstasy that he will not turn from, though he knows what it will cost him. He cannot turn away from her now. Here where she has not walked or stood or turned to look for fifty years, she holds him as before.

  They had not had occasion to speak since the night of his visit to the doctor. A complex understanding had grown between them before they ever spoke. They met always in public, always at a distance. The silent looks that passed between them held them at once together and apart. They waited, he waited, perhaps because of a sense of what a powerful thing, between them, speech would finally be. Their first words, he knew, would change them and change their world.

  And then one fine morning in the spring—there had been rain; the ground was too wet to work; he was in town to buy seed—he felt an old grace upon him. This time, when he passed the cottage and saw Rose in the yard, he did not ride by, but rode up to the fence and stopped. She came toward him, stepping slowly along the stones of the walk and into the gate. She looked up at him, smiling, knowing—she had known, surely, for a long time—what he would say.

  “I’m going to come to see you tonight,” he said.

  The words made a sudden clarity between them, and a new silence. For some time they waited again, aware of their breathing. And then, not smiling, with a look that held to no condition or equivocation, that left them no way out, she said: “I’ll look for you.”

  Her look and her words moved him so that he shuddered. The horse felt it and stirred restlessly beneath him. He rode on.

  And darkfall brought him back, true to his word. He worked until sundown, and then did his chores and ate supper and cleaned up. He went back to the barn and saddled his horse. When he rode past the house Ruth already had a lamp burning in the sitting room. He often rode out at night to carry on the business connected with his work or his debts, and no explanation was required of him. He passed by the lighted house in the dark, a powerful direction rooted in his mind.

  When he approached the end of the Birds Branch Road he met a buggy returning from town. When it was out of sight he stopped his horse and for a moment waited. The night was clear, the moon past a quarter full. His brief pause was not hesitation, but a summoning of himself before the time, a deliberate gathering of himself: “Yes, this is the way I am going to go now.” And again he shuddered, a swift dilation of the flesh. He spoke to the horse and they went on. He went through a gate, crossed the fields well back of town, and turned into a wooded draw that he knew would bring him up behind the cottage garden.

  Now he comes up through the woods, among the great looming trunks of the old trees. Underfoot the last year’s leaves are wet; walking over them, the horse’s hooves are nearly silent. He can hear, receding behind him, the preoccupied voice of the little stream in the bottom of the draw. He can hear the voices of frogs and whippoorwills, those also at a distance. The far-off sounds make the quiet where he is all the greater and deeper. In the little light that filters down through the branches, he can see white flowers faintly glowing on the floor of the woods, and in that light the trees are presences more felt than seen.

  He hitches his horse to a sapling at the edge of the woods, and from there goes on foot out again into the open. He makes no noise at all. He can hear the sound of his breath. He goes by the barn and through a little gate into the back of the garden, careful not to make a sound—not that it matters, but the silence is around him now like a law. The broken ground of the garden is dark on his left. He follows a grassy walk along the edge of it. The fragrance of the lilacs has come over him now, and from the top of the old elm he can hear the triple repetitions of the song of a mockingbird. He goes on past the corner of the poultry yard, treading flagstones under the heavy shadow of the elm. Darkness and silence reach far behind and ahead of him. It is as if he is falling, a sweetness of abandon in him that he has not felt for years. An old music that he remembers well sounds again ahead of him in the distance. A thoughtless dark fragrance fills his mind. His hands are light at his sides. And then behind him the poultry yard gate shuts with a light knock, and he stops and turns. The quiet completes itself again. And then Rose’s voice asks: “Who is it?”

  There is a flash in his nerves then that he will remember half a century. For a moment, while the countryside seems to tilt underfoot and then slowly come level again, he does not answer. And then he says: “Jack Beechum.”

  In the shadow of the elm he cannot see her until she materializes in his reach, the light of her face borne upon shadow. He feels her hand light upon his face.

  “I know you, Jack Beechum,” she says.

  She knew him as he was, and loved him. He was naked before her and was not ashamed. Into the good darkness that she offered him he went again and again. Something of his old gladness returned to him. He worked through the long days eager for the night to fall.

  The town’s ever-vigilant curiosity, which saw in the dark, found them out. And he did not care. The talk went around under cover of righteousness. Need was the cause of it. The little groups that the talk stirred in the stores and the kitchens and the street were like people lighting torches at a fire. It was as if Jack and Rose, like other lovers before and after them, had been elected to stir from the ashes of pretense and fear the light of a vital flame. While it condemned them the town needed them and praised them in the darkness of its heart. The town talked and looked askance, and waited eagerly for more news out of that dark and fragrant garden from which it felt itself in exile. And so this coupling went into the town’s mind, to belong to its history and its hope, even against its will. Even as the knowledge of it fades, it remains, an inflection of the heart, troubling and consoling the night watches of lonely husbands and wives like a phrase from a forgotten song.

  Jack knew all that, and he did not care. He knew that Ruth knew, or would sooner or later know, and he did not care. He would not let himself care. He knew that he might come to care, that he might, later, have to care. But he would not care yet. For the flame that the town desired and envied and secretly praised he had now turned openly toward. He knew that Rose had restored his life, that she had reached with her honest, eager hands and touched and revived that energy, that wild joy in him, that Ruth had all but destroyed with her fastidiousness and her shame.

  He would care for Rose. He would care for the workings of the dark and the ground that she had newly alerted him to. He would care for the cottage and its garden and the great elm that stood like a guardian over it. He would care for the night’s coming, and for the light that his desire cast around him, and for his arrival at the door, and for their talk and laughter falling to silence. And for nothing beyond the reach and touch of Rose would he care now, for there was a joy in him that overrode all outside itself, she had so imparadised his mind. She so received and welcomed him, and made him such delight, that it seemed to him his very life struggled and broke free and passed into her, and he lay in the dark beside her in a strange sleep, empty of strength and thought as a dead man. He went away from her newborn.

  More than a year went by. He came and went as he pleased. For a while he troubled his mind with justifications, but none was required of him. He and Ruth were leading separate lives now. They would go for days, seeing each other only at mealtimes when, as like as not, she would set a single place for him and he would eat alone. The baby, Clara, had got old enough to care for him, and often he would linger at the table after a meal, holding her on his lap. He would bring in curiosities for her out of the fields—nuts or seeds or birds’ eggs or small stones—and she loved to rummage his pockets for them. “What do you have in your pocket, Papa? Let me see, now” It would never be in the same pocket as the day before. Sometimes she had to hunt and hunt. Sometimes even he could not find it, and then they both had to hunt; he would be terribly bewildered then—where did it go?—and she would laugh. And at last the treasure would be found and he would get up and put on his hat and leave. Between him and Ruth lay the peace of distance and silence.

  Spring came again, and passed, and summer came. And then, on an evening shortly after the longest day, when he set out to visit Rose, Ruth walked from the house and stood in the driveway ahead of him. He slowed his horse and walked him up to her and stopped.

  “Where are you going?” She asked in such a way that he knew she knew.

  For a moment the question angered him. “You’ve made that none of your business, my girl,” he thought. And then he sensed the pain in her that the stance and look of her defied, and he grieved for her. He saw that his infidelity had touched her as his love had not, that she who could not abide his passion now helplessly and deeply bore his wound. It turned her toward him, revealed her to him, too late, too late, and for no mercy or denial that was in his power—that beautiful woman with her gray eyes, so fine. And he said with a gentleness that she had not stirred in his voice for a long time: “I’m going to look at a red calf with a white tip on the end of its tail.” And he said: “You look fine this evening, Ruth.”

  She turned quickly to hide what her face could not help but show. And he rode on, bearing, in the fierce justice of their bond, the wound he had given her.

  After that he was torn. He felt the insult and shame that he had given Ruth, and he felt it, he knew, because he cared for her, because he would be forever yearning and grieving after the loss of what perhaps they never could have had. And with Rose too he was beginning to feel an incompleteness. His love for her led to nothing, could lead to nothing. As long as he might come to her he would come, however welcome, as a guest. It was as though he bore for these two women the two halves of an irreparably divided love. With Ruth, his work had led to no good love. With Rose, his love led to no work. With Rose he had come within the gates of Eden, but had found there no possibility for a worldly faith or labor. With Ruth he had made an earthly troth and travail that bore no delight; they had lost the vision of their paradise. Now when he rode away from home, he felt Ruth’s hurt and accusing eyes at his back, and he accepted their blame. When he entered the cottage garden and came away he felt more and more the futility and uselessness of being out of place; there was nothing at all that he could do to justify or redeem or safeguard Rose’s gift.