O the land of cloudless day,

  O the land of an unclouded day;

  O they tell me of a home where no storm clouds me,

  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 Women’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 peeked 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’l1 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.