They brought what this world had left of Ruth Beechum back to Port William to be buried in the September of that year. And it was not long after the funeral that Jack made his one direct attempt to influence his son-in-law. He realized after Ruth’s departure that Clara no longer had a tie with her old home. He and Clara certainly had little enough in common. As things were, there was little that they could do for each other. And so he cast about in a final, desperate attempt to make between them a common ground and a bond.

  One of the farms next to his was for sale, and he knew, or he had good reason to suppose, that Glad had the necessary cash. And that set him thinking. To begin with, he was getting old, and he was worried by the thought that his own good farm would be inherited by the Pettits, who knew nothing and perhaps cared nothing about it. But if they would buy the adjoining farm now, then maybe he would live long enough to teach them what they would need to know. It bothered him that they had no child to have the land after them, but he thought he had no right to consider that; if his own daughter could only take some comfort from and give some care to the place that he had served all his life, then that would be enough. He had visions of the kindness and the mutual pleasure that might follow Glad’s purchase of that farm. For Jack it would make possible a generosity that had not been possible before. It would allow him to do something for Clara and Glad that no one else would do as well. In their absence he would look after their place for them. When they came out on Sundays, he could show them what was going on. He would find various ways of instructing them, so that when he was dead they would be able to carry on for themselves. One day, he thought, they might want to come there to live. For had he not heard Glad already talking about what he might do when he retired? Retirement seemed to him a rather objectionable ambition—but then that was not his business. Or, he thought, suppose Clara should be left a widow. Then she could come back here and have the security and comfort of her own place, with her own people around her, with Mat and Wheeler to look after her.

  And so one Sunday afternoon Jack showed Glad the farm and told him what he had on his mind, or most of it. Glad was no longer the lean and muscular young man he had been when he married. He was fleshy now and somewhat stooped in the shoulders; he had been more weakened by the last fifteen years than Jack had been by the last fifty. But his superfluous weight, covered as it was by a tailored suit, set off by his graying hair, a diamond ring, and an excellent cigar, somehow made him look richer, more substantial, more dignified than ever. As his consort, Clara had become plump and opulent. Though she was still pretty, her looks had somehow become merely decorative. She had made of herself a sort of portable occasion for the ostentatious gifts of her husband, a sort of bodiless apparition in fine clothes—useless, so far as Jack could tell, for either work or love.

  “There it is,” Jack told him. “You can have it, I think, at a good price. You can take care of it and make it a satisfaction to you. And it’ll be there when you need it.”

  Even as he spoke he realized how little pleased he was by the vision he was conjuring up. He disliked the idea of a man retiring to a farm. He disliked the idea of a man living on land that he thought himself too good to dirty his hands in. So far as he was concerned, a man who thought he was better than such dirt as he and Glad had underneath their feet that Sunday was a good deal worse.

  As Jack should have known, Glad did not buy the farm. He did not refuse, of course. He agreed with everything Jack said with his usual readiness and affability. That Jack had thought of him and Clara with such kindness was something he appreciated very much, he said. But he did not buy the farm, and he never mentioned it again. And with that avoided subject between them, Jack and the Pettits had less than ever to say to each other. From then on Clara was more likely than not to drive out alone to perform those observances of daughterhood that she felt to be her duty, and to take back as always a load of eatables “fresh from the farm,” as she and Glad liked to say to their guests at dinner.

  What he had done, Jack realized, was make a good plan and then invent a man to go with it. What he had imagined had certainly had no relation to any possibility that was in Glad Pettit. He was long past the hopelessly defiant anger that might once have led him to rebuke or accuse. Though he knew that Glad’s show of interest in that farm that he never intended to buy amounted to condescension and insult, he said nothing. As had come to be his way, he merely accepted that his daughter and son-in-law were of a kind that was estranged and alien, and probably inimical, to his kind. A man without a place that he respects, he thought, may do anything with money.

  He never spoke of it except once, about a year later, when he told the story to Mat.

  “I’ve hated to tell you that,” he said. “I dislike to talk against my own. I tell you to show you the kind of man you’re not, and to give you some idea what it’s worth to me that you’re the man you are.”

  Jack touched Mat then, to give his words the direct weight and warmth of his hand. They were sitting, talking, on the bed of a wagon in Mat’s barn lot, looking out over the ridges to where the river valley opened. And Mat understood that what Jack had said was both a confession of great failure and an affirmation of what had not failed, meant to clarify their kinship in its final terms.

  “It wasn’t the buying that stopped him,” Jack said. “He’ll buy damn near anything—and then sell it as soon as he can get more than he paid. It wasn’t the buying. It was buying it and then keeping it and taking care of it, with me here where he’d have to look me in the face—that’s what stopped him.

  “I know him. I know what’s in him. He don’t want to take care of anything outside of figures in a book. He wants to lend money to people to make worthless things and buy worthless things. Worth would put him to too much trouble.”

  And then, after a long silence, looking away, he let it go. He grinned. His big hand came down heavy on Mat’s shoulder. “Bank stock don’t eat grass, Mat—and nothing eats bank stock.”

  He never had called Glad Pettit by name—they were too different, too distant from each other, for that. He had called him “son” or “young fellow.” Now, in the silence that followed their Sunday talk about the farm, he took to calling him “Irvin.” Clara hastened to attribute that to her father’s “childishness.” But Mat knew what it was. Jack was an old man, but he was as clear as ever, and in his clarity more direct; he had renamed Glad Pettit to signify that he was done with him.

  At about the same time he also withdrew, bluntly and finally, from all other relationships that had no meaning to him. He granted no more worth to mere formality or blood tie; he would no longer stir a foot for old time’s sake. Now when departed relatives or old acquaintances would return from the cities they had gone off to and come by his place for a nostalgic visit, he would get out of sight if he saw them coming in time, or he would go on with his work and leave them standing. He would not be mussed and reminisced over as a relic of somebody else’s past. Much less would he indulge their hints of how greatly they had improved themselves, or listen while they exclaimed over the difficulty of his work, implying their superiority to it. They belonged to another world, and he could expect nothing from them. He would be faithful to what he belonged to: to his own place in the world and his neighborhood, to the handful of men who shared his faith. He had taken his final stand. He would accept no comfort that was not true.

  For nine years after Ruth’s death he stayed on by himself in the old house. He found it necessary to rent out his tobacco crop, but he continued to carry on the rest of the work himself. And now he did his own cooking and washing, and mended his clothes after the fashion that he liked to describe to Mat as “middling rough.” He slept as before in his room in the back of the upstairs, and did the rest of his household living in the kitchen. The other rooms he seldom entered, and they remained as they were. Occasionally Clara would come out with her maid and clean the house, sweeping and dusting and airing it out. When he left finally in 1944 to move to town, the six rooms in the fore part of the house, except for the perceptible dulling of disuse, looked exactly as Ruth had left them. But more than ever he kept away from the house. So far as necessity and the weather allowed, he stayed in the fields or at the barn. There was a history in those places that was not tragic, and that comforted him. From the house that for him would always keep in it the old stirrings of loss and grief, breakage and failure, he would go back to the farm itself in which, given the simple condition of his care, all was as it had been. Sometimes now when he sat, “studying” as he would say, in the door of the barn or at the edge of a field, he would have the attitude, Mat thought, of an old dog who hears something alive stirring and breathing deep in the ground.

  And then that ended. At first it was Clara’s idea that he should come to Louisville and live with Glad and herself. There was no use in talking about that. But the awareness deepened in him that he had become a worry not just to Clara, which he doubted anyway, but to Wheeler and to Mat. He saw that they were driving out to his place a lot oftener than they should have, given the work they had to do. And so when Wheeler finally suggested, as a sort of compromise, that he move into the hotel in Port William, Old Jack’s resistance was only a token of principle, and it did not last long. On the day he moved to town Elton and Mary Penn moved into the house to be the farm’s first tenants—to prove, to Old Jack’s surprise, worthy of his trust, and to earn his love.

  And so here he is, alone at the supper table in the dining room of the hotel. The other boarders have finished the meal and are gathered in the small lobby, watching the wrestlers on television. He does not know that they are gone. He does not hear the crowd cheering the feats of Chief Don Eagle and Argentina Rocca. Mrs. Hendrick has been around the table half a dozen times, carrying off the dishes, gathering the soiled paper napkins, brushing away the crumbs, but he has not been aware of her, nor does he hear the dishes clattering now in her dishpan. He is getting on in his thoughts to the end.

  When he moved to town he knew the last of his life’s hinges had turned. It seemed to him then that he was finished. Because he had no descendant of both mind and blood, his own descent had become wayward; it had led him out of his homeland into exile. Having no longer the immediate demands of his place and work to occupy his mind, he began to go into the past. His place and his life lay in his mind like a book and what is written in it, and he became its scholar. His thoughts went back to his place and moved obsessively over it, whether in the pleasure of familiarity or in the pain of old reminding. His mind was formed long before the days when maps were commonplace, and even longer before the time of aerial views and photographs. His memory of his place was never overlooking and abstract, but ground-level, as immediate always to his hand as to his eye. It was unified in his mind not by the geographical relationships of its various boundaries and landmarks but by his old routes over it, its aspects opening ahead of him as he ascended heights of the ground or emerged from trees, moving over it in his memory, on horseback or behind a team or on foot.

  “Don’t you want to go in there and watch the TV?” Mrs. Hendrick asks.

  He shakes his head. “No,” he thinks. “God Amighty, no.” For the cost of living beyond his time is in putting up with the various noises and contraptions of these new times, this modern ignorance, as he has come to call it in his mind. The modern ignorance is in people’s assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell. The eyes can look only one way, and Old Jack believes in the existence of what he is not looking at and what he does not see. The next hard time is just as real to him as the last, and so is the next blessing. The new ignorance is the same as the old, only less aware that ignorance is what it is. It is less humble, more foolish and frivolous, more dangerous. A man, Old Jack thinks, has no choice but to be ignorant, but he does not have to be a fool. He can know his place, and he can stay in it and be faithful.

  That a whole roomful of people should sit with their mouths open like a nest of young birds, peering into a picture box the invariable message of which is the desirability of Something Else or Someplace Else; that a government should tax its people in order to make a bomb powerful enough to blow up the world; that a whole country would attempt a civilization with the exclusive aim of getting out of work—all that is strange to him, unreal; he might have slept long and waked in a land of talking monkeys. He is troubled and angered in his mind to think that people would aspire to do as little as possible, no better than they are made to do it, for more pay than they are worth, as if the old world were destroyed and a new one created by Gladston Pettit.

  Mrs. Hendrick has turned out the kitchen light, and now she stands at his elbow again. “I’m done here and I want to turn the light off. Want me to help you up?”

  Hastening ahead of that, he pulls himself to his feet. But the effort is too sudden. Vertigo blinds him and he staggers. He feels Mrs. Hendrick strongly holding him by the arm. His vision clears and the swinging room steadies and rights itself.

  “Are you all right now?”

  He nods, but she continues to hold to him as he starts out of the room.

  “I thank you, Suzy. I can make it now.”

  He pats her hand and she lets him go. Watching him, she stands by the light switch, and turns it off as he leaves the room. He crosses the lobby through the commotion of the TV and sets foot into the gloom of the corridor, heading for the room that the landlady insisted he take when it seemed to her that he had grown too feeble to manage the stairs. It has never suited him. He likes to sleep upstairs.

  He walks with the effort of a man burdened, a man carrying a great bale or a barrel, who has carried it too far but has not yet found a place convenient to set it down. Once he could carry twice this weight. Now half would be too much.

  Nine: Return

  Now he feels ahead of him a quietness that he hastens toward. It seems to him that if he does not hasten, his weight will bear him down before he gets there. He reaches the door to his room and opens it. The room is in the back of the building, looking out on the fields that lie close against the little town. No town lights shine in the window, but he does not turn the switch; there is a moon and that makes light enough—more than he needs.

  He goes slowly across the room to his chair, an old high-backed wooden rocker that sits squarely facing the window. This is his outpost, his lookout. Here he has sat in the dark of the early mornings, waiting for light, and again in the long evenings of midsummer, waiting for the dark. He backs up to the chair, leans, takes hold of the arms, and lets himself down onto the seat. “Ah!” He leans back, letting his shoulders and then his head come to rest.

  For some time he sits and looks out, getting his breath, grateful to be still after his effort. And then he rises up in his mind as he was when he was strong. He is walking down from the top of his ridge toward a gate in the rock fence. It is the twilight of a day in the height of summer. The day has been hot and long and hard, and he is tired; his shirt and the band of his hat are still wet with sweat. He can feel the sweat drying on the backs of his hands and on his face. His team has been watered at the pump and put away and fed, and all his chores are done. The day is finished. He does not know why he is there or where he is going, but he does not question; it is right that he should be going. A deep hush is upon everything. Under the slowly darkening sky the countryside has the sense of surrounding distance that it has only at night. The lives of the darkness have begun to stir. He lets himself through the gate and fastens it behind him. From there he follows a wagon track that slants down the face of the slope and enters the woods.

  In the woods it is already dark, but he knows the way. He lets himself easily into the steep descent, feeling the track solid beneath his steps. The trees lift their canopy silently over his head, a presence of the air. And now the air opens and lightens ahead of him and he comes out into the pasture on the slope below.

  Here is a great pool of warm still air, dampened by the creek, heavy with the strong scent of the weeds in the hollows. And here the last of the light is redoubled, reflected back and forth between the walls of the little valley so that it brims with radiance. The air seems substantial, as though a man might step out upon it and walk away over the tops of the sycamores along the creek. Around the clearing stands the dark woods, and in its center there is a single walnut tree with a square-built cairn of stones beside it. The pasture was mowed perhaps three weeks ago and the new growth has risen green over the fallen stems and leaves. It is a place he has often thought he would like to go to and rest in and be still.

  He turns from the wagon track and goes straight down across the pasture through the glow of the air to the tree. He sits at its root and leans his back and the back of his head against the trunk. All around him is still now. And he is still, his hands lying at rest in his lap, and within himself he is still. He can think of no other place he would want to be. Below him, among the trees along the creek, he can see a pool of water white with the reflection of the sky.

  Slowly the glow fades from the valley, the sky darkens, the stars appear, and at last the world is so dark that he can no longer see his legs stretched out in front of him on the ground or his hands lying in his lap; he has come to be vision alone, and the sky over him is filled and glittering with stars. Now he is aware of his fields, the richness of growth in them, their careful patterns and boundaries. In the dark they drowse around him, intimate and expectant.

  And now, even among them, he feels his mind coming to rest. A cool breath of air drifts down upon him out of the woods, and he hears a stirring of leaves. He no longer sees the stars. His fields drowse and stir like sleepers, borne toward morning.

  Now they break free of his demanding and his praise. He feels them loosen from him and go on.