“Hey, sweet thing,” Lightning says. “Hand me them pliers.”

  This is the Berlews’ evening ritual. Mat should have foreseen it. He might as well have gone to sit in the road. The Berlews are travelers; when they are not going they are getting ready to go. That is the way they will be. In acknowledging that, Mat knows he has come to a limit he has grown too old to assail. But it troubles him. He lets it trouble him.

  Once, when Joe Banion and Nettie and Aunt Fanny lived there, the little house where the Berlews live was a living place. Then there was a garden, full of vegetables and flowers. There was a flock of hens and guineas that made their living mainly by foraging in the pastures and the woods. There was a pen with a pig or two to eat the table scraps. The front porch was a forest of potted plants. The rooms of the house were carefully kept, the walls adorned with Aunt Fanny’s embroidered hangings and with keepsakes.

  The Berlews go there only by necessity, to sleep or to eat. The center of the Berlews’ life is the automobile that Lightning now lies under, tinkering at it, as he perpetually must, to keep it running until Saturday night—the “small Packard,” as Burley calls it. The car, whose blue-green paint has begun to crack and chip off, leaving irregular patches of rust, is encrusted with ornaments of chrome and with glass reflectors of red and yellow and blue and green. All four fenders bear heavily bechromed and reflectored mudflaps. Though the car has no radio, it has a tall aerial flying an American flag half worn away in the winds of the Berlews’ haste to get somewhere else.

  And far be it from Lightning to save or borrow the money to buy a car in good condition; that would involve a connection and obligation that would be too permanent. Better to buy a worn-out car that is cheap enough to require no such bondage, ornament it like a carnival paradise, and then be forever replacing its worn-out parts with other worn-out parts, and work harder at night to keep it running than you work in the daytime for pay.

  It comes to Mat suddenly—so that he first grimaces and then grunts—that the Berlews and the Pettits represent the two halves of the same distraction. What the Pettits are is what the Berlews dream of being. Is not the Berlews’ old car the hopeless dream of a Cadillac? Is not their tireless going a persistently frustrated pilgrimage in search of Easy Street? That the Pettits live on Easy Street makes no essential difference between them and the Berlews. If the Pettits are what the Berlews would like to be, they are also what the Pettits would like to be; they have imagined nothing higher than they are.

  And now, not out of the quiet of the evening as he hoped, but out of a fierce and defiant loyalty, Mat recovers the thought of Old Jack.

  He remembers himself, a boy in college, home for the summer, recounting something lengthy and abstruse that he had learned from his books, seeking in some foolish way to impress his uncle. He sees Jack pause in his work and straighten to look at him, and then turn his back and go ahead.

  “If you’re going to talk to me, Mat, you’ll have to walk.”

  He had a quality about him that Mat has always thought of as level-footed. He stood unconditionally where he stood. He was straight as a tree and stood like one, so charged with purpose and with strength that when your eye first caught him he seemed to have just risen with the sudden thrust and balance of a horse rearing. It was only with the second look that you saw that this stance was natural to him, his gift that he possessed regardlessly as he wore his clothes.

  If the say-so was his, Mat knows how Old Jack would be taken to his grave. He would be taken in secret to a place at the edge of one of his fields, and only the few who loved him best would be permitted to go that far with him. They would dig a grave there and lay him in. They would say such words as might come to them, or say nothing. They would cover him and leave him there where he had belonged from birth. They would leave no stone or marker. They would level the grave with the ground. When the last of them who knew its place had died, Old Jack’s return would be complete. He would be lost to memory in that field, silently possessed by the earth on which he once established the work of his hands.

  But that is not to be. What is to be Mat foresaw and has been unable to prevent. And the time is at hand again, for now he hears the sound of an expensive engine in the yard.

  Eleven : Here We Leave Him to His Rest

  The day of Old Jack’s funeral is bright. Except for Mat—who stayed at the house to visit with the Pettits, his guests overnight—the tobacco cutters worked through the morning. But now they are here, come with the dead to the grave’s edge, beyond which all is dark to them.

  It is not a large gathering, but at that there are too few chairs beneath the undertaker’s awning over the grave. And so the women sit and most of the men stand. In the first row of chairs are Clara and Glad Pettit, Margaret Feltner, Bess Catlett, Mary Penn, and Hannah Coulter. In the second row are Mrs. Hendrick with five of her boarders. In the third and last are several neighboring wives, there more for Mat’s and Margaret’s sake than for Old Jack’s. Mat and Burley and Jarrat and Nathan and Elton and Wheeler, who have borne the coffin to the trestle over the grave, stand under the edge of the awning, uncomfortable because in those circumstances their movements and postures seem to take on a formality that they do not intend. In another staggered row at the back of the shelter stand several other men of the town.

  To Mat’s surprise nothing was ever said to contradict this part of his plan. A simple graveside service is apparently what it is to be. His dealings with the Pettits during their overnight stay were polite and peaceable, if not particularly warm. Of all that he is glad enough. But now his principal emotion is the wish to be away from this that has nothing to do with Old Jack’s life—or, for that matter, his death. He longs for something more fitting than this, if it is only to go home and sit by himself in the barn. Standing between Burley and Wheeler with his hands clasped behind his back, he lets his mind return, with the eagerness of a boy on holiday, to the common substances of his life. He would like to turn around and let his eyes travel over the familiar shapes of his own fields that he knows are lying in the sunlight beyond the stony horizon of the graveyard. “The fields beyond the grave,” he thinks. If he were going to speak at Old Jack’s funeral he would speak of them.

  But now Brother Wingfare steps between his seated auditors and the grave. He turns to the Book of Psalms in the little Testament that he carries in his hand, and begins to read: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.” He reads well, better than most, and Mat is moved by the reading. The preacher reads straight through the list of psalms that Mat gave him to the last of them, the one that ends: “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.”

  “Good!” Mat thinks. “Let him stop there and that will be fine.”

  The preacher closes the book softly, holding it on the upraised palm of his left hand; he lays the palm of his right hand gently upon the shut cover, and he raises his eyes to the canvas.

  “O Lord,” he says, “our gracious and merciful Heavenly Father, we are gathered here on this beautiful early autumn day to commit to thy hands the spirit and to the earth the body of our beloved father and kinsman and friend, Mr. Jack Beechum. O Lord, it is a sad and sorrowful journey that we must make to the graveside of our departed loved ones, but we know that thou hast provided comforts there to erase forever from our hearts the memory of our sufferings here.”

  And then Mat exercises for the first time his prerogative as the oldest man. He turns his back and gazes upon his fields.

  It is a long prayer that the preacher prays. He tells the Lord that the departed loved one was not a man of the church, and seldom attended, but that in talking to his daughter he (Brother Wingfare) has found that toward the end of his life the departed showed unmistakable signs of turning toward an acceptance of Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. He speaks of what a blessed relief it is to know that all a man has to do is believe in the saving power of Jesus Christ in order to be spared the everlasting torments of Hell. He says that his hearers may therefore rest assured that the departed loved one is even at this moment sitting at the right hand of his Savior. He predicts that certain ones among his hearers may at an appropriate time also wish to accept Christ as their Savior, for clearly it is not the dead to whom we speak at these sad occasions but to the living. In a long exposition of the dynamics of grace and salvation he then bids fair to convert any doubters among those within the sound of his voice, on earth or in Heaven. He gives thanks for the general well-being of the community, for the divine favor that has been showered upon the government and the people of the United States of America, for the bountiful harvest even now in progress, and for the beautiful early autumn day. And having thus notified the Almighty of so much, the truth or error of which He presumably already knew, Brother Wingfare concludes by imploring special blessings upon the heads of the bereaved mourners in their hour of sorrow.

  The preacher pockets his Testament and bends to take the hands of the Pettits. The others, by pairs and threes, detach themselves from the gathering. Quiet conversations begin. As the last word was said the men put on their hats, and now they smoke.

  Clara Pettit approaches Mat now and extends her hand. “Mat, thanks for all you’ve done.”

  Mat nods. There is no reply he can make to that. What he has done he has done for Old Jack’s sake, or his own sake, not for hers. And much that he intended has been undone. He and Clara owe each other nothing. But he smiles. He pats her hand. “Well,” he says, “it was good to see you in these parts again.”

  She gives his hand a parting squeeze and moves on to speak to Margaret. Standing up the slope between the grave and their car, Glad is waiting for her, anxious to be gone, the hearse having already departed. Catching Mat’s eye, Glad gives him a quick grin and wave of farewell. Mat nods.

  Clara comes up to Glad and he takes her arm. They turn and start up toward their car, picking their way among the stones. Now that Old Jack is dead and Clara has seen him borne to the grave in a style fitting to her taste, she is free of this place. She has put the past behind her. She is already thirty years gone. In her high heels she walks uncertainly on the deep sod, as though wading, but with determined haste. She does not look at the ground. Walking on it, she asserts her difference from it.

  For the moment oblivious to all else, Mat watches her. She and Glad get into the car and start it and move off down the drive. As they reach the gate and turn into the road, though even now they do not look back, Mat waves.

  He stands facing the road. Behind him the footsteps and voices have begun to move off up the slope. He knows that Margaret is standing behind him, waiting for him. But for some time still Mat does not move. He stands like another of the inscribed stones, bearing the graved name of what is gone.

  Twelve: Wheeler

  In the warm clear sunlight pouring upon the ridges and slopes and woods and roofs and walls, the brushy fence rows, pastures, cornfields, and dwindling tobacco patches of that country as deeply familiar to him as if both dreamed and seen, Wheeler Catlett drives his car out the Birds Branch Road. He drives slowly up the rises and then lets the car drift down again of its own weight. On the steering wheel his fingers beat a light, gentle, unattended rhythm while he watches the country open ahead of him and go by. He left Bess at the Feltners’ after the funeral, saying that he had an errand to do before they went home. But it is not just the errand. Wheeler Catlett has thinking to do. Like Mat and the others, he has recognized Old Jack’s death as one of the crucial divisions in his own life. And he has felt a need, as yet obscure to him, to let his mind and his eyes drift a while again upon the country, to sense himself again as native and belonging there, and perhaps at last to feel established in his life whatever change it is that has been made.

  For nearly thirty years Wheeler has been involved in the founding and the administration and the defense of a marketing cooperative whose purpose is to assure a decent living, a chance to survive on their land, to the farmers of this part of the country. It is a Jeffersonian vision, one might say, that the cooperative was founded to implement and preserve, but in Wheeler the effort was founded also upon an impulse sterner and more personal: as a boy he had seen his father and his neighbors sell their crops for too little to pay the warehouse commission; he had seen the time when the market was a tragedy in which good men saw their ruin. With a child’s clear sense of justice he determined then to do something about it if he could. And in considerable measure he and his friends in the cooperative have so far succeeded in doing something about it. But the complexity of Wheeler’s history has been that in order to serve and defend the way of life that he loves and respects above all others, he has had to leave it to live another kind of life, first in college and law school and then in the courthouse town of Hargrave.

  And yet he has stayed near enough to home—to the farms and households and sickbeds and then the graves of those men whose worthiness and whose troubles first defined his aims—so that he has always had clearly in mind what it was he served. Now Old Jack, who was the last of that generation that Wheeler looked to with such filial devotion, is dead. And Wheeler is fifty-two years old, as old as the century, and younger men are looking to him. Now he must cease to be a son to the old men and become a father to the young. He has his own sons, of course. But there are also the young men of the farms, coming on, men such as Elton Penn and Nathan Coulter, in whom the old way has survived. Wheeler has been thinking about them and about the troubles that probably lie ahead of them: an increasing scarcity of labor as more and more of the country people move to the cities; the consequent necessity for further mechanization of the farms; the consequent need of the farmers for more land and more capital in order to survive; the consequent further departure of the labor force from the country; the increasing difficulty of preserving an agricultural economy favorable to small farmers as political power flows from the country to the cities. These interlinking chains of consequence have lain heavily upon Wheeler’s mind for years. But Old Jack’s death has raised anew and more starkly than ever the possibility that men of his kind are a race doomed to extinction, that the men Wheeler loves most in the world are last survivors. Driving out the Birds Branch Road this afternoon, he sees the farms and their fences and fields and buildings as never before in the light and shadow of a human history that had its beginning in time, and will have its end. His eyes lingering familiarly over the lay of the fields in the brilliant fall sunlight, he muses upon the mortality not of individual men and women but of the human life of the earth.

  As the white buildings of Old Jack’s place become visible among the shade trees at the top of the rise, Wheeler drives even more slowly, and his eyes move more carefully still over the ground. Year by year, for almost as long as Wheeler has been conscious of it, the place has been improved by Jack Beechum’s impassioned kindness to it. Even after Old Jack’s departure his kindness remained, and then Elton and Wheeler himself were its agents; between them they made the plans and did the work to carry out the old man’s wishes. During the war years and afterwards the farm made money. And Old Jack—whose own wants and needs, never great, had become small indeed—turned his earnings to further improvements on the farm. Elton was eager to do the work and to see it done, and incited and pleased by that eagerness in the young man, Old Jack spared no expense. It has become a place a man like Wheeler would drive or walk many miles to admire.

  He turns in at the gate and drives slowly up through the yard under the limbs of the old trees, and past the house and into the barn lot. He stops the car in front of the barn and gets out. He steps through the wide doorway into the hay-fragrant shadow, nearly blinding after the bright sun. He calls quietly: “Elton?”

  Getting no answer, he turns and stands looking thoughtfully out across the lot. The Penns’ automobile is parked on the grass near the back porch. They cannot be long home from the funeral. Elton is probably still at the house, changing his clothes.

  Though he is alone, Wheeler has about him an air of alertness, of implicit haste; he seems to be not resting but poised in passage. It was this quality perhaps more than any other that endeared him to Old Jack. Wheeler could get things done, and Old Jack liked that.

  Now, seeing Elton come out of the house, Wheeler steps forward into the light of the doorway. Elton has changed from the suit he wore to the funeral back into his work clothes.

  “Hello, Wheeler,” Elton says, stepping into the barn. “It’s a pretty day, ain’t it?”

  But now that he has spoken of it, his satisfaction with the weather seems to him unfitting. He turns and stands beside Wheeler, like him looking out into the daylight for a good many seconds before either of them speaks again. It is as though they are two of an assembly of spectators, and this passage of the light is an event they will be long and quiet in watching.

  And then Wheeler says: “It is. It’s a fine day.”

  For a while again they are silent. There is an embarrassment between them that neither of them expected or prepared for. It is only now that it exists that they realize its possibility. Until now their two lives have been bound together by their mutual allegiance to a third life, Old Jack’s. They wait to see what they may mean to each other now.