“They talk about victory as if they know all them dead boys was glad to die. The dead boys ain’t never been asked how glad they was. If they had it to do again, might be they wouldn’t do it, or might be they would. But they ain’t been asked.”

  Under the clouds, the country all around was quiet, except for birds singing in the trees, wherever there were trees, and now and then a human voice calling out to a team. He was glad to be alive.

  He had been glad to be alive all the time he had been alive. When he was hit and thought he was dead, it had come to him how good it was to be alive even under the shelling, even when it was at its worst. And now he had lived through it all and was coming home. He was now a man who had seen far places and strange things, and he remembered them all. He had seen Kansas and Louisiana and Arizona. He had seen the ocean. He had seen the little farms and country towns of France and Belgium and Luxembourg—pretty, before they were ruined. For one night, he was in Paris.

  “That Paris, now. We was there one day and one night. There was wine everywheres, and these friendly girls who said, ‘Kees me.’ And I don’t know what happened after about ten o’clock. I come to the next morning in this hotel room, sick and broke, with lipstick from one end to the other. I reckon I must have had a right good time.”

  At first, before he was all the way in it, there was something he liked about the war, a reduction that in a way was pleasing. From a man used to doing and thinking for himself, he became a man who did what he was told.

  “That laying around half a day, waiting for somebody else to think—that was something I had to learn.”

  It was fairly restful. Even basic training tired him less than what he would ordinarily have done at that time of year. He gained weight.

  And from a man with a farm and crops and stock to worry about, he became a man who worried only about himself and the little bunch of stuff he needed to sleep, dress, eat, and fight.

  He furnished only himself. The army furnished what little else it took to make the difference between a man and a beast. More than anything else, he liked his mess kit. It was all the dishes a man really needed. And when you weren’t cooking or eating with it, you could keep things in it—a little extra tobacco, maybe.

  “When I get to Ellville,” he thought, “I won’t be but mighty little short of halfway. I know the miles and how they lay out end to end.”

  It had been evening for a while now. On the farmsteads that he passed, people were busy with the chores. He could hear people calling their stock, dogs barking, children shouting and laughing. On one farm that he passed, a woman, a dog, and a small boy were bringing in the cows; in the driveway of the barn he could see a man unharnessing a team of mules. It was as familiar to him as his own breath, and because he was outside it still, he yearned toward it as a ghost might. As he passed by, the woman, perhaps because he was a soldier, raised her hand to him, and he raised his own in return.

  After a while, he could see ahead of him the houses and trees of Ellville, and over the trees the superstructure of the bridge arching into Hargrave. All during his walk so far, he had been offering himself the possibility that he would walk on home before he would sleep. But now that he had come nearly halfway and Ellville was in sight, he knew he would not go farther that day. He was tired, and with his tiredness had come a sort of melancholy and a sort of aimlessness, as if, all his ties cut, he might go right on past his home river and on and on, anywhere at all in the world. The little cluster of buildings ahead of him now seemed only accidentally there, and he himself there only accidentally. He had arrived, as he had arrived again and again during the healing of his wound, at the apprehension of a pure emptiness, as if at the center of an explosion—as if, without changing at all, he and the town ahead of him and all the long way behind him had been taken up into a dream in which every creature and every thing sat, like that boy McBride, in the dead center of the possibility of its disappearance.

  In the little town a lane turned off the highway and went out beyond the houses and across the river bottom for perhaps a quarter of a mile to a barn and, beyond the barn, to a small weatherboarded church. It was suppertime then; the road and the dooryards were deserted. Art entered the lane and went back past the gardens and the clutter of outbuildings that lay behind the houses. At the barn there was a cistern with a chain pump. He set down his bag and pumped and drank from his cupped left hand held under the spout.

  “Looks like I ought to be hungry,” he thought. “But I ain’t.”

  He was not hungry, and there was no longer anything much that he wanted to think. He was tired. He told himself to lift the bag again and put it on his shoulder. He told his feet to walk, and they carried him on to the church. The door was unlocked. He went in.

  He shut the door behind him, not allowing the latch to click. The quiet inside the church was palpable; he came into it as into a different element, neither air nor water. He crossed the tiny vestibule where a bell rope dangled from a worn hole in the ceiling, went through another door that stood open, and sat down on the first bench to his left, leaving his duffel bag in the aisle, propped against the end of the bench. He let himself become still.

  “I will eat a little,” he thought, “’gainst I get hungry in the night.”

  After a while he took a bar of candy from the bag and slowly ate it. The church windows were glazed with an amber-colored glass that you could not see through, and though it was still light outdoors, in the church it was dusk. When he finished the candy, he folded the wrapper soundlessly and put it in his pocket. Taking his overcoat from the bag to use as a blanket, he lay down on the bench. Many thoughts fled by him, none stopping. And then he slept.

  He woke several times in the night, listening, and, hearing no threat out in the darkness anywhere, slept again. The last time he woke, roosters were crowing, and he sat up. He sat still a while in the dark, allowing the waking quiet of the place to come over him, and then he took another bar of candy from his bag and ate it and folded the wrapper and put it in his pocket as before. The night chill had seeped into the church; standing, he put on the overcoat. He picked up his bag and felt his way to the door.

  It had cleared and the sky was full of stars. To the east, upriver, he could see a faint brightening ahead of the coming day. All around him the dark treetops were throbbing with birdsong, and from the banks of the two rivers at their joining, from everywhere there was water, the voices of spring peepers rose as if in clouds. Art stood still and looked around him and listened. It was going to be the fine spring day that he had imagined it might be.

  He thought, “If a fellow was to be dead now, and young, might be he would be missing this a long time.”

  There was a privy in back of the church and he went to it. And then, on his way out of the lane, he stopped at the barn and drank again at the cistern.

  Back among the houses, still dark and silent among their trees, he took the road that led up into the smaller of the two river valleys. There was no light yet from the dawn, but by the little light of the stars he could see well enough. All he needed now was the general shape of the place given by various shadows and loomings.

  “I have hoofed it home from here a many a night,” he thought. “Might be I could do it if I was blind. But I can see.”

  He could see. And he walked along, feeling the joy of a man who sees, a joy that a man tends to forget in sufficient light. The quiet around him seemed wide as the whole country and deep as the sky, and the morning songs of the creatures and his own footsteps occurred distinctly and separately in it, making a kind of geography and a kind of story. As he walked the light slowly strengthened. As he more and more saw where he was, it seemed to him more and more that he was walking in his memory or that he had entered, awake, a dream that he had been dreaming for a long time.

  He was hungry. The candy bar that he had eaten when he woke had hardly interrupted his hunger.

  “My belly thinks my throat has been cut. It is laying right flat against my backbone.”

  It was a joy to him to be so hungry. Hunger had not bothered him much for many weeks, had not mattered, but now it was as vivid to him as a landmark. It was a tree that put its roots into the ground and spread its branches out against the sky.

  The east brightened. The sun lit the edges of a few clouds on the horizon and then rose above them. He was walking full in its light. It had not shone on him long before he had to take off the overcoat, and he folded and rolled it neatly and stuffed it into his bag. By then he had come a long way up the road.

  Now that it was light, he could see the marks of the flood that had recently covered the valley floor. He could see drift logs and mats of cornstalks that the river had left on the low fields. In places where the river ran near the road, he could see the small clumps of leaves and grasses that the currents had affixed to the tree limbs. Out in one of the bottoms he saw two men with a team and wagon clearing the scattered debris from their fields. They had set fire to a large heap of drift logs, from which the pale smoke rose straight up. Above the level of the flood, the sun shone on the small, still-opening leaves of the water maples and on the short new grass of the hillside pastures.

  As he went along, Art began to be troubled in his mind: How would he present himself to the ones at home? He had not shaved. Since before his long ride on the bus he had not bathed. He did not want to come in, after his three-year absence, like a man coming in from work, unshaven and with his clothes mussed and soiled. He must appear to them as what he had been since they saw him last, a soldier. And then he would be at the end of his soldiering. He did not know yet what he would be when he had ceased to be a soldier, but when he had thought so far his confusion left him.

  He came to the mouth of a small tributary valley. Where the stream of that valley passed under the road, he went down the embankment, making his way, first through trees and then through a patch of dead horseweed stalks, to the creek. A little way upstream he came to a place of large flat rocks that had been swept clean by the creek and were now in the sun and dry. Opening the duffel bag, he carefully laid its contents out on the rocks. He took out his razor and brush and soap and a small mirror, and knelt beside the stream and soaped his face and shaved. The water was cold, but he had shaved with cold water before. When he had shaved, he took off his clothes and, standing in flowing water that instantly made his feet ache, he bathed, quaking, breathing between his teeth as he raised the cold water again and again in his cupped hands.

  Standing on the rocks in the sun, he dried himself with the shirt he had been wearing. He put on his clean, too-large clothes, tied his tie, and combed his hair. And then warmth came to him. It came from inside himself and from the sun outside; he felt suddenly radiant in every vein and fiber of his body. He was clean and warm and rested and hungry. He was well.

  He was in his own country now, and he did not see anything around him that he did not know.

  “I have been a stranger and have seen strange things,” he thought. “And now I am where it is not strange, and I am not a stranger.”

  He was sitting on the rocks, resting after his bath. His bag, repacked, lay on the rock beside him and he propped his elbow on it.

  “I am not a stranger, but I am changed. Now I know a mighty power that can pass over the earth and make it strange. There are people, where I have been, that won’t know their places when they get back to them. Them that live to get back won’t be where they were when they left.”

  He became sleepy and he lay down on the rock and slept. He slept more deeply than he had in the night. He dreamed he was where he was, and a great, warm light fell upon that place, and there was light within it and within him.

  When he returned to the road after his bath and his sleep, it was past the middle of the morning. His steps fell into their old rhythm on the blacktop.

  “I know a mighty power,” he thought. “A mighty power of death and fire. An anger beyond the power of any man, made big in machines equal to many men. And a little man who has passed through mighty death and fire and still lived, what is he going to think of himself when he is back again, walking the river road below Port William, that we would have blowed all to flinders as soon as look at it if it had got in our way?”

  He walked, as before, the left side of the road, not meaning to ask for rides. But as on the afternoon before, there was little traflic. He had met two cars going down toward Hargrave and had been passed by only one coming up.

  Where the road began to rise toward Port William up on the ridge, a lesser road branched off to the left and ran along the floor of the valley. As Art reached this intersection, he heard a truck engine backfiring, coming down the hill, and then the truck came into sight and he recognized it. It was an old green International driven, as he expected and soon saw, by a man wearing a trucker’s cap and smoking a pipe. The truck was loaded with fat hogs, heading for the packing plant at Jefferson. As he went by, the old man waved to Art and Art waved back.

  “Sam Hanks,” he thought. “I have been gone over three years and have traveled a many a thousand miles overland and ocean, and in all that time and all them miles the first man I have seen that I have always known is Sam Hanks.”

  He tried to think what person he had seen last when he was leaving, but he could not remember. He took the lesser road and, after perhaps a mile, turned into a road still narrower, only a pair of graveled wheel tracks. A little later, when the trees were fully leaved, this would be almost a burrow, tunneling along between the creek and the hillside under the trees, but now the leaves were small and the sun cast the shadows of the branches in a close network onto the gravel.

  Soon he was walking below the high-water line. He could see it clearly marked on the slope to his right: a line above which the fallen leaves of the year before were still bright and below which they were darkened by their long steeping in the flood. The slope under the trees was strewn with drift, and here and there a drift log was lodged in the branches high above his head. In the shadow of the flood the spring was late, the buds of the trees just opening, the white flowers of twinleaf and bloodroot just beginning to bloom. It was almost as if he were walking under water, so abrupt and vivid was the difference above and below the line that marked the crest of the flood. But somewhere high in the sunlit branches a redbird sang over and over in a clear, pealing voice, “Even so, even so.”

  And there was nothing around him that Art did not know. He knew the place in all the successions of the year: from the little blooms that came in the earliest spring to the fallen red leaves of October, from the songs of the nesting birds to the anxious wintering of the little things that left their tracks in snow, from the first furrow to the last load of the harvest.

  Where the creek turned away from the road the valley suddenly widened and opened. The road still held up on the hillside among the trees, permitting him to see, through the intervening branches, the broad field that lay across the bottom. He could see that plowing had been started; a long strip had been back-furrowed out across the field, from the foot of the slope below the road to the trees that lined the creek bank. And then he saw, going away from him, almost out to the end of the strip, two mule teams with two plowmen walking in the opening furrows. The plowmen’s heads were bent to their work, their hands riding easy on the handles of the plows. Some distance behind the second plowman was a little boy, also walking in the furrow and carrying a tin can; from time to time he bent and picked something up from the freshly turned earth and dropped it into the can. Walking behind the boy was a large hound. The first plowman was Art’s father, the second his brother Mart. The boy was Art’s sister’s son, Roy Lee, who had been two years old when Art left and was now five. The hound was probably Old Bawler, who made it a part of his business to be always at work. Roy Lee was collecting fishing worms, and Art looked at the creek and saw, in an open place at the top of the bank, as he expected, three willow poles stuck into the ground, their lines in the water.

  The first of the teams reached the end of the plowland, and Art heard his father’s voice clear and quiet: “Gee, boys.” And then Mart’s team finished their furrow, and Mart said, “Gee, Sally.” They went across the headland and started back.

  Art stood as if looking out of his absence at them, who did not know he was there, and he had to shake his head. He had to shake his head twice to persuade himself that he did not hear, from somewhere off in the distance, the heavy footsteps of artillery rounds striding toward them.

  He pressed down the barbed wire at the side of the road, straddled over it, and went down through the trees, stopping at the foot of the slope. They came toward him along the edge of the plowland, cutting it two furrows wider. Soon he could hear the soft footfalls of the mules, the trace ends jingling, the creaking of the doubletrees. Present to himself, still absent to them, he watched them come.

  At the end of the furrow his father called, “Gee!” and leaned his plow over so that it could ride around the headland on the share and right handle. And then he saw Art. “Well now!” he said, as if only to himself. “Whoa!” he said to the mules. And again: “Well now!” He came over to Art and put out his hand and Art gave him his.

  Art saw that there were tears in his father’s eyes, and he grinned and said, “Howdy.”

  Early Rowanberry stepped back and looked at his son and said again, “Well now!”

  Mart came around onto the headland then and stopped his team. He and Art shook hands, grinning at each other.

  “You reckon your foot’ll still fit in a furrow?”

  Art nodded. “I reckon it still will.”

  “Well, here’s somebody you don’t hardly know,” Mart said, gesturing toward Roy Lee, “and who don’t know you at all, I’ll bet. Do you know who this fellow is, Roy Lee?”

  Roy Lee probably did not know, though he knew he had an uncle who was a soldier. He knew about soldiers—he knew they fought in a war far away—and here was a great, tall, fine soldier in a soldier suit with shining buttons, and the shoes on his feet were shining. Roy Lee felt something akin to awe and something akin to love and something akin to fear. He shook his head and looked down at his bare right foot.