Elton nods, looks down, thinks again, and again looks up. “And you’re saying you’re going to be my friend because of all that?”

  “Yes. Because of you yourself, and because of all that.”

  Elton laughs. “You’re going to be my friend, it sounds pret’ near like, because you can’t get out of it.”

  “If I was his friend, given what that meant, I can’t get out of it.”

  “But, Wheeler, that’s pretty tough.”

  “It’s tough. It’s not as tough as being nobody’s friend.”

  “You’re saying there’s not any way to get out of this friendship.”

  “No. You can get out of it. By not accepting it. I’m the one, so far, who can’t escape it. You have it because I’ve given it to you, and you don’t have to accept. I gave it to you because it was given to me, and I accepted.”

  Elton draws a long breath, and holds it, looking out the window, and then breathes it out and looks at Wheeler. “I can’t repay him, Wheeler. And now you’ve helped me, and I can’t repay you.”

  “Well, that’s the rest of it,” Wheeler says. “It’s not accountable. If the place was its price, or you thought it was, maybe you could consider such debts payable—but then some of those debts you wouldn’t have contracted, and the rest you wouldn’t recognize as debts. Your debt to Jack Beechum is a debt, and it’s not payable—not to him, anyhow. Your debt to me is smaller than your debt to him, not much at all, and it may or may not be payable to me. This is only human friendship. I could need a friend too, you know. I could get sick or die too.”

  Elton says, “Well, I—”

  But Wheeler raises a hand, and goes on. “It’s not accountable, because we’re dealing in goods and services that we didn’t make, that can’t exist at all except as gifts. Everything about a place that’s different from its price is a gift. Everything about a man or woman that’s different from their price is a gift. The life of a neighborhood is a gift. I know that if you bought a calf from Nathan Coulter you’d pay him for it, and that’s right. But aside from that, you’re friends and neighbors, you work together, and so there’s lots of giving and taking without a price; some that you don’t remember, some that you never knew about. You don’t send a bill. You don’t, if you can help it, keep an account. Once the account is kept and the bill presented, the friendship ends, the neighborhood is finished, and you’re back to where you started. The starting place doesn’t have anybody in it but you.”

  “It’s before the line of succession,” Elton says.

  “That’s right.”

  Wheeler leans back in his chair now and spreads his hands and lets them hang relaxed over the ends of the chair arms. “So.” He thinks of Old Jack again, at ease with that imperious ghost at last.

  He looks at Elton. “So. There is to be no repayment. Because there is to be no bill. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Maybe.” Elton grins, at ease now too, looking at Wheeler, his hand fishing in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “Probably.”

  Wheeler laughs. “Well, give me one of your smokes.”

  The Boundary (1965)

  He can hear Margaret at work in the kitchen. That she knows well what she is doing and takes comfort in it, one might tell from the sounds alone as her measured, quiet steps move about the room. It is all again as it has been during the going on twenty years that only the two of them have lived in the old house. Sitting in the split-hickory rocking chair on the back porch, Mat listens; he watches the smoke from his pipe drift up and out past the foliage of the plants in their hanging pots. He has finished his morning stint in the garden, and brought in a half-bushel of peas that he set down on the drainboard of the sink, telling Margaret, “There you are, mam.” He heard with pleasure her approval, “Oh! They’re nice!” and then he came out onto the shady porch to rest.

  Since winter he has not been well. Through the spring, while Nathan and Elton and the others went about the work of the fields, Mat, for the first time, confined himself to the house and barn lot and yard and garden, working a little and resting a little, finding it easier than he expected to leave the worry of the rest of it to Nathan. But slowed down as he is, he has managed to make a difference. He has made the barn his business, and it is cleaner and in better order than it has been for years. And the garden, so far, is nearly perfect, the best he can remember. By now, in the first week of June, in all its green rows abundance is straining against order. There is not a weed in it. Though he has worked every day, he has had to measure the work out in little stints, and between stints he has had to rest.

  But rest, this morning, has not come to him. When he went out after breakfast he saw Nathan turning the cows and calves into the Shade Field, so called for the woods that grows there on the slope above the stream called Shade Branch. He did not worry about it then, or while he worked through his morning jobs. But when he came out onto the porch and sat down and lit his pipe, a thought that had been on its way toward him for several hours finally reached him. He does not know how good the line fence is down Shade Branch; he would bet that Nathan, who is still rushing to get his crops out, has not looked at it. The panic of a realized neglect came upon him. It has been years since he walked that fence himself, and he can see in his mind, as clearly as if he were there, perhaps five places where the winter spates of Shade Branch might have torn out the wire.

  He sits, listening to Margaret, looking at pipe smoke, anxiously working his way down along that boundary in his mind.

  “Mat,” Margaret says at the screen door, “dinner’s ready.”

  “All right,” he says, though for perhaps a minute after that he does not move. And then he gets up, steps to the edge of the porch to knock out his pipe, and goes in.

  When he has eaten, seeing him pick up his hat again from the chair by the door, Margaret says, “You’re not going to take your nap?”

  “No,” he says, for he has decided to walk that length of the boundary line that runs down Shade Branch. And he has stepped beyond the feeling that he is going to do it because he should. He is going to do it because he wants to. “I’ve got something yet I have to do.”

  He means to go on out the door without looking back. But he knows that she is watching him, worried about him, and he goes back to her and gives her a hug. “It’s all right, my old girl,” he says. He stands with his arms around her, who seems to him to have changed almost while he has held her from girl to wife to mother to grandmother to great-grandmother. There in the old room where they have been together so long, ready again to leave it, he thinks, “I am an old man now.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m feeling good.”

  He does feel good, for an old man, and once outside, he puts the house behind him and his journey ahead of him. At the barn he takes from its nail in the old harness room a stout stockman’s cane. He does not need a cane yet, and he is proud of it, but as a concession to Margaret he has decided to carry one today.

  When he lets himself out through the lot gate and into the open, past the barn and the other buildings, he can see the country lying under the sun. Nearby, on his own ridges, the crops are young and growing, the pastures are lush, a field of hay has been raked into curving windrows. Inlets of the woods, in the perfect foliage of the early season, reach up the hollows between the ridges. Lower down, these various inlets join in the larger woods embayed in the little valley of Shade Branch. Beyond the ridges and hollows of the farm he can see the opening of the river valley, and beyond that the hills on the far side, blue in the distance.

  He has it all before him, this place that has been his life, and how lightly and happily now he walks out again into it! It seems to him that he has cast off all restraint, left all encumbrances behind, taking only himself and his direction. He is feeling good. There has been plenty of rain, and the year is full of promise. The country looks promising. He thinks of the men he knows who are at work in it: the Coulter brothers and Nathan, Nathan’s boy, Mattie, Elton Penn, and Mat’s grandson, Bess’s and Wheeler’s boy, Andy Catlett. They are at Elton’s now, he thinks, but by midafternoon they should be back here, baling the hay.

  Carrying the cane over his shoulder, he crosses two fields, and then, letting himself through a third gate, turns right along the fencerow that will lead him down to Shade Branch. Soon he is walking steeply downward among the trunks of trees, and the shifting green sea of their foliage has closed over him.

  He comes into the deeper shade of the older part of the woods where there is little browse and the cattle seldom come, and here he sits down at the root of an old white oak to rest. As many times before, he feels coming to him the freedom of the woods, where he has no work to do. He feels coming to him such rest as, bound to house and barn and garden for so long, he had forgot. In body, now, he is an old man, but mind and eye look out of his old body into the shifting leafy lights and shadows among the still trunks with a recognition that is without age, the return of an ageless joy. He needs the rest, for he has walked in his gladness at a faster pace than he is used to, and he is sweating. But he is in no hurry, and he sits and grows quiet among the sights and sounds of the place. The time of the most abundant blooming of the woods flowers is past now, but the tent villages of mayapple are still perfect, there are ferns and stonecrop, and near him he can see the candle-like white flowers of black cohosh. Below, but still out of sight, he can hear the water in Shade Branch passing down over the rocks in a hundred little rapids and falls. When he feels the sweat beginning to dry on his face he gets up, braces himself against the gray trunk of the oak until he is steady, and stands free. The descent beckons and he yields eagerly to it, going on down into the tireless chanting of the stream.

  He reaches the edge of the stream at a point where the boundary, coming down the slope facing him, turns at a right angle and follows Shade Branch in its fall toward the creek known as Sand Ripple. Here the fence that Mat has been following crosses the branch over the top of a rock wall that was built in the notch of the stream long before Mat was born. The water coming down, slowed by the wall, has filled the notch above it with rock and silt, and then, in freshet, leaping over it, has scooped out a shallow pool below it, where water stands most of the year. All this, given the continuous little changes of growth and wear in the woods and the stream, is as it was when Mat first knew it: the wall gray and mossy, the water, only a spout now, pouring over the wall into the little pool, covering the face of it with concentric wrinkles sliding outward.

  Here, seventy-five years ago, Mat came with a fencing crew: his father, Ben, his uncle, Jack Beechum, Joe Banion, a boy then, not much older than Mat, and Joe’s grandfather, Smoke, who had been a slave. And Mat remembers Jack Beechum coming down through the woods, as Mat himself has just come, carrying on his shoulder two of the long light rams they used to tamp the dirt into postholes. As he approached the pool he took a ram in each hand, holding them high, made three long approaching strides, planted the rams in the middle of the pool, and vaulted over. Mat, delighted, said, “Do it again!” And without breaking rhythm, Jack turned, made the three swinging strides, and did it again—does it again in Mat’s memory, so clearly that Mat’s presence there, so long after, fades away, and he hears their old laughter, and hears Joe Banion say, “Mistah Jack, he might nigh a bird!”

  Forty-some years later, coming down the same way to build that same fence again, Mat and Joe Banion and Virgil, Mat’s son, grown then and full of the newness of his man’s strength, Mat remembered what Jack had done and told Virgil; Virgil took the two rams, made the same three strides that Jack had made, vaulted the pool, and turned back and grinned. Mat and Joe Banion laughed again, and this time Joe looked at Mat and said only “Damn.”

  Now a voice in Mat’s mind that he did not want to hear says, “Gone. All of them are gone.” And they are gone. Mat is standing by the pool, and all the others are gone, and all that time has passed. And still the stream pours into the pool and the circles slide across its face.

  He shrugs as a man would shake snow from his shoulders and steps away. He finds a good place to cross the branch, and picks his way carefully from rock to rock to the other side, using the cane for that and glad he brought it. Now he gives attention to the fence. Soon he comes upon signs—new wire spliced into the old, a staple newly driven into a sycamore—that tell him his fears were unfounded. Nathan has been here. For a while now Mat walks in the way he knows that Nathan went. Nathan is forty-one this year, a quiet, careful man, as attentive to Mat as Virgil might have been if Virgil had lived to return from the war. Usually, when Nathan has done such a piece of work as this, he will tell Mat so that Mat can have the satisfaction of knowing that the job is done. Sometimes, though, when he is hurried, he forgets, and Mat will think of the job and worry about it and finally go to see to it himself, almost always to find, as now, that Nathan has been there ahead of him and has done what needed to be done. Mat praises Nathan in his mind and calls him son. He has never called Nathan son aloud, to his face, for he does not wish to impose or intrude. But Nathan, who is not his son, has become his son, just as Hannah, Nathan’s wife, Virgil’s widow, who is not Mat’s daughter, has become his daughter.

  “I am blessed,” he thinks. He walks in the way Nathan walked down along the fence, between the fence and the stream, seeing Nathan in his mind as clearly as if he were following close behind him, watching. He can see Nathan with axe and hammer and pliers and pail of staples and wire stretcher and coil of wire, making his way down along the fence, stopping now to chop a windfall off the wire and retighten it, stopping again to staple the fence to a young sycamore that has grown up in the line opportunely to serve as a post. Mat can imagine every move Nathan made, and in his old body, a little tired now, needing to be coaxed and instructed in the passing of obstacles, he remembers the strength of the body of a man of forty-one, unregarding of its own effort.

  Now, trusting the fence to Nathan, Mat’s mind turns away from it. He allows himself to drift down the course of the stream, passing through it as the water passes, drawn by gravity, bemused by its little chutes and falls. He stops beside one tiny quiet backwater and watches a family of water striders conducting their daily business, their feet dimpling the surface. He eases the end of his cane into the pool, and makes a crawfish spurt suddenly backward beneath a rock.

  A water thrush moves down along the rocks of the streambed ahead of him, teetering and singing. He stops and stands to watch while a large striped woodpecker works its way up the trunk of a big sycamore, putting its eye close to peer under the loose scales of the bark. And then the bird flies to its nesting hole in a hollow snag still nearer by to feed its young, paying Mat no mind. He has become still as a tree, and now a hawk suddenly stands on a limb close over his head. The hawk loosens his feathers and shrugs, looking around him with his fierce eyes. And it comes to Mat that once more, by stillness, he has passed across into the wild inward presence of the place.

  “Wonders,” he thinks. “Little wonders of a great wonder.” He feels the sweetness of time. If a man eighty-two years old has not seen enough, then nobody will ever see enough. Such a little piece of the world as he has before him now would be worth a man’s long life, watching and listening. And then he could go two hundred feet and live again another life, listening and watching, and his eyes would never be satisfied with seeing, or his ears filled with hearing. Whatever he saw could be seen only by looking away from something else equally worth seeing. For a second he feels and then loses some urging of the delight in a mind that could see and comprehend it all, all at once. “I could stay here a long time,” he thinks. “I could stay here a long time.”

  He is standing at the head of a larger pool, another made by the plunging of the water over a rock wall. This one he built himself, he and Virgil, in the terribly dry summer of 1930. By the latter part of that summer, because of the shortage of both rain and money, they had little enough to do, and they had water on their minds. Mat remembered this place, where a strong vein of water opened under the roots of a huge old sycamore and flowed only a few feet before it sank uselessly among the dry stones of the streambed. “We’ll make a pool,” he said. He and Virgil worked several days in the August of that year, building the wall and filling in behind it so that the stream, when it ran full again, would not tear out the stones. The work there in the depth of the woods took their minds off their parched fields and comforted them. It was a kind of work that Mat loved and taught Virgil to love, requiring only the simplest tools: a large sledgehammer, a small one, and two heavy crowbars with which they moved the big, thick rocks that were in that place. Once their tools were there, they left them until the job was done. When they came down to work they brought only a jug of water from the cistern at the barn.

  “We could drink out of the spring,” Virgil said.

  “Of course we could,” Mat said. “It’s dog days now. Do you want to get sick?”

  In a shady place near the creek, Virgil tilted a flagstone up against a small sycamore, wedging it between trunk and root, to make a place for the water jug. There was not much reason for that. It was a thing a boy would do, making a little domestic nook like that, so far off in the woods, but Mat shared his pleasure in it, and that was where they kept the jug.

  When they finished the work and carried their tools away, they left the jug, forgot it, and did not go back to get it. Mat did not think of it again until, years later, he happened to notice the rock still leaning against the tree, which had grown over it, top and bottom, fastening the rock to itself by a kind of natural mortise. Looking under the rock, Mat found the earthen jug still there, though it had been broken by the force of the tree trunk growing against it. He left it as it was. By then Virgil was dead, and the stream, rushing over the wall they had made, had scooped out a sizable pool that had been a faithful water source in dry years.

  Remembering, Mat goes to the place and looks and again finds the stone and finds the broken jug beneath it. He has never touched rock or jug, and he does not do so now. He stands, looking, thinking of his son, dead twenty years, a stranger to his daughter, now a grown woman, who never saw him, and he says aloud, “Poor fellow!” He does not know he is weeping until he feels his tears cool on his face.