Another night, again, I heard him call me. “Andy. Listen.” His voice exultant then at having recovered the words, he recited:

  There entertain him all the saints above,

  In solemn troops and sweet societies

  That sing, and singing in their glory move,

  And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.

  After he spoke them, the words stood above us in the dark and the quiet, sounding and luminous. And then they faded.

  After a while I said, “Who taught you that?”

  “My mother. She was a great hand to improve your mind.”

  And after a while, again, I asked, “Do you know who wrote it?”

  “No,” he said. “But wasn’t he a fine one!”

  As the summer went along, he weakened, but so slowly we could hardly see it happening. There was never any sudden change. He remained quiet, mainly comfortable, and alert. We stayed in our routine of caring for him; it had become the ordinary way of things.

  In the latter part of August we started into the tobacco cutting. For us, that is the great divider of the year. It ends the summer, and makes safe the season’s growth. After it, our minds are lightened, and we look ahead to winter and the coming year. It is a sort of ritual of remembrance, too, when we speak of other years and remember our younger selves and the absent and the dead—all those we have, as we say, “gone down the row with.”

  We had a big crew that year—eight men working every day: Jarrat and Burley and Nathan Coulter, Arthur and Martin Rowanberry, Elton Penn, Danny Branch, and me. Hannah Coulter and Mary Penn and Lyda Branch kept us fed and helped with the hauling and housing. And Nathan and Hannah’s and the Penns’ children were with us until school started, and then they worked after school and on Saturdays. We worked back and forth among the various farms as the successive plantings became ready for harvest.

  “What every tobacco cutting needs,” Art Rowanberry said, “is a bunch of eighteen-year-old boys wanting to show how fast they are.”

  He was right, but we did not have them. We were not living in a time that was going to furnish many such boys for such work. Except for the children, we were all old enough to be resigned to the speed we could stand. And so, when we cut, we would be strung out along the field in a pattern that never varied from the first day to the last. First would be Elton and Nathan and Danny, all working along together. Elton, I think, would have proved the fastest if anybody had challenged him, but nobody did. Then came Mart Rowanberry, who was always ahead of me, though he was nearly twice my age, and then, some distance behind me, would come Art Rowanberry, and then Burley Coulter, and then, far back, Burley’s brother Jarrat, whose judgment and justification of himself were unswerving: “I’m old and wore out and not worth a damn. But every row I cut is a cut row.”

  In my grandfather’s absence Jarrat was the oldest of us, a long-enduring, solitary, mostly silent man, slowed by age and much hard work. His brushy eyes could stare upon you as if you had no more ability to stare back than a post. When he had something to say, his way was simply to begin to say it, no matter who else was talking or what else was happening, his slow, hard-edged voice boring in upon us like his stare—and the result, invariably, was that whatever was happening stopped, and whoever was talking listened.

  I never caught up with Elton and Nathan and Danny, or came anywhere near it, but at least when the rows were straight I always had them in sight, and I loved to watch them. Though they kept an even, steady pace, it was not a slow one. They drove into the work, maintaining the same pressing rhythm from one end of the row to the other, and yet they worked well, as smoothly and precisely as dancers. To see them moving side by side against the standing crop, leaving it fallen, the field changed, behind them, was maybe like watching Homeric soldiers going into battle. It was momentous and beautiful, and touchingly, touchingly mortal. They were spending themselves as they worked, giving up their time; they would not return by the way they went.

  The good crew men among us were Burley and Elton. When the sun was hot and the going hard, it would put heart into us to hear Burley singing out down the row some scrap of human sorrow that his flat, exuberant voice both expressed and mocked:

  Allll our sins and griefs to bear—oh!

  —that much only, raised abruptly out of the silence like the howl of some solitary dog. Or he would sing with a lovelorn quaver in his voice:

  Darlin’, fool yourself and love me one more time.

  And when we were unloading the wagons in the barn, he would start his interminable tale about his life as a circus teamster. It was not meant to be believed, and yet in our misery we listened to his extravagant wonderful lies as if he had been Marco Polo returned from Cathay.

  Elton had as much gab as Burley, when he wanted to, but he served us as the teller of the tale of our own work. He told and retold everything that happened that was funny. That we already knew what he was telling, that he was telling us what we ourselves had done, did not matter. He told it well, he told it the way we would tell it when we told it, and every time he told it he told it better. He told us, also, how much of our work we had got done, and how much we had left to do, and how we might form the tasks still ahead in order to do them. His head, of course, was not the only one involved, and not the only good one, but his was indeed a good one, and his use of it pleased him and comforted us. Though we had a lot of work still to do, we were going to be able to do it, and these were the ways we could get it done. The whole of it stayed in his mind. He shaped it for us and gave it a comeliness greater than its difficulty.

  That we were together now kept us reminded of my grandfather, who had always been with us before. We often spoke of him, because we missed him, or because he belonged to our stories, and we could not tell them without speaking of him.

  One morning, perhaps to acknowledge to herself that he would not wear them again, my grandmother gave me a pair of my grandfathers shoes.

  It was a gift not easy to accept. I said, “Thanks, Granny,” and put them under my arm.

  “No,” she said. “Put them on. See if they fit.”

  They fit, and I started, embarrassedly, to take them off.

  “No,” she said. “Wear them.”

  And so I wore them to the field.

  “New shoes!” Burley said, recognizing them, and I saw tears start to his eyes.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Burley studied them, and then me. And then he smiled and put his arm around me, making the truth plain and bearable to us both: “You can wear ’em, honey. But you can’t fill ’em.”

  It got to be September, and the fall feeling came into the air. The days would get as hot as ever, but now when the sun got low the chill would come. It was not going to frost for a while yet, but we could feel it coming. It was the time of year, Elton said, when a man begins to remember his long underwear.

  We were cutting a patch at Elton’s place where the rows were longer than any we had cut before, bending around the shoulder of a ridge and rising a little over it. They were rows to break a man’s heart, for, shaped as they were, you could not see the end, and those of us who were strung out behind the leaders could not see each other. All that we could see ahead of us was the cloudless blue sky. Each row was a long, lonely journey that, somewhere in the middle, in our weariness, we believed would never end.

  Once when I had cut my row and was walking back to start another, Art Rowanberry wiped the sweat from his nose on the cuff of his sleeve and called out cheerfully to me, “Well, have you been across? Have you seen the other side?”

  That became the ceremony of that day and the next. When one of us younger ones finished a row and came walking back, Art would ask us, “Have you seen the other side?”

  Burley would take it up then, mourning and mocking: “Have you reached the other shore, dear brother? Have you seen that distant land?” And he would sing,

  Oh, pilgrim, have you seen that distant land?

  On the evening of the second day we had the field nearly cut. There was just enough of the crop left standing to make an easy job of finishing up—something to look forward to. We had finished cutting for the day and were sitting in the rich, still light under a walnut tree at the edge of the field, resting a little, before loading the wagons. We would load them the last thing every evening, to unload the next morning while the dew was on.

  We saw my father’s car easing back along the fencerow, rocking a little over the rough spots in the ground. It was a gray car, all dusty, and scratched along the sides where he had driven it through the weeds and briars. He still had on his suit and tie.

  “Ah, here he comes,” Burley said, for we were used to seeing him at that time of day, when he would leave his office at Hargrave and drive up to help us a little or to see how we had got along.

  He drove up beside us and stopped, and killed the engine. But he did not look at us. He looked straight ahead as if he had not quit driving, his hands still on the wheel.

  “Boys,” he said, “Mr. Feltner died this afternoon. About an hour ago.”

  And then, after he seemed to have finished, he said as though to himself, “And now that’s over.”

  I heard Burley clear his throat, but nobody said anything. We sat in the cooling light in my grandfather’s new absence, letting it come upon us.

  And then the silence shifted and became our own. Nobody spoke. Nobody yet knew what to say. We did not know what we were going to do. We were, I finally realized, waiting on Jarrat. It was Elton’s farm, but Jarrat was now the oldest man, and we were waiting on him.

  He must have felt it too, for he stood, and stood still, looking at us, and then turned away from us toward the wagons.

  “Let’s load ’em up.”

  A Friend of Mine (1967)

  During the three weeks they had been in the tobacco cutting so far, Elton Penn had accumulated several errands that he had put off almost too long. And so on Friday morning, instead of going to the Rowanberry Place where the crew was now at work, he drove first to Port William and then to Hargrave. His several duties in those places needed to be done, but his doing of them was dogged by the guilty knowledge that he was glad to have them to do.

  He was tired. He was forty-seven years old that summer—this was almost thirty years ago—and he was beginning to know what the older men meant when they told the young ones, “you don’t know what tired is.” Elton did not rest as well at night as he once did, and he had got so, in the times of hardest work, he was always sore in the morning. And so it was pleasant to see to his brief business at the bank in Port William and purchase a hundred pounds of stock salt at Jasper Lathrop’s store, and then drive down the river road to the farm equipment place at Hargrave.

  But he was mindful that his friends were at work, and he did not linger anywhere. He was back at home an hour and a half before noon. He changed into his soiled clothes and used the rest of the morning in straightening up his barn. They had been at work in his crop the first of the week and would return again in a few days, and so he made ready.

  When Mary called him to dinner, he ate, and then filled his water jug. He drove back through Port William and down the Sand Ripple road into the creek bottom. As he crossed the creek on the graveled lane that went by the Rowanberrys’ house, he came up behind Mart Rowanberry, who was on his way to the tobacco patch with a tractor and wagon. Elton tooted the horn, and Mart looked bad: and waved.

  Beyond the house, Mart stopped. Elton pulled his truck out of the lane into the shade of the great chinquapin oak that stood well below the house and yet reached its top branches higher than the roof. A dozen feet above Elton’s head a railroad spike had been driven into the trunk to mark the crest of the 1937 flood.

  “Yessir!” Mart said. “Reckon you’ll ever get anywhere without changing jobs? How's this one for a fine day?”

  “It’s the one the doctor ordered!”

  Elton tossed his cutting tools onto the wagon and hoisted himself on, setting his jug on his lap.

  Mart drove on up the steep road into the woods and then finally out again onto the open ridgetop.

  They came to a gap in a fence beyond which was a tobacco patch, the ripe leaves golden in the strong light. Mart stopped the tractor again.

  “How about if I leave you here?” he said. “We got all the hands we need to haul in and house. Me and Art thought, if you didn’t mind, you could start cutting on this piece.”

  “I don’t mind,” Elton said, telling the truth. It would please him to work alone. He stood beside the wagon, holding his tools and his jug.

  “Sticks are dropped in maybe half the rows,” Mart said.

  “All right.”

  “And listen. There’s a patch of little watermelons yonder on the far end. They’re just about dead ripe and sweet as sugar. Whatever you do, don’t eat any of them.”

  “Well, you know I don’t like watermelon.”

  Mart drove on then, drawing the rattling wagon out of sight. Elton straddled over the gap, walked to the far end of the patch, and set his jug in the shade of an old pear tree. The watermelon vines were in two short rows alongside the tobacco; he went back and picked three ripe melons and carried them to the tree and put them down in the deep grass in the shade.

  From where he stood he could see out over the treetops on the bluff and down the river valley almost to Hargrave. For a moment he let his mind go out into that reach of bright air, longingly, for now the dread of the hard afternoon of work was on him. The clear free light over the green slopes and the fields of the bottomlands offered an invitation that he felt it hard to refuse and yet would have needed wings to accept.

  And then, without mercy to himself, which was the only way to do it, he entered into the work. He went to the first two rows on the right-hand side of the patch, picked up a stick, jobbed it upright into the ground at the end of the outside row, and clapped his spear onto it. He leaned and cut the first plant and speared it, and then a second and then a third. After he had cut five plants from the two rows, he stabbed the second stick into the ground and filled it as he had the first.

  Though he did not begin slowly, for a while because of the stiffness of his muscles and joints he seemed to work in harness that was too tight. And then he began to sweat, and his body loosened into its motion. He worked easier, becoming gradually less conscious of himself, his mind beginning to wander among thoughts.

  It was a fine day for work—in comparison, anyhow, with the days preceding. For two weeks the weather had been punishingly hot and humid; not a whiff of air had stirred. They had worked from morning to night in sweat-soaked clothes that bound and galled. And then during the night a little rain had come. This morning the air had tasted of the coming fall. And so the thought of what they had to do had become more tolerable. It was hot again by noon, but it was not so humid as it had been, and Elton’s mind had changed.

  Though he was known as a man passionate in his work, willing to spend himself in long days, Elton was a man also who knew the dread of work. He had sometimes, in moments of candor, spoken of himself as a lazy man.

  “You’re lazy,” Mart would say, “and I reckon I’m that feller that scratches his ass with his big toe.”

  And Elton would insist: “I dread it as much as anybody!”

  He was telling the truth; when he had the work still ahead of him, there would always come a time when he dreaded it. The tobacco harvest always came upon him that way, and followed the same course, at once surprising and familiar, from seeming impossibility to obvious possibility to eventual completion, when almost strangely the great effort would be behind him, and he would become again farsighted in his thoughts, desiring the coming year. He had not changed in this since his boyhood; he had not outgrown his reluctance. Beforehand he could not imagine how he would get the work done, how he would find in his mortal back and arms the strength to do it. And then, once it was begun, the work elaborating itself in the familiar sequence of motions and days, he would again become able to imagine it. He would feel coming into him each morning the necessary strength and will.

  As he worked now he thought of the older men he had known—men of another time and kind, perhaps—who seemed always reconciled to the hardship of their work. Maybe they did not imagine the whole effort, Elton thought. Maybe they did not think of it at all the way he did, making it dreadful by adding it up, but just worked it out day by day, living each day for itself.

  Art Rowanberry was one of that old kind. When the work piled up or did not go right, Elton fretted. But Art, no matter the difficulty or the urgency, always had something cheerful to say. Art was getting old and he had worked hard from childhood, yet he would still run like a boy to get in on a lift. The important thing, Art said, was for a man to feel good and be satisfied with what he had.

  Elton was a strong man who felt good often enough. He was a man too of satisfactions. But his satisfactions were discontinuous, often interrupted, often not even remembered, for he was a man of dread too, and a man of desire. He wanted things he did not have, and he longed for the time when he would have them. He remembered his mother telling him, when he was wishing for Christmas to come, wishing for spring to come, wishing for school to let out, wishing for hunting season to begin, “Child, you’re wishing your life away.”

  He was, and he knew it. He was wishing it away. When he put the bucks in with the ewes, he would be already wanting to see the lambs that would be born; he could hardly wait. And yet he knew that the price of seeing them would be a hundred and forty-five more of his days that would have to pass and be gone. He was wishing his life away. In his eagerness to live it, he was wishing it away.

  Even before he was a man, he had wanted his own crop, his own team of horses. He had wanted to be on his own, a tenant, independent of family help. And then he had wanted to own the good farm that he had been a tenant on. And then, when his and Mary’s names were on the deed, he had wanted it freed from debt; he longed for the day when they would pay the last dollar and bring home the canceled note. They had done that, and sooner even than they had expected. They freed the farm from debt and from their fear that they would not be able to pay the debt. And still Elton looked forward with the alternation of joy and dread that was characteristic of him. He longed to see the farm as it would look after each of his improvements. He saw visions and hurried to make the visions real. He longed to accumulate savings that would assure an education for his children; he longed to see them well-started in the world, and he feared that they would not be.