You could have much joy from an able dog with a keen nose and heart enough and a good mouth. It was a feeling strong and unspeakable that you felt when your reach was extended into the countryside by a willing animal who would call to you out of the dark. The feeling came to you already old, bearing almost the memory of all the ones who had felt it before.

  He was getting well along now toward the fat end of the patch. He had a hard way to travel, but he was getting on. If all the rows of his life had been laid end to end, he wondered, how far would he have gone? It would have been a many a mile. He thought of all that distance, and of himself back there on the far end of it, a big boy just starting out, believing the world would always be as he knew it then. He thought of himself as he was now, having come so far, and of the changes he had seen. On the long ridge, reaching out under the waning day to the log house of the old Rowanberrys and the barn beyond, which he could now see again, he felt the quietness with which the country had submitted to all the changes that had passed over it since the first Rowanberry had arrived and struck the first axe-stroke.

  For a long time it had been a story of flesh alone, the flesh of horses and mules and people, doing the work and bearing the hardship. Elton had grown up in that old way of farming, and he had liked it. He had owned good teams that had answered to his need and will almost as his own hand and feet had done. It had put tears in his eyes sometimes to see what his horses could do, and how willingly they went to it. The tractor, when he finally bought a second-hand one after the war, had satisfied two of his wants: it increased the amount of work he could accomplish and it lengthened his days to the limit of his endurance. Now he could work at night. A man such as he was, who was ambitious and who loved the changes his work made, was bound to be excited by this sudden enlargement. And yet there were times that brought the old ways back full-fleshed into his memory, and he missed his horses and the lost brotherly tie of mutual effort and mutual weariness.

  The machines had come, as irresistibly as the hunters and land speculators who had come earlier—and not just tractors but machines of all kinds, shortening distances, shifting attention and people too from country to city. And now this crop that they had depended on from the beginning was in disrepute and under threat.

  “It all could change,” Wheeler Catlett said.

  On a Sunday afternoon Elton and Wheeler were sitting in Wheeler’s car on a ridgetop, looking at Elton’s steers that were grazing around them. The sun was almost down. They had been together all afternoon, doing what they were still doing, driving through the fields and looking and talking. They had looked at everything and talked about everything. And several times Wheeler had been reminded and brought back to the question of the crop and the life and the people that the crop supported.

  “It all could change,” he said. “It might be that if we should come back from the dead in the time to come, we wouldn’t know where we were.”

  And they fell quiet, for it was really the end of time that they thought of then, foreseeing not only their own absence from that place, but the earth silent, the heavens empty of light, the whole story over and done.

  “Ah!” Elton said. “Ah!” He finished the row and stepped free of it.

  Without pausing this time, he turned and walked back to the starting end. The afternoon, by his reckoning, was now three-quarters gone. One more row, he thought. One more. But he was tired now. This time, when he returned to the pear tree, he did not sit down. He knew that if he sat down this time he would need willpower to get up, and he did not want the rest of the day to become a matter of willpower. He picked up the third melon, knelt on one knee to slice it, and then ate it standing with his left shoulder propped against the tree, his back to the patch, looking again out over the valleys of Sand Ripple and the river.

  He finished the melon, drank from his jug, and smoked. He did not turn to look again at the patch. He watched the light over and within the two valleys, now slowly becoming the light of evening. When he had finished his smoke he picked up his tools.

  One more row, he thought. One more, and now every plant I cut will make it that much less than one. While he rested he had preserved in his body the momentum of his work, as one might hold in mind the tune of a song, and now he gave himself back to it again. He needed to keep the momentum, find his rhythm, stay with it to the end. If he kept to his lick, he would be accurate; the plants would seem just to float free of the ground and onto the spear. But if he faltered, if he acknowledged his tiredness, the plants would grow heavy and clumsy in his hands. It would come to willpower then. His weariness would descend on him like a heavy load. He would not finish the row; the day would feel incomplete, and he would not be free of it. It was the difference between grace and force that he had to bear in mind now. Going the way he was going was a hard way to travel, but he was moving like a dancer in his dance, momentum carrying him across the downfalling of the day.

  Momentum and desire. For now hunger was returning to him. Between his belt buckle and his backbone a hollow place was opening that asked to be filled with something more substantial than watermelon, something dense and weighty, meat and bread. He could imagine his supper now, and he gave some care to it, allowing his hunger to take its full dimension, anticipating his satisfaction.

  When he got home, Mary would have done the milking and the other chores. If she had found the time, she would have his supper warm. Or, if not, he would eat it cold. She was a good cook; it would be good, hot or cold.

  For the nearly thirty years of their marriage, they had worked hard every day. At night they would be tired. Maybe they would be occupied with their thoughts and worries. And maybe they would go from supper on through the little duties of the evening and then to bed, paying no more attention to each other than any two people who were used to living together.

  Sometimes it seemed to Elton that they had come so far from the boy and girl they had been when they married that, looking back, they could hardly see themselves. At those times they would be apart, and all their differences stood between them, a dark thicket. They were like two horses working together. They did not walk the same; they were not always in step.

  But that they walked differently meant that they would be in step from time to time. There would come another time, always unforeseen, as if approaching out of the apparently vacant sky, when all that had happened between them, the landscape of all their years, became a bond that joined them together. Almost only by their having waited, the approach would be open, with signs of Welcome! Welcome! all the way. And then he would become a man without history or memory, fear or hope—a man only lost in the world, who found it good. The burden of living and dying rested lightly on his shoulders then, he waited with so great a longing for the night to fall.

  He heard a tractor engine and looked up. Mart Rowanberry was heading down the hill with a load. It was late in the day. The air was beginning to cool. Seeing that Elton had seen him, Mart drew his right arm through the air in three long strokes, meaning “We’re going down now. Quit, and come on.” Mart did not stop. Other loads were coming; Elton could catch one of them.

  But Elton did not stop cutting, and he did not look up as the other loads went by. He wanted to finish the row, and there was not much left. With the end of the row and the day in sight, he worked easily, easily, and fast, as if he were going downhill. He worked swiftly and accurately to the end of the row, cutting and spearing plant after plant until there were no more ahead of him, and he was done. Weariness then seemed to flow downward through his body, and with it came an old elation.

  He did not leave the field to follow the loads down the graveled track to the barn, but instead turned and walked again to the other side of the patch, looking at the rows he had cut. There were four of them—long ones—the sticks of cut tobacco standing like little tents, perfectly aligned. It was all his own work, done in a quietness that extended over the whole afternoon and that seemed still present. In that quietness, and now complete, his work was lovely to him, and he walked along beside it, to be near it, reluctant to leave.

  When he got back to the pear tree, he laid his tools down at the base of the trunk and set his water jug beside them. They would be there tomorrow and so would he, but at the moment he had no more need for tomorrow than he had for his tools. The sun was down now, and all around him the countryside was still. The backwash of the sunset seemed to concentrate and glow in the two valleys, and the ridgetops, like hens on a roost, had hushed and settled for the night. He heard a bobwhite call brightly above the edge of the woods.

  He looked another moment back at the cut rows, the place of his long journey, where he had traveled hard only to stay in place, and then he went to the melon patch and picked three more ripe melons. He sliced the smallest, and nested the other two in the crooks of his arms. Eating the sweet fragile flesh of the melon, he headed straight down over the wooded bluff toward the barn.

  When his shortcut brought him out of the woods and into the open again at the foot of the hill, Mart and the others had drawn the three wagons into the driveway of the barn for the night. In the morning, while the standing tobacco was still wet with dew, they would be at work there, housing the loads. Now they loitered a little while in the barn door, speaking of what they had done, of what they would do tomorrow.

  And now Elton came walking out of the woods, eating one melon and carrying two. They hushed and watched him as he came in among them.

  “Four rows,” Mart said. “You were dogging on! And I see you laid off of them watermelons.”

  They were grinning at him, and he grinned back, his mouth full, a drop of juice clinging to his chin. “Boys,” he said, “all I want is a good day and a long row.”

  In seven years from that day he would be in his grave, and in the pauses of their work the ones who were left would be remembering him, along with the others who were gone. Often, when they spoke of him, Mart Rowanberry would tell again how Elton had worked that long half day alone on the ridgetop, going hard and eating a watermelon at the end of every row, and still eating when he came down the hill. Thinking of Elton as he had stood there with them in the barn door in the long shadow, sweaty and soiled, exultant and graceful, eating that sugary little melon, Mart would laugh with satisfaction and delight.

  And then, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands at rest, one within the other, he would shake his head. “He was a friend of mine,” he would say, accenting lightly the final word. “A friend of mine.”

  The Wild Birds (1967)

  “Where have they gone?” Wheeler thinks. But he knows. Gone to the cities, forever or for the day. Gone to the shopping center. Gone to the golf course. Gone to the grave.

  He can remember Saturday afternoons when you could hardly find space in Hargrave to hitch a horse, and later ones when an automobile could not move through the crowd on Front Street as fast as a man could walk.

  Wheeler is standing at his office window, whose lower pane announces Wheeler Catlett & Son, Attorneys-at-Law; he is looking out diagonally across the courthouse square and the roofs of the stores along Front Street at the shining reach of the Ohio, where a white towboat is shoving an island of coal barges against the current, its screws rolling the water in a long fan behind it. The barges are empty, coming up from the power plant at Jefferson, whose dark plume of smoke Wheeler can also see, stretching out eastward, upriver, under the gray sky.

  Below him, the square and the streets around it are deserted. Even the loafers are gone from the courthouse where, the offices shut, they are barred from the weekday diversions of the public interest, and it is too cold to sit on the benches under the Social Security trees, now leafless, in the yard. The stores are shut also, for whatever shoppers may be at large are out at La Belle Riviere Shopping Plaza, which has lately overborne a farm in the bottomland back of town. Only a few automobiles stand widely dispersed around the square, nosed to the curbs, Wheeler’s own and half a dozen more, to suggest the presence, somewhere, of living human beings—others like himself, Wheeler supposes, here because here is where they have usually been on Saturday afternoon.

  But he knows too that he is signifying something by being here, as if here is where he agreed to be when he took his law school diploma and came home, or as near home as he could get and still practice law, forty-one years ago. He is here as if to prove “to all to whom these presents may come” his willingness to be here.

  And yet if he is here by agreement, he is here also in fidelity to what is gone: the old-time Saturday to which the country people once deferred all their business, when his old clients, most of them now dead, would climb the stairs to his office as often as not for no business at all, but to sit and speak in deference to their mutual trust, reassuring both to them and to him. For along with the strictly business or legal clientele such as any lawyer anywhere might have had, Wheeler started out with a clientele that he may be said to have inherited-farmers mostly, friends of his father and his father-in-law, kinsmen, kinsmen’s friends, with whom he thought of himself as a lawyer as little as they thought of themselves as clients. Between them and himself the technical connection was swallowed up in friendship, in mutual regard and loyalty. Such men, like as not, would not need a dime’s worth of legal assistance between the settling of their parents’ estates and the writing of their own wills, and not again after that. Wheeler served them as their defender against the law itself, before which they were ciphers, and so felt themselves—and he could do this only as their friend.

  “What do I have to do about that, Wheeler?” they would ask, handing him a document or a letter.

  And he would tell them. Or he would say, “Leave it here. I’ll see to it.”

  “What I owe you, Wheeler?”

  And he would name a figure sometimes to protect himself against the presumptuousness and long-windedness of some of them, or to protect the pride of others. Or he would say, “Nothing,” deeming the work already repaid by “other good and valuable considerations.”

  So Wheeler is here by prior agreement and pursuant history—survivor, so far, of all that the agreement has led to. The office has changed little over the years, less by far than the town and the country around it. It contains an embankment of file cabinets, a small safe, a large desk, Wheeler’s swivel chair, and a few more chairs, some more comfortable than others. The top of the desk is covered with books and file folders neatly stacked. On the blotter in the center is a ruled yellow tablet on which Wheeler has been writing, the top page nearly covered with his impatient blue script. By way of decoration, there are only a few photographs of Wheeler’s children and grandchildren. Though the room is dim, he has not turned on a light.

  A more compliant, less idealistic man than Wheeler might have been happier here than he has been, for this has been a place necessarily where people have revealed their greed, arrogance, meanness, cowardice, and sometimes their inviolable stupidity. And yet, though he has known these things, Wheeler has not believed in them. In loyalty to his clients, or to their Maker, in whose image he has supposed them made, he has believed in their generosity, goodness, courage, and intelligence. Mere fact has never been enough for him. He has pled and reasoned, cajoled, bullied, and preached, pushing events always toward a better end than he knew they could reach, resisting always the disappointment that he knew he should expect, and when the disappointment has come, as it too often has, never settling for it in his own heart or looking upon it as a conclusion.

  Wheeler has been sketching at a speech. In that restless hand of his, that fairly pounces on each word as it comes to him, he has refined his understanding of the points to be made and has worked out the connections. What he was struggling to make clear is the process by which unbridled economic forces draw life, wealth, and intelligence off the farms and out of the country towns and set them into conflict with their sources. Farm produce leaves the farm to nourish an economy that has thrived by the ruin of land. In this way, in the terms of Wheeler’s speech, price wars against value.

  “Thus,” he wrote, “to increase the price of their industrial products, they depress the value of goods—a process not indefinitely extendable,” and his hand rose from the page and hovered over it, the pen aimed at the end of his sentence like a dart. The last phrase had something in it, maybe, but it would not do. At that failure, his mind abruptly refused the page. A fidelity older than his fidelity to word and page began to work on him. He picked up another pad on which he had drawn with a ruler the design of a shed to be built onto a feed barn. The new shed would require changes in the dimensions of the barn lot and in the positions of two gates, and those changes he had drawn out also. His mind, like a boy let out of school, returned to those things with relief, with elation. His thoughts leapt from his speech to its sources in place and memory, the generations of his kin and kind.

  For the barn is the work of Wheeler’s father, Marcellus, who built it to replace an older barn on the same spot. So methodical and clever a carpenter was Marcellus that he built the new barn while the old one stood, incorporating the old into the new, his mules never absent a night from their stalls, and he did virtually all the work alone. The building of the barn was one of the crests of the life of Marce Catlett, a pride and a comfort to him to the end of his days. Adding a new shed to it now is not something that Wheeler can afford to intend lightly or do badly.

  Why at his age—when most of his generation are in retirement, and many are in the grave—he should be planning a new shed is a question he has entertained dutifully and answered perhaps a trifle belligerently: Because he wants to.

  But his mind had begun a movement that would not stop yet. His mind’s movement, characteristically, was homeward. What he hungered for was the place itself. He saw that his afternoon’s work in the office was over, and that was when he got up and went to the window, as if to set eyesight and mind free of the room. He would go soon. By going so early, he would have time to salt his cattle.