For some time he stood and looked. It was the first time he had come here on a workday, and it was a difference that he felt strongly. To come when he had no work to do might require an interest that was little more than idle; no matter how elaborate and ardent had been his visions, they need not possess him, they could be discarded, so long as he offered them only his idle time. That he was there when he had good reason not to be, when he could have been at work in his own fields—that was a serious declaration, and he knew it. He said to himself very deliberately then what he found himself relieved and even eager to say: that if there was any way to do it, when the place was sold, he would buy it. He said that to himself and then a shudder shook him, for he knew he would do as he said.

  He was about to start home when he saw a stain of dust rising into the haze above the rim of the bluff, and when he listened he could hear a wagon’s wheels beating over the stones and ledges of the lane. And then almost at once the team and wagon came in sight. He knew it would be Sims McGrother. His first thought was to keep from being seen. There was a wooded draw not far from where he stood; once in the cover of the draw he could have gone on down to the creek and back to where he had left his horse without having to come into the open again. But though his whole body tensed with his wish to be gone, he did not move. He did not want to be seen slipping away. He did not want to know that he had slipped away. And he particularly did not want to be moved by Sims McGrother.

  Jack did not like McGrother, who was a big talker and a waster. With his two sons and several families of Negroes, McGrother farmed a tract of six hundred acres adjoining the Farrier place on two sides and going all the way to the river. It had been good land, but under McGrother’s use it had declined. McGrother was hard on himself and on his men and on everything he touched—a roughness that he loved to brag about as if it were no more than honest plainness and a devotion to hard work. His hands would with equal indifference ruin a horse’s mouth or a hillside. He loved to handle cash, and he drove himself and all that belonged to him in the direction of money as if it were as far off as heaven and as if he were running out of time; but he also loved his own driving and his roughness, and he loved to speak of it. “Kill a mule, buy another’n, kill a nigger, hire another’n,” he would say. His women hung behind him, out of his reach, watchful of his wrath, as anxious and fluttery as killdees. His abuse of other things always involved abuse of himself. In his fifties then, he was in appearance a characteristic product of his own making; worn lean and ragged, his face, within its nap of gray beard, burnt and wrinkled and dry. Three fingers of his left hand had been cut off above the third joint, leaving the thumb and forefinger a kind of double claw.

  Jack rather expected that he would go to the barn, since there was little reason at that time for him to be coming to the tobacco patch in a wagon. But McGrother came on past the barn. He was driving what Jack recognized as a typical McGrother team: a pair of mules with the hair rough on them and their ribs showing, mismatched in size and color, unsheared, overworked.

  McGrother whips the team into a trot, and they come on back the ridge straight toward Jack, the dust flying from under the wheels and the bolsters pounding. And he comes on, letting the mules slow to a walk, and stops them in front of Jack, the tongue almost touching him.

  “Whoa!”

  “Howdy,” Jack says.

  “Howdy.”

  McGrother, sitting on a plank that lies across the sideboards of the wagon bed, leans forward, elbows on his knees, check lines dangling from his hands, and looks at Jack as if he is something inanimate, a post or a tree, that cannot look back. The sight of the worn-out, ill-used team has already filled Jack with contempt and pity, and now this blatant stare of McGrother’s makes him furious. But he only stands without moving, as if he is indeed a post or a tree that McGrother will have either to run over or back up and drive around. For some seconds neither of them says anything, their locked stares drawn between the two mules as rigidly as the wagon tongue.

  “Well, how do you like it?” McGrother says.

  “I like it all right.”

  “By God, I reckon you do. You been over here enough.” McGrother grins and nods. “I’ve seen your tracks.”

  Jack goes around the lead mule to stand by the left front wheel of the wagon. He is within arm’s reach of McGrother now. “I left them to be seen. I never tried to hide them.” Close as he is to McGrother now, he can feel anger tightening his throat. The desire to take hold of McGrother is as pressing in him as hunger.

  “But you ain’t bought it yet.” McGrother grins, looking down at him. He shakes once with laughter. “It ain’t yours yet, not by a damn sight. And if you beat me to it you’ll have to get up before day.”

  “Then I’ll get up before day,” Jack says.

  His hands want to get hold of McGrother and pull him down out of the wagon. But that would not do and he knows it. He knows what it would mean to have that behind him and the consequences of it ahead of him. He is afraid McGrother will say something else, but he cannot leave or move or look away yet. He stands a long moment, giving McGrother his chance, and then walks away. He does not look back, and he is a long time in the open, going down the ridge. It is not until he has gone in among the trees on the bluff that he hears the waggon move. He stands and listens as it turns and goes back to the barn. And then he goes on down through the trees, through the briary patch of hillside pasture, across the creek, and over the rock fence to where his horse is standing.

  He went back to the barn and hitched up his mules and worked through the afternoon. But now he was changed. The Farrier place had changed him. His trip over there that day had formalized a sort of betrothal; it had joined his vision to his will. Now his desire was no longer a dream; it was an intention, and McGrother’s presence had forced him to declare it aloud. His vision of the redemption of that place was, he now realized, an investment in it. The thought of its possible loss increased his desire. It was a desire that would have carried him across the sea in a wooden ship, or through the Cumberland Gap on foot, or on horseback across the desert, had he not been too much a farmer ever to yearn so far beyond the ground under his feet. What he sought was not the unknown of distance, but the unknown of time: the yearly unfolding of the flower and fruit of the land he knew. And now, having allowed that desire to reach out beyond his own boundaries, he felt its exposure; he must rescue and preserve it and secure its triumph. He could not bear the thought that McGrother might circumvent him. Though the times were hard he would take the gamble. It was well that he had already done his thinking, for now was the time of his passion.

  He had a principle against interrupting his workdays; having already interrupted this one once, he finished it at the usual time. But after supper that night he saddled his horse and rode to Hargrave. He hunted out the house of the lawyer he knew to be handling the Farrier estate and offered for the farm a figure that he thought would be higher than McGrother would offer. The lawyer gladly received the bid and agreed that Jack would not be named as the bidder and that he would be notified if the bid was raised. Having had his part of the conversation well rehearsed, Jack was at leisure to watch the lawyer’s face, and he rode home confident that his bid had been the first and also unexpectedly high. He got home after midnight. “Well, I’m up before day,” he thought. “And I didn’t tell him how far before day it would be.”

  Now he needed time, and it happened that he had plenty. The Farrier place was not offered for sale until the February of the next year. Meantime Jack never went near it. He did not speak of what he had done or of what he hoped. He did not tell Ruth or Ben or Nancy or anyone except the lawyer, who was evidently as good as his word. When he met McGrother, and occasionally he went out of his way to do that, he spoke and held himself as if their meeting at McGrother’s tobacco patch had never occurred. He watched McGrother’s face, and he knew McGrother did not know. He was solitary in those days, keeping his own counsel, saying little, watching. At times he felt the exultant secrecy of a man waiting in ambush. He had made the possibility and seen the vision of his new desire, and he alone knew what it was.

  He knew when the lawyer finally offered the farm for sale. And from that time his attention never left McGrother. He was as ardent now in his cunning as he had ever been in love. He knew the times when McGrother was likely to be in town, and he was there when McGrother was. He made occasions to travel the river road past McGrother’s house. It was the first time in his life—and it was to be the last—that he ever resorted to stealth and deception, but he was pleased, for a while he was pleased, to discover that he was good at it. From the covert of his own apparent good humor and disinterest, as though he moved, faded in among the trees, along the edges of the other man’s life, he watched. So intently did he watch that all that he saw was plain to him. He knew almost to the hour when McGrother made his bid, and knew from the change in McGrother’s face that it had been low and that McGrother was thinking it over. He knew that McGrother was watching him now, baffled: if Jack had not made the high bid, then who had? Who else wanted the place? But as though he was always facing away from what he had most on his mind, he revealed nothing. He went quietly to the bank and arranged, provisionally, to borrow the money he would need. All that he did now was deliberate and well foreseen. He delighted in the deepening revelations of this cunning that he had not known he possessed. When he met McGrother or his sons he would talk as long as they would, allowing the conversation to go where it might, never batting an eye when they deliberately spoke, testing him, of the Farrier place and of the desirability of buying land and of its value. And then he would turn and walk away, not turning his head, knowing that they watched him as long as he was in sight.

  As it drew on toward March he began to feel the strain. If the Farrier place was to be his he needed to be making his plans, and he needed to see about hiring some help. He was keeping that if steadily in mind. And then he got word that his bid had been accepted. He rode to Hargrave and signed deed and mortgage, and felt the past close behind him and the future open. He was in the clear. Or so he thought.

  Riding home, instead of going on to his own place, he turns into the lane that climbs the hill to the Farrier place. He is the owner now, and he will not enter it the first time as owner by coming in over the back fence as he has done before. Now he will ride in through the front gate. He goes eagerly up the narrow lane, rising through the trees, coming out finally onto the open ridge.

  McGrother is there ahead of him this time. He is at the barn, loading onto his wagon the few tools he has left there. He turns and looks as Jack’s horse stops in the door. For a second they say nothing, as if to allow all the implications of this meeting to assemble.

  “You,” McGrother says. And then he breathes deliberately, as if that is something he has been neglecting to do.

  “Me,” Jack says.

  He rides back the ridge and down to the creek. When he reaches the boundary he tears down enough of the rock fence to make a gate. He rides through.

  Laughter gathers in the air around him, surprising him. He did not expect it there in the gray February evening between the leafless slopes of the hollow, and he reins in his horse and looks around. The years flow past him, but still for some seconds the times overlap and he seems to be sitting on horseback though he is in the barbershop. And now, as though gently sinking, he comes to himself again in his chair, no reins in his hands but only the crook of his cane, though even in his reverie he has kept as straight in his seat as a rider. Now the woman and the three little boys are gone, and in their place are three or four of the loafers, to whose talk Jayber is listening, having now climbed into the barber chair himself. The heavy chair holds him somewhat higher than the others; he leans back, at ease, Olympian, his eye lit with amusement and anticipation.

  To Old Jack it is as though he has slept through a change of season. He is still and he slowly becomes aware of his stillness. And now his hands twitch and waken where they rest on the crook of the cane, and he moves one of them to the edge of his chair. He gets up, rising against stiffness as under a burden, and makes his way out the back door. He relieves himself and then stands, smelling dinner cooking somewhere, suddenly hungry. He looks at his watch. Twenty after ten. At Mat’s, in the tobacco patch, they will soon be dividing the crew, some to keep on cutting, some to start loading so they can bring loaded wagons to the barn when they come in to dinner. He knows in his flesh the old relief they feel now, having come to the downslope of the morning, dinner ahead of them, before the long pull of the afternoon.

  He returns to the shop and sits down again. From his height Jayber is watching him, but Old Jack does not know that. He has composed himself, hands on his cane, head tilted back a little, mouth open, gazing sightlessly at the wall. A deep quiet has drawn around him again, as though the front of the shop, where the talkers are, has simply moved away. In his quiet he is aware of another name ahead of him, to be raised up again in its old flesh and given voice: Will Wells.

  For in buying the Farrier place he had destroyed his old independence. He had more to do now than he could do alone. Uncle Henry was still there, of course, as he would be until he died. But Uncle Henry had already been old a long time and he would not be able for long to do the little that he still did. Jack needed a good hand, and after some looking around he hired a young Negro man who had been recommended to him by Perry Clemmons. This was a strongly built dark man, whose eyes had a straight, calm look that Jack liked. He had a wife, Marthy, lighter in color than himself, and four children. He was said to be a good worker, a quiet man, one who could be depended on. His name was Will Wells.

  There was on the Farrier place a small house of two rooms, long disused, and this they repaired for Will and his family, who moved in at the end of the second week of March. Will lived up to the good that had been said of him, and more. He would get out early and stay late. He would work responsibly alone. He took an intelligent pride in what he did, and was able to see what needed to be done and to do it without being told. He was a good man with stock and a competent teamster. He was perhaps four or five years younger than Jack, strong, proud of his strength, eager in its use.

  There grew between the two of them a relationship—a sort of brotherhood—of an intensity that Jack would know only that once. Though they assumed the inevitable economic roles of master and servant, they were from the beginning equals before the work. It would not have occurred to Jack to ask another man to do a job that he would not do himself, or to hold back while another man took the hardest part, or to rest while another man worked. That was his principle and his pride. Though Will worked for Jack’s benefit, he did not work for his convenience. That they worked side by side, that they knew the same hardships of labor and weather, made a ground of respect between them, and a liking. They teamed together as if they had been born twins. Both were big men, both strong, both liked the work. And in the time they were together they did an amount of it that amazed both themselves and the men who knew them. They acquired a local fame as a team among the farmers who worked with them in the tobacco setting and in the harvest. When the two of them stepped up, other men stood back.

  Little idle talk ever passed between them. They might work closely together for half a day without speaking, cooperating like the two hands of a single body, anticipating each other’s moves like partners in a dance. They did not speak of their lives. They met and did their work and parted and went their ways. They met in Port William as awkwardly as strangers. It was in the work itself, not in anything that the work came from or led to, that they made the terms and the comfort of their comradeship. At times in the heat and striving of some hard day their eyes would meet and acknowledge the strange grace of their labor.

  In two years they set the Farrier place to rights with the same assured sense of order with which a housewife would have tidied a room. They repaired the fences and cleared the bushes and briars from the neglected pastures and removed the clutter that had accumulated in and around the buildings. The boundaries and edges became clear. There remained a number of jobs that waited on money, such as repairing and painting the buildings, and there remained the slow healing of the abused and weakened ground. But the healing had been begun. After the ragged idleness of neglect, the encroachment of thicket upon its cleared ground, the old place had resumed a kind of repose within its human limits. The daylight, falling on it, received an order from it that Jack loved to recognize as his own. And he was making it pay. At the end of two years he was beginning to see his way out.

  There began now to be a new adjustment between him and Ruth. Though he had not spoken to her of his plans, they had become plain enough. She believed she saw a direction in them that promised her some sort of deliverance. Once the new place was paid for they would buy another one, for that was the logic of the process, and after that, no doubt, another one. They would hire more men to do the work. She began to have a vision of Jack as a man on horseback, overseeing the work of other men. Perhaps later they would move to town. Perhaps they would travel. The money hunger of her father and brothers had represented itself to her in a Sunday version that had encouraged her own longing for a refinement protected by the labor of servants and the scruples of “gentlemen.” She did not exactly know what she wanted, any more than she knew what Jack’s expansionist efforts might make of him. But she found relief and even attraction in her new sense of him as a man redefining himself, for it had been her realization of him as a man defined that had caused her unhappiness. She began to see herself again when she looked in her mirror—a woman whose beauty had perhaps not yet done all its work. She would lead him into a better life. Guardedly, she turned toward him again. She became pregnant with her second child.