He can’t stand to hear them bark.

Mmm, the old man mused. Say he can’t?

I got to get back to the house before Daddy turns up. Just set the dishes out on the porch in the mornin, all right?

All right, he said irritably, peering closely at the dishes. But if I ain’t badly mistaken they’re mine anyway.

AT FIRST LIGHT HE WAS UP as was his custom and in the dewy coolness he went up thé slope behind the tenant house following the meandering line of an old rail fence he himself had built long ago. At the summit he paused to catch his breath and stood leaning on his walking stick peering back the way he’d come. The slope tended away in a stony tapestry and the valley lay spread out below him in a dreamy pastoral haze and mist rose out of the distant hollows blue as smoke. The sky was marvelously clear and on this July morning each sound seemed distinct and equidistant: he could hear cowbells on the other side of the woods, a truck laboring up a hill on some distant road. These sounds and sights reminded him of his childhood long ago in Alabama, and they caused a singing in his blood and a rise in his spirits, he could hear his heart hammering strong and fierce as when he was a boy. He was alive and the world alive with him and he had come back to it without either of them being changed.

He entered the cool dappled green of the woods going downhill now and when he came out of the trees into the light again he was in Thurl Chessor’s pasture and approaching the barn and house. He went on past deceased tractors and rusting mowers and old mule-drawn planters like museum artifacts.

He was suddenly and against his will assailed by memory. It came to him that he was a repository of knowledge that was being lost, knowledge that no one even wanted anymore. The way the earth looked and smelled rolling off the gleaming point of a turning plow, the smell of the mule and the feel of the sweat-hardened harness and the way the thunderheads rolled up in the summer and lay over the hills like malignant tumors and thunder booming along the timberline and clouds unfolding in a fierce and violent coupling and seeding in the furrows a curious gift of ice that lay gleaming in the black loam like pearls.

He remembered laying out all night as a young man and trudging woodenly behind the mule the next day, sleep-robbed and weary, jerky as a puppet the mule was controlling with the plowlines.

He shook these thoughts out of his head and went on. He could see Thurl walking back toward the house from the pig lot with a feed bucket in his hand. Thurl was his contemporary and he had known him forty years but they had never been close. Thurl was not a very good farmer but he had managed to survive. Thurl did not have a head for business, an eye for the small detail. He was apt to leave a tractor out in the weather with the intake filling with rainwater and pine needles then curse the folks in Illinois or wherever that made it and wonder why it wouldn’t start. On the other hand, Meecham thought ruefully, he was not living in a tenant shack with Lonzo Choat reared back in the main house like the lord of the manor.

Chessor put the bucket on a slab shelf and turned and studied Meecham with no surprise. Well, I see you’re back. Run off, did you.

Yeah.

Are they after you?

After me? Hellfire. It was a old folks’ home, not a chain gang. Why would they be after me?

I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. Where’d you sleep last night? Did Lonzo make you down a pallet on the floor?

That’s mainly why I come down here. I need to use your telephone. I need to call Paul and see if I can’t get this mess straightened out. I’ve got to get Choat out of there.

You’ll play hell doin it. Or doin it quick anyway. He’s got a foot in the door now. You get him evicted legal the law won’t make him move for thirty days.