I got to get on, he said. We’ll see you.

You take care of that chap, the old woman said. You need to be worrying about him stead of traipsin around the country.

Boyd raised a hand in farewell, dismissal, and took the first step away from the porch. No one bade him stay.

You do find her tell her I got a cancer, the old man said.

Boyd didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t. He trudged on woodenly He looked back once and no one had moved, the whole scene fading into a mauve dusk that seemed to be rising out of the earth itself like vapors, bluely transparent, slipping into invisibility now that it could no longer serve him any purpose.

 

DAPPLED BY the first warm light of the season Fleming Bloodworth lay on his stomach on a shelf of limestone that formed the summit of a bluff overlooking Grinders Creek. He was propped on his elbows watching the road through his father Boyd’s binoculars. This road was red chert and it snaked in and out of sight through the cedars shrouding the bluff. A wooden bridge on concrete pylons crossed the creek downstream from where he was lying and through the powerful binoculars he could discern the heads of the forty-penny spikes the timbers were secured with, trace the grain that ran through the weathered wood.

He was waiting for the mailman. In actuality he was waiting for a lot of things: he was waiting for his father to return from wherever he had gone and for his mother to turn up from wherever she had gone and for himself to decide whether or not he was going back to school. His immediate concern, though, was for the mailman, for the U.S. Mail adhered to a schedule the rest of his life did not. The rest of his life seemed to be in limbo, waiting for one event to take place so that other events would sequence themselves behind it, a recognizable pattern coalesce from swirling chaos.

He had been up and about this day before good light. The day gave promise of being warm, and the remnants of a dream still swirling in his head touched it with portent.

He had dreamed that the mailman brought a check with his name on it, a check from a magazine called Country Gentleman, and he had little doubt that somewhere in the mailman’s sorted box of fertilizer ads and burial plan duns such a check existed, needed only the delivering to bring into his possession a typewriter he had seen in the window of a five-and-dime store in the town of Ackerman’s Field.

Some months back he had come into ownership of a stack of back numbers of this magazine Country Gentleman. He had read them cover to cover and written a story so cynically devised that he did not see how it could fail. This story had everything. It had a love story involving a boy and girl from two feuding families, a collie dog falsely accused of killing sheep, a sentimental resolution wherein the accused dog saves a child from drowning. It was Romeo and Juliet moved to the backwoods with a sheepkilling dog and a flood thrown in for good measure, and it would not have surprised him to learn that his name was being bandied about editorial offices in Atlanta, Georgia, where the magazine was published.

The mailman’s car hove into view in a stretch of road between the cedars and almost immediately it began to honk its horn. The boy scrambled up. He was an habitual joiner of book clubs and requester of catalogs and sample copies of magazines but he couldn’t think of anything he’d sent for that would not fit in a mailbox. Perhaps a check from a magazine required a signature.

He was scrambling down the shale bluffs going tree to tree. All right, all right, he yelled. The mailbox was set up by an enormous poplar tree at the foot of the hill and the mailman’s car had parked before it and continued to honk dementedly until Fleming arrived out of breath at the driver’s side window.

Young Bloodworth, the mailman said. Got a package here for you. He was holding a flat manila envelope and now he scanned the return address. The boy was regarding it with a dull loathing. Country Gentleman, the mailman said. Didn’t know they took to boxin em up like this.

Fleming received the package with some reluctance, stood regarding it balefully as if he did not quite know what to do with it.

That all you got?

That’s it, the mailman said. Your mama ever come back, Fleming?

Thanks for the package, Bloodworth said, turning away toward the hill. The car remained still for a few seconds then the mailman raised a hand and drove away.

Crossing the ditch before the hill began its steep ascent he opened the flap of the envelope. The first thing he saw was his own handwriting, the second a note that had been paperclipped to his manuscript.