We regret that we are unable to read handwritten manuscripts, someone in Atlanta had written. All submissions must be typewritten. He threw the manuscript into the ditch and went on up the hill but after a few steps returned and recovered the manila envelope and went on.

To reach this house you came from either of two ways. If you came by the cherted road you left it at the foot of the hill and climbed up through patches of limestone and a grove of cedars where the footpath led. It was an almost vertical ascent and the house came into view by increments, first a green tarpaper roof, hipped from the four corners of the house to a peak in the center, then weathered board walls, a house cobbled up from odds and ends, homemade, as happenstantial as something left by the recession of floodwaters. I reckon it’ll do till we find some-thin better, Boyd had said, but the boy had been six years old then.

If you approached from the rear, came down from the heavily timbered woods, you followed a footpath that in turn followed the spectral shadings of an old wagon road, a ghost of a road, a rumor of a road. This house had been constructed by and for folk for whom a footpath would serve as well, folk who did not acknowledge the invention of the internal combustion engine, to whom the value of the wheel itself was still in question.

The day that had begun with such promise now yawned like an enormous vacuum that he was called upon somehow to fill. He took down a slingblade from the porch and began to cut weeds, clearing the yard then progressing on toward the garden spot, the air full of bits of weeds like anomolaec snow. The day warmed as it progressed and he took off his shirt and resumed work as if he’d rid the world of weeds once and for all.

In the late afternoon he finally put up the slingblade and went into the house. The house was dark and cool, cave like, scarcely lit by the windows. He took up a book and with it a cold cup of the morning’s coffee and went to a chair where light fell through a windowglass and began to read.

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk, in silence. No bird called, no insect. Life in abeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Light through the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into night was of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound down with it.

NIGHT. Boyd hunkered in a viaduct watching beaded rain swing slant off the concrete lip above him. Through the silver curtain this made he watched the lights of a town wax and wane like something dimly perceived through deep waters. Thunder rolled hollowly across the flat countryside. An inch of dirty water coursed beneath him and his feet were wet. He tried to roll a cigarette but his fingers were wet as well and the paper shredded in his hands. I wouldn’t have this Goddamn country if they boxed it up and sent it somewhere I could use it, he said. If they shoved a deed to it in my shirt pocket. Cars went by with tires sluicing the water, gleaming and newlooking in the rain, stark in the surreal clarity of the lightning, like images that were imprinting themselves behind his eyelids.

The concrete was too low to stand erect in and when his legs grew cramped he stood stooped with his hands clasped on his knees, staring into the black water that coursed between his feet. Lightning showed him cigarette butts, scraps of paper, an unrolled condom trailing like some weird sealife.

I reckon by God it’s set in for the night, he told himself.

It hadn’t though. The intervals between the blind white stabs stretched farther and farther, he thought the low rumbling was growing more distant, rolling on eastward the way he planned to go himself. When the rain tempered itself to a slow drizzle he came out of the viaduct and rubbed the stiffness out of his legs and clambered up the sloping shoulder of riprap onto the blacktop and walked off toward the lights of town.

Such town as there was and what there was of it asleep. He trudged through a high-class section of town, into a neighborhood where watchdogs from the dark porches they watched refused even to acknowledge his passage, as if he’d achieved some measure of invisibility. Or was utterly alien to their frame of reference, emissary from some race set apart. He put his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders in the wet coat and coming into what appeared to be the business section of town looked for something that might be open. A cab stand, a bus station, an allnight diner.