He thought vaguely of the cold spring behind his house but he was loath to leave.

The police car left. Almost immediately the hollow was vibratory with activity, a hornet’s nest slammed with a stone: Hardin loped across the yard to the sleek black Packard and cranked it and backed it to the porch’s edge, got out with the motor running, all four doors standing open, and unlocked the turtledeck and raised it. Pearl came through the door of the house with a case of half-pints, stowed it in the car. Hovington’s daughter, her long dark hair swinging with her motion, hurried out with a cardboard carton. Above the throaty idling of the Packard he could hear the almost constant slap of the screendoor and occasional voices, Hardin giving orders.

The back door sprang open and two uniformed soldiers and a woman staggered into the yard across it towards the thickening greenery around the abyss. One of the soldiers stumbled and fell into the branch and arose swearing and bright shards of the woman’s laughter fell on Oliver’s ears like a gift from a dubious source.

When the car was loaded Hardin and the girl got in and the car pulled away, going east, away from town.

After a while the breeze tilted the sedge toward him and dried the sweat on his face to a salty glaze he could feel drawing and tightening on his skin. Swift clouds chased shadows across the field. Here a bottleneck of sky showed between the hills, dark and light clouds lay in alternating layers like varicolored liquid that would not mix. The air chilled and he got up stiffly and took up his homecarved walking stick. As he arose he saw like some byproduct of imminent storm three cards pacing themselves along the roadbed, the sheriff and two cars of the Tennessee state troopers. As they wheeled into the yard there was a brief squall from the siren and they out and started walking rapidly towards the house. Thunder rumbled, faint and far off. Pearl came out and stood leaning against the porch support with her arms crossed, just waiting with an air of stoic forbearance. The old man shook his head and grinned to himself before he turned back toward the woods.

The trees were in motion, and the wind murmuring baleful in the clashing branches. Past their waving green tops what he could see of the sky was lowering, the air taking on a quality of depth, of weight, a world under roiled water. He moved through a heightened reality now, imbued with the urgency the air conveyed. Lightning flared silent and sourceless, eerily phosphorescent in the unreal green of the woods, and he quickened his steps, his movement stiff and jerky, a comic figure resurrected from an oldtime film.

He turned down a footpath, slowing his descent tree to tree, and warily crossed a barbed-wire fence into a flat bottom tangled with weeds and went up a path past his corncrib. As he came out into the barnlot he could see beyond the worn gray of his house the rain begin, past the pale dust of the road where a pastel field stretched to a darker border of woods he saw the horizon dissolve in a slanting wash of rain and the jerk of weeds advancing toward him portentous with motion.

He went hastily in the back door just as the first drops were singing on the tin. The room was dark and cluttered, shapes softly emergent like benign familiars from the cool ectoplasm of shadow. He emptied the flour sack of ginseng into an enamel washpan and turned to the stove, took from the warming closet a pan of beans. He dipped some onto a plate and too bread left from breakfast and set the plate atop the stove reservoir and filed an earthenware mug with cold coffee. He took up the plate again and with it and the coffee crossed from the long kitchen to the living room, stepping down where the level changed, through a room almost as dark as the kitchen, mismatched oddments of furniture, random debris beached by time.

He kicked open the latchless screen door and crossed onto the porch. The noise intensified, the porch was unceiled and the drumming on the tin precluded any other sound, even the wind whipping the trees seemed to do so in silence.

He ate in a swing hung by lengths of chain from the porch rafters and set the plate by his foot on the board floor when he had finished and slowly drank the coffee, staring past the earth yard where the road had gone to mud. The rain fell in sheets, sluicing off the unguttered tin, dissipated to spray the wind took. Thunder boomed almost directly above him, a few scattered pellets of rain fell and lay gleaming white as pearls in the mud. The trees were in constant motion, all the world he could see was animate. The chaff-filled air seemed electrical, unreal.

For a time he sat and listened to the soporific rain and when he had drunk the coffee he set the cup down atop the plate. The end of the swing nearest the yard darkened with moisture and drops of spray dampened the old man’s clothes but he did not move. The frenzy of the storm subsided and the intensity of the rain leveled off, the woods across the fields gained clarity like a scene viewed through clearing glass or turmoil constrained to stillness. They grew drowsy.