had gone up in the early morning to see about them, driving the
tractor while the ground was frozen so that the heavy machine
would do no harm to the road. Otherwise, Mart too would have
walked. Unlike their eventual successors, four di=erent owners
in twenty-five years, who would wear the road to a raw wound by
driving on it in all weather, no Rowanberry ever drove a wheeled
vehicle up the hill when the ground was soft.
By the calendar it was almost spring. The days were lengthening, a tinge of green was showing in the pastures, and the buds
were fattening on the water maples. But on that day the season
was halted by the cold. A steady, bitter wind was blowing from the
north, hard against his back as he came up into it and turned the
sharp bend in the road. He warmed his hands by shifting them,
first one and then the other, from his stick to a pocket.
But he liked weather, anyhow most weather. He liked its freedom from walls, its way of overcoming all obstructions and filling the world. And he liked walking, which was another kind of
freedom: no preparation, no expense, just get up onto your legs
and go. What he had liked best in the army was the marching,
the passing through country, with the others, nearly all younger
than he, stepping in the same cadence all around. But a greater
pleasure was in walking by himself. There was pleasure also in
the company of old Preacher, the gray-muzzled hound who was
walking for the time being at Art’s heels. Preacher knew the way,
even the errand, as well as Art did, and like Art he was too old
for needless haste.
With Mart away, at Port William or Hargrave or somewhere,
doing whatever it was he did on Saturday afternoon, Art began his
walk plenty early, giving himself time. It was not that he needed
time, so early in the day, for anything in particular. He needed time
only to take his time, to have time for the day and the weather, to
walk in his own time, unhurried, with no reason not to stop and
look around, or to take a “long cut” o= the knapped stone of the
road and into the woods. In his own time, time asked nothing of
him except to live in it and to keep alert, to watch, to see what he
could see, the day and its light coming to him unburdened.
He had never minded company. He had always liked to be in
the field, in the barn, at a wood sawing or hog killing, with a crew
of friends and kin. Even then, at the age of seventy-six, he would
hurry to get in on a lift, to do his part. “Many hands make light
work,” he liked to say, for he knew it was true. But to be alone
was a di=erent happiness. At times it was almost a merriment,
when he liked his thoughts.
Some thoughts that had gathered to him in his time gave him
no pleasure. There was always something that had to be subtracted from pleasure, “always something,” as he would say now
and again, “to take the joy out of life.” But he had acquired also
many thoughts that gave joy.
His thoughts were placed and peopled, and they seemed to
come to him on their own, without any e=ort of his to call them
up. He would think of the present day and place, as now, as the
prospect widened below him and he felt in his flesh and in the
breadth of the country the full, free stroke of the wind across
the ridges.
“We’ll have to face it, coming down,” he said to Preacher. And
then he stopped and looked about. As if to console the dog he
said, “Well, maybe it’ll fair up tomorrow.”
OR IT WOULD HAPPEN that another time would open to him,
sometimes from long ago, and he would see his grandmaw and
grandpaw Rowanberry at the log house back on the ridge, and
the old life they had lived there when he was a boy. He would see
their going among the fields and along the roads, mostly afoot
even when they went to town, and the network of paths that connected house and barn and corncrib and hog lot, well and cellar
and smokehouse. The life they lived there he recognized, even in
his childhood, as old beyond memory, little changed in so much
time beyond their marking of the ground. Some of the marks
they left were wounds in the steeper land, slow to heal, for hard
times and the family’s unrelenting will to endure had driven
them to crop the slopes, and the rains had imposed their verdict.
Art knew the stern requirement that his elders, remembered and
forgotten, should survive if they could, as he knew the inexorable judgment of weather and time. He saw the fault, knew the
wrong, yet placed no blame. They had paid to live as resignedly
as they had expected to die. In his thoughts they went from day
to day to day in their steady work, eating their large and frugal
meals, going to bed precisely at darkfall, rising to work again
long before daylight even in summer. Of the things they needed
they grew and made much, purchased little.
Art had been the first grandchild, and the elder Rowanberrys,
his father’s parents, made much of him. As his younger brothers
and sisters came along, at the rare times when he could escape the
chores that were assigned to him almost as soon as he could walk,
and oftener as his grandparents grew older and had need of him,
he liked to leave the house down in the creek valley and go up to
stay days and nights at a time at the old house on the ridge.
It was a house of two tall rooms broadly square with a wide
hallway between, a long upstairs room under the pitch of the
roof, two rock chimneys at either end with wide fireplaces, and
at the back a large lean-to kitchen, weatherboarded. The house
was finely made, the logs hewed straight and square, the corners
so perfectly mitered that you could not insert a knife blade into
the joints. The rafters were straight poles, saplings, notched and
pegged together at the peak with the same artistry as elsewhere.
When he had stayed overnight, Art slept upstairs in the drafty,
