tree. Even then you'd have to look hard.
All my car windows were down, and as soon as I turned off the paved road, I killed my radio and doused my lights. Moonlight was enough to pick out the sandy lane. I drove slowly, quietly, slipping into the old game, but the air was too cool and clear for me to win.
Only Saturday night traffic back out on New Forty-Eight between Cotton Grove and Makely let me get as close as I did before the dogs let loose in their pens on the far side of the house, yipping and howling as they heard me approach.
I topped a low ridge and there was the homeplace spread out before me.
White rail fences gleamed in the moonlight. Beyond a broad expanse of grass—new-mown by the smell of it— swept across the level ground and disappeared in thick dark shadows cast by a grove of huge old oaks and fifty-year old pecans. The house itself was just a plain old two-story white wooden box, nondescript and ordinary except that it was surrounded on all sides by deep porches upstairs and down.
Despite the racket the dogs were making, there were no lights in any of the windows. Only the tin roof shone like worn silver in the moonlight.
I switched off the motor and coasted to a stop on the circular dirt drive beneath a magnolia tree my grandmother had planted in 1900 to mark the new century. Its sweet fragrance welcomed me back as gladly as the two dogs that waited silently for me to open my car door. A few more querulous yaps, then the hounds and rabbit dogs out by the barns subsided. Those penned dogs get sold or traded every few months, but the night that Blue and Ladybelle bark at me will be the night I know I've stayed away too long.
They were too well mannered to jump up on my linen skirt or rip my stockings, but they appreciated a hello scratch behind their silky ears.
Five wide wooden steps led up to the shadowy porch and I sat down on the second one to whisper baby talk to the dogs. The smell of cigarette smoke reached me just as I heard the creak of the porch swing from the deepest shadows.
'Didn't wake you, did I?' I asked quietly.
'Nah,' said Daddy. 'I was just setting here enjoying the night. And thinking about taking a ramble. You want to come?'
'If you'll wait for me to change.'
'Take your time. I ain't in no hurry' * * *
Without turning on a light, I went through the house and up the central staircase. None of the curtains were drawn, but the moon was unneeded. I could have walked blindfolded to my old room on the southeast corner.
Maidie keeps fresh linens on my bed, and I leave several changes of clothes in the closet and extra toiletries in the dresser drawers. Like a snake shedding its skin, I peeled off my town clothes in the dark and slipped into jeans and an old cotton sweatshirt. Knowing Daddy's rambles, I felt around on the closet floor for a pair of worn leather boots and tucked my pantlegs down inside their tops against ticks and chiggers. * * *
The caged dogs whined in excitement as we approached, hoping this meant they were going to get to run with us through a night world sensuous with the smell of coons and darting rabbits and slow-trundling possums. They gave soft pleading yaps as we passed.
'Hush!' Daddy said sternly, and they hushed.
Blue and Ladybelle, aristocrats of the farm, strode past without turning their heads.
We walked on down past his vegetable garden, through a cut, past Maidie's little house perched on the last bit of level ground before it sloped down to the creek. No light in her windows either. She and Cletus were early to bed, early to rise and they slept soundly. The dogs never woke them unless they kept it up so long that even the soundest sleeper must come awake, knowing there were trespassers on the land.
It seldom happened.
Cletus's pickup was parked beside the porch. From atop the cab, Maidie's big black tomcat was an inky pool of watchfulness as we passed.
On the other side of the lane lay a small field of melons. Honeydews and swollen cantaloupes gleamed among dark vines, and watermelons were starting to stretch themselves.
The lane wound through another stand of trees and then we were out into a twenty-acre field of tobacco. The waning moon, almost a week past full now, sailed high in the sky, flooding the countryside with silver-blue light. A winelike aroma arose from the very earth itself, compounded of cool dirt, green tobacco, and a light breeze blowing up from the creek.
Of one accord, we stood as still and unmoving as the tall pines behind us and breathed it in. Long moments passed, then an owl swooped down into the middle of a truck row. There was a sudden frantic squeak, followed by a silence all the deeper as the owl gained altitude on noiseless wings. A small dark shape dangled limply from its talons.
The spell broken, Daddy lit a cigarette, and we walked on in the general direction the owl had taken. Another quarter mile brought us out along the edge of a deep irrigation pond. Three people had drowned in it over the years. Tonight, the still water was a sheet of shiny black glass. White moths fluttered toward the moon reflected there and were snapped up by the waiting fish.
Beyond the pond was the beginning of the farm he'd given Seth and Minnie as a wedding present years ago. On tonight's clear air, faint music mingled with distant laughter and raucous speech—Saturday night winding down at the migrant camp that straddled the line between Seth's land and Andrew's.
Thus far, we had walked the two perpendicular sides of a right triangle, now we struck across a fallow field to make a rough hypotenuse back toward the house, less than a mile away. The dogs raced out ahead of us and began casting back and forth through the weeds. Once I would have nearly had to trot to keep up with Daddy's long legs. Tonight, even though my feet had been too long on concrete, the pace was slower. Still, he didn't seem winded, and his pauses were contemplative, not for rest.
