Mister Harper was on the wagon seat now, breathing heavily, and Harold moved as close to his father as possible. Harry whispered to the red animal, looking down at its back like a twisted red circus balloon and headed it out of town, past the rows of stores and houses, past the people who had come out of the stores and houses to gape as at a Confederate Day Parade. Many who saw—without word, without explanation—hooked up wagons, saddled horses, started motors and followed the wagon, gazing mesmerized at Mister Harper.

Near the edge of town and to the right the wagon passed the low wind-chapped buildings where Negroes lived. They, too, watched Mister Harper and put aside what they had been doing, stopped talking, and leaving a proper space, formed a line of their own to follow the old man.

A short distance out they passed Wallace Bedlow sitting as broad and black as a coal car on the back of an orange horse the size of a large dog. As always, he wore the white dinner jacket he had won at a pile-driving convention. He pulled up short, turned, and joined the Negro line at its head.

The two groups went up the Highway toward Tucker Caliban’s farm and finally Harry saw in the distance the white farm house, three joined sections side by side, bought and painted the summer before, and behind that the barn, sturdy and faded, and in front the square corral, no bigger than a good-sized parlor, and a gaunt and leafless maple, dead and rotted many years, and the small figure of a tiny man at work in a field that with every wave of his arm took on the white color of an autumn frost.

They sat at the side of the Highway in the wagons, the cars, atop horses and waited for Mister Harper to do something. Elbows jutting from his thin body, he asked Harry and Thomason to help him down and walk him to the fence. He said nothing, did not call to Tucker as he would have to any of the men with him or to any other Negro, but instead leaned against the fence watching the boy-sized Negro at work, almost as if he respected the work being done and would not interrupt until it was completed.