After paying for the gas in the station, Jimmy got back in the car and they were on their way. They would drive through a score of little towns and hamlets today, villages and communities with names like Hankensville, Turkey, Bull Rush, Vander, Roseboro. Mostly they would pass through fields, stretching on either side of them for miles, or forests, high timberwoods, composed mostly of pine trees. The idea set him to thinking about roads. Remembering. Was a time when there wont no paved highways—just little two-rut trails and footpaths. Now, of course, there was that wood-plank road twixt Fayetteville and Wilmington, but shoot, it’d behoove a man to go on and take a train than drive a mule and cart all them seventy-so miles. But now folks drive cars. Take them for granted. Hop in a car to go here. Hop in a car to go there. Don’t ever stop to think: how did folks get about before the au-to-mo-bile? I remember the first car I ever seen. A old Model A Ford, old man Geoffrey Hodder got it, onliest man in the county with as much money as that old devil Ben Henry. He come over Tims Creek that day with that thing aspitting and afiring, making more fuss than a snakebit horse. And come stopping at old Henry’s General Store. All the colored folks and the white folks come out to inspect it. All of them but old man Henry, he just sat there in the store, looking out the window—but trying to act like he won’t paying none of it no mind. Envious as hell. And I don’t think I ever seen anything to beat what happened—come to show why the white man got so much dang money—cause I declare if Geoffrey Hodder didn’t start taking folk to ride, the white and the black, for a penny apiece—a penny was a fair piece of money in them days—and he’d drive them down the road a piece—three or four head at a time. And people just went hog wild, it was like a little fair. Folks were there anyway from doing their trading—I reckon it was on a Saturday cause there wouldn’t a been so many people there—but then again people use to work on Saturday back then just like they works any other day—and here come still more folk and the folk there ain’t leaving. But old Henry, vexed as he was over the whole situation, about being showed up and all cause he wont the first with an automobile, made out like a bandit too, cause people were buying, buying everything, including that old tart lemonade he sold, and I couldn’t stand the mess, reckon other folks hated it too, but it was about the onliest thing you could get cool besides water and there wont no pump nearby—it must of been in the summertime, just before tobacco-cropping time, cause I remember that Aunt Sally had come with Aunt Viola who was visiting from Wilmington and had first got in town and had stopped to see me cause I was loading wagons for old man Henry before Papa’s tobacco was ripe for picking.