They rode back silent to town: the old man slumped down against the seat and doorframe, his face turned to catch the wind through the window, his pale stringy hair blown up away from the stretched-paper skin of his skull in some awful halo; Foster driving one-handed, his right arm draped across the seat down into the back where his hand rested on one of his dogs, driving through the deadstill middle of the afternoon where even the muledrawn wagons they passed seemed to swim in the dust, the mules trudging each step with a sideways yaw as if belabored more by the strike of the heat than the load behind. Foster no longer raising a hand in greeting to the black men driving the loads, no longer able to see them as other working men but recognizing that they inhabited landscape unknowable to him, one that he could not penetrate regardless of what blood he shared with any of them or not; it was not blood anymore than it was the common shares of dreams and hopes and fears that bonded them but rather the dark bay of the soul that the one race had opened unhindered upon the other. Slavery he knew then was not the whips and chains of the school history books, not the breaking apart of families or the unending driving labor but some stain far greater and deeper, something that had been unleashed and then bloomed up, between and within at once, both races, white and black, forever without surcease, tenacious, untouchable and unchangeable. And wondered how a man might know this and go on. And for the first time since driving up to the farmhouse in Vermont and seeing the face of his aunt come out the open door he thought he understood something of his father. And he thought then, That is how it’s done, how we go on; we make it personal because we can bear that. And recalled Mebane saying something like that and looked over at the old man as if to see something of himself there. But this man was a stranger to him, in a way that other old man, that faded yellow ferocious old man on the parlor wall a thousand miles away would never be. And Foster then also thought Don’t be so sure.

He parked in the alley and opened the gate in the back fence for Alex Mebane and left the old man to make his way unaided to the house while Foster opened the trunk of the Chrysler and fed the dogs tinned meat out of there, sitting on the seat with the door open and his feet out in the sand of the alley under the speckled shade of the live oaks as the dogs wolfed the gray meat from a shared tin plate. Then he let them into the yard and worked the pump to fill their bucket with fresh water. He brought in the tin water can from the car and filled that also at the pump, wanting things as much in order as he could make them. He refilled the bucket for the dogs and watched as they switched ends of the yard from earlier to lie up in the shade now against the side of the unused barn. Then he went quiet into the house.