The night before, after a long day on roads that were broader than the mountain roads but also ankle deep in red dust that boiled around the car as he went, on either side of the road long fields stretched out either side and he saw crews of people working in those fields, bent among crops he did not know—the soft dull droop of midday tobacco and the green stippled heavy-as-if-with-snow spread of cotton—at the end of that day he’d stopped in the town of South Hill and rented a room in the railroad hotel and ate a hot meal in the dining room and bathed in a rusted tub. And was up before dawn to walk his dogs in the moist shrouded light that even at that hour was mild, not even cool. And without food from the hotel he drove on. Crossing into North Carolina as the sun hefted itself beyond his left shoulder, a red ball huge in the pale mist that hung between earth and air as if it were a final hope of the night. Then he went down a long gentle swoop of road and up again and the sun was out, no red ball but a blaze of heat coming through his open window. And he could smell the earth then, hot and sweet and fetid. He passed wagons piled with long burlap sacks stuffed full. Other wagons with the tender cradled layers of leaf tobacco. The wagons drawn by mules. Sorrel mules. Some the color of burnt wet wood. He’d never seen a mule before. All driven by Negro men in rough clothes who would not look at him as he drove around them. After he passed each load he’d lift his left hand up above the roof of the Chrysler in greeting and then watch his rearview but no man responded and after a time he just drove. He was hot. He could hear the dogs panting in the backseat even with the windows all the way down. That air churned, gritted with dust. Fouling his mouth and nose. He considered New Hampshire. A man at work there roadside would not pause to greet some passing stranger. So it was. Still, in the gangs working the fields there were children as well as men and women and some of those children close by the road would raise faces in fast dark flashes to stare at the car and he wondered what they saw passing them by, if he was some dream or some other vision altogether unobtainable.