He crossed over a river and then some miles later crossed it again, still driving south and east. The river a deep low dark sullen thing, with none of the bright flash and quick sparkle of the rivers he knew; this one cased between banks of low-hanging trees, its color not out of the air or reflected sky but as if sprung up from the earth, moistened by the wealth of foliage overhanging it. The water oily, without obvious movement. A deceptive stillness.

Tracts of pine woods. Small rises of land capped with hardwoods. Crabbed patches of cotton broken out between the woods. Other fields, larger and more level, of tobacco. Cattle pastures with burned-yellow grass, the cattle bunched up in the shade of a single huge-spread red oak. No barns that he could see but sheds of weathered wood everywhere, high and square and small on rough raised stone foundations. Some just standing on piled stones under each of the four corners. Some chinked tight with the gauzy air of heat over them and the faint tang of woodsmoke where tobacco cured. These sheds always with a colored man close by, lounging on a chunk of firewood or bent down some feet from the building, tending a low fire.

The land was not flat but seemed so. The sun high and spread overhead, the horizons far off. But as the road turned and moved over the land the land also moved, revealing itself to be pockets and small open spreads of space. Briefly it would flatten and the fields would grow larger but there was always a backing flank of woodlot, a stretch of pines, something to crease or fold the land. As he drove on he realized what that thing was: the river, which all the land aimed toward.

He dropped down and followed the river itself for some miles, passing under a railroad trestle, a tower of creosote-blackened crisscrossed matchsticks high over him, and then the road graded up and he passed a metal sign, black letters on white for the Sweetboro city limits, and went on some distance and then came into the town itself. Along a residential street he dropped down in second gear and traveled slowly, the houses set back from the road, smaller than he’d expected but surrounded by land and flanked by trees he did not know. Then into the three-block downtown, mostly brick but some wooden buildings, three and four stories tall. It was very quiet, very small.