“You don’t have to go. You can stay here. My cousins will be here.”

“I’ll go with you. I want to help you. I want to do anything I can.” I touched his arm again, ran my hand up and down his sleeve. He looked down at me, a strange puzzled look, a look I would never penetrate or understand. All the years I would sleep with him and breed with him and eat and drink and fight with him were yet to come. All the painful days and nights when we would struggle to grow up beside each other, all the cigarettes and whiskey and feigned gaiety and feigned remorse and jealousy and passion would not teach me who he was, would not tell me what he was thinking or what he dreamed or feared. I would never know this man.

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “They ought to be here any minute.”

They drove up in a blue Ford. His mother, Rose, was riding shotgun, her hands clutching her purse. The worries of the world were always on her head and now she had a full-blown tragedy. Behind the wheel Malcolm’s father held down his corner of western civilization. He was the oldest son of an old Georgia family and in true aristocratic fashion he had lost the plantation in the Depression. It was the assailing metaphor of Mrs. Martin’s life. Mr. Martin didn’t care. He had rented an empty mansion on the main street of the little town of Martinsville and he liked the rented one as much as the one he left behind. He got a job in the hardware store and became adept at helping his fellow citizens repair screen doors and small appliances and choose shutters or paint for their houses. Every morning he put on a white shirt and a bow tie and left his rented mansion and walked down to the store. At noon he walked back home and Mrs. Martin fed him vegetables and cornbread and tea. Then he walked back to the store and worked all afternoon. On weekends he and Mrs. Martin drove to other small towns to visit people they had gone to school with or their wealthier relatives in Monroe and Madison and Griffin and Forsythe. Some Sundays they drove out to Martinsrest and sat in the car, looking at the lost plantation. Wealthy Yankees had turned it into a showplace. Mrs. Martin began to believe it had always been that way, but Mr. Martin remembered the leaking roof and rotting timbers and how hard he had had to work when he had owned it. “This is where you were born,” Mrs. Martin would say to little Malcolm, when he was a child. “By rights this should be yours. Your great-grandfather built it.”

“It was in disrepair,” Mr. Martin would add. “It was a great deal of trouble to keep up.”