Now they revert to their common tongue and set off for home. Despite their fatigue they go on foot. They feel a chill breeze, notice a graying of the air, field stubble burning somewhere not far off. All that is ordinary and extraordinary about the day converges the minute they cross their separate thresholds. Necessity and order rush together, providing a tent of calm while they go about preparing the simplest of suppers, envelopes of soup and soda crackers, or plain bread and jam.

Sally Bakey, brewing her solitary tea, has an attack of the yawns. She’s tired, more tired than anyone who knows her would believe. Shadows move on the wall behind her. Her old bones complain, whimper, and her yawning shades away into an unconscious sifting of images, one burning into another, stubborn and curious. An onion trying to be a flower. A long sleep in the frozen ground. Misgivings. Dread. Unbearable pressure. Cracked earth. The first small faintly colored shoot, surprised by its upright shadow. A hard round waxy bud. Watchfulness. More than watchfulness, a strict and willing observance.

Hinterland

Hinterland

Everyone seems to have stayed put this year except Meg and Roy Sloan of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Although both Meg and Roy are patriotic in a vague and non-rhetorical way, and good mature citizens who pay their taxes and vote and hold opinions on gun legislation and abortion, they’ve chosen this year to ignore the exhortation of their president to stay home and see America first. The Grand Canyon can wait, Roy says in the sociable weekend voice he more and more distrusts. The Black Hills can wait. And the Everglades. And Chesapeake Bay.

And they can wait forever, he privately thinks-with their slopes and depressions and fissured rock and silence and stubborn glare. He and Meg have come this fine golden September, now turned gray, but an endurable gray, to the city of Paris, and have settled down for three weeks in a small hotel near the Place Ferdinand, determined for once to do the thing right.

For the first ten days the sun gives out a soft powdery haze. Then it starts raining, little whips of water dashing down. Beneath their hotel window the streets are stripped of their elongated shadows and stippled light; this is suddenly a differently ordered reality, foreign and purposeful, with a harsh workaday existence and citizens so bound to their routines that they scarcely notice the serious, slightly older, end-of-season tourists, like the Sloans, who are taking in the sights.