He let his body drop again on the mattress of needles, turned to his side. He could smell the dead fire in the circle of rocks and the left-over coffee from his coffeepot. Tomorrow, he would need to find a store and buy more coffee, he thought. Coffee was his great luxury. In the war, he had never had his fill of coffee.

The owl sailed from the dark bark of a pine thirty yards away—less maybe; twenty maybe—and feathered a landing on the ground. The owl’s wings had an astonishing reach, wings that could have been robbed from a sleeping eagle, and he propped up on one elbow, wondering what the owl had trapped on the ground. Field mouse doing its night feeding, most likely.

He eased again against the rolled coat he used for a pillow and imagined the fish of his dream hanging above him, turning lazily in the breeze. In the war, he had seen a hanged man at the death camp called Dachau. More boy than man, though. Dressed in the uniform of the SS. His eyes bulging, his arms hanging limp. An old Jew wearing the rags of prison stripes had stood near the dangling body, moaning like the moans of Hoke Moore in his dream.

Thirty yards away—twenty, maybe—the owl made its slaughter with a beating of wings that could have belonged to an eagle.

TWO

He saw the store from the road that ran parallel to the railroad track. A sign on the store gave it, and the place, a name: Bowerstown Community Store. He remembered that Hoke Moore had said the valley was called the Valley of Light or Bowerstown, and he knew he had been right about his guess of being where he wanted to be.

A few cars and trucks, dust-covered, were parked under the shade of two water oaks that fronted the store. It was a setting he knew well, and the gathering of men and boys on the porch of the store—some standing, some sitting in cane-bottom chairs and others on the porch steps—meant to him the possibility of pleasant company, though he had never been comfortable in a crowd of people. From the voices he heard at a distance—voices eased by laughter—he believed he would find high spirits. He knew the men to be farmers having good crops standing in the field. Corn, mostly, he judged, remembering the many fields of corn he had passed. A little tobacco, too. Milk cows grazing from thick grass in clearings that once had been timberland. The corn had a dark green look of health to it, as though it had been fed nitrate of soda at the right time, hand-pitched to the bottom of each stalk, just before a steady rain. The promise of good crops made upbeat feelings, and there would be boasting and laughter among the men, and the purchase of not-needed items solely for the celebration of the moment.

The talking, the laughter, stopped when he approached, as he knew it would. In the South, a stranger had to be studied, measured. In the South, silence hid many judgments behind faces that could have been carved from hardwood. A stranger could not walk his way past the gaze of such men. He slowed his step to make his own study, take his own measure, searching for the one man who would be spokesman among them. His eyes stopped on a man sitting in a chair, center of the gathering. The man was dressed in the farmer’s wear of work pants and field shirt buttoned to his throat, felt hat on his head. His face was furrowed, having the look of age made by work and weather, yet a smile rested comfortably among the creases. His eyes were the eyes of a man who had a feisty nature among other men.