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drew Audie’s sharp face to the window from behind the curtain that his brother had pushed away. His eyes were vague and his long beard mingled with the lace curtain and he smiled through it as if he had just been reminded of something remarkable.
    Tom came up on the steps and sat.
    His uncle said, “I seen that crop of yours on television.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “I seen it all right.”
    From the window Audie muttered something either oracular or idiotic. Maybe words and maybe not.
    “I seen it on that 60 Minutes last week. They was saying it might do me some good.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Vernon.”
    They sat for a minute and the wind kept up and the things in the yard kept turning. Audie said something to them, either to the things or to his relations, but he got no answer. Vernon worked at the chair. After a while a door opened somewhere and the lace curtain billowed out from the window and the door slammed and the curtain collapsed back in on itself.
    Vernon did not so much as turn in the overstuffed chair. “That you, Creed?”
    “Suppertime,” said Creed, in from the barn, standing by the dead refrigerator in the dark house. He took a plate of butter from on top of it and swatted away flies and set it on the table. Then he opened the refrigerator and took out half a loaf of bread and put that on the table too. The refrigerator was jammed with stuff but not much of it was food and not much of that was still worth eating. Audie moved from the window to the table and scraped back one of the three chairs and sat.
    Vernon flicked away a pellet of cotton batting and held out his hand. “Help an old man up,” he said.
    “If you sat on a straight chair,” Tom said, “this wouldn’t happen.”
    “You don’t know.”
    “I work alongside men older than you forty hours a week. Plus overtime.”
    “Work,” said Vernon. He smiled and wheezed. “I know about work. You couldn’t kept up with me in my day.”
    “You’ve still got your day, old man.” Tom stood and hauled Vernon to his feet. “It’s still your day, as far as I can tell.”
    “I’m sixty years old.”
    In the kitchen, without turning his head, Audie offered something by way of disputation.
    “So I’m fifty-nine then. He’s right enough. I was born in the fall of twenty-five. I’m fifty-nine.”
    “That’s not old.”
    “I got a birthday coming.”
    “I know.”
    “My own mother died at fifty-six.” He shuffled toward the door. He was still half bent from sitting and he tilted forward, grimacing behind his beard. “She had the same cancer as me.”
    Tom just shook his head. “When’d you last see a doctor?”
    “I ain’t never seen a doctor. Not but that one time I got the blood poisoning.”
    “So how do you know what you’ve got. If you’ve even got anything.”
    “I know what I got. I seen it kill her. We all did.”
    Tom held the door for him. “Go on in and have your supper,” he said. “Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”
    “I’ll feel better if you give me some of what you’re growing up by the still.” Vernon stepped into the inner dark. “That’s how I’ll feel better.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tom said.

Preston
    I THINK IF they’d been left to their own devices those boys’d put her in the burn barrel with everything else and meant no disrespect by it. It’d been like something out of Homer. God knows they revered that woman.

Ruth
    A PERSON CANNOT forever beat back the predations of time and the world. The house where she lives is the house where she raised up the children and the house from which she buried her husband, but it is not the same place. Her room in the back is a dank and airless cell. Her daughter, Donna, is gone and with her such standards of cleanliness and order as a woman will maintain. She ascribes it to that. Now and then Audie will slip into her room and reposition the lace doily on the bedside