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treated Jeremy as a distant friend, and Jeremy treated us pretty much the same way too; yet, there was a closeness between him and us that ran deep and was never spoken.
    Stacey said nothing else as he left the fence and came back over to the car and dipped his chammy into one of the water pails. Jeremy came over too. “What she look like under the hood?”
    Stacey squeezed the water out of the chammy and glanced back at him. He seemed to understand Jeremy’s curiosity about the car. It was a male thing, I supposed, this passion for cars, and in that there was no distinction between black and white. “You want to take a look?”
    Jeremy looked at him with a wide grin. Stacey put up the hood, and the two were soon immersed in talk of carburetors and engines and horsepower. I wondered at them. Stacey, usually almost monosyllabic in his talks with Jeremy, was in his pride, being most expansive as they discussed the car’s mechanisms. Jeremy, most times stumbling in his speech in searchof words that did not offend, talked almost without pause. Then, amidst it all, Jeremy, his blue eyes bright and his face lit in eager excitement, turned to Stacey and asked: “You . . . you think maybe I could get a ride in it?”
    Stacey’s smile faded. White folks most times didn’t ride with colored folks unless the colored folks were in the white folks’ employ and were driving the white folks’ car as a chauffeur. Under those circumstances white folks sat in the back seat. There were those times, of course, when white folks gave black folks a lift, but on those occasions black folks sat on the bed of the truck or on the back seat of a car or on the rumble seat, if a car had one. That was just the way it was, and since most colored folks didn’t have cars or trucks to be giving rides, there was never that much question of colored folks giving white folks a lift. Now Jeremy was asking for a ride in Stacey’s new car, and it was an awkward thing.
    “Just ’cross the pasture there, back of the barn,” said Jeremy, knowing what he was asking. No one could see them riding in the pasture.
    Stacey hesitated, glanced at Christopher-John, Little Man, and me; then he nodded. “All right,” he said, and opened the driver’s door and got in. Jeremy, grinning, ran around to the other side and slid in beside him. Then the two of them took off through the pasture gate onto the meadow grass. Stacey raced the Ford up the pasture and down the pasture and around in circles, and as he did Jeremy’s laughter was so loud and hard at the speedy ride that we could hear him from where we stood by the gate. I had never seen Jeremy more joyful. Then they came back through the pasture gate, hollering something we couldn’t understand, and continued on down the drive and across the road and up the forest trail on the other side.
    “What they say?” asked Little Man.
    “I don’t know,” I replied, staring after them.
    Christopher-John and Little Man stared out at the forest as well, then tossed the water from the buckets and took them into the barn. I started to return to the house and my kitchen chores before Big Ma came out calling for me, but then I looked back to the forest again, and without hesitation I, too, went down the drive, crossed the road, and started up the forest trail. I was curious where Stacey and Jeremy were headed.
    I wound my way through the forest. Years ago unwanted lumbermen had come onto our land and cut the trail, but they had cut more than the trail. They had cut down trees that had stood virgin strong for centuries untold. I followed the trail of rotting logs to within several feet of the Caroline, the pond Grandpa Paul-Edward Logan had named for Big Ma. There I stopped, for parked on the bank facing the pond was the Ford. Jeremy and Stacey were inside, and to my surprise Jeremy was now sitting behind the wheel. The front doors to the car were wide open. I stepped behind a pine and didn’t show myself. Neither Stacey