Clay, 1932

The train comes from the woods, and curving in its tracks falls alongside the riverbank. Across the water he can see the fallow fields, and at intervals in the distance he sees abandoned houses beside rundown barns and silo towers sharp against the land and sky like objects in a painting. He looks to where the shadow of the train moves along the embankment. A scrub of dead or dying trees and litter of dry leaves covers the banks and the bark of the leafless trees coils away from the trunks in long curlicued strips. Dead things, he thinks. Dead things.

The curve in the tracks brings the train broadside to the setting sun and he crosses the boxcar and leans from the doorway. He peers along the length of the train as it cuts alongside the river, and ahead he sees a distant town low and wide and dark. Clay sits down and watches the sky and waits. As the train nears the town the barrenness at the river's edge gives way to spruce and dense clumps of cattail and low canopies of river vine. He stands and takes his suitcase and folded greatcoat from where they lie concealed in the hay and as the sun sets—the sky by turns crimson and gold and powder blue in bands above the edge of the earth—he jumps from the train. He rolls and comes to lie in tall weeds along the riverbank. He sits up and watches the train pass and curve toward the town.

He walks along the tracks. The land here is made up of farm fields and as he gets close to the town he sees houses with white clapboards and dainty looking curtains. He walks away from the tracks and follows alongside the river where it bends and turns northward. The water is low and gentle and reflects the dusk light. There is a hole in the sole of his left shoe and after walking a while he sits on the riverbank and takes off both shoes and lets his feet cool in the water. He gets up and walks on. A dog behind a fence growls when he comes through the narrow path between two houses. There is a road but no one is on it. On both sides stand shotgun houses and empty lots. Light glances through curtains and he sees silhouettes pass beyond. He has come to that point in long solitude when such simple things amaze him, and he stares at the amber windows and wonders at the comforts of quiet people living quiet ordinary lives. He reaches the far end of the road and the town gives way again to farm fields and houses in the distance on gently rolling hills through which the road continues, a slender silver path in the night, and he moves on until he finds another train.

Hobo jungles, campfires, remnants of men, of lives he can hardly believe more barren than his own. He is thirty-four years old and has seen much. He is sensible to accidents, to violent death, to the slow genesis and decay of things, but this shocks him. In the years since he left for the war the whole country seems to have gone to a stunning ruination. Men line up for work, for the possibility of work, for thin soup and stale bread. Skeletons they are, their lost faces lit by firelight and shadowed by hopelessness and branches that droop with the weight of worn leather strops and mirror shards and rusted straightrazors. The country reels by. He sees signs for Coke, signs for Sears, signs for Hoover and Roosevelt. The trains pass through dense forests, pass through the desolation. In northern Pennsylvania one morning he sees a young girl in a blue dress standing on a far-off hill watching the train and he wonders if she sees him, a scarecrow sitting in a boxcar door, watching her.

He wakes to the sound of a rusty windvane spinning in the dark above...