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everything has to be so casual.

Early Morning Wind
    I n a terrible snowstorm when John was a boy they had brought a donkey-steam engine up that road and down into the creek bed, the hollar. John told that at the supper table, eating pan-fried chicken, beans, green salad. John’s farm was clean. Sarah had never seen the ocean. She asked Lee to send her some shells from the ocean, seashells. John said, “Well, we’ll go see the old place in the morning.”
    They rode on John’s big-wheeled tractor out along a high bank on a tilt along a long, high-staked turkeyfence, the turkeys all running hard and banging into each other when John crashed the horn. “They agitate me so I agitate them,” he said.
    It was a bright morning with the sky blue and the grass dry and dusty. The road disappeared as they came to what looked like a small farmhouse. Woods started in the back of the house and went away as far as you could see in a covering of endless hills. John stopped the tractor and got off. A man came out of the house to the fence.
    â€œMorning,” John said. “This here’s my cousin’s grandson from out west. I’d like to take him back into the hollar and show him where the old place was.”
    â€œSure enough, John,” the man said. He unlocked the padlock on the aluminum gate and let them through.
    The road broke immediately into some trees, the tractor jouncing and shaking. Lee tried to imagine running a horse through. His grandfather had worn a diamond ring on his little finger and had a racing horse, the only one to go to school, too, the baby of the family. As they went on, Lee got John to talk about him. “They didn’t call him that,” John said, “they called him Faye, he was sure enough a rounder, one thing I recall was when he’d got himself and his guitar up in one of them limestone caves up near the ridge and started hooing in there at the boysout working in the corn around the bend—when they heard that sound they just took off, wasn’t till the afternoon that your great granddad rounded them up and when he found out it was Faye that had done it he gave him a solid whippin’—a rounder, for sure, that was him . . .”
    The rest of the trip continued rough, yet beautiful, they followed a barely discernable road, more a track, along the hillsides, often driving around huge boulders and fallen trees, and then they turned down and were in a draw where they went along a dry creek bed that wound around between wooded cliffs. John told him it might be hard to believe, but that back in the eighteen-nineties and during the turn of the century a lot of folks lived on those hillsides, farming down here in the bottom, hundreds of folks. It was hard to believe. The slopes were straight up and down in places, entirely covered with growth of all kinds. There were no houses nor did it look as if there ever could have been.
    After a time the creek bed opened into a near valley, about a hundred yards wide. John stopped the tractor and shut it off. The sound of thousands of cicadas droned off the hills. They walked across the dry rounded stones of the creek bed and went over to the slope. Lee had lost all sense of direction. It was extremely hot. John pointed left, high along the hillside.
    â€œThe big house was up there,” he said. “That was the second house, the one I remember as a boy.”
    â€œWhere was the first?”
    â€œRight where you’re standing,” John said.
    He showed Lee the outlines of the foundation. Actual square-cut blocks of limestone brought from Rogers forty miles away. The blocks were still in the ground, dirted over. Lee cleaned one off with the toe of his boot.
    â€œThree kids in this house, the other eight up there,” John said.
    That was all there was to it. They walked up to where the cornfield had been and then came back to the tractor.
    The next day John and Sarah took Lee into Claymore