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started the engine and drove away.
    He wanted to look. You could tell he wanted to follow this woman with his eyes, a quick light came into them, but then it was out, just like that, and he went on with the next customer. He came awake like a man who’d been in a deep sleep, and was late getting where he was going. His blade sliced into a chop, the ladies began their chatter again, watching him not watch her leave.
    “That woman,” Will said, “walks like a farmer.”
    “How’s that?” asked Charlie.
    “She walks,” said Will, waiting, “like she’s got a bale of hay on one hip and a bale of alfalfa on the other, and when she walks,” he paused for effect, “she’s rotating the crops,” and all the women laughed, even though they had heard the same old joke since they were girls, and Charlie laughed, too, although he found the joke vulgar when he thought of the way it didn’t even begin to describe the majesty and poetry of that girl’s way of walking.
    As if the movie were over, everything went back into motion, the ladies chattering as though she had never been there, Charlie finishing the chops and wrapping them neatly in clean white paper he ripped from a roll over his head, his hands shaking, his whole body electric beneath his clothes, the boy and Will sitting again and playing at Cat’s Cradle, the chair creaking as the father and the son intertwined the string in more and more complex ways.
    “Poor Sylvan,” said Eleanor Cooke.
    “Poor Boaty Glass, you mean,” said Mary Page. “He sure got what he paid for.”
    “If you lie down with the dogs, you get up with the fleas,” Eleanor said, ending it, and all the ladies nodded in agreement.
    But Charlie Beale had heard her name. Sylvan Glass. She went off in his head and his heart like a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Something dazzling. Something stupendous.
    Something, finally, that was wholly and mysteriously wonderful.

CHAPTER THREE
    A SHIMMERING AND A stillness, all at once. Charlie moves across the land, humming a song, but compared to the landscape itself, he is still and mute as a rock. Compared to the animals that, unseen, surround him, moving, feeding, breeding, he is a statue.
    The thousand thousand grasses, dry now in the late-summer heat, bristle like the brittle pages of a thousand ancient books being turned by invisible scholars. Every blade and leaf and rock speaking of loss and endurance, the birds settling down for another night or two before their long, familiar hegira. The landscape he walks is an endless cascade of loss and dying and coming to life again, and he feels the immense silence of the dead and the eternal pulse of the living in the soles of his feet.
    He is in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on flatland by the Maury River. He is cradled in the palm of the valley as a mother holds an egg.
    His quilts are spread out on the ground, sandwich eaten, the speckled tin plate washed in the river, the last light now the thinnest veil between him and the mossy blackness of the night. He hums the song he heard two days before, the old guys singing it sitting on the porch at the general store, brothers, overalls, dung-smeared boots, the brothers white-haired and bearded, a five-string and a mandolin, the same face no more than two years apart, playing and singing a song they had been singing together for years and years, singing separate lines of music that flowed together like the water around him into a single river of sound. The words come back to him, the sound of their wavering voices, infused with a belief in what they knew to be true.
Life is like a mountain railway
With an engineer so brave
You must make this run successful
From the cradle
To the grave
Watch the curves that fill the tunnels
Never falter, never fail
Keep your hands upon the throttle
And your eyes upon the rail.
    It was music. It was gospel. It was their hearts’ true belief, those old men, and Charlie, listening, believed, not so