The two men walk through the cotton field without speaking. Frank walks down one row, the father—his name is Lester—down the next. The cotton plants rustle around them as they pass; brittle stems snap. They walk in silence until they come to the edge of the first field, where Lester stops, unscrews the cap of a canteen he’s brought along. He holds it out to Frank. Frank shakes his head.
“You sure?” Lester asks.
Frank nods.
Lester shrugs and brings the canteen to his mouth.
Frank looks back toward the cabin; they have come less far than he thought. He imagines the family inside, the mother settling the children on their pallets, pacing in the shadows with the infant as she awaits Lester’s return. Outside, the laundry wavers on the clothesline like so many blue ghosts.
“How old’s your boy?” Frank asks, still staring in the direction of the cabin.
“My boy?” Lester wipes water from around his mouth.
Frank nods.
“Amos just a baby,” Lester says. “Manny goin’ on ten years old.”
“Manny,” Frank repeats. “I looked at him back at the cabin, saw my Willie.” He gives a half laugh, weary. “S’pose now I’m bound to see him everywhere.”
“Ain’t right for an ol’ man to bury his child,” Lester says.
Frank looks at him, but he says nothing, shifts his gaze to the wagon in the distance. He’s got a vague memory from boyhood, his father crouched over his baby sister’s grave, his broad back shuddering. Though he feels nothing now but the urgency of getting where he needs to be, he knows that this same grief must be inside him somewhere, and he’s afraid to feel it. “Lot of things ain’t right,” he says.
“Yassah, I reckon that’s the truth.”
Again, Frank says nothing. He sets off through the cotton, following his own shadow through the moonlit rows.
“Ain’t my business,” Lester says, after several minutes. Frank glances at him sideways, waiting for him to continue, but he doesn’t pursue his thought right away.
“Ain’t my business,” he starts again, a few minutes later. “But what you gonna do once you back at the wagon?”
Frank shrugs. “Maybe now the mule will go.”
“What if she don’t?”
“I tole you,” Frank says. He stops walking. He finds it too hot to walk and talk. “Gonna wait, see what comes on down the road.”
Lester scratches his head, and Frank notices his fingers, how long they are, thin as pencils. “Not a whole lot come down that road. Been better y’all were on the highway yonder.” Lester gestures behind them. “But not a whole lot come on down that road. Least not at night.”
Frank does not reply. He has not thought about what will happen should no one come down the road, just as he did not consider what would happen if there were no mule at the cabin. It’s one of the things that make Elma crazy. He doesn’t think enough ahead, she says. But it seems foolish to Frank to think too far into a future that can only ever be uncertain. The present moment is what’s real, and that’s where he puts his attention. “All I can do is all I can do,” he says. And he continues on through the moonlight.