He held it up to the light.
I saw him do it in the mirror and I had to look back at the road because my eyes were not any good for a second.
He held that leaf up to the sun the exact way I had watched him do it the last October Pop drove, twelve years gone.
I do not think he knew he was doing it. I do not think he was in our wagon at all right then. I think he was in Pop’s.
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We went out to the river and I brought the wagon around in the wide turn Harlan had mowed for us, and we came back up the field road with the sun behind us now and the color lit up from the other side, and the men had gone quiet again, the good kind of quiet, full instead of empty.
And then we came up over the little rise toward Harlan’s gate, where the plank table was, and the cider, and I saw that the word had traveled the way it does in a county like this.
The Gate
There were cars at Harlan’s gate. A lot of cars.
I had told maybe six people. Six people in a county like this is the whole county by Saturday. They had come, families from town, kids, the ladies from the church with more cookies than I had made, somebody with a coffee urn, Pastor Al in his barn coat. They had strung a couple of flags along the fence and they stood there on both sides of the gate, and when the wagon came up over the rise full of old men in the low gold light, they started to clap.
They clapped those nine men right up to the gate.
The men sat up straighter. Old soldiers know what to do when people stand for them, it is wired in under everything else, and I watched nine backs straighten in the hay and nine caps come up, and Bud Hollis, seventy eight years old, got to his knees in the wagon and then to his feet and stood the rest of the way in like the deck was under him.
I stopped the tractor by the table. The ladies came with the cider in foam cups, hot, and the molasses cookies from Dale’s mother’s tin.
The kids came up shy to the wagon side to look at the old men, and the old men looked back at them, and for a minute there was not a dry eye at that gate that belonged to anybody over fifty.