"The Blackberry River?” asked the girls, but no it wasn't quite; Pierce told them how it got its name, from a certain Lord Blackbury, to whom the king long ago gave a grant of land, in what was then called Ferroway County. Long, long ago.

"Is that true?” they said.

"It's true,” he said.

They crossed the bridge at Fair Prospect, and since now they had been on the road some hours, they had to stop, and there ahead, as it had always been, just where those who have turned toward the Faraways are meant to stop, was the village store by the side of the road. Pierce told the story of how he had first come to stop here, when his bus had failed; he imitated how it had tried to climb the last hill like the Little Engine that Could, only it couldn't, and here had stopped.

"Daddy, is that true?"

"You took a bus?"

They all exited from the Festina, small to tall, and dispersed.

The soda machine like a long red sarcophagus was, of course, no longer there; from the dark, cold waters within it Pierce had on that August afternoon chosen a Coke, and opened it on the rusted fang by the slot where you put in the quarter that it cost. Instead, a huge glowing repository gaudy as a jukebox offered drinks twice the size for four times the money. At the register, though, stood the same rack of cigarettes he remembered, many brands the same, and he picked out his brand, the ones he'd always smoked when he didn't roll his own, back in the days long ago when he smoked. The oblong pack in satiny cellophane, the smokes within yielding to his thumb-press. But it was too small: it felt absurdly little in his hand, as though it had shrunk with distance, or stayed the same as he went on, same thing. For a long time he held it as the incurious clerk observed him: turning and turning it, intrigued by the impossibility.

"The cigarettes?” asked the clerk, finger on his register.

"No, no,” he said. “I don't smoke."

"Never too late to start."

"Ha ha.” Camel, pyramids, sandy waste. And where would you go if you found yourself lost in this desert? Why, you'd go around to the city on the back. He returned the pack to its place.

Outside he sat down at the picnic table that was still there, going gray like himself, to wait for his women to finish in the bathroom. A great maple shaded it, its leaves begun but not done, veined damp and tender like the wings of newborn insects. Full, plush, and heavy when he'd first sat here. A little breeze had on that day stirred the leaves, and his hair. And out from that side road, beyond that now-shuttered house, had come Spofford and his sheep. Pierce sipped the Coke, and thought of those elaborately contrived fictions popular (or at least intriguing, to some) in the days he had first left the city to come here: stories that, though maybe vastly long, are shown at the end to have taken place all in a night's or a day's or even just a single moment's imagining, at the end of which the world of the beginning picks up again: the drink that was on the way to being drunk is drunk, the cigarette that was being lit is lit and the match shaken out. No time at all, thank God, has passed, except in the realm of thought, or desire: all ways (but one, for the now-chastened hero) lie still open.

"Let's go,” said Roo beside him.

* * * *

Now Vita and Mary were carried past the scenes of Pierce's life and Roo's life here, before their own existence. See that motel? Daddy lived there. Daddy, you lived in a motel? And see that place that sells cars? Mommy sold cars there; well, she helped to sell cars, with her father, Grandpa Barney. Mom, you sold cars? The road had been widened, the strip repopulated with the new franchises, the dealership sold Yugos and Nissans. Barney had said once that he wanted to be buried on the lot, where the test-driven cars could ride over him every day, but he lay in a cemetery, a small brass plaque at his head noting that he was a veteran of the U.S. Army, his rank and unit: like Sam Oliphant's far away.

Everything had grown smaller. Pierce caught himself thinking he was glad to have come back before it all became too small to enter, but when they actually came close to them, doors and roads and gates let them pass the same as ever. Relativity. See down that road? See that big yellow house? Daddy used to live there; not there, but down that way, no, let's not go down, let's go on.

At Arcady, the Rasmussen Humanities Center, Roo parked in the new parking lot that covered a swathe of meadow where once Spofford had kept his sheep. Spofford and his truck had turned in just ahead of them, coming from the other way.

"No more sheep?” Pierce said to him, taking his hand and then falling into an embrace. “Your Totem Animal."

"Too much damn trouble. It was all I could think about, even when I put ‘em on the table. The damn trouble they were.” He was grinning, turning to Pierce's girls to be introduced. And Rosie was suddenly there, in the doorway of Arcady, unchanged, it seemed, not gone gray as he and Spofford were rapidly doing, bright shawl around her shoulders, and beside her a young woman Pierce didn't know, a woman who seemed to be both here and not here, graciously present, secretly absent. Self-possessed, he might say.

"God, Pierce!"

"Hi, Rosie, hi. Rosie, you remember Kelley Corvino, my wife. My father, Axel Moffett. And our girls, Mary and Vita, no Vita and Mary."

Roo raised a cool hand to Rosie, and put forward the girls, who in earlier years would have hung back and hid behind her, but not now. Roo didn't know that Pierce and Rosie had once slept together, but then Pierce didn't know that Spofford and Roo had. Indeed they could hardly, any of them, exactly remember these things, only the bare names of them. Gone.

"And you all know my daughter, Samantha,” Rosie said, and the young woman, dark brown curls and plumbless blue eyes, put out her hand to Pierce.

* * * *

Rosie took Pierce and his package—the photocopied typescript, which she'd said he should chuck but which he found he couldn't, and the set of little plastic squares within which the book hid, at once changed and unchanged—down the hall to the office. It was all certainly changed, clean and bright; even the floors had been bleached and varnished so that they glowed like buttered toast.

"You haven't seen all this before,” she said.

"No."

"Like it?"

"Um,” he said, not knowing how to answer. In the office, the same fruitwood bookcases anyway, filled with software manuals and file cases of white plastic. There were posters and notices of lecture series, conferences, calls for papers.

"You'll like this one,” she said. “You have to come. We're so proud."

The topic was “Civility and Civilization: Eastern Europe After.” Of course in that month of that year you didn't need to ask after what, though the term might puzzle the future. Photographs of those who were coming to speak. Pierce pointed to one in awe.

"You could meet him,” Rosie said. “I mean you were there, before."

"I was never there,” Pierce said.

"Sure you were. You wrote me from there."

For a moment he wasn't sure himself. The face on the poster was dark, minatory, storm-cloudy, as the man surely was not. The same picture was on the cover of a book that lay on Rosie's desk. Pierce opened it and read.

Genuine conscience and genuine responsibility are always, in the end, explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed “from above,” that everything is visible, that nothing is forgotten, and so earthly time has no power to wipe away the sharp disappointments of earthly failure: our spirit knows it is not the only entity aware of these failures.