Either power had returned to the house since the short interval of my departure or the motion-triggered floodlight was solar-powered (a distinct rarity in that region in those days). No matter, the nature of the vehicle was revealed to me, as was the figure now emerging from it with a great mass of mail tucked beneath an arm. He shut the car door gently and then turned to appraise the house, reclining lightly, casually, against his car as if he did not wish to disturb or trouble it too much. He was a slim man probably in his late thirties or early forties. Though not tall he was possessed of that sort of ranging leanness that lends vicarious inches to a man. His mouth and chin were sculpted in profile, and his nose would have been a fine one did it not seem a little askew, as if it once had been broken in such a way that ever after it must incline a little to the side. Though he slouched against his car, making no move to approach the house, there was an air of assurance about him—of ownership. It was difficult to be certain in that light, but it seemed his face was stubbled as though he had not shaved for perhaps the latter half of that week, and his dark hair was swept back, rather cavalierly, I thought. Half-zipped jacket by Members Only.

It was Willy Mann’s Uncle. It had to be.

He took a few paces toward the side door of the house, ignoring the litter of beer cans and other trash in the driveway and yard, before turning to look back in my direction.

It was possible he might have glimpsed my moving form on the road as he sped into that curve as only he could, yet it was a distinct impossibility he could see me now where I stood, obscured by the night and trunk of a roadside oak. I say it was impossible, and yet he stood there a moment longer, gazing in my direction, with an expression that might have been a smile—that I choose to imagine as such.

Then, turning suddenly, mail tucked beneath his arm—each parcel bearing the name I would never come to know—he flung open the door. He entered his house.

***

I turned it all over, or as much as I could, in my mind while walking down that quiet country rode, its silence and stillness deepened by the intense cold.

It felt to me then, as it does now, that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s grand, sudden moonlight arrival and my witnessing of it had signaled some kind of final departure for us all.

“We’ll be back next weekend,” everyone would say as a matter of course at the conclusion of a party.

But it was not true that night, for none of us were ever coming back any more. Time would move on in spite of the stopped clocks of Willie Mann’s Uncle’s House and reveal the majority of we country folk as retail salespeople and manual laborers living day to day, or—as then—weekend to weekend. Some of us would become alcoholics, several of us already well on our way, and others would do and sell drugs, commit brutal acts of violence, and engage in smalltime crime. A couple would kill people and a couple others submit to a kind of stupefied despair, culminating in the extinguishing of themselves. How our seemingly inexhaustible springs of freshness and emotion—a bubbling cauldron or torrent when gathered together in that house—would diminish into bare trickles or bone-dry depressions in a matter of years.

Of course, we none of us, even the most intuitive of our lot, could foresee with any clarity those sad destinies at that time. Our youth blinded us, as do the youths of all beings in all times. A kind of felt green and growing world surrounded us even in winter, vining about our minds, and we succumbed to it willingly enough, the overpowering brilliance of its intense sun discouraging us from gazing too long or intently at anything far off—any particular horizon.