1Moses’ career at college had been unexceptional and—but for a few friendships—there was nothing about it that he would miss; not the skimmed milk on his porridge or Dunster House upended like a sow above the threadbare waters of the Charles. He wanted to see the world. For Leander the world meant a place where Moses could display his strong, gentle and intelligent nature; his brightness. When he thought of his son’s departure it was always with feelings of pride and anticipation. How well Moses would do! Honora had tradition at her back, for all the men of the family had taken a growing-up cruise—Leander’s father included—rounding the Horn before they shaved, some of them, and on the homeward voyage lewdly straddling the beauties of Samoa, who must have begun to show some signs of wear and tear. Sarah’s habitual reliance on sad conclusions—life is only a casting off and we only live from day to day—helped her to bear the pain of having her first born plucked from his home. But where did all of this leave poor Coverly?

2The relationship between the two brothers had been stormy until a year or so ago. They had fought bare fisted and with sticks, stones and iceballs. They had reviled one another and had thought of the world as a place where the other would be exposed as an evil-tempered fraud. Then all this bad feeling had turned to tenderness and a brotherhood had bloomed that had all the symptoms of love—the pleasure of nearness and the pain of separation. They even took long walks together on the beach at Travertine, airing their most intimate and improbable plans. The knowledge that his brother was leaving gave Coverly his first taste of love’s dark side; it was gall. He didn’t see how he could live without Moses. Honora made the arrangements. Moses would go to Washington and work for a Mr. Boynton who was in some way indebted to her. If Moses had any regrets or hints of regrets they were lost in the confusion of his feelings and overridden by his passionate wish to get out of St. Botolphs and try his strength in the world.

3Sarah gathered those things that she thought Moses might need when he took up his life in a strange place—his confirmation certificate, a souvenir spoon he had bought at Plymouth Rock, a drawing of a battleship he had made when he was six, his football sweater, prayer book, muffler and two report cards—but, hearing him shout loudly up the stairs to Coverly, she sensed, in the notes of his voice, that he would leave these things behind him and she put them away again. The closeness of Moses’ departure drew Sarah and Leander together and refreshed those charming self-deceptions that are the backbone of many long-lived marriages. Leander felt that Sarah was frail and on the evenings before Moses left he brought her a shawl to shield her from the night air. Sarah felt that Leander had a beautiful baritone voice and now with Moses going away she wished he would take up his music again. Sarah was not frail—she had the strength of ten—and Leander could not carry the simplest tune. “You have to remember about the night air,” Leander told her when he brought her the shawl, and, looking up at him admiringly, Sarah would say, “It’s a shame the boys have never heard you sing.”

4There was a farewell party. The men drank bourbon and the ladies had ginger ale and ice cream. “I came over by Waylands’ pasture,” Aunt Adelaide Forbes said, “and that pasture’s just covered with cowflops. I have never seen so many cowflops in my whole life. There’s just cowflops everywhere. You can’t hardly take a step without ending up in a cowflop.” Everyone was there and Reba Heaslip came up to Rosalie and said, “I was BORN in the inner sanctum of the Masonic Temple.” They all talked about their travels. Mr. and Mrs. Gates had been to New York and had paid eighteen dollars a day for a room where you couldn’t swing a cat around in. Aunt Adelaide had been taken to Buffalo when she was a child. Honora had been to Washington. Mildred Harper, the church organist, played the piano, and they sang from the old hymnal and song books—“Silver Threads Among the Gold,” “Beulah Land” and “In the Gloaming.” While they were singing Sarah saw Uncle Peepee Marshmallow’s face in the window but when she went out onto the stoop to ask him in he had fled. Moses, going into the kitchen for a drink, found Lulu crying. “I ain’t crying because you’re going away, Moses,” she said. “I’m crying because I had this bad dream last night. I dreamed I give you this gold watch and you broke it on some stones. Ain’t that silly of me? Of course I don’t have the money to buy you a gold watch and even if I did you aren’t the kind of boy that’d break it, but just the same I dreamed this dream where I give you this gold watch and you broke it on some stones.”

5Moses left the next night on the 9:18, but there was no one to see him off but his parents. Rosalie was in her room, crying. “I won’t go to the station,” Honora had said in the same tone of voice she used at family funerals when she said that she would not go to the grave. No one knew where Coverly was but Sarah suspected that he was taking a walk on the beach at Travertine. Standing on the platform they could hear in the distance the noise of the train coming up the east banks of the river, a sound that made Sarah shiver, for she was at an age when trains seemed to her plainly to be the engines of separation and death. Leander put a hand on Moses’ shoulder and gave him a silver dollar.

6Moses’ feelings were strenuous but not sad and he did not remember the skimming fleet at the ten-minute signal before a race or the ruined orchards where he hunted grouse or Parson’s Pond and the cannon on the green and the water of the river shining between the hardware store and the five-and-ten-cent store where Cousin Justina had once played the piano. We are all inured, by now, to those poetic catalogues where the orchid and the overshoe appear cheek by jowl; where the filthy smell of old plumage mingles with the smell of the sea. We have all parted from simple places by train or boat at season’s end with generations of yellow leaves spilling on the north wind as we spill our seed and the dogs and the children in the back of the car, but it is not a fact that at the moment of separation a tumult of brilliant and precise images—as though we drowned—streams through our heads. We have indeed come back to lighted houses, smelling on the north wind burning applewood, and seen a Polish countess greasing her face in a ski lodge and heard the cry of the horned owl in rut and smelled a dead whale on the south wind that carries also the sweet note of the bell from Antwerp and the dishpan summons of the bell from Altoona but we do not remember all this and more as we board the train.

7Sarah began to cry when Moses kissed her. Leander put an arm around her shoulder but she would have none of it and so they stood apart when Moses said good-by. As soon as the train started, Coverly, who had boarded it in Travertine, came out of the toilet where he was hidden and joined his brother and past the table-silver factory they went, past old Mr. Larkin’s barn with this legend painted on it: BE KIND TO ANIMALS, past the Remsens’ fields and the watermans’ dump, past the ice pond and the hair-tonic works, past Mrs. Trimble’s the laundress, past Mr. Brown’s who ate a slice of mince pie and drank a glass of milk when the 9:18 rattled his windows, past the Howards’ and the Townsends’ and the grade crossing and the cemetery and the house of the old man who filed saws and whose windows were the last of the village.