Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was facing Motes in the section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn’t think so too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn’t reach the floor.

He looked at her a second and, without answering, leaned forward and stared down the length of the car again. She turned to see what was back there but all she saw was a child peering around one of the sections and, further up at the end of the car, the porter opening the closet where the sheets were kept.

‘I guess you’re going home,’ she said, turning back to him again. He didn’t look, to her, much over twenty, but he had a stiff black broad-brimmed hat on his lap, a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear. His suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still stapled on the sleeve of it.

He didn’t answer her or move his eyes from whatever he was looking at. The sack at his feet was an army duffel bag and she decided that he had been in the army and had been released and that now he was going home. She wanted to get close enough to see what the suit had cost him but she found herself squinting instead at his eyes, trying almost to look into them. They were the color of pecan shells and set in deep sockets. The outline of a skull under his skin was plain and insistent.

She felt irked and wrenched her attention loose and squinted at the price tag. The suit had cost him $11.98. She felt that that placed him and looked at his face again as if she were fortified against it now. He had a nose like a shrike’s bill and a long vertical crease on either side of his mouth; his hair looked as if it had been permanently flattened under the heavy hat, but his eyes were what held her attention longest. Their settings were so deep that they seemed, to her, almost like passages leading somewhere and she leaned halfway across the space that separated the two seats, trying to see into them. He turned toward the window suddenly and then almost as quickly turned back again to where his stare had been fixed.

What he was looking at was the porter. When he had first got on the train, the porter had been standing between the two cars – a thick-figured man with a round yellow bald head. Haze had stopped and the porter’s eyes had turned toward him and away, indicating which car he was to go into. When he didn’t go, the porter said, ‘To the left,’ irritably, ‘to the left,’ and Haze had moved on.

‘Well,’ Mrs Hitchcock said, ‘there’s no place like home.’

He gave her a glance and saw the flat of her face, reddish under a cap of fox-colored hair. She had got on two stops back. He had never seen her before that. ‘I got to go see the porter,’ he said. He got up and went toward the end of the car where the porter had begun making up a berth. He stopped beside him and leaned on a seat arm, but the porter didn’t look at him. He was pulling a wall of the section farther out.

‘How long does it take you to make one up?’

‘Seven minutes,’ the porter said, not looking at him.

Haze sat down on the seat arm. He said, ‘I’m from Eastrod.’

‘That isn’t on this line,’ the porter said. ‘You on the wrong train.’

‘Going to the city,’ Haze said. ‘I said I was raised in Eastrod.’

The porter didn’t say anything.

‘Eastrod,’ Haze said, louder.

The porter jerked the shade down. ‘You want your berth made up now, or what you standing there for?’ he asked.

‘Eastrod,’ Haze said. ‘Near Melsy.’

The porter wrenched one side of the seat flat. ‘I’m from Chicago,’ he said. He wrenched the other side down. When he bent over, the back of his neck came out in three bulges.

‘Yeah, I bet you are,’ Haze said with a leer.

‘Your feet in the middle of the aisle. Somebody going to want to get by you,’ the porter said, turning suddenly and brushing past.

Haze got up and hung there a few seconds. He looked as if he were held by a rope caught in the middle of his back and attached to the train ceiling. He watched the porter move in a fine controlled lurch down the aisle and disappear at the other end of the car. He knew him to be a Parrum nigger from Eastrod. He went back to his section and folded into a slouched position and settled one foot on a pipe that ran under the window. Eastrod filled his head and then went out beyond and filled the space that stretched from the train across the empty darkening fields. He saw the two houses and the rust-colored road and the few Negro shacks and the one barn and the stall with the red and white CCC snuff ad peeling across the side of it.

‘Are you going home?’ Mrs Hitchcock asked.

He looked at her sourly and gripped the black hat by the brim. ‘No, I ain’t,’ he said in a sharp high nasal Tennessee voice.

Mrs Hitchcock said neither was she. She told him she had been a Miss Weatherman before she married and that she was going to Florida to visit her married daughter, Sarah Lucile. She said it seemed like she had never had time to take a trip that far off. The way things happened one thing after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn’t tell if you were young or old.

He thought he could tell her she was old if she asked him. He stopped listening to her after a while. The porter passed back up the aisle and didn’t look at him. Mrs Hitchcock lost her train of talk. ‘I guess you’re on your way to visit somebody?’ she asked.

‘Going to Taulkinham,’ he said and ground himself into the seat and looked at the window. ‘Don’t know nobody there, but I’m going to do some things.

‘I’m going to do some things I never have done before,’ he said and gave her a sidelong glance and curled his mouth slightly.

She said she knew an Albert Sparks from Taulkinham. She said he was her sister-in-law’s brother-in-law and that he …

‘I ain’t from Taulkinham,’ he said. ‘I said I’m going there, that’s all.’ Mrs Hitchcock began to talk again but he cut her short and said, ‘That porter was raised in the same place where I was raised but he says he’s from Chicago.’

Mrs Hitchcock said she knew a man who lived in Chi …

‘You might as well go one place as another,’ he said. ‘That’s all I know.’

Mrs Hitchcock said well that time flies. She said she hadn’t seen her sister’s children in five years and she didn’t know if she’d know them if she saw them. There were three of them, Roy, Bubber, and John Wesley. John Wesley was six years old and he had written her a letter, dear Mammadoll. They called her Mammadoll and her husband Papadoll …

‘I reckon you think you been redeemed,’ he said.

Mrs Hitchcock snatched at her collar.

‘I reckon you think you been redeemed,’ he repeated.

She blushed. After a second she said yes, life was an inspiration and then she said she was hungry and asked him if he didn’t want to go into the diner. He put on the fierce black hat and followed her out of the car.

The dining car was full and people were waiting to get in it. He and Mrs Hitchcock stood in line for a half-hour, rocking in the narrow passageway and every few minutes flattening themselves against the side to let a trickle of people through. Mrs Hitchcock talked to the woman on the side of her. Hazel Motes looked at the wall. Mrs Hitchcock told the woman about her sister’s husband who was with the City Water Works in Toolafalls, Alabama, and the lady told about a cousin who had cancer of the throat. Finally they got almost up to the entrance of the diner and could see inside it. There was a steward beckoning people to places and handing out menus. He was a white man with greased black hair and a greased black look to his suit. He moved like a crow, darting from table to table. He motioned for two people and the line moved up so that Haze and Mrs Hitchcock and the lady she was talking to were ready to go next. In a minute two more people left. The steward beckoned and Mrs Hitchcock and the woman walked in and Haze followed them. The man stopped him and said, ‘Only two,’ and pushed him back to the doorway.

Haze’s face turned an ugly red. He tried to get behind the next person and then he tried to get through the line to go back to the car he had come from but there were too many people bunched in the opening. He had to stand there while everyone around looked at him. No one left for a while. Finally a woman at the far end of the car got up and the steward jerked his hand. Haze hesitated and saw the hand jerk again. He lurched up the aisle, falling against two tables on the way and getting his hand wet in somebody’s coffee. The steward placed him with three youngish women dressed like parrots.

Their hands were resting on the table, red-speared at the tips. He sat down and wiped his hand on the tablecloth. He didn’t take off his hat. The women had finished eating and were smoking cigarettes. They stopped talking when he sat down. He pointed to the first thing on the menu and the steward, standing over him, said, ‘Write it down, sonny,’ and winked...