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The lights were far between on shore—sheds and warehouses, long walls that needed propping. High up on the ramparts of town some old iron bells were ringing.

"Are you a Catholic?" I asked her suddenly, and she shook her head.

Nobody was a Catholic but I looked at her—I made it plain she disappointed some hope of mine, and she had, standing there with a foreign bell ringing on the air.

"We're all Baptists. Why, are you a Catholic? Is that what you are?"

Without touching her except by accident with my knee I walked her ahead of me up the steep uneven way to where my car was parked listing downhill. Inside, she couldn't shut her door. I stood outside and waited, the door hung heavily and she had drunk all I had made her drink. Now she couldn't shut her door.

"Shut it."

"I'll fall out. I'll fall in your arms. If I fall, catch me."

"No. Shut it. You have to shut it. I can't. All your might."

At last. I leaned against her shut door, and held on for a moment.

I grated up the steep hills, turned and followed the river road along the bluff, turned again off into a deep rutted dirt way under shaggy banks, Father, dark and circling and rushing down.

"Don't lean on me," I said. "Better to sit up and get air."

"Don't want to."

"Pull up your head." I could hardly understand what she said any more. "You want to lie down?"

"Don't want to lie down."

"You get some air."

"Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore."

We circled down. The sounds of the river tossing and teasing its great load, its load of trash, I could hear through the dark now. It made the noise of a moving wall, and up it fishes and reptiles and uprooted trees and man's throw-aways played and climbed all alike in a splashing like innocence. A great wave of smell beat at my face. The track had come down here deep as a tunnel. We were on the floor of the world. The trees met and their branches matted overhead, the cedars came together, and through them the stars of Morgana looked sifted and fine as seed, so high, so far. Away off, there was the sound of a shot.

"Yonder's the river," she said, and sat up. "I see it—the Mississippi River."

"You don't see it. You only hear it."

"I see it, I see it."

"Haven't you ever seen the river before? You baby."

"I thought we were on it on the boat. Where's this?"

"The road's ended. You can see that."

"Yes, I can. Why does it come this far and stop?"

"How should I know?"

"What do they come down here for?"

"There're all kinds of people in the world." Far away, somebody was burning something.

"You mean bad people? Niggers?"

"Oh, fishermen. River men. See, you're waked up."

"I think we're lost," she said.

Mother said, If I thought you'd ever go back to that finny Stark, I couldn't stand it.—No, Mother, I'm not going back.—The whole world knows what she did to you. It's different from when it's the man.

"You dreamed we're lost. That's all right, you can lie down a little."

"You can't get lost in Morgana."

"After you lie down a little you'll be all right again. We'll go somewhere where you can lie down good."

"Don't want to lie down."

"Did you know my car would back up a hill as steep as this?"

"You'll be killed."

"I bet nobody ever saw such a crazy thing. Do you think anybody ever saw such a crazy thing?"

We were almost straight up and down, Father, hanging on the wall of the bluff, and the rear end of the car bumping and rising like something that wanted to fly, lifting and dropping us. At last we backed back over the brink, like a bee pulling out of a flower cup, and skidded a little. Without that last drink, maybe I wouldn't have made it at all.

We drove a long way then. All through the dark Park; the same old statues and stances, the stone rifles at point again and again on the hills, lost and the same. The towers they've condemned, the lookout towers, lost and the same.

Maybe I didn't have my bearings, but I looked for the moon, due to be in the last quarter. There she was. The air wasn't darkness