Nat Quinto sat bareback on the ox, just longlegged enough to hold the beast’s ribs between his knees and brook the loll and roll from all four strokes of its shoulderblades. The sway carried up to the man’s own shoulders but stopped there; his hatless head rode steady and level, gliding, as if this were not an ox but an old ferryboat he had boarded to drift downcontinent on, a long ride on a southward current.

His wife wore the hat. She sat on the rear plank of the wagon. Her feet dangled off of the back and swung a little in the grasswake: this might have been enough to make her look girlish, especially with the big hat covering her. But somehow she fell just on the far side of girlishness. Her bearing was too firm, too gold, she was in womanhood, young womanhood though it was. Maybe the change had only happened in the past week. It was in that week they had been leaving down for Florida in a rickety cart, axles a-squalling, their few possessions sliding around in the back. Yes, maybe it was that experience which had given her the appearance of a woman, or maybe it was what she did with her hands as she rode: in the left hand was a knife, in the right was a dead rattlesnake. She sat there shucking the thing down to the flesh. The head had been crushed under wagon wheels but back of that was seven feet of good snakemeat, and she butchered it with a cloth draped over her knees for the blood.

How she’d ended up with the hat on was this:

It was midmorning, they had been driving for a while. Lucy was inside the wagon, underneath the canvas, and Nat was up on the ox. The ox smelled the water before he did: it tossed its head to the right and huffed. Before long Nat could smell it too, sweet and fresh through the trees. ‘Luce,’ he called. ‘There’s a creek yonder, I smell it. Do you care to stop? I’d kind of like a drink.’ The ox was already turning.

‘I could use that,’ Lucy said after a time, slowly, as if she had been woken from sleep. Which she had not been. ‘I could use a creek. Is it far away?’

‘No. Off to the right. Not long thataway.’

‘Oh, well, we’ll see,’ she said. ‘What’s long to some men ain’t to you, Quinto.’

‘Not long thataway,’ he repeated, his throat a little dry.

The ox broke its own road down to the water. They arrived and saw it was a fair creek, coursing amber above sand and the last dregs of chert off of Georgia’s shoulder. ‘Oh, oh,’ said Lucy, coming out from the canvas, ‘this is nice, Nat. This is pretty. Maybe here, Nat? Maybe this is the place?’

‘Not this, not this,’ the man said. He stood and looked. ‘This, it’s pretty and it’s clear water. But where we’re going is all of this and richer and prettier and clearer.’

‘Yes?’ said the woman. She had stepped into the creek, eyes partway closed.

‘All this and richer and clearer and they’s herds of cows, herds of horses all running, and deer running, and flowers shooting up, and fruit trees shooting up everwhere whether you want em to or not. You’ll see.’

‘Soon, then?’

‘Soon. Yes, soon,’ he said. He was unhitching the ox from its yoke, watching her. ‘You believe me, don’t you? Luce?’

She was removing her shawl. ‘I don’t guess I have a choice,’ she said.

‘Lucy, now please, you—’

‘I believe you, Nat,’ she said. ‘I believe it. With all I got.’

She stepped away in the creek. He threw the ox’s last trammels off and took it to the water. It began to drink. Quinto went off to a shrub to relieve himself, his eyes roving over the terrain, as was his way. Then he came back to the creek and dipped into it alongside the packanimal, bringing water to his face and neck and dampening himself generally. He tended to the ox a moment, bringing up water in his hat to wet its back. Then he looked around for his wife.

There she was. Twenty yards downstream and all in the water, naked, nakeder than he’d ever seen her somehow, behind but not very much behind an outcrop of willows. He took a shallow breath and turned to the wagon.

There was a small pouch up by the driver’s bench and he took it down and bumbled a smoke. He was nearing the last crumbs of the tobacco. Soon it would be all gone. This was bad: what then would he do, at such moments? What would he do with his hands, his shaking hands? Well, they would have to steady.

The cigarette made, he smoked it; thereby it was gone. Too quickly. He slumped against the wagon, facing away from the creek, spitting out a few stray shreds of tobacco. After a moment he turned and peered over again. That terrible whiteness, off in the water. Wading, bathing, not paying him any mind whatsoever. Maybe that more than anything was what moved him.

He left the wagon and walked those twenty yards down the creekbank and pulled up directly in front of her position and stood, frankly looking. There she was. The pale back, the long heavy honeycolored hair turning dark-hued in the seep of the creek and piled a little on one shoulder, which she had raised against him, and over which she was now gaping wide eyed as if she had never seen the man before in her life.

He laughed at this. He stood and looked and laughed again. Then he walked into the creek, fully clothed, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Which maybe it was.

They made love up on solid ground. Afterward they got into their own clothes, somewhat grudgingly, after a little confusion about whose were whose. Except she kept his hat and did not return it.

They set back toward the Alachua trail and turned south again. It was around that time that the wagon rolled over the snake. Lucy saw the corpse all stretched out in the grass after they had moved past it and called to Nat to stop. There it was, dead, not even twitching. It was true what she said, that it had never even had a chance to rattle, the poor thing.

From that creek they continued south for two more days without sight of any thing that man might have made or hoped to make. Except for one place, where they saw a shaft of hickory wood sticking out of an oak tree, the arrowhead buried deep in the oakheart. Otherwise no trace of humankind, and still Quinto insisted they were not far enough, saying that they’d know the place by a certain twist in the trail which he’d heard described, and a couple of other landmarks. He did not disclose these to her. She in turn pulled the heads off flowers.

The wagon was a rickety machine, but it held up. It did not have much to carry. Their larger belongings were tied against the walls and most of the floor was taken up by a mattress. This was where they slept nights, dozed days. In this way the wagon resembled not much more than an ox-drawn bedchamber, a mattress on wheels rolling down the road. A few pots and pans rang together sometimes, like a signal bell, and a crate containing a few white chickens swung from the rear like a lantern.

Nat Quinto had purchased the ox and the wagon with all of his savings. He had been a lumber man on the Saint Marys River in Georgia but recession had come through and broken the industry, set him adrift. He and all his fellow sawyers were turned out from the company houses and given no pay for their last five thousand boardfeet. This betrayal had sent Quinto into a slow fury. He was a steady man at heart but he had such rages sometimes, they were very rare but burned very hot, and they often resulted in decisions such as this one: to leave that country immediately for someplace where there would be no man to count on for his eating or his starving or payment in anything save where God himself was exchequer. He was not certain this could be done but he guessed it could be done and guessed he would die if he did not try it.

He and Lucy were recently married. She agreed to go. He got the destination from an old neighbor at the lumbercamp who described a piney roadhouse called Missus Monroe’s and a fair country south of that and Quinto purchased his ox and wagon in town and left the next day. They had been riding this trail ever since. They did not hurry, there was no need for hurry. Nat did not require haste or speed to hold him to his decision.

He sat on the ox looking forward and down. Nat was tall but he was narrow-shouldered; he was not imposing; his smile was wide and crooked. He had dark hair, gotten from the same source as his surname presumably. His wife cut his hair but she was not very good at it and the result made him look somewhat scraggly and almost boyish. All the same he had big quick fists and no man he fought ever forgot him.

Late one afternoon their wagon was squalling across the pinelands. It was hot, it was April. The axles disliked the weather and made a loud sound. Lucy also disliked the weather or was pretending to. She sat in silence under the canvas. There had been a dog following the wagon for a day or two. It was small, wild, fringe eared, a poorlooking bitch. Every once in a while Lucy flicked a thumbnail of cornbread off of the back of the tailgate and the dog ate it with joy. Nat wouldn’t like this, but Nat didn’t know. The dog followed them and fattened visibly.

Lucy had pinched and was about to throw another piece of bread when the wagon stopped dead. She froze. She listened. There were no noises, or at least no indian noises. That was what she listened for—war whoops, horses, muskets. There were none of those for a long minute and so she stuck her neck out of the wagon.

To the right, nothing. To the left, nothing. Nothing but the same gigantic trackless woods, with brushy growth along the roadside. The same woods she had been looking at for the last week. She got down from the wagon and went around to find her husband.

He was out in the middle of the path, staring at an oak tree. She had to squint for a moment, but then she saw what he was looking at. There was a little dark house under that oak. Five horses hitched to posts along the front. She walked closer to her husband to be able to see it as he saw it. Across the distance there was a single voice laughing like a maniac, crowing with mirth in the early afternoon. A second laugh joined in, and then a third, a woman’s. But then those two dropped off and the first voice kept on laughing, long, loud, the sound growing dry and hoarse and chapped in the throat but still not stopping. An empty bottle flew out of an empty window and lodged in the sand and the laugher laughed on.

Lucy Quinto left her husband looking at the roadhouse and turned. She went to the edge of the woods and wrenched a skinny laurelcherry out of the dirt, roots and all. Then she walked back to the wagon and raised the switch and swung it down on the ox’s rump with all her might.

The ox gave a groan like a big door swinging and started forward at a trot. This was an unprecedented speed for that animal. Lucy dropped the switch to the ground and swung up onto the tailgate when it came to her. She sat there for a moment in the runaway wagon, brushing the root dirt from her hands. It was not bad soil here, damp, tacky, clayey. A moment later there was a Ho-ing and a Hey-ing and wild curses from the front of the wagon and the leather traces creaked and Missus Quinto lay back on a cushion, satisfied that the wagon had regained its pilot.

After that brief pause their journey accelerated. Quinto urged the beast forward with quick flicks of the reins. So they must have been getting close: close to what? At one point the road became a little rough and Lucy looked out from the wagon and saw that they were actually no longer on a road at all. They had left it and angled out across the pinelands, bumping a little over the wiregrass clumps, driving past big corinthian trees broad enough to put the whole ox in their shadow.

Then as quickly as they’d come into the pines they left them. The wagon sank down a slope into a leafy hammock. They rolled through it for a long time and then, at last, inevitably, came into the presence of waters, the ox once again knowing it before they did. The beast upped from a slow walk to a steady walk and they came to a little spring and a little stream yet Quinto did not let them stop but instead steered the lowing animal around the pool of water and cussed it faster into the adjoining woods down a little deer trail amidst the snapping of saplings and the crash of brush being breasted aside and rolled over then springing up again behind them to form an unbroken ring around the wooden wagon and it was as though they were not so much moving as being moved through the woods, down the long dark gut of the wilderness. Then they came to a clearing.

They could barely see what was in it because it was almost dusk. They made a meager camp, cooked on an open fire and slept in the bed of the wagon. When morning came they woke up and saw where they were. It was a goodsized clearing. The oaks stood off twenty yards in every direction and there was an array of grasses on the ground. A lone dogwood stood, abloom like Easter.

Nat got up and walked around the place. Lucy sat up in the bed in the wagon, watching. Then the man came back to the wagon and began pulling out the things he would need. The tools of his old trade: crosscut saw, handsaw, wedge, adze, an axe with the haft worn smooth. He would use them to clear trees if necessary but had no special urge to do so. He also brought out an auger, a hoe, and a leather case with five different knives. These were all of the tools he had brought to clear the land, it was most of everything he owned.

The location was good. The springhead they had passed was a close source of water, and the hammocky ground would be fertile for crops, better than the pinewoods. It was level and plenty big enough for what little they had or dreamed of having. Quinto fixed the ox with tackle and rode it out of the clearing. While he was gone Lucy got up and walked around the place alone, looking, listening.

He came back with four whole pine trees dragging behind the ox. He took and split the limbs off the springy young trees and piled them up for the posts of a leanto. Lucy took a knife and went to gather palmetto fronds. They would use the palmetto fibers to tie the joints of the leanto; the flat fronds would be for a roof. Though when they had gathered everything the pile of raw materials did not look like much. They both eyed it dubiously.

They slept in the bed of the wagon while the house was being built. Nat set the pinebranches in augered holes in the ground and bound them at the corners. They layered palmettos on an angled roof, a barrier more watertight than wagon canvas. Then Quinto set about splitting the trunks of the small trees in half to make a flat puncheon floor. They were cut to size and laid face up inside the structure. He did not allow Lucy into the place until he was done with this job but at the end of the third day he called to her. She was out sowing corn, she came in, slowly, smiling. The structure was bigger and squarer than their last house. The floor was clean and white as ivory and the whole place smelled tremendously of pine. They brought their two chairs and their table inside and just sat there for a while, and then they brought in the bed.

The Quintos began to set themselves up in the clearing. The dog that had been following their wagon came and set up in the clearing too. It stayed on the outskirts at first, then moved closer to the middle when they did not drive it off. Eventually Lucy confessed. I gave it food, Nat. Well? Do you think that’s wrong? Should I of just let it die walking? But Nat was smiling, and went to the dog and evaluated it honestly, saying it was a good thing Lucy had done. He named the dog Cadge.

All of a sudden they had the makings of a garden and the makings of a house and a dog too. During those furious three days they had barely held a conversation. They spoke about the dog, or small things like A little farther over there, Luce, or Where to put the ox pen? or Plant them chickens there under the oak. But there was no real conversation, they were too close for that somehow, moving so much in unison.

It was a good season. They ate through their supplies of corn and sweet potatoes and barreled salt pork, like they knew they would. But as those supplies dwindled they began to make up the difference with poke greens and hearts of palm, and cattails from the pond ground into a flour, as Nat had heard it done in Florida. In that way their old life shaded into their new one, with added bounties. The spring ran cool and deep, with a pleasant flavor. Deer presented themselves for the slaughter. An orange tree sprang up. The chickens could not stop laying eggs. As the summer ended their food stores were almost empty and the garden they had planted was not ready but still they ate pretty well. Soon they would have no need for the grubby old storebought corn and potato sacks anymore and then their previous lives would be fully forsworn. They both got strong and brown from many little labors.

Then it rained. Of course it did. It had been a mild dry summer, too dry to last, too good to trust. First came a big tropical storm. Nat Quinto looked up one day and noticed cumulonimbi on the western horizon the likes of which he had never seen, true oceangoing stormclouds birthed in the Atlantic and bound for the Gulf with little heed for the narrow peninsula which they would gouge with their rains. When he looked again an hour later they barely seemed to have moved. But they were moving, and by late afternoon had arrived, grim and greenly flickering, shotten with the earth’s healing waters.

When the rain hit they sat inside listening as it rattled against the thatch and the stiff wind toyed at the roof’s edges and threatened to strip it bit by bit. The house accounted well for itself but not well enough. The water didn’t pour in, it just trickled down all the roof posts and guyropes. That was how everything got wet. Clothing and bedding, tallow and wick, everything. They spent days and nights inside in the dark, on a damp mattress, eating handfuls of damp corn and a few pieces of venison and some berries. After the first few days of rain Lucy Quinto was seized with panic. ‘Are we going to drown?’ she asked. Everything outside of the house was water and everything inside it was becoming water too. ‘Are we going to drown?’ Nat said no they were not, but they began to see that even if God did not drown them in a flood there were other ways to die from rain. It was a matter of food. Quinto could not go outside and hunt, all the wild animals were cowering just like they were, and anyway his gunpowder had gotten wet. They could not build a fire to cook, there was nothing that would take a flame anywhere in that landscape. The chickens had all fled to the trees, and the ox haunted the marshes. They let Cadge the dog inside. She lay pitifully on the floor and was not dry for three days, filling the room with her smell.

None of the rains that followed were as strong as that first one. But they didn’t need to be. They followed one after another over the course of a month, establishing new ponds, swelling creeks into rivers, and shrinking the earth wholesale. During the breaks Nat and Lucy would go outside to repair the roof with new fronds and Nat would hurry down to the pond to try for some catfish on his single fishhook. He couldn’t cook the fish if he caught them, because he could not start a fire, so instead he sunk them raw into a brine barrel to cure in the hopes that they would be edible someday, so they wouldn’t starve. At no point did they talk about eating the dog.

The rain came down like walls around their house. Sometimes they sat and talked. Sometimes they just sat. Sometimes they argued bitterly. Sometimes they told each other grand tales about what their life was going to be like soon. And oftentimes when the rain got too loud they’d spend a wordless hour hand in hand with their eyes shut in what was unaccountable as anything except prayer.

It did stop eventually. There was one big last round of storms, and it was over. The sun shone like it hadn’t in weeks. Quinto went outside to look around.

One half of their clearing was a little lower than the other and this had become a floodpond. Floating in it were the bodies of several drowned snakes and what he recognized as three of his chickens. Next to that, the smokehouse he’d been building had collapsed. Worst of all—he hated to see it—was the garden. The rows ran straight down into the flooded area with its dead snakes. But the parts still on solid ground were also destroyed. The shoots of corn had bent double and turned brown. The sprigs of the sweet potatoes were plastered to the ground, signposts for untold ruin below. The squashes had just started to grow up on the surface before the rains started; now they lay there like forms dredged up from the ocean’s floor and deposited on land, weird and drooping, sucked and shapeless and covered in a substance like pus where they lolled on the soil, steeping in their own liquors.

Nat went away. He did not tell Lucy where to. She pulled the bed out of the house onto a couple of stumps in the hopes that it would dry out a little. She hung pieces of clothing around in bushes and trees. About an hour later, while Lucy was still alone, a stranger stalked into the clearing. It was a naked black man with pale eyes and white teeth. He was leading a large black ox she had never seen before. Lucy screamed. But then she saw the man bare his white teeth in a smile and laugh a familiar gravelly laugh and the ox huffed a familiar huff and stamped its leg revealing a patch of white flank where the mud fell off, the mud which man and beast had both been dragged through in some brutal contest to reestablish their relationship, master and mastered, though they looked about like equals now.

Nat gave Lucy a weary chase looking for a kiss but did not get it. She called him a boy and he became angry and went down to the creek and came back white again. ‘Ain’t a boy,’ he said to her. ‘I’m a man. Do you understand me? I’m a man.’ Then Quinto came and sat down in the doorway of his small dwelling and looked out at the reeking remains of his homeplace and that white man put his head in his hands and moaned like a bear.