Daniyal Mueenuddin Reads Peter Taylor

Two Pilgrims.

We were on our way from Memphis to a small town in northern Alabama where my uncle, who was a cotton broker, had a lawsuit that he hoped could be settled out of court.

Mr. Lowder, my uncle's old friend and lawyer, was traveling with him.

I had just turned 17, and I had been engaged to come along in the capacity of chauffeur.

I sat alone in the front seat of the car.

The two men didn't discuss the lawsuit along the way, as I would have expected them to do.

I don't know to this day exactly what was involved, or even whether or not Mr. Lowder managed to settle the matter on that trip.

From the time we left the outskirts of Memphis, the two men talked instead about how good the bird hunting used to be there in our section of the country.

During the two hours while we were riding through the big cotton counties of West Tennessee, they talked of almost nothing but bird dogs and field trials, interrupting themselves only when we passed through some little town or settlement to speak of the fine people they knew who had once lived there.

We went through Collierville, La Grange, Grand Junction, Salisbury.

At La Grange, my uncle pointed out a house with a neoclassic portico and said he had once had a breakfast there that lasted three hours.

At Salisbury, Mr. Lowder commented that it somehow did his soul good to see the name spelled that way.

There was even some color still, dull pinks and yellows mixed with reddish browns, and under a bright, limitless sky, the trees and the broad fields of grayish cotton stalks, looking almost lavender in places, gave a kind of faded tapestry effect.

After we crossed the Tennessee River at Savannah, the country changed, and it was as if the new kind of country we had got into depressed the two men.

But it may have been only the weather, because the weather changed too after we crossed the river.

The sky became overcast, and everything seemed rather closed in.

Soon there was intermittent rain of a light, misty sort.

I kept switching my windshield wiper on and off until presently my uncle asked me in a querulous tone why I didn't just let the thing run.

For 30 or 40 miles, the two men had little to say to each other.

Finally, as we were passing through a place called Waynesboro, a hard-looking hill town with a cement block jailhouse dominating the public square, my uncle said that this town was where General Winfield Scott had made one of his halts on the notorious Trail of Tears when he was rounding up the Cherokees to move them west in 1838.

The two men spoke of what a cruel thing that had been, but they agreed that one must not judge the persons responsible too harshly, that one must judge them by the light of their times and remember what the early settlers had suffered at the hands of the Indians.

Not very long after we had left Waynesboro, Mr. Lowder remarked that we were approaching the old Natchez Trace section and that the original settlers there had been a mighty rough lot of people.

My uncle added that from the very earliest days, the whole area had been infested with outlaws and robbers, and that even now it was said to be a pretty tough section.

They sounded as though they were off to a good start.

I thought the subject might last them at least until lunchtime.