"You can't count it," old Jim said, and the chalk was whiter. "We all lost the same; I just had more of it. Our kids and their kids—and their kids ... lost heavy? What can a man lose more'n his life?... And if you're as old as us, what's your life except the family you made out o' your own flesh? What else's a man got when he's eighty or a hundred?"
Tom Pace said, "Ruth and Dave and their kids. I remember little Davey. He called me Tom Peach. I bought him a toy plane for his birthday. That was a couple days before the real planes come. I buried it with him ... I think. I think it was him I put it with. It mighta been Joey ... they looked alike."
"A man ain't nothing, when he's as old as us," Jim Liddel said, his skull sockets closed, "except what he done. He ain't much any more, himself; he's mostly what he done with his life, whatever he done and left around that he can point to and say, 'I did that', that's all. And what's he got left if they take that away? We can't make it again. We made Smoky Creek; built it; wasn't a thing here that didn't come out o' us or ours. We made the valley, after God give it to us; wasn't a thing here we didn't let live or help live or make live. We made our families, and watched 'em fit into the town and the valley, like the valley fits into the world, and we watched 'em go on doing what we done before them: building and working and planting and raising families—going on, like people got to go on. That's the way it was. That's what we had. Until they dropped the bomb and killed it—killed all we done that made us men." Tears were squeezing out of the skull sockets, and Ben Bates caught Tom Pace's eye and looked away, out the window, at the green walls of the valley that was a coffin.
"I just wish an airyplane would come around again," old Jim said. "I—just—wish. You know, Ben?"
Ben tried to talk and had to clear his throat; he put out his cigar in the ashtray, as if that was what was wrong with his throat, and said, "I know, Jim. Sure. And maybe you'll get your wish." He pushed back his chair and tried to grin, but it came out sour. "Maybe you will, you old fire-eater—and what if one comes and we get spotted and it shoots us up or goes back and tells everybody we're here? That's one wish we don't want the good Lord to grant, ain't it? Ain't it, now?"
Jim didn't say anything.
Ben got up and said, "'Bout noon. Guess I'll go home for a bite and then go down and fish with Windy."
Jim said, thinly, "I meant, I wish one would come and we'd get it."
"Well, maybe one will," Ben said, turning toward the door. "They built a slew o' them. And maybe we will, if it does."