The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry

IF Aunt Georgie was formal and austere, Nick was casual and familiar. If the bent of her mind was often otherworldly, Nick's belonged incorrigibly to this world; he was a man of the fields and the barns and the long nighttime courses of fox hunts. When he spoke of the Lord he called him, as my grandfather did, the Old Marster, by which they meant a god of mystery, the maker of weather and seasons, of abundance and dearth, of growth and death-a god far more remote, and far less talkative, than the god of the churches.

At night after I had finished supper in my grandmother's kitchen I would often walk down across the field to where Nick's house sat at the corner of the woods. He would come out, lighting his pipe, and we would sit down on the stones of the doorstep, and Nick would smoke and we would talk while it got dark and the stars came out. Up the hill we could see the lighted windows of my grandparents' house. In front of us the sloping pasture joined the woods. The woods would become deep and softly massive in its darkness. At dusk a toad who lived under the doorstep would come out, and always we would notice him and Nick would comment that he lived there and that he came out every night. Often as we sat there, comfortable with all the outdoors and the night before us, Aunt Georgie would be sitting by the lamp in the house behind us, reading aloud from the Bible, or trying to lecture to Nick on the imminence of eternity, urging him to think of the salvation of his soul. Nick's reluctance to get disturbed over such matters was always a worry to her. Occasionally she would call out the door: "Nickum-Nackum? Are you listening to me? " and Nick would serenely interrupt whatever he was telling me-"Yessum, Miss Georgie"-and go on as before.