Ben's place is open only on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., but it easily does as much business as the nearby Hardee's and Dairy Queen and Big Chick combined, even though their doors stay open longer. Dave's comes closest to Tillman's in its menus and cafeteria line setup. The main difference is that most of Dave's sit-down clients and all of his staff are black. Most of Tillman's clients and all of his staff are white.

Dad's wife, Lois, is still asleep when he and I leave the farmhouse to go to Tillman's for breakfast the morning after we arrive. Inside the restaurant's front door, Dad takes off his taupe Stetson and places it on an empty chair. Cowboy hats are not a popular head covering in central Georgia—I can't recall seeing one on anybody else's head—but my father has never been a slave to fashion. He adheres to a foundation of cleanliness and good repair, but beyond that, function and comfort prevail. And innovation. For some years, he favored a stiff polyester traveler's blazer, the blue one with hidden pockets he had ordered from a stamp-sized ad in The New Yorker. He treats clothing as a uniform, a necessary accoutrement of living, but nothing more.

Tillman's business is brisk, as it is every morning, yet there are still plenty of open tables. We sit up front, near the entrance and cash register and recently expanded retail product line: shelves of jams, barbecue sauces and peppered vinegar locally brewed and bottled and canned. My favorite is "The Enhancer: The Sauce that Demands Your Imagination." We order eggs, sausage and grits from Connie, whose long brown braid swings down the back of her Christian rock concert T-shirt as she pads around the restaurant in high-top cross-trainers. She swallows the ends of words in the local fashion, talking about a husband who keeps her out of troub- and wondering at the end of our meal if we want anything el-.

The restaurant's cafeteria line and three seating areas are carved out of the first floor of a large, old, wood-framed house, obligatory porch out front. On one wall a horse halter hangs between two fur stoles sagging on metal coat hangers. Atop an upright piano, Little League team portraits alternate with historic shots of the area collected by Benny, the UPS deliveryman who is also an amateur historian. In a picture from the 1930s, a white man sits on a horse-drawn cart, legs primly crossed and hands in lap, presiding over dozens of black men in prison stripes and shackles.

There was a time, before the Tillmans bought the business, when we could not have passed through these doors and sat at a table. As Coloreds (or Nigras or Mulattoes or Blacks or whatever term was in fashion), we would have been relegated to the back door of the restaurant to buy our food and take it away. To my father, this past is direct, personal and constant, etching itself into his instincts. My father is as fair-skinned as I am, so the restrictions he grew up under, so largely tied to skin color, were, in his case, not actually because of the color of his skin, but because of the idea of skin color. To me, this past is historical, his story abstract. As a white-looking, mixed-race girl, growing up in the urban, integrated North in the 1960s, I have only heard of such customs.

**********

We arrive on a Tuesday. The pigfest is set for Saturday. In the interim, Lois will ensconce herself in the sunroom's BackSaver lounger, set at full recline. Lois and my father have established fairly separate activity orbits in the 30 years they've been together (twice the length of his marriage to my mother). Dad finds projects, obsessions, intrigues to pursue, either telephonically or in person. His modus operandi is all operandi, all the time. Lois watches English mystery series and reads whodunits. While we're at the farm, the sunroom is her headquarters, and she has a mystery novel in hand, telephone and remote control within reach. She gets up only to use the bathroom and for meals, in both cases relying on a walker to keep her upright. Her mind is sharp but her balance is gone. It's brain chemistry rather than inner ear, the doctors tell her, and her only protection from dizziness and imminent collapse is to remain horizontal.

Lois seems relieved whenever my two sisters and I are around. For better and worse, we absorb our father's attention, and more than once, his tendency toward irascibility has prompted a reactionary alliance. I credit Lois for establishing the noncompete policy under which she and I operate: I was 12 when she became a part of my family, too young to do much more than feel resentful. Toward me and my sisters, and her own four children, as far as I can tell, she displays a curious blend of being unsentimental but generous, uninterested but accommodating. As physically inhibited as she is, she seems fairly content, and so I do little for her while we're in Georgia other than to bring her a glass of water, no ice, when she descends into one of her chronic coughing spells, or to ask her if she needs anything when I'm going to the store. Only rarely will she ask for something, and only when I'm already headed out on an errand.

In Georgia, my father lives from errand to errand, repair to repair, enterprise to enterprise. He keeps lists in a small spiral notebook or on index cards or the backs of envelopes, and he scratches off items as each is accomplished. Ever since August of 1985, when my two sisters and I flew down with him so that all of us, including him, could see the farm for the first time, one of his to-do items is to bestow allowances at the start of every visit.

The Chamber of Commerce welcomes you to Monticello, he says, then proffers a handshake, a crisp $50 bill (and after a few years and in a nod to inflation, a $100 bill) folded into his palm. He singles out each of us to do this, delivering his welcome in a low voice, as if the transaction is a secret to be kept. This largesse, this whimsy, from a man whose cash gifts for most of my life consisted of birthday checks for $5, half of which had to be given to charity and the other half deposited into a savings account. My sisters and I come to call his presentation the "golden handshake," and the joke of it is that, beyond purchasing nail polish from the drugstore or The Enhancer from Tillman House, there is nowhere to spend the money.

Tuesday's to-do list is shorter, less ambitious than usual. My father seems to have misplaced his up-and-at-'em. He has trouble climbing in and out of his high-riding, 10-year-old Isuzu Trooper, a small truck manufactured before consumer comfort was incorporated into SUV design. He alley-oops one leg into the truck using progressive swings, then shifts his body weight into the center of the passenger seat in labored increments before picking up the other leg with both hands and pulling it up after him. Sometimes during this process he lets out a little laugh, a chortle I take to mean: This is how it is. We'll just carry on. Do not pity me.

Old age is hell, is the most he'll say out loud. Or, tacking on the nickname coined for me by his one grandchild, My legs don't work so good, Leesee. For my father, this is as bare as he's willing to get. It's more than I am used to.

**********

We turn our attention to chemotherapy on Wednesday, after breakfast at Tillman's. Dad's errand list is tucked into his breast pocket, and we climb into the Isuzu, which doubles as a mobile toolshed. In the rear cargo area, paper towel rolls commingle with green plastic five-gallon buckets that once held pond fertilizer and now await either the day's catch, pecans (when it's a good year), or roadside trash. Clever devices are always close by, most designed to save the operator from bending over. This includes two three-foot poles attached to wire cages that are rolled over the ground to snag fallen pecans. For efficiency's sake, Dad likes to operate both at once. Also, a long-reach, two-clawed trash grabber sits near a bag of used supermarket bags that are wedged between rectangular plastic tubs, one filled with fish kibble, the other with fish trap bait that resembles dried horse manure. Pliers and deerskin work gloves tend to remain up front, stuck between driver and passenger seats. A condition of using the vehicle is that one must keep the glove compartment locked at all times. It holds a loaded pistol. Inevitably, Kleenex boxes are within reach and miscellaneous tools are strewn around. You never know when you'll need to tie a hammer to a rope, heave it up and over the nut-laden branch of a pecan tree, and tug at the two rope ends until nuts shake off and fall to the ground, after which you can roll over them with the picker-upper cages.

Today, I drive. Dad began to criticize my shifting technique a year or so ago, wincing and groaning whenever the clutch-gas-shift interaction fell below his standards. Which was every time. But this day, he looks out his window and says, apropos of nothing, My vision seems to be getting fuzzier, and for the rest of my visit, the job of driving will fall to me by unspoken agreement. We must travel 30 miles to meet an oncologist whose offices are in the town of Covington. Dad no longer radiates disapproval when first gear hiccups into second or second stutters into third, but while I drive, he steadies the manila envelope filled with test results in his lap and dispenses orders.

Turn left, he instructs as I approach an intersection, after you stop at the stop sign.

Otherwise, we are mostly silent. I drink in the landscape as we drive north on Highway 83. Everything I see demands translation. I don't know the seasons, only that the azaleas here will be long gone before the ones back in Philadelphia come close to blooming. Wisteria, with its grape-bunch flower clusters, climbs up into the trees the way I know ivy to do, and kudzu druids loom at the highway's edge. Roll after roll of baled hay line recently shorn fields, and unpaved red clay roads splinter off to the left and right, marked by various signs promising religious fellowship, fresh eggs, or, come election time, the best bet for sheriff.

Pastures and pine forests dominate, interrupted by long, low poultry barns and pecan groves. The land in Jasper County yields up its bounty unevenly, and farmers are increasingly drawn to whatever requires the least amount of labor. One man can grow a 100-acre stand of pine trees by himself. One family can run a poultry operation of 100,000 broilers, the Chicken McNuggets and shrink-wrapped family packs of tomorrow, bred and plumped in six-week cycles. Crops take more hands than most farmers can find, none more labor intensive than peaches and cotton, the two that at one time made certain Jasper landowners rich.