He had turned off the road to fill up in a town with the word “living” in its name and found it deserted.  Its one-pump station was unattended.  He feared a plague had swept through, though quickly realized people may still be at worship at block’s end.  The building’s parking lot though was empty.  He felt an uncertain shiver and took steps to leave, but, then — in the movie-gait of one come too late to the rescue — he ended up surveying the four blocks of town, till faint joyous voices led him to look upon a party dancing up the path through the fields.  People dressed in their best.  Still in bowtie and muffler, the elderly attendant at the gas pump later recited in a monologue how the celebratory ritual had begun at the gravesite:  We first honor the deceased and we then joyfully leave them behind in their resting place.  We let them go, we can’t have them continue to live with us.  You’ve got to think always of the living; new relationships must get formed.  After bringing him his change, the old man added:  It’s how a faraway town like ours has survived more than sixteen hundred years — the living always before the dead.  He was a long way down the road when he came to feel a quick urge to turn around, to return to “living,” back to the glimpse he had gotten for an end to a need for the past, but he let it pass.