Soon he is in the South Pacific, and she is pregnant with my sister, living with his parents on their chicken farm in East Tennessee—not especially prosperous, but something a bit better than subsistence: they have hens aplenty for my grandmother’s velvet-and-air dumplings, and lard for her biscuits and cherry pies, whose rose-and-gold filling she canned herself, then baked till it bubbled up through the weightless lattice. My mother’s there, I suppose, because they can feed her and her new baby, something her parents would probably find a strain if not an impossibility. Maybe her own parents’ home is too much country, too much the rock-bottom rurality she’s escaped; aren’t they really, her people, hillbillies? But it isn’t easy here; my grandmother’s long-suffering, but she and her husband don’t get along, and my grandfather’s always trying to get my mother by herself, so that he can rub up against her or pat her ass. What is there to occupy her? It doesn’t seem to occur to her or to anyone else—not now and not ever—that she might get a job, either for the war effort or, later, for company or stimulation or even money. She will never work, and on my grandparents’ farm in 1944 she seems to be practicing for her isolation: writing letters to my father every day, letters he won’t get for months, if ever. News leaking back, slowly, of the sinking of his ship; is he lost at sea? Intolerable waiting, then a telegram from him, and then he’s sent out on another destroyer to do it all over again.

(Later he will hardly talk about it. A word or two about the ships going down, the raft, the days floating on the Pacific with few other men, no one and nothing else in sight. No, I don’t want to talk about it.)

Maybe there’s another reason she never works. When my sister went to Sweetwater by herself, in the sixties, to visit the relatives, my mother’s sister and aunt said something like, “Well, how is Ruth? She never was, you know, really right.” I can’t recapture the words, don’t know what they said, exactly, but Sally understood them to mean that she was always fragile, unstable, not of the strong and reliable stock the farms of Sweetwater might be expected to produce.