The transition from “Soddy” to “farms outside of Soddy” was abrupt. The shacks ended, the farm fields began, and already there were men and women out in the fields, either doing something with a mule dragging some sort of implement between the rows of growing plants while a man steered the thing, or with a man dragging the implement himself and a boy or a woman guiding it. Plow? Harrow? Hoe? She didn’t know. She didn’t know nothin’ about farming.

That must be cruel hard, she thought with astonishment, looking at the men dragging a plow their own selves. No wonder Pa was contemptuous of farming. At least he wasn’t being treated like a mere beast. Was he? She realized at that moment she didn’t know much about mining either. For all she knew, his foreman could be driving him as harder or harder than that man pulling that plow. Pa might be contemptuous of farming, but was mining really better?

But if you farm, at least you ain’t gonna starve . . . and you ain’t allus owing the Company more money than you got.

Jeb turned the mule onto a new road, going south and east, and soon they were driving along parallel to the Lake. For all that she had lived all her life within shouting distance of the Lake, this was the first time she had ever set eyes on it, and she tried not to gape at the expanse of water. Until now, the most water she had ever seen at one time was when Ma had the extra wood to heat water for everyone to have a bath in the old tin hip-bath—which normally lived next to the rain barrel, with both set to catch extra water so Ma didn’t have to go to the pump as often. Ma kept pieces of old rag stitched together over the tops of both to keep out the critters, the bugs, the leaves, and the soot. There was a pump shared by all the nearby houses where they otherwise had to get their water, which was why it was much more convenient to have the rain-water handy.

Wonder where Aunt Jinny gets her water? Does she have a crick nearby? Walking all the way to a crick in the winter to get pails of water would be a powerful lot of work. And cold. And she didn’t have shoon, so she’d have to wrap her feet in rags and straw and hope they didn’t freeze going to and fro. She hoped Aunt Jinny wasn’t going to expect her to do it. She wasn’t sure she could haul a half-full pail, much less two full ones.

Little wisps of fog floated over the surface of the Lake. It wasn’t exactly a Lake, it was more like a very, very wide part of Soddy Crick, because barges came up the Crick all the time, passing through the Crick and on, to take up the coal and coke from the mine at Soddy and the bigger one at Daisy, south of Soddy, and haul it down elsewhere to sell. The view was unexpectedly beautiful, with the sun just coming up and glinting off the ripples, and a passel of ducks floating on the current, and she found her heart going still for a moment at the sight. And suddenly, instead of smelling soot and smoke and someone’s dirty privy, she smelled—