Pastor allus says iffen y’all is Godly, ain’t nothin’ kin happen to you from hants an’ spirits an’ suchlike. And Aunt Jinny lived in woods like these, and she never came to no harm.

“Mistuh Jeb? Where y’all live in Cleveland? What kinda town is it? Is it like Soddy?” she asked, as she thought she spied something not unlike a doll made out of sticks with an acorn cap on its head, whisking under the bushes.

He guffawed. “Bless yore heart, no! It’s away bigger! Even Daisy’s bigger nor Soddy!” He proceeded to regale her with a description of something she could scarcely wrap her mind around—a town where the main streets were all paved, and there were so many buildings that were two and even three stories tall that there were “too many to count.” What he described sounded like a traveler’s tale. Houses with water that came from pipes inside, not pumped, hauled up from a well, or carried from a crick—and lit at night by gas that was brighter than dozens of candles. Privies inside the houses, with all the waste being magically carried away somewhere. Not just one store, or two, but dozens, an “opera house” and a “trolly” (whatever those were). And factories! She suspected Ma would have been a lot happier if Pa had gotten a job in one instead of in the mine. And a railway station! And he said there were almost two thousand people living there! The very idea made her head spin.

“But I ain’t livin’ in Cleveland,” he added, with a laugh. “An’ the fancified stuff’s fer the well-off. So don’t ’spect no inside privies, nor gas-lights, and jest a pump at the kitchen sink.”

Quite frankly, a pump of your very own at the sink sounded like unimaginable luxury to her.

“It useta be a farmhouse, but the city growed up to it an’ the fields got sold off, so it’s got the barn fer Daisy, an’ we got a garden an’ a pig an’ some chickens, but not much else,” he continued. Which sounded like heaven to her.

The woods abruptly changed to farms again, and she stopped seeing things out of the corner of her eye. And oddly, rather than feeling comforted, she felt a little disappointed. The things weren’t offering her any harm, and she really wished she had been able to get real glimpses of them so she could have made up her mind if there actually were things there, or it was just her overactive imagination.

Not so much in the way of hills on this side of Soddy Crick, so it was easy to see Cleveland long before they got near it. She gaped at the spires of what must be churches by the crosses on top, the tall chimneys and buildings that were, as he had promised, two and even three stories tall!

But the nearer they got, the more she began to feel that all-too-familiar weakness. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been back home, but—did this mean that her sudden improvement had only been temporary? If she couldn’t get well, completely well, Ma would never let her come home to be a burden again. The thought cast a bit of a gray pall over the otherwise beautiful, sun-filled morning.