The accident with the bull was just the first of a series of misfortunes the family suffered during the next year. Pine beetles spread from one lightning-struck tree throughout a vast tract of old longleaf pines, and they all had to be cut and sold as salvage. Then there was a wet winter, and rain rushing down the bare slope where the woods had been eroded gullies through the fields, and all the topsoil ended up spread out in a muddy flat down at the river. And then, early one morning, the house burned to the ground. No one was hurt, and they managed to save a few pieces of furniture, but it was a fine old house, built in the 1830s out of heart pine, and it made a spectacular fire.

The father’s pride went with the house, and he sold his ruined land to a paper company and got a job at Miss Hamilton’s thriving dairy as a pastureman, where he became quite respected among agronomists for improving grazing by intercropping grasses with velvet bean.

But the mother was never comfortable in her new, small life in the rented cottage at the dairy. Her greatest pleasure was in telling and retelling her bored neighbors about the grand life she had led when she had been mistress of a plantation and had had servants and a governess for the children.

“A Miss Wigglesworth, tiresome woman, always giving herself airs.”

The neighbor’s eyes would flicker and he would lean forward with his hands on his knees and say, “Well…”

But by then the mother would have come to the accident with the bull. “My son not expected to live through the night, but by a miracle…,” and the neighbor would settle back down, knowing there would be no escape now until after the house burned to the ground.

“…burned to the ground, one of the finest houses in the county, all heart pine.”

And the neighbor would stretch and begin to rise. “Well, it’s been real nice, and give your husband my regards.”

“Such a coincidence, the fire exactly a year and a day after the accident.”

And knowing the rest by heart, the neighbor would prompt, “It must have been something in the—”

“There we stood, at first light, our feet wet with dew, watching our ancestral home go up in flames. The cause of the fire was never determined,” the mother would conclude all in her own time. “It must have been something in the wiring.”

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