“Now, nary a word I’d say agin Brack. He’s good to work. Hain’t scared to bend his back nor mud his boots. Chap, you’ve got a clever pappy. Brack’s an honest man, but heired sorry kinf oiks. That Samp, and them two devil cousins diddling around, stirring trouble. Hit’s no wonder Brack’s forever moving, abiding nowhere long. Only if he’d settle some place and grow roots, I’d not be eternally worrying.”

I put a beech log on the fire and poked the charred embers underneath. A covey of sparks winged into the chimney. I sat on my stool and homesickness was hot inside of me.

“Child,” Grandma said, “hit would comfort me to know you’d never be a miner.” She lay back on the pillows, resting a bit. The feather tick swallowed the weight of her body. “I’d give a year out o’ my life to see all my children and their chaps,” she said at last. “A year’s breathing I’d give. Never they come to see their mommy. Old, and thrown away now. No good to fotch and carry for a soul.” Anger rose in her throat. She struck her elbows against the tick. “When my dying day comes I’m right willing to be hauled straight to Flat Creek burying ground and put beside my man, buried down and kivered over against any o’ my blood kin was told. My chaps won’t come when I’m sick and pindly; they hain’t use in coming to see me lay a corpse.”

Her voice lowered, the anger creeping away. “Child,” she said, “I long most to see Baby Green. I hear Alpha sets a store o’ love for him that’s ontelling. More than’s good, for if he was tuck to die, it’d be more than could be borne.” She closed her eyes, shutting away the damp sad glance of pain.

I RAN into the fields one April morning, thinking to climb to the bench land where Uncle Jolly was breaking new ground. The sky was as blue as a bottle. A rash of green covered the sheltered fence edges, though beech and leatherwood were browner and barer still for the sunlight washing their branches. I began to climb, hands on knees, the way being steep. I went up through a redbud thicket swollen with unopened bloom and leaf, coming at last to where Uncle Jolly was plowing. The bench spread back to the swag, level as creek land, set up against air and sky and nothing. Uncle Jolly had already broken a half-acre of furrows in the rooty earth with the horse-mule Uncle Luce had loaned him.

“Whoa-yo,” Uncle Jolly said when he saw me. He drew rein and leaned against the plow handles, blowing. He whistled a long redbird whistle. His forehead was moist, his shirt stuck to his back. He’d been hustling the mule, and was glad of the rest. “Hain’t you got a sup o’ water?” he asked.

“I never thought,” I said. “I come up to learn to plow.”