After breakfast I went to the blacksmith shop to pump the bellows while Uncle Jolly sharpened plowshares. Sunlight leaked through peep cracks in the wall, the room being darksome for all the brightness outside. We hacked and coughed in the dust and coal smoke. The shares yellowed in the furnace bed like the sun blades piercing the cracks. They heated dead white. And how Uncle Jolly smote them on the anvil! He was still angry at Grandma. The hammer rose and fell steady as a clock pendulum. He beat the blades to a hair line. He made them ring like winter axes.

When the shares were done Uncle Jolly made ready to lay-by the corn yonder side Lean Neck. He brought Uncle Luce’s horse-mule from the lot. “Fotch a jug o’ water along middle o’ the morning,” he told me, “and keep a watch on Ma. If she starts off, follow.”

I couldn’t think why he kept worrying about Grandma. He saw my wonder and drew a jaw down, hardly knowing how to tell me this thing. He leaned against Old Bully, hands spread, explaining. “When a body gets old,” he began, “they turn chap-like. They’re a-liable to get off somewhere and drop stone down dead, only the buzzards seeing where.”

I wanted to chop crab grass in the corn. The stalks were in tassel, black-green with growing. Bees worked the tops. Groundhogs fed in daylight in this far patch, and I had in head going to look for their tracks. I might see one sitting on his rump, shucking an ear with his hand-paws.

Uncle Jolly clanged two shares together. “Looky here, feller,” he said. “You stay near the house and when I take you to Blackjack we’ll go the long way around, Redbird River way. There’s a pretty little woman I want to see on Left Fork of Troublesome. We’ll make a circle round. We’ll go to Troublesome, on to Ball and down, cutting across bloody Breathitt to Leslie County. A sight o’ things you’ll see on Cutshin, Big Greasy, and Goose Creek. A far piece, but we’ll go.”

“I’ll keep a watch on Grandma,” I said, and joy welled inside of me. “I won’t go home till they send, a-making.” And I thought of Redbird River, and of John Gay who might be walking there, pitching up six pebbly rocks at a time, looking the world over. It would be like going to the scrag end of creation.

Grandma was somewhere in the house, working threads and needles, piecing and patching. I sat under the bubby bush in the yard, my head among the leaves, the boughs clutching my shoulders. It was quiet and warm there. Three ants climbed my leg; they circled my kneebone, touching feelers, and walked down again. A chippy sat on a fence post in the yard, cocking his head. He flew over the bubby bush. Afar in the corn Uncle Jolly sang “Old Talt HalT-Old Talt Hall killing Frank Salyers; Old Talt Hall sitting in jail writing two letters to his brother: “See your satisfaction, brother. Brother, now farewell.” And then he sang “Rich and Rambling Boy.”