I went to bed early, for there was no heat in the cold hallway. In the night I waked, thinking someone had spoken. Uncle Jolly had called, speaking my name into pitch dark. His words were barely louder than the straw ticking rustling in my ears. I stepped on the stone floor, feeling my way to the cell. Uncle Jolly was there, though I couldn’t see him. He reached through the bars and found my hand, putting the stolen key into it.

“You go home at the crack o’ day and get a wad o’ dirt betwixt us before Logg misses it,” he said. “Give the key to your grandma and tell her to keep it eight days, and then have it fotched back—eight days and not a minute yon side. Tell her I said it.”

I felt my way along the wall, crawling back into the warm spot in my bed, and slept until the morning slosh of horses’ feet in the creek awakened me.

Logg opened the jailhouse door for me when light broke. The steps were moldy white. The season’s first frost lay on the ground. “Hit’s a killer,” Logg said. “This here one ought to make the shoats squeal.” I set off, walking fast over the frosted road, knowing the pawpaws were fat and winter-ripe on Lean Neck ridge.

III

III

THE hail of early June shredded the growing blades of corn, and a windstorm breaking over Little Angus Creek in July flattened the sloping fields; but the hardy stalks rose in the hot sun, and the fat ears fruited and ripened. The mines at Blackjack had closed again and Father had rented a farm that spring on the hills rising from the mouth of Flaxpatch on Little Angus. We moved there during a March freeze, and the baby died that week of croup. When sap lifted in sassafras and sourwood, Father sprouted the bush-grown patches, and plowed deep with a mule Quin Adams lent him. With corn breaking through the furrows and the garden seeded, he left us to tend the crop, going over in Breathitt County to split rock in Mace Hogan’s quarry. There was good seasoning in the ground. Shucks bulged on heavy corn ears. Garden furrows were cracked where potatoes pushed the earth outward in their growing.

Weeds plagued the corn, and Mother took us to the fields. We were there at daylight, chopping horse-mint and crab grass with blunt hoes. Sister Euly could trash us all with a corn row. She was growing beanpole-tall, and thin and quick like Mother. Fletch had grown during the summer. His face was round as a butter ball. He dug too deep, often missing the weeds and cutting the corn. Mother let him take the short rows. He slept during hot afternoons at the field’s edge, deep in a patch of tansy with bees worrying dusty blossoms over his head.