Preacher Sim slept on the feather bed that night. Father took the men out to the barn to sleep on the hay. Aunt Rilla and Aunt Sue Ella took Mother’s bed, the rest of us sleeping on pallets spread upon the floor.

The moon was full, and big and shiny as a brass pot. It was daywhite outside. I couldn’t sleep, feeling the strangeness of so many people in the house, and the unfamiliar breathing. Before day I went to the corn-crib and got a nap until the rooster crowed, not minding the mice rustling the shucks in the feed basket.

Mother climbed to the Point before breakfast to spread a white sheet over the baby’s grave. When she came down the Adamses were there, Quin looking pale with his first shave of the fall, and Mrs. Adams flushed and hot, not wanting to sit down and wrinkle her starched dress. Cleve Cockerel and his family were not far behind. The Gearhards, the Letchers, the Oot-ens came; folk were there from Dans Fork, Hurricane Branch, Rowdy, Old Trace, Pushback Hollow, Saw Pit.

Before nine o’clock the yard and porch were crowded. Neighbors came quietly, greeting Mother, and the women held handkerchiefs in their hands, crying a little. Then we knew again that there had been death in our house. All who went inside spoke in whispers, their voices having more words than sound. The clock was stopped, its hands pointing to the hour and minute the baby died; and those who passed through the room knew the bed, for it was spread with a white counterpane and a bundle of fall roses rested upon it.

At ten o’clock Preacher Sim opened his Bible in the arbor on the Point. “Oh, my good brethren,” he said, stroking his white beard, “we was borned in sin, and saved by grace.” He spat upon the ground, and lifted his hands toward the withered linn thatching. “We have come together to ask the blessed Saviour one thing pine-blank. Can a little child enter the Kingdom of Heaven?”

The leaves came down. October’s frost stiffened the brittle grass, and spiders’ webs were threads of ice in the morning sun. We gathered corn during the cool days, sledding it down the snaky trail to the barn. Pigs came out of the hills from mast hunting and rooted up bare potato rows with damp snouts. Father went to Blackjack and stayed a week. When he returned there was coal dust ground into the flesh of his hands. He had worked four days in the mines.

“I promised to get moved in three days,” Father said. “We got a new house waiting, with two windows in every room.”

“I’m a-longing to stay on here,” Mother said. Her voice was small and hoping. “I’ll be staying with the children, and you can go along till spring. Moving hain’t nothing but leaving things behind.”