We fueled up at the company town. They were sending us off with food we hadn’t asked for and extra canisters of gas. I wanted to refuse it, but we hadn’t found any place to buy or borrow since we had been robbed by the people in white, and the faces of the women pressing canned goods into my hands were so hopeful, so sure of what they were doing: giving survival away. I had never felt that sure about anything.

Some of the women cried when they said goodbye to Starla, passing her into the arms of Jamey, who rolled her eyes. That made me feel a little better.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Jamey said.

She buckled Starla into the back. She tucked heavy blankets around her, which Starla immediately kicked off. Jamey got into the front seat, pulled the visor down and put sunglasses on, even though there was no sun. The sunglasses were heart-shaped, cracked on one lens. Everything that wasn’t already broken was starting to break.

I hoped that Grayson and Lisbeth would protect each other from whatever The Church would demand of them. I hoped that I would see Grayson again; maybe he would be walking. Maybe Lisbeth would think of my hand in the dark.

They both had come out with the rest of The Church to say goodbye, lined up outside the miners’ little houses as if for inspection. It might have been easy to lose Lisbeth among the other women. They all wore long denim skirts, thick woolen leggings or slouchy sweatpants tucked into boots underneath. They all kept their hair in braids down their backs. But Lisbeth was different. There was a spark in her. It radiated off her, a kind of humming light. When she was onstage, singing, I knew that everyone saw it: a golden glow, buzzing around her. But now—waiting to get into the truck, Jamey checking her hair in the passenger mirror—I felt I was the only one who could see it still.

Grayson stood with his folks. People like us left home both earlier and later than people in cities, I knew that. The pull of the holler was real, a kind of invisible mist or vine swirling around our ankles, tying them fiercely to the red ground.

But it was also practicable to stay. Where would we go? How would we live? What jobs were there? How could we afford to get them and start over in a town with no kin to float us gas money or food, or offer us a couch for sleeping, even reluctantly?

“I don’t feel useful,” Grayson had said to me last night. “You grow things. I’m a waiter.”

“You’re great with kids,” I said.