BONDING FIRES ORIGINATED IN THE SCOTTISH MIDLANDS. A family’s hearth fire was never allowed to die down completely. Banked embers from the previous night’s fire were stirred and kindled back into flames. When children left to marry and raise their own families, they took fire from their parents’ hearth with them. It was both heirloom and talisman, nurtured and protected because generations recognized it for what it was—living memory. When some clans emigrated they kept the fires burning on the ships as they crossed the Atlantic. Then they hauled them up into the southern Appalachians from Charleston or down the Shenandoah from Philadelphia. There had been one bonding fire started in the 1500s that was kept alive until the 1970s. The flame was tended by an old man and extinguished only when a dam flooded the valley where he’d lived eight decades. Two hundred feet of water covered that hearth now.

The closest thing to a bonding fire in Tamassee was Saturday night at Billy’s store. It was not unusual to see four generations of the same family seated in lawn chairs together, not fire but song passed from parent to child.

Lou Henson began the communal gatherings the summer I turned fourteen. Ben hadn’t wanted to go, so Aunt Margaret, who had planned to drive, offered to stay with Ben while the rest of us went. But Daddy wouldn’t hear of it.

“Nobody notices those burns but you,” Daddy said to Ben, and his voice was angry and frustrated, as if the scars were just something in Ben’s imagination. “You’ll go whether you want to or not. I’ll not let you hide in the house and feel sorry for yourself. You hear?”

Daddy was shouting but Momma said nothing. It was Aunt Margaret who placed her hand firmly on Daddy’s arm.

“I’ll go,” Ben had said softly, just as he did the other times Daddy insisted he attend a family reunion or a gospel singing or—worst of all because people didn’t know him there—go down to Seneca.

When Daddy went to get his cap, Aunt Margaret leaned over me.

“Your daddy isn’t mad at Ben, honey. He’s mad at himself.” But if that was true, I thought, why was he yelling at Ben?

My girlfriends and I were beginning to be interested in the boys in our middle-school classes. They lagged behind us physically and socially, but despite their attempts to act otherwise, we knew they were interested in us as well. We would drag them out in front of the pumps to dance. They’d be awkward as newborn colts and all blushing but you could tell they enjoyed our attention. Sometimes the bolder boys would venture a kiss or slip their hands under shirts or blouses to caress the small of our backs, and we realized they were catching up to us perhaps faster than we were quite ready for.