Albion wrote that the trial was scheduled for June 12. He urged me to stay away until then. “Nothing you can do here. Medicine is about gone. The warm weather is keeping the pneumonia down. Twenty families have left, moved away. Funny how they put up with all that cold, and then it’s the warm that breaks them. But most everybody else is dug in. Folks keep saying the worst is over. I pray to God they are right.”

I missed him terribly and longed to tell him so. But it was useless writing to him, for the strikers’ mail was intercepted, read and destroyed. I couldn’t quite bring myself to go to him. After an initial period of strangeness the Homeplace had begun to assume magical proportions, as though I had never seen any of it before, as though it were a mythical kingdom I had stumbled upon after years of weary wandering. They wouldn’t let me do heavy work. I passed lazy hours on the riverbank, fishing and reading Ben’s books, until Flora called, “Carrie! Supper!”—her voice clear as a bell. Then, after the fried trout and potatoes and shucky beans, Flora and I gathered up the children, Jane, Luke, Mabel, John Henry and baby Rachel, and we went to call the cows home.

The path took us past the Aunt Jane Place, empty now. I’d often say, “When that strike is over, I’m going to bring Albion Freeman back here and live in that house. You see if I dont.” Flora smiled and led the way to the meadow on Scary. We caught a granddaddy longlegs, asked it which way the cows had gone and followed the waving of its leg. We heard the tinkling of the bells before we saw anything.

“Old Bess!” Mabel would cry, and Jane and Luke ran ahead swinging their sticks and leaping over hummocks of weeds on their long slender legs.

It was impossible to explain to Ben and Flora what Blackberry Creek was like. I wearied of saying, “Hit’s coming to us,” and hearing Ben reply, “I hear there’s no coal on Grapevine anyway.”

“Who says so? Miles?”

“Carrie!” Flora said. “That aint a tone of voice for talking about your brother.”

“Things will change here too. You wait and see.”

“They already changed some,” Ben said. “Folks with big families, their homeplaces cant support all of them. Used to be some would move on to new land. But the land is all taken up now. What are they supposed to do? The world will move on.” He shook his head. “This violence, I dont understand it.”

“Hush!” Flora said. “Carrie aint needing to be reminded about all that.”

Aunt Becka seemed to understand better than the others.