It was Mommy I missed now. I only saw her on Sundays, except for a few moments in the early morning and late at night. Even on Sundays she seemed more distant. She went to church and stayed all morning, or worked in the garden and told me not to come bother her.

One Sunday when she was outside, I got the idea of reading the newspapers covering the walls. I missed C.J.’s visits with the Justice Clarion, missed the books at school. The newspapers were new; Mommy had put them up that very week. I brought a wooden chair from the kitchen and set it by the front door, lit a kerosene lantern, and stretched on tiptoe to read the headlines near the ceiling. When I had read halfway down the wall, I got down and stood on the floor, then hunkered down to study the articles near the baseboard. I worked my way around the room, even removed the calendar with the picture of Jesus given out by Ermel Justice’s store so I could read beneath it. I was wedged in tight behind the black pot-bellied stove, my rear end pressed against the pipe, engrossed in an account of how European companies would soon be mining coal in China, when there came a sizzle and pop and a burst of acrid smoke. The heat from the lantern’s chimney had set the wall on fire.

I squirmed from behind the stove, ran outside to the rain barrel, returned with a bucket of water. I dashed the water against the wall. A gaping black-edged hole was left in Mommy’s clean newsprint wallpaper, but the flames were dead.

I went to find her in the garden.

“What you doing down here?” she said. She was clearing a patch for fall planting.

I told her what I had done. When she didn’t answer, I said, “You going to switch me?”

“Why should I?” She chipped at the ground with her hoe. “You done gone in the mines. Aint no switch going to faze you none. Your daddy done made a man outen you. I cant do nothing with you now.”

I wished she would whip me about the bare legs with a briar switch, like in the old days, then weep at the sight of the scratches, hug me and feed me an apple butter biscuit. But I was left lonesome to chastise myself.

One of my jobs in the mine was to keep an eye on our canary. We were always in danger from black damp, an odorless poison gas that collected in pockets where we blasted. We kept the bird in a small wooden cage at our place. If we hit a pocket of black damp the bird would fall over dead, and we would know to run. It didn’t take long for black damp to kill a man.