“I reckon I ought to marry you,” he said. “Make you and the boy respectable.”

He said it like I should be grateful.

“No,” I said. “I want him to have Albion’s last name. Albion deserves that much.”

He looked surprised, then suspicious. “Hit aint because I’m a cripple?”

I kissed him and held his face in my hands. “I think you’re worth ten of any other man I know.”

The wrinkles on his forehead smoothed away.

“Dillon Freeman,” he said. “Dont sound too bad.”

He loved to tend the baby while I was out working the garden. He changed diapers, and rode around the cabin in his chair with the baby in his arms, its head craned back and its eyes open wide to take in every detail of the room. When both of them tired, Rondal hoisted himself onto the bed, lay on his back, and stretched the baby out on top of his chest. They slept that way for hours.

They were asleep when Rondal was taken with one of his breathing spells. From the vegetable garden out back, I heard him gasp. By the time I reached him, he had stopped breathing. The baby was snoring peacefully, one hand wrapped tight around Rondal’s thumb.

I sat by them until evening light, when Dillon woke and cried to be fed. Then I went to the Homeplace to tell Ben and Flora and Aunt Becka. I walked past the cemetery where Rondal would at last have a place of his own. The headstones did not stand in tidy rows on that slope beside Scary mountain. They were placed companionably, as people will sit together and talk—Aunt Jane beside Uncle Alec, Albion facing them beneath a spreading oak, Florrie’s dead baby at his feet. The elements had already worn the names from the older stones and they leaned at gentle angles as though conferring with one another. Butterflies and honeybees tended the violets and sweet clover that grew over the graves.

It was a tranquil place, but no one could ever imagine a quiet slumber for the dead in that earth. They are not a people made for eternal peace, and even if they were, the mountains would not let them rest. The mountains are conjurers, ancient spirits shaped by magic past time remembered. The dead walk abroad in the shaded coves, or writhe in their graves, pushing up with strong arms and legs, waiting for the day.

AFTERWORD