C.J. walked to the door. “You got to talk, Rondal. You got to say what you’re going to do. Hit’s your choice.”

I motioned for a pencil to write with.

“No,” C.J. said. “You got to say it.”

So I tongued the words as though speaking a new and exotic language.

“C.J.” I said. “C.J. Take me.”

Talcott ran away from home the day after I left. Daddy found him below Felco and wore him out with his strap.

Three

CARRIE BISHOP

YOU HAVE SEEN OLD PHOTOGRAPHS, BROWN AND SWEET-LOOKING, as though dipped in light molasses. My memories of the Homeplace in Kentucky are like that. Sweet, bittersweet.

When I was ten years old, Ben Honaker lent me his copy of Wuthering Heights. I loved it, just for the name of it, even before I read it. It has the sound of a lost and precious place, Wuthering Heights. I learned from that book that love and hate are not puny things. Nor are they opposed. Everything in this world that is calculating and bloodless wars against them both, wars against all flesh and blood, earth and water.

Even now, when I whisper that name, Wuthering Heights, it is the Homeplace I see. My people crowd around me, Ben and Flora, Miles, Daddy, Aunt Jane and Aunt Becka. And I see myself, waiting for Heathcliff, waiting for someone to come from outside, bearing with him both passion and menace.

I knew he would come from the outside, because Daddy and Aunt Becka said I would never find a man on Scary Creek or Grapevine. I was too forward, they said, too stubborn. I was not pretty like Flora. Flora looked like the princess in children’s stories old folks tell—white skin, rosy cheeks, and black hair. She took after Daddy and Aunt Becka’s side of the family, which was part Cherokee. I took after my dead mother’s side. Freckles splashed my face, my shoulders, my arms. My nose was a trifle large, my hair drab brown.

“Carrie takes after the Mays,” Aunt Becka said to Daddy one night when we were in bed before the hearth and supposedly asleep. She was Daddy’s oldest sister. “She’s even got her Papaw Alec’s nose, poor child. Hit wouldnt look so bad on Miles.”

I couldn’t sleep for worrying and went straightway up the river the next morning to the Aunt Jane Place. Aunt Jane May lived at the mouth of Scary Creek where it flowed into Grapevine. Aunt Jane was both my grandmother and my great-aunt. She was Daddy’s aunt who had married Alec May, and their daughter Tildy was my mother.

I cried out my hurt feelings to her. She sat composed, her hands laid flat on her lap so the blue veins stood up in ridges.

“Dont you pay no mind to your Aunt Becka,” she said. “That woman will wrap her tongue around any kind of silliness. You’re the picture of your mother, and I love to gaze on you for it.”