I loved to hear him talk that way. Dillon Lloyd was always a free-talking man. He lived alone in a cabin back up the hill from his brother Clabe. They worked the land together, one hundred acres at the mouth of Trace. Dillon’s thick black hair hung down between his shoulder blades like an Indian’s. People said that he had the second sight, that he could set the Evil Eye on a body. He went abroad at night, not hunting, just walking. Vernie, Clabe’s wife, was scared of him. Dillon laughed at her behind her back.

When my papaw could spare me from chores, I rode my mule up Blackberry Creek to the Lloyd homeplace and spent the night. Dillon took me out after dark, coon hunting or bullfrogging, or maybe just walking. Later I’d lie alone in the loft of his cabin. The summer breeze would rush through the window and rustle the bedclothes, bearing the flailing of his banjo like the sound of the river running yonder.

When Rondal was borned, Dillon let me stay out with him all night. The moon on the wane was giving light enough to show the creek rippling silver where it joined Trace Fork. My mind’s eye could see all the land—the mountain wrapped like a protecting arm around the cabin, the prickly grass in the pasture up Trace where the cows and sheep grazed, the dark fields fanning out along the bottom, soon to be dense with corn, the wall of mountain across Blackberry, the side of it rearing straight up from the creek bed.

“Bad times comin,” said Dillon. “That youngun will suffer it. He was in the womb when the papers was signed.”

“My papaw says it too. He dont trust them railroad men. And he aint took no money neither.”

I was proud of it. My papaw, Henry Marcum, had refused to sign the paper giving the minerals to the railroad. He hadnt knowed what the minerals was, but when he heard they was on his land, he wanted to keep them. Still he was scared, like most people. The railroad men claimed they owned all the land, had bought it off somebody in Philadelphia whose papaw had fought in the Revolutionary War and been give it as a gift. According to them, they owned most of Justice County, and McDowell County, too. Then they come around, fat, smooth-faced men in black suits, and vowed they’d leave us the land if we’d sign over the minerals. Vernie signed one day when Clabe was gone hunting. Clabe didnt chastise her.