In the meantime, I become a socialist. Doc give me a lot of books by Karl Marx to read, and I fell asleep every time I tried to read one. They was just too dry for me. But I voted for Eugene Debs.

Six

CARRIE BISHOP

I HAD A DREAM THE NIGHT MILES CAME HOME FROM BEREA. I dreamed one of Flora’s quilts hung on the clothesline to dry. It was the double wedding band, neverending loops of purple and red on white backing, paths leading back into themselves, mountain paths that refused to run straight. The quilt did not sag on the line but was taut as if nailed onto an invisible wall. Something moved at its center; it was the point of a knife thrust from the back. The knife cut easily as through butter, with no sound of tearing. I knew Miles held the knife.

“Why are you cutting up Florrie’s quilt?” I asked him.

“To make little covers for the baby’s bed,” he answered cheerfully. “It’s all for the new baby.”

Miles always said “it” now, never “hit.”

“It sounds ignorant to say ‘hit.’ They shamed us out of it at school. Same with ‘aint.’ Educated people don’t use those words.”

Ben sat by the fire and whittled. “Chaucer said ‘hit,’” he observed.

Miles looked startled, then said, “That’s different.”

“Why?” Ben asked.

“He’s been dead a long time. He was medieval.” He said this last word as though it described a very disgraceful condition. “This is the scientific age.”

It rained all that September evening. Daddy, Miles and Ben sat up late, deep in conversation about what Miles called “business affairs.” I listened from the front porch.

“Subsistence farming,” Miles said. “That’s what this is. You can’t make it on subsistence farming any more. The economy is changing. Prices are going up. It’s the miners’ wages doing it. They see more cash than you do, Daddy, a whole lot more. When Pond Creek opens up over here, you won’t be able to make it without more cash.”

Miles planned to move to Pond Creek in November to become superintendent of a new coal mine that was owned by a Boston family, relatives of one of his professors at Berea. That is what education is about, Miles said. To prepare mountain youth to take their place in the modern world. We must not be left behind, he said. Who better to oversee a coal mine than someone who had grown up in the area, someone who understood the men he would supervise? Miles had spent the summer in Boston getting acquainted with his employers and learning what he called their “business philosophy.”

He wanted to buy Daddy’s trees for his coal company.