“I love you,” I said softly, to no one.

Flora’s first baby was due in May. By the time the men began cutting the trees she was too large for her regular dresses. She and Ben lived with Aunt Jane. Ben had stopped teaching when Miles left home so he could help Daddy work the land. Now he was timbering and would ride the logs down the river. Sometimes, we heard, trees fell on men, or ran them over as the trunks were dragged to the river. And the trip to Catlettsburg would be the most perilous part of all. Flora fretted so over Ben that she became distracted. Aunt Jane took to gathering the eggs each day, because Flora would drop them or rattle them so hard in the basket they cracked.

From the Aunt Jane Place, the distant axes sounded like slow woodpeckers. The men cleared the mountainside down Grapevine from the Homeplace. Daddy planned to use it for a new ground or pasture. They cleared it rough. The tree stumps, some of them five feet across, were fresh and raw like proud flesh, and the falling trunks smashed the dogwoods and rhododendron. Trimmed branches fell in untidy heaps and the gashed carcasses of white oak and poplar were dragged to the riverbank. There the men wielded their cant hooks and called to one another in a strange language they had only just learned, crying of tie poles and chain dogs. They slid the logs over the bank and into the water. The logs would float in a pen until high tide when the men would lash them into rafts for the trip downstream.

We cooked all day to feed the men who had come from all over Scary and Grapevine to work on the hillside. We grumbled as we worked.

“I’m scairt for this here baby,” Flora confided. “Hit’s a-trying to grow all the while they’re a-cutting and slashing. Hit’s aiming to be borned while its daddy is putting himself in mortal danger. When them trees holler and crash down, this here baby kicks.”

Aunt Jane shook her head in agreement. “They’s something about it aint right. Hit’s one thing to clear for a new ground, but this here, I dont know.”

“They aint nothing wrong with providing for your family,” Aunt Becka said. She was always especially fond of Miles. But even she spoke without conviction and her forehead was wrinkled with worry.