I hated the ugliness of the cleared mountain. But most of all I was angry about missing school to cook. I thought about my neglected books lying in the loft and burned with resentment at the bedraggled men who trooped in to dinner each midday. It often rained that winter, and the men shook themselves like dogs before they came into the house, so many of them that the four of us women had to stand bunched together in the corner near the stove until they went out again, and make do with the scraps they left.

“Put up with it now,” Miles said when he came for a visit. “This time next year there’ll be a big new house.”

I resented his part in this disruption, but I couldn’t be too angry with him. When I complained about the school I had missed, he looked at me thoughtfully.

“You like school, don’t you, Sis? You ought to go off and study like I did.”

“I’d love to,” I said. “I want to be a nurse. They’s a nursing school over at that new hospital at Justice.”

“I’ll pay for it, if that’s what you want to do.”

“You mean that?”

“Sure. I haven’t got a wife or children to worry about yet. Why shouldn’t I help you out? That’s what family is for.”

I daydreamed about nursing school. When I mentioned it to Daddy he laughed. I knew it meant nothing to him, but I also knew he wouldn’t oppose it as long as he didn’t have to pay for it.

The thaw came in March. The river was up, lashing at the low-hanging branches of trees, running so wide and fast that the whole earth seemed to move with it. The men roped the logs into rafts and prepared to leave. We gave them cool goodbyes, for to cling and weep would be to acknowledge the danger they would face.

We didn’t cook elaborate meals while they were gone. We were weary of cooking and food did not interest us anyway. We sat around the table at the Homeplace and nibbled on sliced ham, cold biscuits, and boiled eggs. Sometimes we opened a jar of preserves.

We fed the animals, milked the cows, chopped wood. Aunt Becka hitched up our mule Mag and plowed the vegetable garden. I would come laden with water buckets from the well or from bringing in the cows and see Aunt Jane walking beside Aunt Becka, talking earnestly to her and sometimes draping an arm across the younger woman’s shoulders.