Dillon vowed he was going way back in, beyond Daisy.

“That will be hard livin,” Ermel observed.

“Our people allays lived hard,” Dillon replied. “That there is what makes us.”

“You keepin that moonshine still?”

“Maybe.”

Ermel rubbed his chin. “All this new trade comin in, they’ll be a call for liquor.”

“I might trade,” Dillon said. “Long as I dont have to set foot on this creek. Hell, you wont even find a coon in the holler time all that mining starts up. I cant bear to see it, all mud and ugly, men sellin their souls for the almighty dollar.”

“Take me with you!” I pleaded. “I dont want to see it neither.”

Dillon just laughed. I was so hurt, I went off to the creek and cried. By the time I got back, they was leaving. Rondal run up to me on his bow legs and stretched out his arms.

“Hwing me, C.J.!”

I held him by the wrists and swung him round and round. When I set him on his feet, he staggered and fell. I picked him up and held him clost to me. He was still for a moment and I felt the rise and fall of his chest against mine. Then he set his hands to my shoulders, pushed himself back and looked at me. Something passed between us then, I vow it, though he was only a baby. Rondal was marked at his birth and easy marked every day after.

“You tell your daddy not to stay on Island Creek,” I said. “You tell him to bring you back to Blackberry.”

He smiled and poked my nose with his finger.

I worked right beside Ermel in the fields. I craved the company of a man, an older man, to take the place of Dillon and papaw. In the afternoon we would stop work, come set on the porch steps and take a glass of cold cider from the springhouse. Annadel had hung leatherbritches on one end of the porch, row after row of drying green beans dangling on strings, thick as a screen.

No one come for his land. Every day we expected to see the sheriff, and Ermel kept his rifle close by at all times, but the sheriff never come. Later we heard from a new man come to trade at the store that they was no coal in reach of the forks. That saved us. The railroad did come in 1893 to negotiate a right-of-way up to the head of Pliny Branch, where American Coal would build a camp. Ermel sold the right-of-way, but he never signed away his mineral rights and nobody never claimed he did.

“We’re still yet here,” Ermel would say.

He would rub his balding head. Ermel is the kind of man who shows sun, and his scalp was raw-looking all through the summer, like it had been scrubbed with a wool carder.

“We’re still yet here,” he’d say again. “Hit wont never be the same though.”