In Justice town, the houses stabbed pillars of stone and wood into the flesh of the hillside and clung there like a swarm of mosquitoes. The buildings were too closely packed for trees to grow. The clamor of trains and autos and people chased away the bullfrogs and hoot owls and other sounds of night. But I loved to wander the streets on a Saturday afternoon; to watch gentlemen and their well-dressed ladies come and go at the train depot; to poke my finger into a fresh octupus or squid at the Italian grocery, or buy a strange-smelling cheese to carry back to my room; to sit in the dark of the Odeon Theater with the gray flickering of the moving pictures teasing the faces of the people around me.

Pond Creek, where I worked for Miles after I finished school, was different yet again. The holler was narrow and twisty; it seemed to squeeze me and say, “Stay a while, but never rest easy.” Vulcan, the coal camp where Miles and I lived, was wonderfully dark, like a painting in a book I once saw of a Spanish town called Toledo, with a sky that looked as though demons streaked across it. Swaybacked houses grew right up around the tipple like toadstools about a tree stump. The camp was divided into little colonies—Negroes in board and batten shacks down in Colored Bottom, mountain people in squat four-room houses on Tipple Hill, Hungarians in tall thin double houses up Hunkie Holler. None of the houses sat on foundations, but instead balanced on small piles of bricks set at each corner. Clouds of black bug dust whipped through the streets, and when the wind was right, the sulphurous fumes from the burning slag heap above Hunkie Holler choked the air in the narrow bottom. Orange slate, called red dog by the miners, littered the streets, carelessly scattered about to keep down the mud. Vulcan was a challenge for me, an adventure, like Florence Nightingale in the Crimean.

I moved into the big house on the hill where Miles lived, above the noise and dirt, three stories and fifteen rooms, green shingles outside with white gingerbread trim and scalloped eaves. From the bottom it appeared to be a castle, floating behind its brown stone wall on a moat of green grass. I was uncomfortable living there, for we had not known chandeliers and crystal drinking glasses on Grapevine. After a few months I moved into two rooms in the clubhouse at the foot of the hill. Miners were not allowed to board there; it was reserved for the “better sort” of employee. Although I knew I should disapprove, I accepted this distinction. It added a touch of the exotic, as though I had set down in imperial India amid the sahibs and the natives, and all this in Paine County, just across the mountain from where I had been born.