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.”

I got riled when he said that, though I never let on. I tried to tell myself that nothing was changed, except that my papaw was gone. On Ermel’s farm it was easy to think it, most of the time. But when I would pause in the field, lean against my hoe, and the wind would stir and bear a shriek, thin and ghostlike, from up Pliny—the death cry of some huge tree, fallen to make mine timbers and houses for American Coal—then my dream of sanctuary on the farm seemed a mockery and a reproach.

One day in the springtime, Ermel took me on the new train to Justice town. Lumberjacks had shaved the mountainsides for fifteen mile, sliced the trees into boards or strewn them about in tangled heaps. The bushes was growed up, the flanks of the hills gashed and sticky with mud. At the mouth of Marcums Branch, long stone buildings rose from the oozing ground, and on the ridge where the Marcum cemetery had been, a tall structure of wood stood like a giant tombstone. Ermel said it was a coal tipple. He talked the whole time, while I sat with my arm acrost my belly to hold it still, because of the jostling of the train.

“Damnable thing is, business at my store has never been better. I make more in a week than I used to all year. No sense in farmin much this year. I’ll be makin money outen this mess anyhow. They’re a blastin and a tamin the mountains, and I’m a gittin rich.” He shook his head. “I’m glad my daddy has passed on so he cant see it.”

When we arrived at Justice, I jumped down from the train, wobbled along the station platform, and lost my breakfast beside the baggage rack.