He grinned. “Looks like I’ll be eating good this weekend.”

He showed up on my doorstoop at five o’clock, his cap in his hand and his hair still damp from a washing. He handed me a paper bag full of poke and wild onion.

“Flowers from the mountains,” he said.

“Let’s take them downstairs. I talked Mrs. Hairston into letting me use a cookstove in the big kitchen.”

I had four pork chops, wrapped in slick white paper, specially cut by the butcher at the company store. I simmered them in flour and butter, mixed cornbread and baked it in an iron skillet, fried potatoes and wild onion, tossed the poke salad. When I was finished we bore our treasure upstairs on trays, along with a pitcher of cold buttermilk. We sat down at the table and looked across at one another. There was an awkward silence.

“You usually say grace?” Lloyd asked.

“No.”

“Good.” He heaped potatoes onto his plate. “You feed a man real good, Miss Carrie.”

“You can stop calling me Miss Carrie,” I said. “Miles aint around.”

He smiled. “I was just being polite like my mommy taught me.”

“Where is your mama? You never told me where you’re from.”

“I was born and raised in Justice County, over in West Virginia. Blackberry Creek. We had some land there oncet. Company took it.”

I remembered Albion Freeman, who had spoken of stolen land in West Virginia. I had not thought of him in years.

“They do that a lot? Steal land, I mean.”

“Sure. All over. Steal it or put the pressure on to buy it. Same thing, far as I’m concerned. How do you think your brother’s company got this here land?”

“I just figured they bought it.”

“Oh, they did. Everything legal, but sinful as hell. This here is fine cornbread.”

“Thank ye. Hit’s my Aunt Jane’s recipe.”

“Aunt Jane. What’s she like?”

“Real old. Fiesty.”

“That where you git your meanness?”

I giggled. “Some say we’re peas in a pod,” I said.

We finished off with a chocolate layer cake I made the night before. Lloyd leaned back in his chair and moaned.

“I got to git up and move,” he said. “Maybe all that food I et will settle down into my hollow leg. You want to go for a walk?”

“Sure. Dont let’s fret about the dishes. I’ll cover em and do them tomorry.”

We went outside and wandered down the road toward Chieftan, past a row of double houses. We’d had no rain for two weeks. The holes in the road were dry, and coal dust lay thick on the dandelions that grew up by the fences.

“You was awful sweet to Miles,” I said.

“I’m sweet by nature.”

“You are not. I was watching you close. You was laughing at him the whole time.”

Lloyd grinned. “You watch too close,” he said.

We passed by the company garden. People worked their corn, chinked their hoes against the rocky ground.