It was a cold January day. We made biscuits in the kitchen beside a frosted windowpane. Flora flung her arms around me, careful not to touch me with her flour-dusted hands. I didn’t tell her that I feared we would lose the Homeplace some day. I tried not to think about it myself. It was bad enough to dread a long life without the love of Rondal and hope of children. But if there was no place of my own to be, no ground where my bones could be laid beside my kin’s, would I not be the most miserable creature in God’s world?

Flora still held me tight. “God has picked out a man for you somewhere,” she whispered.

“What if He aint? What if He dont mean for me to git married?”

“Then you got to accept God’s will.”

Her answer infuriated me. It was the answer she would give, the answer that all my people would give, all except Miles. But when I realized that, I was not so angry. It took a strength of will to give such an answer. If I could not say such words, if I could not overcome my selfishness, there was nothing left except to go off and turn my back on all I had come from.

I still prayed to God, as Aunt Jane and Aunt Becka had taught, even though I never really liked to go to church. The only church on Grapevine or Scary when I was a child had been the Holiness church at the mouth of Bearwallow. Daddy didn’t care for the Holy Rollers and all their noise. He wanted a church where he could sit quiet, but there had been no preachers raised up for that sort of thing in our vicinity. Aunt Jane wasn’t much of a churchgoer either, but she took me occasionally to Bearwallow. I was fascinated by the joyful whooping and the shimmying dances, but always left downhearted because we had not gotten the Holy Ghost the way the others had. When I mentioned this to Aunt Jane, she said, “Everbody gits the Holy Ghost in different ways. Me, I git it when I’m working the garden, when I see the food God gives us spring outen that rocky ground. I may not whoop and holler, but I swing my hoe in praise of the Almighty.”

“Maybe I git it down by the river,” I mused. “Sometimes they’s something special I feel when the sun lights the mountainsides and everthing looks so clear.” Then I remembered Old Christmas. “I got the Holy Ghost one time in the barn!” I exclaimed, and told her about the animals.

She nodded her head. “You see there,” she said, satisfied.