“Get relativity,” he said. He placed his hand lightly on mine; it was warm and dry, like he’d been kneading bread. “I know you hurt because you thought you knew Queen, but this is a lesson for you. You don’t know Queen because you don’t know there is no definite self.” We reached Mars Hill. I looked at the preponderance of letters. I couldn’t help but read every word that passed, Comfort Inn, Forks of Ivy Baptist Church, Waffle House, Zip N Slip Snow Tubing. My whole time on the farm, I’d only read the songs in our songbooks and the plaques for the calendar. I stared down at the glove compartment and at my own dirty lap. “There is no definite self. The self isn’t a fixed point,” Dice said, unperturbed by the chaos of town, “but more like a forest. Think of Pisgah.”

I wanted to think about Queen and Cassie, about Queen and her mother, but I could not shut Dice out—his soft, urging voice, and the faint pulse of his hand on mine, signaled that I would find all the answers I needed if only I would listen. I knew that, if I wanted to stay with the family, I had to trust Dice before anyone else.

“Unquestionably the same forest, a hundred years ago and now,” he said, “though its animals and trees grow and die, its waters come up from the ocean in clouds and then return to the ocean in spring rivers which carry its dirt away, and it is never seen in its entirety from any vista.”

I threw all of my attention into listening. This was the second time he’d talked to me about the definite self, and now I found comfort in the idea. When I’d tried to explain it to Lindsay, something had fallen into place. In nature, everything was tendencies and groupings. In nature, as in a family, self-interested decisions and actions were destructive.

Dice said, “When you say ‘I exist,’ your words call into being a unity which has no permanence. As though you’re gathering daisies from the hills and saying they’re a bundle—but then the wind of the next moment rips them from your hand.”

Only a few days in our holler were windy enough to wrest daisies from our hands, but I will never forget that terrifying force, which buffeted whole branches from our hickory to the ground and made the long house moan from all its joints, like a calving glacier.