She was about thirty years old then, a young woman. Fierce with energy, forever busy, always working at something, cleaning up, nursing a child, feeding chickens and gathering eggs, chopping at weeds in her garden with abrupt, harsh, angry strokes of the hoe. Each Monday she did the family wash (down in the cellar in winter, outside under the walkway in summer) with the sputtering gasoline-powered Maytag that the old man had found for her, somewhere, years before. One by one she guided each soaked garment through the hard rubber rollers of the wringer into the rinsing tub and back again into a basket. Paul and I would help her hang the damp things on the line.

In the evening after dark after she’d tucked us all in bed, our father out in the barn seeing to the stock one last time or down in the cellar fixing harness, sharpening tools, whittling another stretch board for the pelts of fox, muskrat, skunk, then—why then and then only—our mother, free at last for a little while to live a private life, would sit at her piano and play. Lying in our double-decker bunks under the sloping ceiling, half asleep but listening, trying to stay awake, we heard the soothing, lyric sound of nocturnes and sonatas by Chopin and Debussy, or perhaps a few tunes from the hymnbook, something not too rousing, appropriate for bedtime—What a Friend We Have in Jesus, The Old Rugged Cross, He Walked with Me, Take My Life and Let It Be, Amazing Grace, or Leaning on the Everlasting Arms…

Striding through the October wind. Women don’t stride, not small skinny frail-looking overworked overworried Appalachian farm women like Lorraine Holyoak-Lightcap. But our mother did. She strode over the reddish dirt of the road, the burned slag from the coke ovens of Deerlick, Blacklick, the coal-mining towns. She walked rapidly in the windwashed afternoon, switching her stick. She gazed at the red-gold leaves of oak, beech, elm, maple and poplar and hickory—chlorophyll withdrawn for the freezing times ahead, leaving behind in each veined leaf the flame-colored chemistry of fall—and stared up at the streamlined clouds in the silver blue of the sky.

What she longed for, I suppose, was something far away from the ramshackle farmhouse, the unpainted barn, the pigpen chickencoop outhouse toolshed springhouse wagonshed of Lightcap Hollow. Lorraine was the daughter of a professional schoolteacher; her brother was a cashier in a bank; her sisters lived in town in houses with hardwood floors, electricity, hot and cold running water, centralized heating, even refrigerators.

INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES. Appalachian autumn. Rustle of wind through the dry corn, rattle of dead leaves beneath our feet, the frosty breath of morning, the sleepy stasis of Indian summer.

Mornings and at night we walked our trapline with flashlight and .22 rifle. Hoping for fox, silver fox (wealth!), but catching mostly only skunk and muskrat. Sometimes in early dawn we’d find a muskrat dead in our trap, half frozen into the ice. Or now and then, not often, one small furry foot with chewed-off stump clutched in the steel jaws. A cruel business, our mother kept reminding us. Will shrugged, I was embarrassed, the old man scoffed.