I was grown. I’d been helping Molly, Mr. Salee’s cook, for about five years. My hot water cornbread was almost as good as hers. My stack cake wasn’t, but that’s because she kept her back to me whenever she added the spices to the stewed dried-apple filling. Molly, as with most cooks, wasn’t always forthright. She showed me only what helped her, and the rest she kept to herself.

But this is your home, Mr. Foley’s daughter had said to me when I told her that I was leaving. Then she warned me that if I changed my mind I wouldn’t be taken back in. I thought it over for about the length of a blue jay’s song, and I left. I traveled light because Mr. Foley’s daughter said that my clothes were still the property of Mr. Salee. The homespun skirt and blouse and the hand-me-down work boots that I had on that morning belonged to him too, but I could consider them as gifts, Mr. Foley’s daughter said.

Molly stayed. She said that she was too old to wander the roads and turnpikes of Kentucky, but she really wasn’t. At most, Molly was ten years older than I was. She would head back to the mountains and find her siblings, if she were to go anywhere, she figured. Before we parted, Molly gave me a knitted shawl the dark green of pine needles that I’d never seen her wear, and she said into my ear, “One small spoonful and two blades.” I knew right away what she meant. It was the amount of cinnamon and mace that she added to the stewed dried apples, when her back was turned to me. It was her way of wishing me good luck and Godspeed. I repeated it back to her—one small spoonful and two blades—to let her know that I’d heard her and to wish her the same.

I soon met folks who knew where Maysville was, and I walked with them. We followed the banks of the Ohio River, heading eastward. We were still on the Kentucky side of it, but that mighty river, in their minds, had already become a shallow stream. Some of them opined that the Ohio no longer seemed so wide nor its currents so fast. They took turns challenging the river. We could cross you now! they were saying, each in their own way. I listened as they talked and laughed at that river.

I told Pat that it was their laughter that made me feel free. I wasn’t sure that he took in the fullness of my meaning, but he blinked and blinked and that was a sign that he was trying.

Mr. Anderson figures that I was ten or ten and one at the time, Miss.