Thanksgiving, or gone to Yankee Stadium to lunge for white leather balls and gobble hot
dogs. Several months ago all of that had been replaced by steep land, dirt and trees, and
animals that smelled and made you earn your place. Corner grocers had been exchanged
for crackling bread and strained milk, tap water for water pumped or in bucket hauled,
grand public libraries for a pretty cabinet of few books, tall buildings for taller mountains.
And for a reason she couldn't quite get at, Lou did not know if she could stay here for
long. Maybe there was a good reason her father had never come back.
She went to the barn and milked the cows, carrying a full bucket into the kitchen and the
rest to the spring-house, where she laid it in the cool stream of water. The air was already
growing warmer.
Lou had the cookstove hot and the pan with lard fired up when her great-grandmother
walked in. Louisa was fretting that she and Eugene had slept late. Then Louisa eyed the
full buckets on the sink, and Lou told her she had already milked the cows. When she
saw the rest of the work Lou had done, Louisa smiled appreciatively. "Next thing I know
you'll be running this place without me.
"I doubt that will ever happen," said the girl in a way that made Louisa stop smiling.
Cotton showed up unannounced a half hour later dressed in patched work pants, an old
shirt, and worn brogans. He didn't wear his wire-rim glasses, and his fedora had been
replaced with a straw hat, which, Louisa said, was foresight on his part because it looked
like the sun would burn a bright one today.
They all said their hellos to the man, though Lou had mumbled hers. He had come to read
to her mother regularly, as promised, and Lou was resenting it more each time. However,
Lou appreciated his gentle ways and courtly manners. It was a conflicted, troubling
situation for the girl.
The temperature, though cold the night before, had not come close to freezing. Louisa
didn't have a thermometer, but, as she said, her bones were just as accurate as bottled
mercury. The crops were going in, she declared to all. Late to plant often meant never to
harvest.
They trucked over to the first field to be sown, a sloped rectangle of ten acres. The
vigilant wind had chased the malingering gray clouds over the ridgeline, leaving the sky
clear. The mountains, though, looked markedly flat this morning, as if they were props
only. Louisa carefully passed out bags of seed com from the season before, shelled and
then kept in the corncrib over the winter. She instructed the troops carefully as to their
usage. "Thirty bushels of corn an acre is what we want," she said. "More, if we can."
For a while things went all right. Oz walked his rows, meticulously counting out tihree
seeds per hill as Louisa had told them. Lou, though, was letting herself become sloppy,
dropping two at some places, four at others.
"Lou," Louisa said sharply. "Three seeds per hill, girl!"
Lou stared at her. "Like it really makes a difference."
Louisa rested fists on her haunches. "Difference twixt eating and not!"
Lou stood there for a moment and then started up again, at a clip of three seeds per hill
about nine inches apart. Two hours later, with the five of them working steadily, only
about half the field had been laid. Louisa had them spend another hour using hoes to hill
the planted corn. Oz and Lou soon had purple blood blisters in the crooks of their hands,
despite the gloves they wore. And Cotton too had done the same to his.
"Lawyering is poor preparation for honest work," he explained, showing off his twin sore
prizes.
Louisa's and Eugene's hands were so heavily callused that they wore no gloves at all,
hilled twice as much as the others, and came away with palms barely reddened by the
tools' coarse handles.
With the last dropped seed hilled, Lou, far more bored than tired, sat on the ground,
slapping her gloves against her leg. "Well, that was fun. What now?"
A curved stick appeared in front of her. "Before you get on to school, you and Oz gonna
find some wayward cows."
Lou looked up into Louisa's face.
Lou and Oz tramped through the woods. Eugene had let the cows and the calf out to
graze in the open field, and, as cows, like people, were wont to do, they were wandering
the countryside looking for better prospects.
Lou smacked a lilac bush with the stick Louisa had given her to scare off snakes. She had
not mentioned the threat of serpents to Oz, because she figured if he knew, she'd end up
carrying her brother on her back. "I can't believe we have to find some stupid cows," she
said angrily. "If they're dumb enough to get lost, they should stay lost."
They pushed through tangles of dogwood and mountain laurel. Oz swung on the lower