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of the tree. G.D. and my twobrothers got their guns out and the rats dropped all around—forty or more of them, bloody on the ground in front of the springhouse door.
    Every time a good rain came, the drain clogged and the springhouse flooded. All of us would come tearing, laughing and screaming and histing up our skirts and pants legs to wade out into the swirling waters. We would rescue the crocks and the tall churn and its dasher and lug them out under the apple tree until the storm was over and the water run down. Then we would sweep the mud and rat turds off the floor stones and move back in.
    The hog pen stood on the hill right above the springhouse. We took it as a sort of easy destiny that we would all eat our peck of dirt. We were never sick either, except with things like mumps and chickenpox, and Mama's gallstones. Captain Jim drank the water for forty-one years and lived to be eighty-eight; Granny Fanny drank it for fifty-eight years and lived to be ninety-two; G.D. drank it, off and on, for fifty-five years and lived to be eighty-seven; but Mama, who drank it for only twenty-six years, lived to be only eighty-two.
    The main part of the house that Captain Jim built was clean and had three of the rooms wallpapered, one with big red roseson the wall. After G.D. was able to pay for it, Mama had a big kitchen range, silver-bright with scrollwork and with a big warming oven. Pressed into its door face were the words “Malleable Steel Range Company, South Bend, Indiana.”
    I learned to read from the newspapers pasted on one side of the kitchen wall and from reading the name on the stove and the name, “Mother” on the oats boxes, and “Arbuckle's Coffee,” “Silver Brand Pure Lard,” and “Wheeling Steel.” Before I was old enough to go to school, my brother Ward and my sister Elizabeth would come home with their books and study by the kitchen table at night under the light of a glass oil lamp. I would climb up beside them, and they taught me to read in Mace's Beginners' History , stories about Dan Boone, George Rogers Clark, and “Nolichucky Jack.” While Elizabeth and Ward were away at school, I would stand looking out the winter window at the great trees and imagine the hunter men walking there through the shadows until they disappeared through the Cumberland Gap.

    G.D. had two cases of books along the wall in the best bedroom: his old school books and stories like Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush and In Days of Bruce. G.D. always was a soft touch for a book salesman. He saidthat an education was the only thing “they” couldn't take away, and he was always bringing home a new set of books: a green encyclopedia, and the red and gold set of Charles Dickens, and the green and gold set of the World's Best Literature with hard pieces in it like ones by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Immanuel Kant. I didn't like Immanuel Kant too well, but I liked the Scotch stories, and especially Lorna Doone . I read Dickens, Homer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Victor Hugo, Thomas Hardy, and The Girl of the Limberlost . Sometimes I would take Lorna Doone to the haymow and read it there, lying in the soft golden hay of the loft. On rainy days we played there, jumping and sliding down the steep slippery hills of hay.
    To get into the loft, we put our bare feet between the cracks of the logs and climbed up the wall to the door of the mow. The logs were worn with feet climbing up and, thrust into the hole of the door, was Captain Jim's old square-knobbed wooden peg, slick with wear. In a way, this peg was almost a living thing to me. It was just an old door peg, knotted and familiar and strong, and it held the door shut. But it fitted tight into its log as though it was strong enough to hold together the whole barn, the house, the fields, the little village, and all our kinfolk spread up and down Swago Crick.

Green-up Time

    W e had a store calendar on the kitchen wall, and Granny Fanny's old clock