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growing up in places that even God forgot.
    Every year VISTA workers tote them out of the hills and into town. Volunteers in Service to America is what they’re called, rich northerners thinking they can save the poor. Pop says the mountain people run loose and spit on the sidewalks and claim they’re here to get what the government owes them.
    The third Wednesday of every month the commoditytruck comes to town handing out free food—big jars of peanut butter and blocks of yellow cheese and boxes of powdered milk with no-brand, plain brown wrappers, but the ones who get commodities don’t like the no-brand food. They sell everything for money to buy Camel cigarettes and Cokes.
    Sometimes Aunt Rose buys commodities from Mountain Bessie, an old woman who collects from the others and sells stuff from the back of her pickup truck just outside the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. Rose puts the cheese through the sausage grinder with pickles and red pimientos and makes enough pimiento spread for a month’s worth of sandwiches.
    After the commodity truck’s gone, the mountain people stand on the courthouse square smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes and pretending the third Wednesday is like any other day and they are like any other people. But it’s not any other day and they’re not like any other people.
    We’re not either, Pop says. We’re sure not like those newscasters on the six o’clock programs. Whether we like it or not, we’re more like the mountain people.
    While we walk, Aunt Rose has been stooping down to pick periwinkle flowers. She hands me a purple blossom.
    “See that star?” she says, pointing to the center of the tiny bloom.
    I bend over for a better look. The purple star, outlined in white, is as perfect as if it had been drawn with a ruler. Aunt Rose says you can’t really know a thing until you’ve looked at it up close for a good, long time.

S ecrets, Songs, and Bad Dreams …
    I’m putting on my coat to go to school when Myra waddles down the stairs on the verge of tears with her pink robe dragging on the floor behind her. She had a dream about Jerry Wilson, she says. He was in a car wreck on some curvy mountain road and was all alone and waiting to be rescued. She wants Momma to stay home from work today, she says, rubbing her belly. She can’t be alone.
    I’m already late and need lunch money, but Momma ignores me and tries to get Myra settled down.
    I look out the window and see the school bus stop at the corner to pick up Willie Bright and then head down Persimmon Tree Road without me.
    “I’ve missed the bus,” I say to Momma. “There it goes.”
    She looks at me like I’m from another planet.
    Myra plops down on the couch and almost pushesLenny’s cassette player onto the floor, but I run over and grab it while it’s still rocking back and forth.
    Last night Lenny set the cassette player on the couch arm so he could listen to his music and dance in front of the living-room mirror. He tapes songs off his transistor radio late at night when our stations close down and clear the airwaves. Then you can hear stations from far away—Chicago, Baltimore, Fort Wayne. But mostly they fade in and out and carry static. Lenny likes some show called
The Top 25
, every night at nine. Rock music. Ear-piercing music, Pop calls it. Some nights he sends Lenny out to the sunporch so nobody else has to listen to it.
    Lenny tapes songs that our stations don’t play—“Free Bird” and “American Pie” and “Riders on the Storm.” He goes around the house singing:
I fought the law and the law won
. Uncle Lu wags his finger. You’d best steer clear of the law, he says. Lucius doesn’t like “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” for the same reason. Not the kind of people to associate with, he says to Lenny, like these songs are about real people.
    Lenny can dance better than most girls, but Pop says it’s prissy. He makes him chop wood or clip the holly bushes or do some other ornery task when he