tables. There were rhubarb, cherry, and apple crumb pies worthy of blue ribbons. An angel food cake piled with strawberries, another cake stiff with walnuts, and a vanilla cake with boiled frosting all vied for attention.

But Grandma’s cake was best.

She made an Appalachian stack cake with lots of thin molasses-flavored layers put together with homemade cinnamon apple butter. She said the cake was sad, but that didn’t have anything to do with being down in the dumps, it was just our way of saying it was moist and heavy. She told me that stack cake was used for weddings and funerals and other socials back when she was a girl. Baking was costly, so each woman brought a layer to add to the cake or a jar of apple butter or cherry preserves to smear between the layers.

Brother Dub called for me to bring him some of Grandma’s cake. His last name was Williams, but everybody always just called him Brother Dub. Grandma said the Dub probably came from the first letter of his last name. He only had one leg so it was kind of hard for him to get around. Grandma said he’d got his leg blown off in the War and that was a shame. I cut an extra big piece and walked it over to him, balancing it on two slightly greasy hands.

By way of thanks he said it looked like I just might grow up to be as fine of a woman as my grandma.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was wrong about how I was going to turn out. After all, he had no way of knowing about me and Sissy gambling with real cards all night.

Finally everyone picked up their dishes and quilts and, like a scene played backwards, everything went back into baskets and boxes and paper bags.

It had been a grand day.

A shooting star silvered through the dusky sky. I stopped and closed my eyes to make a wish. I wished for my mother to come home.

Grandma said if I didn’t stop being such a slowpoke we never would get home.

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

15

Suffer the Little Children

Like a tribe worshiping a false idol, we sat bowed around the big Philco radio in the front room, leaning forward not to miss a single word Rochester said about Jack Benny and his cheapskate ways. My brother, Hursey, home from Romney School for the Deaf, came busting in, raring to tell Grandma something or other. Although I motioned him to wait, it was too late—we’d missed the funny part. It was done without giving it a thought—that hand I held up to stop Hursey from interrupting, but there was a look came over his face I’d never noticed before, maybe because I wasn’t much interested in anything that didn’t have me in the center of it. Yet the hurt I sensed come over my brother at that moment came over me as well.

Hursey Clev, feisty and sharp as a tack, was the spitting image of our daddy, whose given name he carried, and the Clev, of course, he got from Grandpa Luther Clevland Cales. My mother was only sixteen when she had him, just a child herself, my daddy twenty-three. They’d run off and got married when she was fifteen, but it was too late for Grandpa to do much about it besides shooting my daddy with his double-barreled shotgun.

Grandma said the thought likely crossed his mind.

A smile twitching at her mouth, she shook her head. “Oh he was a charmer, your daddy was, coming around with silver-blond hair and a silver tongue. The way he set his sights on your mother, there was no stopping him. Your mother was shy as a girl, but willful too. Some are at that age, as I expect you’ll find out when you have young’uns of your own. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“I don’t want any babies when I grow up,” I told her.

“You’re likely to change your mind when you get a little farther down the road,” she said.

“Nope, not a one,” I repeated.

Dangling a soggy baby on my hip all day didn’t interest me one bit. I had in mind to ride an elephant through the jungle with a parrot named Echo on my shoulder and sing songs we both knew all the words to, like “Zippity Doo Dah” and “You Are My Sunshine.”

Grandma told me the story about when my brother was little and got very sick. She said it wasn’t like him not to be outside running and playing with the other children who lived nearby. But one day he took to laying around, all the energy sucked out of him. Then he started complaining of a headache and felt warm. By suppertime he was burning with a fever that cold rags didn’t do a thing to bring down. Next day he was vomiting and said his neck hurt, so the company doctor in Lynwynn, that’s the coal camp where they were living at the time, was sent for. But first he had to deliver Marlene Mae Haegar’s baby up in Yell Again Holler. Marlene was having some trouble so the doctor couldn’t say when, but he promised to come when he could.

A holler was the small valley between the folds of two mountains. Yell Again Holler got its name because it was so narrow ever little noise carried so far that if you wanted someone who lived along the flats, you just stood at the bottom and yelled the name of who you wanted to come down to meet you. You were sure to be heard by the first house, they’d yell again to the next, and so on, until word got to the right person.

After Marlene suffered hours of tears and travail, the doctor delivered a boy, a blue baby who never took his first breath. She was bleeding bad, so he’d had to tend to her, the baby dark

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