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Virginia line and they drive it, steep dusty green mountainside on their left and then a sheer drop down into Dry Fork Creek on the right. The big gray stone gates rise up ahead, anachronistic, a monument to her grandfather’s colossal vanity. It’s like entering a book. LITTLE EMMA MINING CO . is engraved on the smooth stone in the center of the arch. Lorene turns off the main road and drives under the arch.
    Crystal tries to imagine it as it was once, in the thirties maybe, when her grandfather Iradell Spangler was living out his vision of grandeur here and running things in his crazy, flamboyant fashion, and the two tipples were operating around the clock and they were bringing coal out of thebig drift mine at the Little Emma and all the other shafts that went out from it and shot through the mountains until it was like a honeycomb under there. That whole opposite hillside was full of identical green wooden houses where the miners lived with their families, and on that side, too, was the company store. Crystal has heard them talk about Iradell and how he wouldn’t let the union in and wouldn’t modernize his mine, how he himself perversely engineered the long fall of the Little Emma, which was finished finally sometime after his death. Now the company houses that are left are crumbling, and vines grow up through their floors. One tipple has caved in and the other is ready to go. Long since, Odell sold the machinery and scrapped the company store and most of the houses for lumber, so that everywhere up this holler there are half-overgrown roads leading noplace, pieces of falling-down structures, and POSTED and NO TRESPASSING signs tacked up to tree after tree. Lorene drives past the family graveyard on the left, where Little Emma herself, Crystal’s grandmother, lies beneath the columned monstrosity, a little Greek temple of sorts, which Iradell had constructed there. One truck mine still operates, and a coal truck comes rumbling now from a road to their right and passes them, the dusty-faced driver waving his hand.
Tennessee Nights
is the name stenciled across the top of the bed of the truck.
    “Who is that?” Crystal asks.
    “One of Odell’s people, Johnny Goff probably,” Lorene answers absently, negotiating a pothole in the road. Crystal knows that Odell, Iradell’s illegitimate son by Mae Peacock, lives alone in a little house up that road, and a bunch ofredheaded Goffs live up there, too. But Crystal has never been there. They are close enough now so that Crystal can hear Devere’s dogs barking, and then Lorene brakes to a stop by the tin mailbox.
    “Here, honey,” Lorene says, getting out to open the mailbox, “take this to your aunt Nora, it’s still here from yesterday.” She puts a pile of mail into Crystal’s left hand and her overnight bag in the other hand and gives her a kiss on the cheek. “I can’t come in!” Lorene calls before anybody has a chance to ask her, waving to Nora, who has appeared at the door. Then Lorene jumps back into the car and pulls out in a cloud of dust, already late for a meeting.
    “Law, honey, I’m glad to see you,” Aunt Nora calls, stepping outside the screen door and wiping her face with her apron. “Shoo!” she says, flapping her apron back down at the chickens which come pecking around at her feet. “Shoo, now, I ain’t got nothing for you.”
    “Here’s your mail,” Crystal says, giving it to her, glancing down once at the little booklet on the top of the pile; it is named
So You Sew!
Grace must have ordered it. Grace is always sending off for things.
    Aunt Nora smothers Crystal, pressing her into her giant bosom, then pushes her back out to arm’s length and looks at her. “Getting prettier every day,” she says. “You look a little peaked, though. Come on in, we’re waiting dinner on you.” She pushes Crystal across the porch and into the old frame house where the air is cool even in August. The Spangler house is built in the old style, with