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baby, catching lightning bugs,” he told me once. “She’d come running to show us how they lit up her hands.” He stopped walking then to look at me. “I can see why you love her, Douglas,” he said. “That little girl is special.” It seemed like he was trying to tell me something, but I was afraid to ask what it was.
    BYRDIE
    It was sad to leave our cabin with the haint blue door and go live with Pap on his farm, even as much as I loved him. We still seen Grandmaw and the great-aunts but it wasn’t the same. Me and Mammy lived there on Pap’s farm until I was fifteen years old, when Grandmaw died. It was an awful time and after we buried her we got to where we couldn’t hardly stand Chickweed Holler and all the memories there. Pap said one day maybe we ort to move down to the valley. He’d struggled so long with the rocky soil on his farm, he believed he could do better somewhere else. Me and Mammy agreed to it because we needed to run away from our grief. Much as we cared for Della and Myrtle, it was hard to be around them without missing Grandmaw so bad it liked to killed us. Pap got word of land for sale about sixty miles east, in a little farming community called Piney Grove. He bought ten acres off a man named Bucky Cochran that owned a big dairy farm and everything else along the five-mile stretch of road between our place and his house, a two-story yellow brick with white trim and fancy columns on the porch. Pap built us a log cabin with a loft where I slept in a feather bed Mammy made for me. Every day I’d slip off from my chores to set by the springhouse where we kept a jug of fresh milk tied up in the ice-cold spring. I’d pull it up out of the water and close my eyes and take a long drink and it seemed like nothing in life could taste sweeter. I thought it was the prettiest plot of land I ever seen, too, until I came up here to Bloodroot Mountain.
    I took a job cooking and cleaning for Bucky’s wife, Barbara Cochran, and we found us a church not far from the house. That’s where I seen Macon for the first time. I never was good-looking like Myra, even before I got real old. My ears stuck out and I had a good head of hair but it had an ugly color to it, like dirty dishwater. It’s a wonder Macon took to me, but he wasn’t no looker hisself. Had a puckered face and scraggly whiskers and a brown birthmark over his eye shaped like an island off of the globe I seen at the Cochrans’ house. Every chance I got I’d sneak and spin that globe and run my fingers over the shapes. Macon’s birthmark put me in mind of all them shapes that stood for places I’d like to go. Sometimes the soles of my feet still itched in the night. Up until he died I had that island to run my fingers over whenever I wanted to.
    Piney Grove Church was about two miles down the road from us, and about the same from the foot of Bloodroot Mountain. I guess you could say me and Macon met in the middle. He caught my eye right off, setting over in the amen corner with suspenders on. I’ve thought about what drawed me to Macon, besides that island birthmark, and I believe it was being able to tell right off that he was a man. He wasn’t but eight years older than me but there was something about the way he carried hisself. He’d give his sisters stern looks when they went to giggling on the back pew, and every time he led prayer his voice rung up in the rafters. I could tell just by setting in the church house with Macon that he’d know how to treat a woman and run a farm and be a good daddy like Pap. Even though I was only fifteen, I knowed I wanted to marry a man like him.
    That’s how come I stood close to him every chance I got and tried to get myself noticed. Seemed like it took forever for him to figure out I was around. Then finally at the Easter egg hunt me and him and some of the other older ones was picked to hide the eggs. It was springtime and chilly out. The churchyard grass was bright green and slick with dew. My