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they became sick.
    When she cured the bacon, she’d remove the rind and cut it into small strips and cook it in a heavy pot to render the lard and preserve the skin, which she called cracklings. The children ached for the hog slaughter because it meant their school lunches would include biscuits and homemade jam and fried pork loin.
    Emma made apple butter in a giant cauldron over a large fire outside. She put the girls in charge of stirring the fresh, peeled apples constantly with a long wooden paddle and they occasionally got too close and felt the sting of popping hot apple butter on their skin.
    She made chicken and dumplings and chicken and noodles and every once in a while, on special occasions, fried chicken. Once every summer a man drove around to the farms with a truck full of various cuts of beef. Emma would peek inside and ask the man about prices. She could never afford much, but sometimes she’d walk away with a chuck roast and she’d make a giant pot of stew. Beef was rare, though—so rare that one of the boys walked into the barn once and bit a cow on the ear to see if it tasted like beef.
    She served breakfast at a long table, and P.C. always sat at the head. Sometimes, if the farmhands joined them, there’d be seventeen mouths waiting to be fed. She’d come from the kitchen with large pans of biscuits, bowls of oatmeal and cornmeal mush, and bacon. She served pancakes but refused to flavor her syrup.
    When the children needed to relieve themselves, they used the outhouse, which they called “the closet” or “bath with a path.” It was a three-seater, and they wiped their behinds with pages torn from the Sears, Roebuck catalog to save money on toilet paper. They walked to school, barefoot sometimes, because they each got just two pairs of twenty-five-cent shoes a year, and they had to make them last.
    At Christmas, P.C. would chop down a tree and drag it home. The older children would string popcorn and make ornaments from last year’s wrapping paper or the tinfoil from chewing gum or cigarette packages that they found along the road. Their stockings were filled with an orange, a banana, a candy cane, English walnuts, and a new pencil or handkerchief. Most of the larger gifts they shared, including a sled one year and a single pair of roller skates another. Emma sometimes made the girls little dolls with ceramic heads and sawdust stuffing.
    P.C. was a thinker, a renaissance man, and his neighbors thought highly of him, even if he overpaid his farmhands. He’d taught school for fifteen years—at the one-room Oak Dale and Waugh Bottom schools—before he quit to run a farm and grow a family, which expanded again in 1920, with the birth of twins, Robert Wilson and Elizabeth Caldwell. He drew blueprints and built a beautiful modern home for his parents on a hillside not far away. He also designed and constructed a new schoolhouse at Swan Creek.
    The neighbors knew of his above-average intellect. He’d bought a large tobacco barn for one hundred dollars from a man who lived a mile away and had numbered every board, into the thousands, then disassembled the barn and hauled it down the road and up the hill and to a level patch behind their house where he rebuilt it, nail by nail and board by board. When he finished the project, he climbed to the peak of the aluminum roof and did a handstand while the farmhands cheered at his thin silhouette.
    On Sundays, he required the children attend church. They’d pack into a pew at the Methodist church near Swan Creek, where they’d sweat and swat flies for hours while the preacher tried to save their souls from eternal damnation. P.C. made a point of delivering a short sermon to the congregation, himself, when the preacher had finished.
    Always, though, just beyond the thin shroud of his respectable public persona, there gurgled a mean streak, and if something set him off, he’d grow wild-eyed and his veins would bulge. His children once watched him beat a