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stubborn horse half to death with a leather strop. He was prone to administer discipline on his own blood with a briar switch or fire poker or whatever instrument was close at hand.
    His madness, in the right moment, wasn’t even bound by law. In 1924, a year after Emma delivered their ninth child, P.C. killed a man.
    P. C. Gatewood and Hiram Johnson got into an argument one afternoon. The state would charge P.C. with manslaughter and the trial would drag on. Young Monroe, twelve at the time, would testify that Hiram Johnson had fetched his rifle and Monroe had fetched his daddy’s for him, and just as Hiram had raised his gun, P.C. had swung his and caught Johnson on the forehead, the approximate site of a fresh wound from an earlier scrap the old man had found himself in. He never regained consciousness and four days later, in the hospital, Hiram died.
    Word was that Johnson’s widow would not sue P.C. because he’d paid the medical bills and funeral expenses. But a lawyer from Huntington, West Virginia, convinced her to try for a settlement and she won. P.C. was convicted of manslaughter and ordered to pay $50,000. His prison sentence was suspended because he had nine children and a farm to tend to, but the debt was so burdensomethat he had to sell half the land. Even then he couldn’t make ends meet, and each year it got worse. By the time Dora Louise was born in 1926, and Lucy Eleanor in 1928, P.C. was struggling to keep his farm running. In August 1929, he got a job with the Ohio Township rural school board, hauling pupils from Sugar Creek to Crown City and back for seventy-five dollars a month. He converted an old pickup truck into a makeshift school bus to make the runs. The board hired him again the following year, but in 1932 the contract went to Stanley Swain, who offered to do it for seven dollars less.
    The extra income was missed as the Gatewoods inched through the worst of the Great Depression and tried to cope with a drought that had started in the east and raked across the country toward the Great Plains. Crop prices had fallen drastically. That same year, nearly 40 percent of the labor force was out of work. By the following year, more than 40 percent of Ohio factory workers and 67 percent of Ohio construction workers were unemployed, and many of them, with nowhere to turn, were moving from cities like Akron and Toledo and Columbus to the countryside to try to feed their children off the land.
    It wasn’t unusual for tramps to stop at the house on the hill and ask for food. They all had the same look of desperation. Though she eschewed government handouts, Emma was always generous and invited them to sit on the porch and enjoy a hearty meal. She’d do anything for someone who needed help, and often nursed sick friends back to health. P.C. occasionally let the tramps sleep in his barn if they promised not to smoke. The children sometimes followed the travelers down the highway, and they’d grow old remembering one particular family. The man was driving a dog team, which was pulling a small cart loaded with their possessions. The woman was pregnant, clutching a young child, her feet hanging down off the back.
    In 1932, as progressive New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt chased vulnerable President Herbert Hoover, P.C., a longtimeRepublican, switched parties. Emma would have none of it. When the election rolled around, P.C. was in his sickbed, eaten up with ulcers. Pollsters were dispatched to his home to record his vote, but Emma wouldn’t let them inside. This event added yet another layer to their discord.
    P. C. Gatewood, with the help of his wife and children, held on, but they wouldn’t hold the farm through the decade. And he was becoming increasingly difficult to live with.

    Emma trudged on, as May wound down, through lonely woods. She sucked on bouillon cubes as she hiked, and found water where she could. She filled up on wild strawberries—whenever she found a patch, she’d drop her