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that followed Tom had his own selection, boy books, the Hardy Boys series, seven of them, and just when I’d begun to think he’d select nothing but fun books, he picked up a thick volume of Shakespeare, and that made Miss Deale’s blue eyes glow.
    “You don’t, perchance, hope to be a writer one day, do you, Tom?” she asked.
    “Don’t know yet what I want to be,” he said in his most careful diction, nervous as he always was around someone as educated and pretty as Miss Marianne Deale. “Get all kinds of notions about being a pilot; then next day I want to be a lawyer so I can get to be president one day.”
    “President of our country, or of a corporation?”
    He blushed and looked down at his large feet that kept shuffling about. How awful his shoes looked. They were too big, too old and worn. “I guess President Casteel would sound kinda stupid, wouldn’t it?”
    “No,” she said seriously, “I think it sounds fine. You just set your mind on what you want to be, and take your time about it. If you work to obtain your goal, and realize from the very beginning that nothing valuable comes easily, and still forge ahead, without a doubt you’ll reach your goal, whatever it is.”
    Because of Miss Marianne Deale’s generosity (we learned later she put down her own money as deposit so we could take those books home), in books we had the chance to look at pictures of the ancient world, and in books we traveled together to Egypt and India. In books we lived in palaces and strode the narrow crooked lanes in London. Why, we both felt that when we got there eventually, we wouldn’t even feel strange in a foreign land, because we’d been there before.
    I loved historical novels that brought the past to life much better than history books did. Until I read a novelabout George Washington I thought him a dull, stodgy sort of president … and to think he’d once been young and handsome enough to cause girls to think he was charming and sexy.
    We read books by Victor Hugo, by Alexandre Dumas, and thrilled to know adventures like that were possible, even if they were horrible. We read classics, and we read junk; we read everything, anything that would take us out of that godforsaken cabin in the hills. Maybe if we’d had movies, our own TV set, and other forms of entertainment, we wouldn’t have grown so fond of those books Miss Deale allowed us to take home. Or maybe it was only Miss Deale, being clever when she “allowed” only
us
to take home precious, expensive books that she said others wouldn’t respect as much as we did.
    And that was true enough. We read our books only after we washed our hands.
    I suspected that Miss Marianne Deale liked our pa more than a little. God knows she should have had better taste. According to Granny, his “angel” had taught Pa to speak proper English, and with his natural good looks, many an aristocratic woman fell for the charms of Luke Casteel, when he cared enough to be charming.
    Every Sunday Pa went with us to church, sat in the midst of his large family, next to Sarah. Petite and dainty Miss Deale sat primly across the aisle and stared at Pa. I could guess she was marveling at Pa’s dark good looks, but surely she should consider his lack of knowledge. From all I’d heard from Granny, Pa had quit school before he was finished with the fifth grade.
    Sundays rolled around so fast when you didn’t have the kind of good clothes you needed, and I was always thinking I’d have a pretty new dress before anothershowed up; but new garments of any kind were difficult to come by, when Sarah had so much to do. So there we were again, in the very last pew, all in our best rags that others would throw out for trash. We’d stand, and we’d sing along with the best and richest in Winnerrow, along with all the other hillbillies dressed no better or worse than we were, who reveled in coming to church.
    In God you had to trust, and in God you had to believe or feel a fool.
    On this