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live with your great-uncle and his family.”
    “What was it like in the orphans’ home?”
    “I can’t remember, honey. And you’ve worn me out for the night. I don’t have no story left in me.”
    “Okay, Nanna,” I told her.
    I didn’t say my prayers that night, but before I fell asleep, I made sure Nanna knew that I didn’t think she committed a sin by lying to the judge. She didn’t have any choice.
    “Sin or no sin,” Nanna said, “I’ve had nettles in my bed every night.”
    “Really?” I asked her, and slid my hand underneath her back.
    “Not those kinds of nettles, honey,” she replied.
     
     
     
    T hat was the beginning of my understanding of metaphors. I thought about Nanna’s nettles a lot, wondering how it could be that she felt prickles and stings to her skin when nothing was in her bed at all. But after a time, I came to realize that the nettles were all around her, inside and out. I dreamed of Mamma cutting me down the back, filling me up with sandspurs, and sewing me back together. Nettles every night and even in the day, slightly stabbing with every movement, every turn.
    Then I started thinking about Grandpa Herman and figured he was the biggest nettle of all. One great big irritation in the bed with Nanna. I remembered his whiskers, seventy years tough, and knew how badly he must make her itch, how she must just want to leap out of that bed and sleep somewhere else.
    To The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind, metaphors were ways of saying the unpleasant. That’s how they taught us everything they didn’t want to say aloud.
    In our after-supper classes, we’d recite, “He who carves a notch in another man’s tree shall pay a hundred dollars. Half to the man whose tree he marked and half to The Church of Fire and Brimstone.”
    One night in the middle of this, my nephew Mustard, who was nine at the time and the youngest in our group, stopped Ben Harback, that night’s teacher, to ask, “A hundred dollars just for sticking your knife in a tree?”
    “Mustard!” his sister Pammy scolded under her breath. Pammy was eleven, a year younger than me, and mostly invisible.
    “It just don’t make sense,” Mustard said. “A hundred dollars! That’s a lot of money for one little notch in a tree.”
    “But it is not a lot of money for thieving, now is it?” Ben Harback asked Mustard, then looked at us all.
    “Maybe not for stealing a baby pig or something,” Mustard argued. “But for one little notch in a tree?”
    I glimpsed at James, whose almond eyes were walnuts, and I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or about to yell, but he was about to do something. The Saturday night classes weren’t discussions. They were lectures and recitations. As far as I could remember, nobody’d ever asked a question before. We all knew Mustard was in terrible trouble and couldn’t imagine why he didn’t know. It would be more than nettles for disagreeing with the law book. Maybe even more than the strap. My ears felt hot. I put my hands onto the sides of the cold metal chair to cool them, wishing I could lay my ears there.
    Ben Harback just stared at us all, his eyes cast down as if he was looking at a tobacco leaf covered with a breed of worm he’d never seen before.
    I thought about Mustard, all alone, the only brave voice, the rest of us sitting like eggs, just waiting.
    “It’s not about the notch or the tree,” I whispered.
    “What did you say, Ninah Huff?” Ben asked sharply.
    “It’s not about the notch or the tree either,” I said louder. “It’s about claiming something that doesn’t belong to you.” I couldn’t tell whether I was getting us into trouble or getting us out of it, but it was a huge chore, no matter what it was, and my voice shook. “It’s like if we told Grandpa Herman that we deserved to be paid for picking up leaves in the field when the field doesn’t really belong to us at all and he already takes care of our