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like the sound in his head. When he finally fell to ground, his head would be completely clear, like the summer sky with no cloud in sight.
    Sometimes, right then, he could remember his mother. He remembered her gray eyes and her clear voice and how she smoothed the hair back from his forehead when he ran in from the yard and grabbed her skirts. He remembered her saying “Now I lay me down to sleep” at night.
    But most times he could not remember his mother, so that when Great-aunt Edith told him she was dead, that first summer they took him away from her, it meant nothing, nothing to him at all. He just looked up at Great-aunt Edith, whose chins started quivering like jelly when she told him, before she started to cry. Then Edith stood there on the porch staring at the boy for the longest time. Then she flung her apron up over her face and ran back in the cabin crying. Zeke stood right where he was and did not think about her, or about his mother, or about anything. It was hot on the porch. Red roses bloomed, climbing up over the porch rail of Edith’s cabin at Honey Camp.
    Later that day, Edith gave him a special marble, a steelie, which was exactly the kind Zeke had always wanted, and how did she know that? How could she possibly know? “Where did this come from?” he asked, holding it, and Edith said it had belonged to a dead boy. Then she started up crying again. Later she put on her bonnet and walked him down to the store and got him some horehound candy.
    Zeke kept the steelie in his pocket always, and sometimes he’d roll it around and around in his fingers, and no one knew. He never traded it, or shot with it, or even took it out of his pocket. The only person he showed it to was his big cousin Tom, his favorite.
    Ezekiel himself would grow up after all, or if he did not grow up exactly, he would at least change from a too solemn child to a too solemn young man. He would stay on at Frog Level, working the hard rock ground with Clovis, who was a man that did not talk to women and children and never appeared to notice Ezekiel at all, so that Zeke wondered at first if his uncle even knew he was present in the house. Until it came time to clear the field that first year, that is. Then his uncle let on that he knew it, all right. For Zeke was a large, strong lad, and Clovis aimed to make him earn his keep.
    Zeke did not mind working, truth to tell. He was never much for school, where he sat like a bump on a log and refused to recite. Zeke would bite his lip and stare through the open schoolhouse door at the mountains while Mr. Green caned him unmercifully, until Zeke’s face grew fiery red, and Pansy started crying. “Is this yet enough, Ezekiel?” Mr. Green would gasp, the slick yellow strands of his oily hair stuck to his head with perspiration. Mr. Green was a slight young fellow with pale skin, spectacles, and a constant cough. It was harder for him to beat Ezekiel than it was for Ezekiel to take the beating.
    Both Zeke and Mr. Green were relieved when Clovis sent word that he’d need the boys, that it was time to clear the fields for planting. And Zeke loved it out there on the long hillside that rose gradually above Frog Level to the steeper incline of Cherokee Mountain; he loved the feel and smell of the dirt on his hands as they grabbled out the rocks, the ghosty look of the bare trees in the morning fog, the faint pink mist of the first redbud, then the purple sarvis, then the white blur of dogwood as spring came on and the birds showed up and the woods grew green again. One famous day when he was twelve, Zeke put himself in harness with Buck, the mule, when they couldn’t for the life of them pull a particularly recalcitrant stump out of the stony newground they were clearing. Zeke strained forward as hard as ever he could. The other kids pushed on the back of the stump. Tom beat the mule. Finally, with a long, wrenching, sucking sound, the stump pulled free, spewing