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can’t stand to see the way you’re growing up. I don’t know where you get all those crazy ideas you come up with.”
    Rhoda looked down, caught off guard by the tears. No matter how many times he pulled that with the tears she fell for it for a moment. The summer forest was all around them, soft deep earth beneath their feet, morning light falling through the leaves, and the things that passed between them were too hard to understand. Their brown eyes met and locked and after that they were bound to start an argument for no one can bear to be that happy or that close to another human being.
    â€œWell, I’ll tell you one thing,” Rhoda said. “It’s a free country and I can smoke if I want to and you can’t keep me from doing it by locking me up in a trailer with some poor white trash.”
    â€œWhat did you say?” he said, getting a look on his face that would have scared a grown man to death. “What did you just say, Rhoda?”
    â€œI said I’m sick and tired of being locked up in that damned old trailer with those corny people and nothing to read but religious magazines. I want to get some cigarettes and I want you to take me home so I can see my friends and get my column written for next week.”
    â€œOh, God, Sister.” he said. “Haven’t I taught you anything? Maud Samples is the salt of the earth. That woman raised seven children. She knows things you and I will never know as long as we live.”
    â€œWell, no she doesn’t,” Rhoda said. “She’s just an old white trash country woman and if Momma knew where I was she’d have a fit.”
    â€œYour momma is a very stupid person,” he said. “And I’m sorry I ever let her raise you.” He turned his back to her then and stalked on out of the woods to a road that ran like a red scar up the side of the mountain. “Come on,” he said. “I’m going to take you up there and show you where coal comes from. Maybe you can learn one thing this week.”
    â€œI learn things all the time,” she said. “I already know more than half the people I know…I know…”
    â€œPlease don’t talk anymore this morning,” he said. “I’m burned out talking to you.”
    He put her into a jeep and began driving up the steep unpaved road. In a minute he was feeling better, cheered up by the sight of the big Caterpillar tractors moving dirt. If there was one thing that always cheered him up it was the sight of a big shovel moving dirt. “This is Blue Gem coal,” he said. “The hardest in the area. See the layers. Topsoil, then gravel and dirt or clay, then slate, then thirteen feet of pure coal. Some people think it was made by dinosaurs. Other people think God put it there.”
    â€œThis is it?” she said. “This is the mine?” It looked like one of his road construction projects. Same yellow tractors, same disorderly activity. The only difference seemed to be the huge piles of coal and a conveyor belt going down the mountain to a train.
    â€œThis is it,” he said. “This is where they stored the old dinosaurs.”
    â€œWell, it is made out of dinosaurs,” she said. “There were a lot of leaves and trees and dinosaurs and then they died and the coal and oil is made out of them.”
    â€œAll right,” he said. “Let’s say I’ll go along with the coal. But tell me this, who made the slate then? Who put the slate right on top of the coal everywhere it’s found in the world? Who laid the slate down on top of the dinosaurs?”
    â€œI don’t know who put the slate there,” she said. “We haven’t got that far yet.”
    â€œYou haven’t got that far?” he said. “You mean the scientists haven’t got as far as the slate yet? Well, Sister, that’s the problem with you folks that evolved out of monkeys. You’re still