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land—too mountainous and rocky—but all those hills were rich-timbered. The family had already started selling timber to the Eastern businessmen, who came in and clear-cut and paid a fraction of what the trees were worth. Later the mineral rights were sold as well. Hampsons had been in that valley a hundred years with just their neighbors, and didn’t understand much about business.
    The farm was beautiful, two big white frame houses cross-pasture from each other, the smaller a guest house, and a plank sidewalk built up off the ground so the women wouldn’t dirty the hems of their dresses on Sundays. The houses had full circular porches with fancy trim, and a black iron fence to keep the barn animals out of the yard. The women held church socials and picnics. They picked berries near the barn and used their big hats for baskets, then were all day making pies.
    Church was the only social life, and Coalton Church was a half hour’s wagon ride away; in warm months there was something going on nearly every night. Don’t ask me what. But my uncles had built that little church for the town, and the family gave the land for the graveyard. It’s still called Hampson Cemetery, and most of them are buried there: the grandparents, the parents, all the brothers but Calvin, who left home at seventeen and disappeared out West, and all the sisters but Bess, who is ninety now and the only one left living after Ava died.
    Ava died at a hundred, think of that. You remember her funeral. That was the old family plot. Snowing so hard no one could drive past the gate and they had to walk the casket up. Besstook the death hard. The old house was just down that road, out the Punkin Town turn-off. Foundation still standing, but that trail is steep mud in bad weather.
    All those winters the family stayed put, just ate food they’d dried or put up in pantries, and venison the old man shot. They kept one path shoveled through the snow to the barn, and the walls of the path were as high as a man’s shoulders.
    I know all this because I heard about it, growing up—I was too small to remember, really. Just a few things.
    I was lying in the grass and watching my uncles hammer slate on the barn roof. They were all big men dressed in broadcloth shirts. They swung the hammers full circle, from the shoulder, as they drove the nails. Tall pine ladders lay against the barn walls and thick yellow ropes hung down. The slates were shining like mirrors.
    And once I looked out a window at snow. Snow as far as you could see, pasture fences covered and trees gone, so their top limbs fanned out of the snow like spikes. Nothing but snow. Snow like an ocean.
    In the winter, I was the only child.
    I was with Bess at first. We were in the big house by ourselves, except for the old parents, and at times the brothers stayed a few days. The wagon was hitched on Sundays, and not even then in January, February. Snow too deep for the wheels. When Bess was a girl, she’d gone to finishing school for a year in Lynchburg, so she’d been farther from home than any of the other women. She was the youngest, and pampered. The older sisters would tell a lot later how she’d been sent away to learn to ride a horse like something other than a savage.
    Bess had been married once before; she was young and it was kept secret in the family. Divorce was rare then. The first husband? He wasn’t from around here. Seems to me his name was Thorn. She probably came back from finishing school and had big ideas at eighteen, nineteen. Left with this Thorn and went out West; I don’t think she knew him very well. Just within a month or so, she wired home from St. Louis—he’d taken off and left herout there. It was my father, Warwick, went to get her. He was closest to Bess in age and had warned her against leaving in the first place. They booked passage back on the train, but it was near Christmas and a winter of bad blizzards; they were weeks getting home.
    Afterward Warwick was very