Chapter 1
She didn’t have much.
She had untended brown hair that fell like scissor-twisted ribbons over her stalwart little shoulders. Grey eyes. She had will and steady strength in her little ropy arms. Her garden. Their mountain. Her Pop.
The last time she saw her Pop was the Sunday a ways back. Atta was wrestling the old hoe through the field west of the mountain, the ground resisting. He had given her the field that fall for her own. She had plans for corn. For beans and squash.
Winter now, Pop was off to the east working behind Raze, their sweet old bay, plowing that field for soy. She could see them steadily and slowly working their way back and forth across the land when she would look up from her digging.
Then she couldn’t see Pop. She could see Raze. Raze was still.
Aunt Josephine told her later that Pop’s heart couldn’t bear up to the strain. Some folks from around buried Pop under the straight, spreading oak on the protected side of the hill, right next to the small stone that read “Cecilia Just”. The stone she thought of as Mama.
That morning before he fell, he had smoothed her hair as she wrestled the hoe from the shed, “Atta girl,” he said in his quiet, steady grumble, and gently, firmly fixed the plow onto Raze. It was the only name he had ever called her.
Atta knew Pop’s heart could handle any strain, she knew what Aunt Josephine did not. Pop could roll away the biggest boulders in the furrows, he could pull the plow without Raze. He could chop enough wood to warm her all her life. He could hold back the fevers that tried to claim her and darn the holes in her socks. He had a heart that nothing could fell. The earth simply wanted him back. After all of their years of cooperation and yield, the mountain gave him rest and took him back.
