“G
EAST TEXAS, 1863
ET IN HERE, DIXIE. Supper’s on the table.” “I’ll be there in a minute.” After I sank the broadax into an oak stump next to the woodpile, I glanced around at the culmination of a week’s work with more than a little pride. Course, I still had to stack the wood in the lean-to shed, but the pile would get us off to a good start when Old Man Winter comes a’calling in a couple of months. But it weren’t easy. Cutting up three dead falls on the riverbank to a size that old Sass could snake ’em up the hill to the cabin would get a feller thinking about goin’ south with the geese. “Get a move on, Dixie,” Mary Alice shouted. “Pa is getting impatient.” “Aw, he’s always getting impatient about something or another.” I ran my calloused hands up and down my cord trousers as I pushed through the back door. Mary Alice and Pa were seated at the kitchen table. I’d hoped Pa had already sent his rambling message up to the
Heavens, although I had my doubts. He always figured his long-winded prayers weren’t meant only for God but for us sinful earthlings, too. Five minutes later, we dug into the boiled taters, carrots, and salted pig-meat. Mary Alice was two years younger than me but had been doing a fullgrowed woman’s work since Ma passed. I felt bad for her not being able to do girly things like going to play parties with some of our neighbor’s girls. Still, she rarely complained ’cause she knowed it would fall on deaf ears if’n she did. My given name is John Dixon Burch, although I’d been called Dixie as far back as I can remember—and my memory is pretty danged good. Pa says I’m sixteen years old, but I’d bet a gold horseshoe, if’n I had one, that I’m seventeen. That’s ’cause I remember my mother telling me how old I was when I reached my fourth birthday. That was way back in 1850, the year she died when we lived in the Kentucky hill country. Pa called it consumption, but as I thought more about it over the years, I’d say she died of worry and the strain of trying to feed a slothful husband and two children off’n the proceeds of a rocky hillside farm.
