The next day I walked the 3 miles into Mercy Crossing to buy supplies. Mercy Crossing was barely a town: a church, a mercantile with a post office in the back, a blacksmith shop, a small wool warehouse, and perhaps 40 houses scattered along the creek. There were 200 and some people who all knew one another and all knew exactly who I was before I opened my mouth.
The mercantile was run by a man named Pell and his wife Martha. She stood behind the counter when I came in, a woman with a face like a hatchet and a voice like a church bell that had cracked.
“You’re the Ren girl,” she said. It was not a question.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The one who inherited Silas’s place.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked at me the way you look at a stray cat that has wandered into your barn. Not with cruelty exactly, only with the certain knowledge that nothing good will come of it.
“Folks say that cave breathes,” she said. “Cold in summer, warm in winter, ungodly either way.”
I did not know what to say to that, so I did not say anything.
“Your granddaddy spent 30 years measuring that breath,” she continued. “30 years carrying smoke pots into that hole. 30 years talking about heating a house with stone instead of fire.” She shook her head. “People thought he was touched. I thought he was touched. You planning to live off that hole in the cliff, girl?”
“I’m planning to live,” I said.
“Not in that place you aren’t.”
