Free To Make My Bread by Grace Lumpkin

the cord instead of some woman who knew her business. He knew because he had ears with which to listen to the grown-ups talk. He was a little vague about all the details of the business. But it must have been very important, for it had brought him into the world.
    To wash the rest of his body John raised the pan high above his head with both skinny little arms and tipped the pan. The water came down on his head and shoulders. It splashed from his shoulders and touched the prominent parts of his body, and trickled along the curved indentation down his back that was like the shallow bed of a stream.
    He ran up and down the spring path in the early sunshine to dry. He trotted like the preacher’s horse, as it came up the road to church. At the end of the trot he halted at the sassafras bush and nibbled at the leaves. His upper lip curled back and his teeth clicked together, except where two were missing. Reluctantly he put on his jeans when he heard Emma calling.
    At the cabin Emma looked him over and was satisfied. With his hair slicked back with water, the boy looked as clean as a peeled hickory.
    Basil was having trouble with his shoes. Preacher Warren had given him an old pair of his own. The day before to make them bright and shining Basil had taken some molasses and mixed it with soot from the chimney into a black paste. Rubbed with the paste, the shoes looked quite new. In his pride Basil had put the shoes on when he got up, though he would have to take them off later to walk across Thunderhead. From the very first moment he put them on the flies began to settle on the molasses. Basil shook one foot and then the other. Some of the flies left the shoes, but most of them were stuck fast. Those that had left came back again and settled so that their legs were caught in the mess. And after getting stuck from their own foolishness they buzzed their distress and struggled frantically to get off.
    Their distress was not greater than Basil’s. At last he was forced to scrape off the whole mess, flies and molasses together, with a stick, and wipe the shoes clean with leaves. He still looked harassed as he went up the trail, with the shoes in his hand and the bundle of baptizing clothes slung across his back. Kirk did not go with him. He waited until Basil was out of sight and struck off to the left, making for the short cut over Barren She Mountain.
    On the meadow side, near Laurel Creek, the gray cliff of Barren She Mountain was split open from top to bottom. In the space between the two walls there were enough jagged projections to make a rough stairway to the top. From these the trail led to the McClure cabin. This short cut was a hard climb both ways and few people used it from the south side unless like Kirk they wished to pass the Hawkins’ cabin that was at one side of Swain’s meadow. But there was an important reason for the use of the trail from the north on the meadow side. In a little hollow halfway up the mountain there was a small still. The narrow stream that ran by this still dripped over the face of the cliff. Occasionally when some careless person dropped sour mash full of carbonic acid and alcohol into the stream the stink was strong enough to make a pig squeal. Sometimes cattle pastured in Swain’s meadow had been known to get drunk from licking the water that came over the face of the cliff. This had happened perhaps once, only. But the tale went around and even the children knew where the still was located.
    Because of it Emma was sorry to see Kirk taking the short cut. She knew he had begun to drink, and she meant to say nothing against it. He was almost a man. But on this day when his brother was to be baptized she wished for Kirk to be sober and thoughtful. She, herself, went about looking sober enough for both of them as she prepared the lunch. Her two oldest were grown men—almost. They were going different ways. And where those ways would lead them only the Lord could