Chapter One.
Nut Bush

It is a sun-dappled late-summer morning in Nut Bush, Tennessee, sometime in the early forties. A meandering breeze ruffles the poplars and pecan trees along State Highway 19, and the air is heavy with honeysuckle perfume. Fields of brown sorghum, soybeans, sweetcorn and blossoming cotton blanket the gently rolling country side. Strawberries abound, and peach trees thick with fruit. There is about the scene a feeling of deep, rural repose: the occasional buzz of a hornet, the half-hearted peck of a stray hen scratching amid the clumps of cow-itch begonia, perhaps the soft flip-and splash of a hooked perch in some nearby, fern-banked pond, or a supper-bound catfish in one of the creeks. And now, out of the backwoods, comes the unhurried clop of a family field-horse bearing five small, brown children down Forked Deer Road toward its oblique junction with the two-lane highway.