But there’s something about the house of Dies Drear, too, Thomas thought. Like, maybe it’s waiting. Like, the time is up. The truce is over.

He shivered. That’s too dumb, he told himself.

“Well, we’re off,” his father said, rousing Thomas from his reverie.

“Good and off,” Thomas said and his father chuckled.

The heater was on. They were dressed in boots and warm jackets, ready for anything. Ready for winter highways and cold mountain highs.

“Can’t wait to see Great-grandmother Jeffers,” Thomas said. “It’s been so long.”

“Too long,” his father agreed.

Great-grandmother Jeffers was his papa’s grandmother. She was the only elderly relative that his father had in North Carolina. Great-grandfather Canada Jeffers had passed away some time ago.

Thomas patted his papa’s shoulder and smiled up at him. Mr. Small grinned, not taking his eyes from the road.

They went south, first to Chillicothe, Ohio, and then on to Portsmouth, where they picked up Highway 52. The high hills made Thomas eager to see the mountains of North Carolina.

Thomas often made figures out of wood, and before leaving home, he had begun a carving. Now he took out the square piece of white pine he was working on and his sharpened pocketknife. Whittling would give him something to do with his hands on the long drive.

His hands moved expertly over the wood. His left hand appeared to feel out the shape he wanted from the pine while the right hand carved it.

Mr. Small glanced around, amazed again at how his son seemed to be working with something soft, like clay. He could shave the wood so quickly.

“Wish I could stop awhile and watch you do that,” he said admiringly.

“It’s not going to be a whole lot,” Thomas said.

“No? What is it to be?” asked his father.

“I’m not sure yet,” Thomas said. Usually he didn’t think about what he was whittling. “But there’re some things on my mind.”

He pictured his mama and his brothers back at the house of Dies Drear. He imagined the Drear house drawing away from the snow-white countryside. He thought about the old abolitionist Dies Drear, who had come from the East to help escaping slaves up from the Ohio River. Drear, moving through the house and outside it. Just vague notions and parts he recalled from the written history the foundation owners had given them about the Drear house and property, the section about the house as a station on the Underground Railroad.

Thomas’s hands never stopped moving over the carving.

They stopped for lunch and to fill the tank with gas. They took the interstate down through Virginia. Near Fancy Gap they picked up the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, which ran along the top of the mountains. Misty light and shrouds of rain hung over deep valleys. White patches of snow on the ancient range were swirled by fugitive winds. Thomas stared out the window, his hands turning and feeling the shape he was making in the white pine.

“Hope we get there soon. Hope the sun comes out.” He spoke tiredly, suddenly bored with the long drive, of thinking about things over and over again.

The sun did come out in long shafts of sunlight, illuminating the western Appalachians.

“Nothing like my mountains!” he said, laughing.

“Not quite your mountains, but almost,” his papa told him.

“When do we get to North Carolina?”

“Soon,” his papa said. And it wasn’t long after that that they crossed the state line. They headed southwest on the Blue Ridge Parkway, passing along between Sparta and Roaring Gap.

“Just another eighty miles or so,” his papa said. Not long, and they were entering the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Pisgah National Forest.

The very space, the air, somehow shaped by the bluish distance, was different from anything farther north or anything Thomas had ever known. The mountains took his breath away.

In no time they found the little valley nestled where it had always been. And Great-grandmother Rhetty Jeffers’s house the way it always was.

Wasn’t a house, like houses in Ohio. It was a mountain cabin, really, planted in the valley. The cabin was smack against a hill that rose to mountains. Great-grandmother called all of the Blue Ridge “my hills.” That way she made them fit her, made them her size so she could live with them, and they, with her.

They crossed a creek and wound down a lane that ended in front of the cabin.

There she was, standing by the lane, waiting for them: Great-grandmother Rhetty Laleete Jeffers.

4

SHE WAS DWARFED BY the cabin and the hill rising behind it. Great-grandmother Jeffers wasn’t more than four feet seven inches tall. The whole world and Thomas were taller.

Great-grandmother held herself tall, shoulders high. Her face was awash with happiness. She peered at Thomas and his papa as though trying to see above a sunrise. Her hair was swept up in a ball at the top of her head. Thomas was shocked to see that it had turned almost completely white.

“I knew it was you!” she exclaimed to them. She came forward gingerly, as though she were walking a tightrope. She wore a new coat and a dark blue dress and shoes to match. Her small, neat hands were clasped before her. “Heard the car winding ’round the hills. Great goodness, knew it was you, too!”

“Grandmother Rhetty!” Mr. Small exclaimed. He was out of the car, coming around the front. He folded her close. She felt breakable. Her arms, so thin. “You look well,” he said, gently patting her shoulder.

“Oh, I’m fine, ’cept for some slowness.”

Thomas came forward. “Great-grandmother Jeffers, hi!” he said.

“Well, Thomas, you come back.” He lowered his head to her shoulder as she folded him in. “Wasn’t expecting you. Now, I remember, your mama say on the telephone you’d be coming, too.” She kissed his cheek warmly. She hugged him tightly, then held him at arm’s length a moment to look him over. “Getting to be a big old boy! Missed you!”

“Uh-huh, missed you, too, Great-grandmother,” he said.

She looked far into his eyes. “So,” she murmured, “that Dies house, is it? You all had yourselves a something! I had my chicory roasting, don’t you know? It takes care.”

She believed that chicory had the power to ward off calamity. It must’ve, too, Thomas decided. For almost everything had turned out all right in the North.

Great-grandmother’s property came right up to the laneside. There sat her blue mailbox on its post as they turned in the yard. There wasn’t a walkway, just three or four stepping-stones, placed at points where the ground became soft after a hard rain.

Thomas took note of it all. That faded blue of the mailbox. It reminded him of something—that old gate of hers he used to paint. It was nowhere to be seen. Must’ve fallen down. He breathed deeply of the fresh country air. “Oh, it smells so good out here!” he said.

Great-grandmother Jeffers smiled. The smile was sad somehow. Then Thomas understood. He bowed his head.

“Not easy at all, leaving all this,” Great-grandmother Jeffers said softly.

“Will you see it again?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, I plan to see it again. I won’t get rid of it.”

“You didn’t sell it?” he said.

“I would never sell land like this,” she said.

“Well, that’s good. I thought you had.”

“She’s rented it, Thomas,” his papa said.

She took hold of Thomas’s arm for support but stood her ground. She was not yet ready to give up the view. It was her pride and joy.

“And you never minded staying out here all by yourself?” Mr. Small was saying, marveling. He loved the mountains, but he had always been ready to leave them when he had to. College. Work. Advancement.

Great-grandmother pursed her lips and said, “You know, after supper, couple times a week, I walk on over there to the Beau Chesters, my old friends.”