Summary

The novel opens before Chapter 1 with a two-page section told in the third person titled, “Kentucky, 1936” (1). A librarian and her mule stop up short as they see a body swaying on a branch in front of them with a rope around its neck. In the dirt below the man lies a baby, crying. A sock falls off of a “cerulean-blue” foot and lands next to the baby’s head (2). The librarian looks at her own “cobalt- blue flesh” then back at the body, thinking about how they are bound together to the tough Kentucky land (2).

Chapter One begins at the new year in 1936, presumably before the previous section. Pa gets out a courting candle and lights it on the porch of their one-room log house, hoping to get his daughter Cussy Mary Carter married. This would mean she would quit the “Pack Horse...