Charlie and his family finally settle into a place for seven years. It’s not a mansion by any means, but it’s also not a “sharecropper’s shack or river cabin but had three big, open rooms, and for the first time in as long as the Bundrum children could remember, the family would not all sleep in one room” (164). This is also the first house that has a deep well with clear, clean water, and a free horse that the previous tenants left behind.

During this time, the family begins receiving commodities, “just plainly packaged surplus foods that the government handed out at National Guard armories and courthouse auditoriums” (167). The older children move out and get married, but they stay close by Charlie and Ava’s place because “[i]t was as hard for the older children to leave as it would have been for a planet to break free of the sun. The tie was still way too tight, too strong, to the man and woman who had raised them” (170).

One night, James decides he’s going to kill a man named George because he called James a liar. James is drunk, and he goes inside Charlie’s house to grab a gun.