The Epperson sisters lived across the street from us in a huge clapboard house that went entirely uncared for from the moment their father died to the day the roof collapsed and the fire department decided to burn what was left for practice. Daddy told me Mr. Epperson had been in commodities but had done so poorly at it that he had to take a job at the FCX on the side where he was given a pickup truck and was employed delivering salt licks to the surrounding farms. He died three years before I was born. Daddy said he was nailing a shutter tight against the siding when he was taken by a stroke.

I don't ever remember seeing Mrs. Epperson except when they carried her out of the parlor all bedecked with flowers and greenery and loaded her into the back of the hearse, and I couldn't see her then. Momma said she was a mousy woman. Daddy said he'd always suspected she was mute, but Momma told me that wasn't so. Momma and Daddy both agreed that she was nobody's pretty child, and I didn't need anybody to tell me that her daughters were three of the homeliest women I'd ever laid eyes on. They looked like old photographs of sodbuster's wives—shapeless figures, plain manly faces, and heads full of thin brown hair drawn back tight into buns.

When their mother died, they were all three still fairly young women. Eustace was near 40, which was a good seven or eight years older than Cora and Annie, whose ages were indistinguishable from each other since sometimes Cora looked older than Annie and sometimes Annie looked older than Cora, depending on the light. I'd usually see one or the other of them a couple of times a week pulling a metal