"My father, Wood Hume, worked for the railroad. We followed him from town to town through Texas and Louisiana in the tomato-red sun that sank into the plains. I learned to read on highway signs." So begins the beautifully told story of Rachel and her itinerant Southern family.
Sometimes the Humes lived in the Cajun town of Pole Cat Creek, Louisiana, where the children washed cotton bins, but the most permanent home for the 11 children was with their grandmother in Madill, Texas. There the young and naive Rachel meets and begins an awkward courtship with Jim, a soldier at the nearby army base whom Rachel's grandma immediately sizes up and pronounces "the enemy."
Rachel's rich religious and family background leave her unprepared for married life in the barracks, where the other young women shock Rachel by smoking and having affairs. Profoundly homesick, Rachel almost dies in childbirth. She must resolve the differences in her new adult life with memories of a beloved childhood.
Jacket art: Carrots Relocating by Kathy Callaway.
ISBN 1-55921-183-0, Moyer Bell, Wakefield, RI, 1996
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