Where the Lilies Bloom Author:Vera and Bill Cleaver "Sometimes when I look at my father, I am stirred to an unholy anger. I think, God help me, Roy Luther, I don't want you dead, and that's the truth. But since it's going to happen anyhow, I wish it could hurry up and be over with things and try to fix them around so that life will be easier for those of us who are left. — "And I get scared and I... more » think, but how am I going to do this? Who will show me and who will help me? And then I get madder and I think, there's a way; all you have to do is find it."
The creators of the irrepressible Ellen Grae now show us an entirely different way of life, one which is nearly unknown to the outside world, the life of the "wildcrafters" who gather herbs on the slopes of the Great Smokies - people who are free, proud, and achingly poor.
This is the moving story of one young Appalachian girl's desperate, resourceful, and sometimes very funny attempts to preserve the dignity and independence of her family in the face of frightening odds. Tenant farmer Roy Luther's death (from "worms in the chest") poses unique for fourteen-year old Mary Call who has promised her father to bury him in secret upon Old Joshua in order to save the cost of a preacher and an undertaker. She and ten-year-old Romey drag the body up the mountain at night on top of a little wagon, but Mary Call's problems are not so easily buried. Somehow she must conceal Roy Luher's death from nosey neighbors who want to send the four children to the county charity home, a fate Mary Call has sworn to avoid at any cost.« less