It wasn’t a common question in the Garner house. Why? he asked at the supper table that night. He turned and walked into the house, as silently as a shadow. He reminded himself, I will never be allowed outside again. He laid his hoe down gently, and savored one last moment of feeling warm soil beneath his bare feet. He took one extra breath of the fresh air, scented with clover and honeysuckle and-coming from far away-pine smoke. But on this day, the day they began taking the woods away, he hesitated. Even as a toddler, barely able to walk in the backyard’s tall grass, he had somehow understood the fear in his mother’s voice. He had never disobeyed the order to hide. Then he heard his mother call out the kitchen window: Luke! Inside. He saw the first tree shudder and fall, far off in the distance.
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