Chapter 4

Nelson studied that paper for a long while. Then he looked up, squinting at me. "Who taught you all this?"

I shook my head and pointed toward the hills.

He let out a short breath. "You're that girl from the shack up on the ridge, aren't you? The Miller place."

I nodded.

"Did your grandma teach you?" he asked.

I shook my head again.

Nelson frowned. He stood there looking at me for a moment, then gathered up all the herbs from my basket.

"That comes to thirty-two cents," he said. He pulled the coins from the drawer and laid them in my palm.

Then he hesitated. He reached into the cabinet, pulled out a thin booklet, and pressed it into my hand. "Take this home with you."

I looked down. It was a guide to common herbs.

"You've got a good eye for this," Nelson said, his voice low as he turned away. "Don't let it go to waste."

I walked out of that clinic clutching the booklet, and something burned hot behind my eyes.

In my previous life, all sixty-two years of it, nobody besides Grandma had ever told me I had anything worth saving.

Nobody ever looked at a girl like me and saw something that shouldn't be thrown away.

*****

I didn't spend a single cent of the money I got from the herbs. By the third month, I had saved up two dollars and ten cents.

What could two dollars and ten cents get me in 1968?

It could buy ten pounds of grits under the table. A pound and a half of sugar at the general store. Or, if I played it right, parts for a radio.

I'd been chewing on that idea since the day I woke up in this life.

In my previous life, Grandma spent every year of her existence blind and trapped in that shack. Her whole world was ten steps across.

Beyond those ten steps, she had no way of knowing what went on out there.

She didn't know who got elected, what was happening in the war, whether the weather was turning bad, or what the price of anything was anymore.

She was cut off from all of it.

The only news she ever got was what I could bring back from down the hill, bits and scraps I'd heard in town, repeated to her as best as a tired kid could manage.

But how much could I really tell her?

I wanted to get her a radio. So she could hear the outside world for herself. I wanted her to hear anything to prove the world was bigger than that ten-step shack.

Radio parts were hard to come by. In 1968, a working radio was a rare thing in the backwoods. Most folks in the hollow couldn't afford one, and the ones who could kept theirs for years.

I couldn't buy a whole radio. So I had to scrounge up pieces and put one together with my own hands.

In my previous life, there was an old man named Samuel Goodwin who lived in the next hollow over.

He'd worked at a radio factory when he was young, then came back home and got by fixing radios for folks around the county.

When I was about ten in that life, I used to watch him from a distance. I never got close enough to talk to him, but I had sharp eyes, and I picked up the basics that way.

After he died, nobody knew what became of his tools.

This time around, Samuel was still around. But I couldn't walk up and ask him to teach me.

A nine-year-old girl showing up out of nowhere wanting to learn radio repair? That would raise every eyebrow in the hollow.

So I worked out a different way. Every time I went down the hill to sell herbs and passed by Samuel's place, I'd crouch beside the fence and watch him work.

He set up a table in his yard, with folks gathered around waiting their turn to get their radios fixed.

I'd blend into the crowd, keeping low, my eyes locked on his hands as he took things apart, reconnected wires, soldered joints, and tuned the dials.

Between the hazy memories from my old life and the sharp watching I did now, the pieces came together in my head pretty quickly.

After three visits, I had the whole setup of a crystal radio mapped out in my mind.

I knew what I needed: a germanium diode, some magnet wire, a variable capacitor, a pair of high-impedance headphones, and copper wire for the antenna.

I could sometimes find the diode and magnet wire at the junkyard.

The capacitor was the tough one. I'd have to figure that out some other way.

As for the headphones, I remembered from my previous life that the post office in town had once cleared out a batch of old telephone receivers and thrown them on the scrap heap.

With a little tinkering, those receivers could be turned into working headphones.

I scratched a list onto a scrap of paper and started hunting for each part, one piece at a time.

Bob at the scrapyard already knew me by now.

Every time I showed up, he'd help me pick through the piles to see if there was anything worth taking.

"Girl, what in the world are you doing with all this junk?" he'd ask.

I'd smile and wave my hands, trying to show him. He never really understood, but he'd shake his head and let me take the stuff anyway.