Chapter 5

It took me the better part of a month to track down every part, one piece at a time.

In that month, I worked through that dictionary three times, boiled grits for ninety meals, sold sixty pounds of herbs, and dug through more than a hundred pieces of junk at the yard.

Then, on a night when snow was falling thick outside, I sat under the oil lamp in the shack and soldered the last strand of copper wire.

The radio was finished. It looked like something cobbled together from a trash heap, which it was.

The base was a…