CHAPTER ELEVENBud Lassiter
Bud had wondered about Miss Hazle’s granddaughter, while he waited for her to appear to take over the homeplace. Though he had traveled to a lot of places and learned many odd things, he had never actually met a writer of books. Newspaper people, here and there, had come into his sphere of acquaintance, but they usually looked down on him because he hadn’t gone to college, and because he didn’t parrot the current “in-think.”
They’d called themselves liberals, but he had recognized in them a terrible conformity. His East Texas accent had been assumed to mean he was stupid—a river-bottom redneck. He had never corrected the misconception, for he was born to the deep woods and proud of it.
Miss Hazle had been kind to him. Nobody since his mother died had seemed to
