The day before Thanksgiving, Rena made pie dough. She still does it the way her mother, her grandmother, and many other grandmothers did before her—by "gathering the flour into the fat". Standing with a big green plastic bowl of flour resting on her hip, she adds a handful of Crisco and begins working the dough. Then she drizzles in cold milk from a pint canning jar. She doesn't measure; she has performed this rite a thousand times, and she can just feel when it's ready.

Now, sitting at the table, she peels a big bowlful of apples, their skins falling off into long curling green ribbons. She assembles the pie and then puts it into a low oven, so that the apples can cook slowly and the crust won't burn.

William heads out to a small storehouse built up against the ridge. He unlocks the door and steps inside. Floor-to-ceiling shelves are stacked with quart jars of fried apples in wild raspberry syrup, pickled green tomatoes, stewed rhubarb, canned tomatoes, cucumbers, apple jelly, bread-and-butter pickles, pickled salted hot peppers, greasy beans (plump string beans with slick pods), green tomatoes in brine, relish, summer squash, canned peaches, sauerkraut, and sorghum molasses; burlap bags of red potatoes sit on the floor. He grabs some cucumbers and pickles and walks back to the kitchen. Pouring himself a cup of coffee, he says to Rena, "Let's listen to the boys." They slip the little cassette made by their sons Dennis and Roger into a boom box in a far corner of the kitchen. William stands expectant, one hand resting on the back of a chair for balance, the other holding his coffee cup. Rena leans against the kitchen counter. The scanner is turned off, and the quiet of the kitchen is filled with the brothers' voices singing
a cappella in pure harmony. "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" they sing. When they get to the line "Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble," their voices swelling with each "tremble", William closes his eyes.

It's close to noon on Thanksgiving, and Rena runs like a teenage girl to answer the phone. Again and again it rings. "We'll be a little late." "I'm bringing chicken and dumplings." All but one of her children live less than an hour away. She keeps cooking, tasting as she goes: "Mmm-hmmm," she says with approval. Then a thought seizes her, and she picks up a large white conch shell with a lustrous pink lining from a living-room shelf.

Standing on the porch, she puts it to her lips and blows out a forlorn, moaning whistle. "This shell came from William's great-great-grandma. They used it to call the boys in from the fields to dinner." By magic or coincidence, just as the sound dies away, daughter Faye McClure's car pulls off the road and stops in front of the house. Faye gets out, carrying a gingerbread cake. As she heads up the path, her mother waits on the porch, holding her hands out to her daughter in a timeless gesture. They hug and head inside right to the kitchen.

Soon the yard is full of families arriving, and the kitchen table loads up with food: roast turkey with sage, corn bread and sausage dressing, country ham, chicken and dumplings, shuck beans with ham hocks, greasy beans, black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, creamed corn, broccoli casserole, coleslaw, corn bread, rolls, biscuits, applesauce, cranberry sauce, pickles, apple pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, butterfinger cake, gingerbread cake, apple pound cake. The family won't all fit at the table, so some sit where they can in the living room or out on the porch, and some stand in the kitchen—it doesn't matter, because they're all together.

"We had a unique upbringing," says Betty Lou Thomas, the eldest of the McClure children. "We girls helped our mother in the house, and the boys helped Daddy outside. We worked in the garden and picked wild blackberries for jam and syrup. We had June apple trees, and we would all sit on the porch or in the kitchen peeling those apples to make apple butter, fried apples pies, or canned apples. Later in the summer Daddy would lay a big white sheet on the ground and pile up the beans as high as our heads. We would gather 'round and string those beans all day.

"We didn't think it was special at the time, but when I look back I guess it was. As Dolly Parton says, 'We didn't know we was poor, but I guess we were.' But we sure had lots of love. All but Gerold live right around here, and nearly every Sunday we get together for dinner after church. We gather 'round on the porch at Daddy's house, and we eat and talk and laugh. We just like to be together. It feels right. Thanksgiving is special, but we give thanks every time we all meet. We cherish every moment."