But he was as big as a horse, and to look at him no one would ever have guessed that he was not completely healthy. Sissy knew it, as they had had numerous conversations, increasingly intimate, on their lunch and dinner dates during the last month, though she was keenly aware that there was much about him that she did not know, too. They were traveling a full day’s journey from Mississippi to West Virginia to visit the country where Russell had once worked and to go canoeing there. Sissy was both excited and nervous; they had left Mississippi long before the sun had risen, and all day she had been filled with the feeling that the day was like a present that was waiting to be unwrapped. By early afternoon they had passed through Alabama and were up into the foothills of the Appalachians. They drove deeper into the mountains: up craggy canyons and down shady hollows, as if disappearing into the folds of the earth. They passed the leached-out brushfields of revegetated strip mines, as well as the slaughterous new ruins of ongoing ones: big trucks hauling out load after load, pouring out rivers of black diesel smoke from their riddled tailpipes as they thundered wildly down the twisted mountains and then groaned and growled slowly back up the hills.
