Chapter 1 Summary

Jay Berry, the narrator and protagonist, is a fourteen-year-old boy who was born c. 1880 in Missouri. Jay Berry is a twin to his sister Daisy. While Jay Berry is healthy and well-formed, Daisy is born with a deformed right leg and must use a crutch to get around. Nevertheless, both Jay Berry and Daisy are happy children. They live with their mother and father in a traditional nuclear family. Jay Berry's father is a hard-working farmer and his mother is a religious woman who is very small, about 100 pounds. When Jay Berry is a newborn his parents inherit sixty acres of farmland in Oklahoma from Jay Berry's maternal grandfather. Jay Berry's grandfather is a store owner in the so-called Cherokee Lands of Oklahoma, near the Illinois River. He traded goods for sixty acres of land and then gave the land to his daughter...