“School’s a fine thing,” Skipjack said, “when a family ain’t starving. I don’t think many kids out here in farm country has seen the inside of a school since this emergency began.” This emergency. There was no need to give it a name, no sense in trying to encompass every fact and feature of the catastrophic end that had come upon us all. The heat, the desperation, the rains that existed only in memory, or in the unreality of a scarce-remembered dream. The dollars that were good for only half of what they’d bought the week before. This endless, permanent emergency. The frayed hem of our lives,
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