One night, the wind begins to roar through the Bottom, shaking houses and felling trees. The community waits for rain, but they wait in vain: The intense, unrelenting wind sucks all of the moisture out of the hills, leaving an oppressive heat wave in its wake.
The next day, Hannah asks her mother if she loved her, Pearl, and Plum when they were children. Eva irritably answers that, as a wife and mother deserted by her husband, she had no time to indulge in loving play with her children: She was too busy nursing them through deadly winters, worms, and contagious diseases, as well as trying to find enough food to keep them alive.
Hannah then asks Eva about Plum's death, and Eva explains that when Plum returned home from the war, he became childlike again. After reliving the painful memory of that bone-chilling winter night when she stood in the outhouse and saved Plum's life by digging out his impacted bowel, Eva then describes how drugs reduced Plum to a baby who wanted, more than anything else, to escape from this fearsome world by crawling back into his mother's womb. Eva decided that before drugs completely destroyed her son, she would relieve his pain by killing him: She first held him close and then set fire to him so that he could die while he was, to some degree, still a man, not a childish, dazed drug addict.
