Olive Hamilton declares her war

A family chapter about the narrator's mother. Country schools were the whole cultural apparatus of the valley — polls, dances, debates, May queens — and the teacher its intellectual paragon and best matrimonial prize, so hard-worked and so constantly proposed to that few lasted long. Olive Hamilton left home at fifteen, passed the county board at seventeen and was teaching at Peach Tree at eighteen, sewing up knife cuts and sucking the poison from a snake-bitten toe, before marrying the young man who built the flour mill at King City. She is her mother's daughter: certain of her family, ferocious about debt, and able to obliterate any unpleasant fact by refusing to believe in it. When Martin Hopps is killed in France she declares her own war on Germany and sells Liberty bonds by the bale, and the prize is a flight in an army biplane — a thing she also does not believe in. Mishearing "stunt" as "stuck", she smiles the pilot through every loop to keep his courage up.

The narrator steps forward as a character with a mother and a sickbed, which is what licenses the book to keep switching between family memoir and invented history. The comedy of the flight is built on a single misheard word, and it works because the chapter has already established that Olive's method is to refuse to believe in whatever frightens her.