TOP: Bobby Dempsey washes roots in a creek behind his trailer. He and his sister Donna Jean sell the various roots they gather for cash to help make ends meet. LEFT: Tommy Vance, who owns Vance Recycling and Root Co., often pays desperate locals cash in exchange for various items they bring him to sell, including aluminum cans, old pots and pans, engine parts and rubber-coated cable. RIGHT: Donna Jean Dempsey takes a break from digging for roots in the mountains. She still wears a ring that her husband, who is now deceased, gave her. She also wears the same flannel shirt and jeans for days because she has no running water or money to do laundry.

Five miles below, in the hollow of Mallory, is a thin road lined with junk cars and mobile homes, several of which belong to Dempsey family members, who have lived here longer than nearly anyone, through everything that has happened. Seven of the 13 children died. The family house burned down. And Donna Jean, the eighth child, underwent one misfortune after another: rape survivor at 12, mother and illiterate dropout at 13, and, after years in special education, disability beneficiary at 22, the exact reason for which she can’t recall but summarizes as, “I’m not that smart, buddy. Kids made fun of me.”

Home eventually became a shed the size of a one-car garage that her rental company describes as a “lofted playhouse,” where she has placed two mattresses, a hot plate for cooking and an unconnected toilet. If she ever got enough money, she’d like to hook it up to a sewer line so she could stop using Bobby’s bathroom, in the trailer across the road, although she doubts that will happen anytime soon. Every month, half of her Supplemental Security Income payment immediately disappears: $304.17 to Lokey Rentals & Sales for her house, $50 to Appalachian Power, $20 to the Dollar Store for minutes on a phone with a cracked screen that she rarely uses. And the other half soon follows, on gasoline, on whatever her $190 worth of food stamps doesn’t cover, on helping Bobby when he needs it.

There was no helping anyone at the moment, two days before the first of the month, as Donna Jean, Bobby and his wife, Linda, watched people roar up and down the hollow on four-wheelers and smoked every home-rolled cigarette to the filter.

“I ain’t got nothing,” Donna Jean told them.

“We’re in the same boat,” Bobby said.

“We’re in a worser boat,” Linda corrected him. “We don’t have nothing coming in.”

“Other than what we go out and earn in the mountain,” Donna Jean said, without apparent bitterness, because, for her, that was how it had always been. After social services discovered her extreme poverty, she said, and took away her three children, whom she now rarely sees, she went to work in the underground economy. She had always been strong — “like a man,” one friend said — and cutting grass or digging ditches or root hunting, which she’d learned as a child, became as much about distracting herself from all that she had lost as subsidizing her disability check. There were mornings she would get to thinking about the children she didn’t know, or the husband who had died, and whose ring she still wore, and conclude that the only way to feel better was to do something useful.

Some months, that usefulness has brought in less than $50, others as much as $200. But she never felt bad about concealing what she earned while on disability. She believed she had made it honestly — never stealing, like some, never selling drugs, like others, but by turning nothing into something, which was how she viewed the contents of her knapsack spilling onto the ground before Bobby and Linda.

Out came 12 white roots.

And eight red roots.

And a bundle that smelled like root beer.

Bobby leaned in for a look.

“Ain’t much,” he said.

He picked at his fingernails, dirty from the day before.