she said, and Jeremiah pictured a wild-bearded man covered with boils and scabs, wandering the wilderness, shrieking at the heavens.
“But God give him another family,” the little boy said after some thought. “Four of us and you.”
“Yet snatched away the favorite.”
“Mayhap,” the six-year-old Jeremiah said, recalling that one clear vision of the golden-haired brother lifting him, “but it don’t make sense to me. As a test, I mean.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Mother swept the hair from his forehead and kissed him there.
“I just wonder sometimes if He gets too much on His griddle or something and kills the wrong feller.”
She yanked his earlobe. “Lands! Don’t you ever question the works of the Lord, Jeremiah! Nor say anything disrespectful to the memory of your brother!”
“I didn’t mean no disrespect,” he replied, “I was only thinking, Mother. I mean, a feller can make a mistake if he’s got too much on the fire, is what I meant. And it didn’t make no sense killing Dan’l Junior, did it?”
His mother’s tears served as a reminder to tread softly around certain subjects, especially those dealing with God and his brother. And when the boy was near the same age as the brother had been upon his death, a man with a flowing white beard rode up the trail from the forest. Late-October drizzle and its mist in the trees made the figure appear spectral. The boy watched from the manger as the horseman walked the stallion to within a yard of the cabin and stood it, towering above the porch.
Mother and Ruth stepped out of the cabin. The old whitebeard had a weathered and resigned aspect under the large-brimmed hat. He scowled down at the two of them and seemed to scrutinize each momentarily before making pronouncement: “We must be off for Oregon this spring. I come to get you, as the drought is upon us and this country no longer provides.”
The two women stared up at him, openmouthed. “Where are the other three?” the man asked.
“The older girls have married and gone downriver,” Mother responded in a small voice. “The boy is abed with the ague.”
The old horseman scratched behind an ear. “We’ll make the Missourah jump at Independence.” Jeremiah, watching in secret, realized that this old stranger was his father. He closed the manger door silently and listened in darkness.
“There is no easy turning back on such a journey,” the old man said, and the boy in the darkness imagined himself and his brother camped in a tepee among savage Indians out on the frontier beyond the Missouri. Mother called for him, and yet he hid a while and stifled his rasping gasps for air. The last light of day came through a hole in the door and projected a coin-sized white circle on the wall opposite it, which seemed a tiny, precise, upside-down vision of the tree line and their little cabin. And years hence Jeremiah would observe the photographer’s craft and think of that projection as the image
from the camera obscura, or
• THREE •
6 AM
the dark room
where he and his wife had lain an hour earlier had a shelf of photographs, and here was the one of the old patriarch in his only suit and the ubiquitous sweat-and-smoke-stained frontiersman’s round-brimmed hat. The man’s beard shot out from the sober mouth like a round spray of white water over a boulder. The eyes were so light as to appear washed out by the wonders, or terrors, they’d seen. His father’s image had been cut to fit a heavy necklace favored by his mother on Sundays. Jeremiah took the tintype to share with the gathering before the family house.
And if it were true, if somehow this little redheaded boy had been born with the soul of the old man inside him, what would it be like to see this grizzled image of your previous self? Not wishing to frighten the lad, Jeremiah pocketed the picture with the shotgun shells and carried it a few yards off to the lawyer, who had just finished helping his wife and child into the hotel carriage. “Our driver assures us that we can tarry no longer,” the young man said. “What’s this?”
“The man whose farm this was.” He watched the attorney study the tintype. “He passed five years hence.”
“We got to keep schedule,” Smith said in a gravel voice. He flicked a whip across the hindquarters of one horse, and the wagon started up without the lawyer. Jeremiah boosted the young dandy onto the buckboard and trotted alongside.
“Mind if I pay a visit? You’re in the hotel?”
“Please, please do!” From under the man’s arm the boy’s head peeked, and as the wagon rolled down the lane the child and Jeremiah stared into each other’s eyes and slowly, simultaneously, lifted arms to wave.
THEY SAT a while in the dooryard, this family of four, the parents aged almost half a century while the children were at the very beginning of life. After some time of sitting and listening to birdsong, lost in their private thoughts, the little boy ran to the chicken coop and the mother placed the baby girl in the father’s lap and went into the house. Sarah pulled on her father’s gray brush of mustache and gurgled excitedly. Jeremiah, staring into her dark eyes, wondered if the babe had memories beyond the six months since her emergence from Lucinda’s womb and thought again of the gaze of the redheaded boy and the way the great live oak had come out of the darkness before dawn as he himself had come out of a conversation with Teresa in his sleep. The dead seemed intent on speaking to him today, he mused. And he wondered what the professor would say to all of this, beyond calling it mystical claptrap.
As he thought of the imminent arrival of Elijah Applewood, a man known to Lucinda and a dozen others of their generation as nothing more or less than the professor, his son cried in jubilation at having found seven eggs. The little fellow ran across the field with his treasure held precariously in shirttails, Ezekiel barking at his heels, and Jeremiah started to warn the boy against dropping their breakfast when he realized that the dog’s call had another aim.
“Jake, you hold those close,” he said, scooping the boy into his other arm and carrying both children to the doorway at a trot. One egg fell and splattered, but Ezekiel was so intent on invasion that he didn’t tarry to lick it up. A little dust came up from among the willows where the lane met the road. He could see it from the doorway. Lucinda bent over the cookstove as he set the children on the floor. The box of shells was still in his pocket, the shotgun leaning by the door.
It looked to be a lone horseman in wide sombrero and flapping poncho. Fifty yards off he shrank from a man on a stallion to a mere boy on a donkey. Jeremiah met him down the lane, shotgun breached, and saw that the messenger was unarmed and trembling with fear, a Digger boy he’d never seen before, holding nothing more perilous than an envelope. “Disculpame,” Jeremiah said, putting the gun down. “Zeke! Ezekiel Hornblower, get over here!” he shouted to the dog. “Excuse me. Habla usted español? Inglés?”
“Little bit,” the boy whispered, arm extended. “For you?”
It was a telegram addressed to him and his wife, but the writer had reverted to her old surname. In his forty-six years Jeremiah had received but two personal telegrams, so he held the document gingerly and leaned the firearm less cautiously against a fence post. The Indian boy started to leave, and Jeremiah thanked him absently as he walked back to his father’s house reading the missive.
He set the envelope on the table beside the platter of fried eggs. When Lucinda sat he presented the message to her. She gasped and immediately read it aloud, exactly as it appeared on paper:
MCKINLEY URGENT MATTER STOP MEET TODAY SUNUP NEWS OFFICE STOP ASI.
She laughed just as the baby shrieked. “Who or what is ASI?”
“I