After helping Reverend Pearl with another service in the oak-strewn park, they’d slept once more in the river camp. This morning, waking with frost in their hair, they’d tied up their bedrolls and followed the reverend to the depot, where he bought a ticket to Jamestown for himself and tickets to Bismarck for the two of them. Then he’d led them straight to the dining car, where he showed them how to rap the side of a boiled egg with a single swat of his table knife, remove the top, and spoon out the tender whites and runny yolk.
“I’m happy in a boxcar,” he told them, dabbing his lips with a pressed, white napkin. “But happier in first class.”
The prairie was brown, flat, and mostly treeless, the sun cool and white as it climbed toward the west. In every direction, endless, wavering Vs of geese aloft. Sentinel hawks on telegraph poles. Reverend Pearl had gotten off at Jamestown, bedroll under his arm, a pair of socks poking out from his coat pocket. He had smiled as the train pulled away, walking along the platform beneath the boys’ window. “Say hello to your father when you see him, won’t you? And tell him I said God is there waiting for him, wherever he’s going.”
Now it was late afternoon and the boys were standing in the dirt street, in front of a big four-square house, white with green shutters. To find the place, they’d walked about half a mile north from the rail station. Before they could go up and knock, the door swung open and a woman appeared, carrying a watering can. Seeing her made Eli’s heart sink. She was both prettier and younger than he’d allowed himself to think she might be, maple-colored hair falling in waves past her shoulders, good color in her face, a full mouth, and a jawline that ended in a fine, pointed chin, which lifted now as she tried to make out who these boys were, standing in the street, watching her. She was tall and slim like their mother, wearing a yellow dress tailored close to her body. She tipped the can to sprinkle a pot of red flowers on the stoop.
Danny gripped Eli’s arm, pulled down, and whispered into his brother’s ear: “You think he’s here?” It was the question Eli had tried to push out of his head all day long.
“Course not. Quiet.”
“Hello,” she said.
“Ma’am.”
“Is there something I can do for you boys?” She was still smiling, but Eli could see her lips tighten, he was sure of it.
He put a hand at the center of his brother’s back and together they moved forward, Eli at the same time retrieving the letter from the inner pocket of his coat and holding it out to her. She blinked at it for a moment, then took it and scanned down the page. Eli could tell that she wasn’t as young as he’d first thought. She had worry lines on her forehead and crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, which were large and light green and tired. She took a breath and handed the letter back. “Well I guess you know who I am,” she said. “You boys had better come in.”
Eli steeled himself, half-expecting to see his father at her kitchen table—but there was no one here, and the tightness in his belly eased. She pointed them into chairs and poured out glasses of milk from a pitcher she took from the icebox. Although Eli was thirsty, he paced himself, unwilling to seem too grateful. He looked straight at her as he sipped the cool milk, asking her in his mind, Where is he? What lies are you going to tell us?
Danny quickly emptied his glass.
“More?” she asked him, then refilled his glass and watched him drink that down as fast as he did the first. He didn’t even pause to breathe.
“You’ve been traveling hard.”
Danny nodded, wiping his mouth. Eli said nothing. Her gentle elegance and comforting voice made him nervous. She seemed like a woman able to accomplish whatever she set her mind to.
“I’d imagined he was home by now,” she said, and pushed the letter across the table.
“He never came home,” Eli said. “We haven’t seen him since he left in July. He hasn’t sent a letter or a telegram, nothing. We thought you might be able to help us.”
Arms crossed in front of her, Mrs. Powers lowered herself into one of the ladder-back kitchen chairs and leaned forward. She looked briefly at Danny then back at Eli. “He never received it then,” she said, nodding at the letter still open on the table.
“That’s right.”
“My brother got it straight from the postman,” Danny said.
She waited, her head moving in a subtle nod.
“Didn’t see any reason to show it to our mother,” Eli said.
She leaned back in her chair, laid her hands in her lap, and looked out the window that faced east, where the afternoon light was fading. “Does she know where you are?”
“Yes,” Eli said. “Of course.”
Beside him, Danny nodded emphatically. They’d talked about the questions she might ask, rehearsing the answers.
“Because if she doesn’t know, first thing I have to do is walk downtown and have a telegram sent.”
“She asked us to go,” Eli said.
“But you told me she didn’t see the letter.”
“She didn’t see it, Ma’am. But all the same, we knew he was coming out this way. He talked about it.”
“He told you he was leaving?” She was still gazing out the window, the lines in her forehead sharpening.
“He talked about finding work, yes. On a rail crew. Or in the silver mines. Something anyway.” Eli was surprised at how easy it was, lying to her, and watched her face to see how she took it, how it jibed with her own account of things.
“We needed the money,” Danny said.
“I see.” She turned and looked at them now, her eyes bright and hard, and Eli knew there were two conversations going on here, one with words and the other inside their heads.
“Do you know where he is?” he asked her.
“No, I don’t,” she responded, just that quick. “You have to understand, I never laid eyes on your father until he stopped by that day, the end of July, I believe it was. I knew of him, of course, from my husband—they served in the army together. Jim died a year ago, but your father hadn’t heard about it. He didn’t know until he got here.”
“I’m sorry, Ma’am.”
“He mentioned Jim, surely. Didn’t he? He must have told you stories.”
Eli shook his head. “He never talks about the war.”
There was an awkward silence. Then Mrs. Powers smiled. “Men can be funny that way, can’t they—what they say and don’t say about things. Of course, your being men, it might not seem funny to you.” She stood abruptly from the table and put her palms together. She said, “What am I thinking? You must be starving, and I don’t have supper even started yet. Let’s get you situated. Come on, now”—and she gestured them up from the table. “I’ll go out back and dress a nice big chicken, dig some red potatoes from the garden. Here—” and she ushered them into the sitting room and a pair of high-backed, upholstered chairs. “There’s some books on the shelf there—Jim loved to read. Or maybe you want to just rest awhile. I won’t be more than half an hour. We can talk once I’ve got supper going.”
As soon as she was gone, Eli and Danny climbed the stairs to the second floor and began searching, hunting through the dressers and closets of all three rooms, sifting fast through letters and papers, catalogs, magazines, books, men’s shirts and trousers, women’s dresses, blouses, stockings and even undergarments, some of these light and silky—lifting them up and then laying them back with care, so that nothing would appear disturbed. Yet they didn’t find a thing to suggest that he’d been here, the men’s clothes all smaller by far than what their father could wear. Back on the main floor, they searched the kitchen cupboard, the china hutch in the dining room, every nook and cranny, working as fast as they were able, and going at last through the massive oak secretary that took up the whole north wall of the sitting room. Every minute or so, Eli glanced out a window to check on Mrs. Powers—chopping off the head of a flapping bird, talking with a gray-haired neighbor lady at the far side of the yard, kneeling in a row of wilted potato plants, a spade lying beside her.
“What do you think she’s going to tell us?” Danny asked.
“Less than she knows,” Eli said. “Keep your eyes open.”
By the time she came inside, the boys were back in their chairs, and through the archway they watched her move about the kitchen, peeling potatoes and putting the hen on to boil. Setting the table. Eli felt himself giving way to exhaustion, his arms and legs tingling, sand-filled. Danny’s head hung forward and to one side, and he was blinking to stay awake.
“You look like a pair of ghosts,” Mrs. Powers said, joining them. Her face was flushed from her work. She pulled out an ottoman from between their two chairs and sat down, crossing her knees. “You’ve put me in a tight place, haven’t you. Either I decide to believe what you’ve said about telling your mother, in which case I’m obligated to help you. Or else I don’t believe you—and then I have little choice but to send you home.”
Eli says, “You can believe us, Ma’am—”
She lifted her hand, stopping him. “But whether I should or not, I have decided I will.” She smiled. “It must be those honest faces of yours. Now, you asked me where he is, and I told you the truth—I don’t know. But I do know that when he left here, he was heading to Miles City, Montana Territory, to see if he could make some money in bones. Buffalo bones. Hearing him talk, there must be good profits in that. From there I expected he would be going back home.”
Eli kept his eyes on her, willing her to say more, holding her gaze with a hardness he feared might be impolite.
“He thought he could persuade Jim to go along with him, though I would never have allowed such a thing—I preferred to keep my husband close by. The way I saw it, Jim had gotten more than his fill of wandering by the time we married. Not to mention, I lost a husband when I was young and had no intention of losing another, not if I could help it. You see, I had three young children when I met Jimmy.”
“They’re grown up?” Danny asked.
“One’s in Denver, yes, and I’m lucky if I see her every other year. She’s my oldest. Another’s in Seattle, the older of the two boys. The third one’s gone.” She swept a strand of hair from her forehead and stood to light an oil sconce on the wall behind them. She said, “I have something you boys should have a look at, just so you know I’m not making up stories here.” At the front of the oak secretary she opened a door Eli hadn’t noticed in their search and lifted something out. It was a tintype in a gilt frame, and when she sat back down on the ottoman she tipped it up on her lap for the boys to see.
They leaned close, Eli feeling a sudden loose warmth in his chest, Danny reaching out to touch the image but catching himself and drawing his hand back. Eli had never seen a picture of their father as a young man, never seen what he looked like before his hair turned gray, before his eyes had retreated into the sockets of his skull. There was only the wedding picture their mother kept on the bureau in their bedroom, taken when he was past thirty, already old. Here, though, was someone else entirely: dark hair and eyebrows, a face without shadows or lines, both ears intact, and wide, sparkling eyes. And yet it was him: the same high forehead, long nose, and square-set shoulders. He looked like the sort of father Eli had often wished for, one who smiled for no reason and whistled when nobody was listening. He was in uniform and standing with another soldier, who was shorter, the two of them posing in front of a painted backdrop of Roman columns. In a show of casual deportment, they held their rifles propped on their shoulders, fists gripping the barrels, stocks sticking up behind them. The shorter one was blond-haired, with a square jaw and wide shoulders. He wore spectacles.
“Jimmy always told me how much fun they had, how your father was always playing pranks,” Mrs. Powers told them.
“He was?” Danny asked.
Eli looked more closely at the image. He touched the cool surface with his fingertips, trying to decide if it was a trick of some kind, or if the woman had confused their father with someone else, if the man her husband knew was another Ulysses Pope, not their father at all. Yet this was proof, wasn’t it, right here?
“One time, Jimmy told me, they were marching through some godforsaken place in the heat of summer, men fainting right and left, and their C.O. wouldn’t halt the march, not even when the trail brought them alongside this nice blue lake. And so your father, he got up close to one of the cannons and yanked the linchpin from the wheel. It spun off the axle and rolled down the hill, and that was that. The men got their rest and had themselves a swim in the lake besides.”
Eli tapped the top edge of the gilt frame. “Where was this made, do you know?”
“I’m not sure Jimmy ever told me. Likely some traveling man did it for them. Could have been anywhere, I suppose. I know they served together for quite a while.”
“Did they write letters back and forth? Afterwards?”
“No. Well, yes. In the early years they did, when Jimmy and I were first married. But I don’t have them anymore. This would’ve been after your father left the army and Jimmy was still with the Seventh, at Fort Riley.”
“The Seventh?” Eli asked. He remembered the newspaper article in his father’s lockbox that told about the Minnesota Ninth and its southern campaign—Tupelo, Brice’s Crossing, the Battle of Nashville. The Ninth had been a regiment famous for having Chippewa Indians among its regulars.
Mrs. Powers got up and went again to the big secretary, opened the same door, and reached inside. “Here,” she said, extending a yellowed envelope. The letter was on Seventh Cavalry letterhead and written in a sloppy, forward-tilting hand. It was dated June 23, 1869.
Dear Jimmy and Laura,
Please accept the congratulations of Libby and myself on the joyous occasion of your wedding. We would have been there if we could, as you know, but have kept you much in mind and wish you every future happiness.
Yours,
GA Custer
Eli handed it to Danny, who brought it close to his face, his lips moving silently as he read. “G. A. Custer,” he said, finishing. “Custer,” he said again.
“Our father was in the Ninth Regiment,” Eli told her.
Mrs. Powers frowned. “The Ninth?”
“The Minnesota Ninth, yes.”
“During the Rebellion, you mean. That may be so. But afterwards he served in Custer’s Seventh, down in the Indian Territories. He and Jimmy both. Your father was mustered out in sixty-nine, early that year.”
“The Little Bighorn Custer?” Danny asked.
“Well, yes. But we’re talking about an earlier time. The Custer battle didn’t happen till seventy-six.”
“The year after I was born,” Danny said.
She nodded, but her face was serious, eyes cutting back and forth between the brothers. “He never said anything about the Seventh or General Custer?”
“I don’t think so,” Eli said. “Not to us he didn’t.”
“It could be that he didn’t think there was much to tell,” she said. She picked up the tintype and carried it back to the secretary.
Eli was aware of being at fault somehow, unworthy of his father’s history. The room had darkened, and he could hear the wind rising in the eaves and specks of rain or ice spattering against the windows, but these sounds were far off, unimportant. He looked at his brother, who was chewing his bottom lip, waiting for a signal from Eli that would let him know what to think, how to react. At school a couple of years back, Miss Waterson taught them about Custer’s Last Stand, her voice quavering as she described the man’s long yellow hair and buckskin jacket, and the way he and his men had fought against impossible odds, thousands of warriors swirling about them on that hill, told the class how afterward the Indians had stripped and butchered their bodies, all except for the young general’s, out of respect for his courage. She showed them a painting of the battle—Custer at the center of a whirling, hellish scene, revolvers ablaze—and read to them from stories cut from newspapers. At one point Danny had raised his hand and asked, “Why did he want to attack that big village of Indians, anyway?” to which Miss Waterson said, “They had it coming.”
“Well,” Mrs. Powers said, standing above them, palms pressed together. “Chicken’s done, I can smell it. Let’s put it to good use, shall we?”
As usual, Eli took the breast meat, Danny the wings and legs, and though the bird was large and tender, the boys ate with little relish. They left their plates half full then barely touched the apple pie she laid out for dessert.
“Is there something wrong, aren’t you hungry?” Mrs. Powers asked.
Eli was tempted to say something cruel—about the food, her home, her person—anything to punish her for what she knew about their father and he did not. And when she said, “I suppose you’ll be leaving in the morning,” he told her there was a westbound scheduled to leave at ten, careful not to explain that he and Danny, with any luck, would be on the seven o’clock freight-hauler, the first train leaving in the morning, squirreled away in one of its boxcars.
She took them upstairs to a bedroom overlooking the street, the room her sons used to sleep in, she told them, with a bed that had real springs. She pressed on it to show them how comfortable it was.
“Bacon and eggs at seven sharp,” she said. “That should give you time to catch your train. Good night now.”
They crawled into bed, exhausted but not sleepy, Eli’s eyes scraping like sandpaper every time he blinked, and Danny’s narrow face drooping. Outside, the wind had let up, but a cold light drizzle was tapping the window glass.
“Do you believe her?” Danny asked. “You think he fought in the Indian Wars?”
“She didn’t say anything about fighting.”
“Custer, though.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think he’d lie to us?” Danny asked.
“He never lied. He just didn’t tell things.”
“Why, though?”
“It’s probably like she said, because nothing much was going on. Nothing to tell about.” Eli didn’t believe this, but in fact he had no idea what was going on during those years, down in the territories.
“Do you think Mother knows about it? You think he told her?”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Truth is, we don’t know, do we,” Eli said.
“I know one thing—if it was me, I would’ve told my boys. Wouldn’t you?”
“I guess I would, yeah. Unless it was something I didn’t want to remember myself.”
“You think he doesn’t?”
“It might remind him of men he knew that got killed. Friends of his. He probably doesn’t want to have to think about them anymore.”
Danny was quiet for a little while. “When we get back home,” he said, “I’m going to tell everybody that my dad rode with Custer. Everybody. Herman Stroud, too. He will leave me alone then, won’t he.”
Eli held his breath, lines of heat burning through the veins in his arms and pulsing in his neck. Sometimes his brother made him crazy, saying things out loud that needed to be held on to. Some things required silence and thought—not talk—and Eli hated it when people didn’t understand that.
“Won’t he?” Danny asked. “Herman?”
“Listen,” Eli said, “I can take care of Herman Stroud and anybody else. Now be quiet and go to sleep.”
Danny had been lying on his back, but now he flipped around. “Are you mad at me?” he asked. “Why are you mad?”
“I’m not mad, I’m only tired. Now leave me alone, will you? Please.”
“I was only saying—”
“I know what you’re saying, Danny. As far as I’m concerned, you can tell everybody, Herman, too. But we have to go to sleep now, all right? We have to get up early, like I told you.”
Danny sighed and shifted around the other way and retreated to the far edge of the bed. He fidgeted for a while, turning from one side to the other, but soon he was sleeping, his breath coming slow and rhythmic.
Eli was exhausted, but his mind wouldn’t stop spinning, his thoughts leading him into corners he couldn’t find his way out of. If Mrs. Powers was telling the truth, and their father had gone out to Miles City after bones, why hadn’t he explained that before he left? If it wasn’t Mrs. Powers he’d come out here to see, but her husband instead, what had there been to hide? He remembered the words of her letter—a burst of sun in a long dry season—and tried to imagine his own mother widowed, and the loneliness she would feel. Possibly the letter carried less meaning than Eli had given to it. Or a different meaning. But whatever had brought his father out here, and wherever he was now, and whyever he’d chosen to leave without an explanation, there was now also the matter of the Seventh Cavalry and a whole secret chapter in his father’s life.
Why would he do that? Eli thought, lying in the dark room. Why would he do that to us?
On the dresser beneath the gable window a loud clock tapped away the minutes like an impatient finger, and several times Eli climbed out of bed and tiptoed across the floor and put his face up close to the clock’s face to check the time. At ten-thirty he heard Mrs. Powers move lightly down the hall and climb into a squeaky bed. Then around midnight he heard what sounded like a quiet knock on the front door. Instantly Mrs. Powers was out of bed and padding quietly along the hall and down the stairs. A door latch sounded below. Then the melodic tone of her voice floated up in the stillness, though Eli couldn’t make out what she said. He climbed out of bed, crept into the hall, and paused at the top of the stairs, one hand on the rail. Below, in the kitchen, heavy bootsteps sounded across the floor, then stopped. In the same instant, a square of light rose out of the hallway floor. Eli bent down and knelt at the heat grate, put his face right into it and saw the kitchen table below, its oak surface gleaming in the lamplight. At the far edge of his view he could see a man’s knee and booted foot. A dark hat rested at the center of the table. Eli wondered for a moment if it was the one his father had worn on the foggy morning he walked away, but no, the brim wasn’t wide enough.
“You’re pretty sure about about this,” the man said, his tone low and pinched, a voice Eli didn’t recognize.
A large hand moved across the tabletop, and its fingers drummed against it for a few moments before the hand retreated. Mrs. Powers spoke softly. Eli couldn’t make out her words.
“They might be telling you God’s own truth,” the man said, “and if they are, it wouldn’t be right to stand in their way. Least the way I see it.”
For half a dozen breaths Eli heard nothing. Then it was Mrs. Powers again, but with more volume: “I take it you couldn’t get a telegram through,” she said.
“I had Weldon give it a try. Had him try the depot there. But nothing doing. He’ll have to give it another go in the morning.”
“The boys are leaving, though, right away,” Mrs. Powers said. “They plan to be on the ten o’clock, or so they say.”
The man’s hand came back into view and his fingers drummed again. “Safe thing, if we go with your woman-feeling on this, is have them stay another day. Give us a chance to get that telegram through.”
Mrs. Powers said something Eli couldn’t hear.
“Or we just let them go. Seems they can take pretty good care of themselves, least the way you’re telling it.”
A slim hand appeared, and it pushed the man’s hat toward him. Mrs. Powers said, “You have sons, Sheriff. Think if you woke up some morning and they were gone. Think how your wife would feel. And imagine someone had it within their power to give them back to you.”
The sheriff reached out and picked up his hat, one long finger riding the middle crease. He said, “I can go upstairs now and wake them if you want, take them over to the office for the night, make sure they don’t run.”
“No, no, we’ll let them sleep, they’re so tired. If you come back in the morning, early, that would be best.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right then.”
Chair legs scraped and bootsteps moved across the floor. Then the click of the latch, the moan of hinges, and a few moments passed before the lamp went dark. Eli got up and tiptoed back into the room and slipped into bed next to his brother. He didn’t wake him up, though, not yet, there was no point. Danny needed his rest, and Eli needed to think, figure things out, decide on a different way out of here—because when the sheriff returned in the morning and found them gone, he’d go straight to the depot and search the train. Which meant they needed to leave town on foot and try to catch up to the train someplace west of here. How far could they walk before six o’clock, if they left, say, at two? Ten miles? A dozen? How far was the next town, the next stop? And how persistent would the sheriff be in hunting them? Eli couldn’t imagine a pair of runaways causing the law in Bismarck to beat the bushes too hard or for too long, not once it was clear they’d gotten free of town. In any case, that’s what Eli had to count on.
He checked the clock again—twenty minutes past midnight—and dragged himself back into bed, heavy-limbed, exhausted at the prospect of staying up all night and having to keep his brother on the move until daybreak. He hoped the squall had passed through. His head hurt, right at the top, like it did whenever sleep wouldn’t come, and his eyes ached—but he knew it was important that he rest awhile. Ten minutes, he told himself. I’ll rest for ten minutes. He rehearsed in his mind how he’d wake his brother, whispering in his ear, and then lead him downstairs and through the kitchen, how they’d move quietly in their stocking feet, holding their shoes, and slip outside, bedrolls under their arms. Then the cry of an owl, close by, took Eli back to a morning last fall when he was checking his muskrat traps in the marsh outside of town, poling his flat-bottom skiff through heavy fog and coming face-to-face with a pair of glaring yellow eyes that hung in the mist above a giant lodge on which Eli had made an open set. A pair of wings lifted and flapped, and the owl rose into the air—but only a foot or so, because the trap chain grew taut and yanked the bird back to its perch. Eli had gone to fetch his father, and together they brought the owl back home, draping it first in burlap to protect themselves from its beak and talons. It seemed confused, stunned, like a man waking from a nightmare only to find that his dream has solidified around him. They opened the spring-loaded jaws that held the bird by just two talons and then pulled away the burlap and stepped back. The bird blinked but made no move to leave. For two days it remained in their backyard, standing immobile in the shade of the willow and ignoring the offered chunks of beef and chicken. Finally on the third morning—early, before sunup—Eli heard its cry. Through the small window of the sleeping loft he’d seen it lift away from the high branch of a cottonwood and flap eastward toward pinkening clouds.
He woke in a sweat, hair matted on his neck and forehead, shirt soaked through at the chest and under his arms. For several moments all he could do was lie there, trying to locate himself, Danny breathing in his ear. Then he pushed off the quilt and swung out of bed and moved lightly across the floor to the dresser. It was dark outside, darker than before, and he had to put his eyes right up close to make out the narrow hands. Five o’clock sharp.
Damnation.
When he touched his brother’s shoulder, Danny twisted away, pulling the quilt close around himself. Eli crawled on top of him and took a grip on his small shoulders. “Listen to me,” he whispered, “we have to leave. He’s coming over to get us and send us home—the sheriff, do you hear?”
They dressed silently, grabbed their bedrolls, and holding their shoes in their hands crept out of the room and down the hallway in their socks, the floorboards soundless beneath them—a well-built house, Eli thought—Danny holding to the back of his coat as they crossed into the kitchen and moved past the table to the front door, which Eli opened as gently as he could, the hinges muttering only a quiet complaint. Then they were outside in the cold air, putting on their shoes and running down the dirt street. Low, gray clouds moving above them. Needles of ice stabbing at their faces.
“Here,” Eli said, and grabbed hold of the back of Danny’s collar as they went.
The wind was bitter, hard from the northeast, and the sleet was coming stronger even as morning started to show through the ragged clouds that tumbled and pitched through the uppermost branches of the trees and along the rooftops. Eli’s shoulders and back were already damp, the icy rain penetrating his coat and shirt, and his feet, too, from splashing through puddles. He stopped beneath the canopy of an old boxelder tree that still had its leaves and pulled his brother close. There was a high fence beside them, and behind it a horse flapped its lips and bumped against the boards.
“Where are we going? I’m cold,” Danny said.
“Just let me think.”
“The depot? We’re gonna catch the train?”
“No.”
The horse nosed the fence again, snorting, and a gust of wind almost knocked them over. It was too late to go anywhere tonight. They needed someplace to hide for a day at least, until it was safe to jump a train or walk out of town. When the horse bumped against the boards once more, Eli looked behind them at the pitched roof of a barn. “Here we go,” he said, “come on now,” and he started his brother climbing. The fence was six feet high but easy enough to scale, and they dropped down on the other side and scrambled through the muddy lot and let themselves into the barn, where the smell of hay was so sharp that Eli sneezed. He couldn’t see a thing, but going up on his toes, he was able to touch the ceiling.
“The haymow,” he said. “That’s where we need to be.”
“We do?”
A cow bellowed at them right up close, and from a far corner a sheep bleated irritably. “This is perfect,” Eli said, “you’ll see. We’ll go up and make ourselves a little hay-fort.”
As their eyes adjusted to the dark, they stepped past the reaching nose of the milk cow and past a stall that held a colossal sow with her rooting brood. Against the west wall they found a ladder of boards that rose into the mow. “Wait,” he told Danny, and he went up the ladder into the high, round-roofed space, dull slices of morning light squeezing in through the siding boards of the east pediment. The rich, dying smell of hay was so strong Eli could feel it between his teeth. The back half of the mow was filled nearly to the rafters.
“Come on,” he said, pulling his brother up through the hole in the floor. “Come on.” He pushed Danny toward the pile of hay, and together they climbed, sinking in up to their knees and then deeper as they struggled upward. The hay was well packed, though, and they were able to reach the top of the pile and then tumble and roll down the other side, up against the barn wall. They took off their pants, coats and shirts and spread them out to dry, and unrolled their blankets and wrapped themselves up.
They were barely settled before a man’s voice rang out from below: “There, you old devil, hold still a minute.” A pail clanked. Then the whacking thud of a man’s hand against the solid flank of a cow. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” the man shouted. “Hold still now.”
In the silence that followed, Danny whispered, “I don’t feel right.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m itchy.”
“It’s the hay.”
“But my head too, like my skull’s getting brittle.”
“Does it hurt yet?”
“No.”
“Look at me,” Eli told him.
Danny turned to him listlessly, his face screwed up tight and his eyes clamped shut. Eli imagined the two of them stuck up here for days, his brother groaning and crying. “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “There’s not going to be any pain—not this time, do you hear?”
Below, the man wrapped up his morning milking. His boots shuffled against the barn’s plank floor, the hinges creaked, and the door slammed against its frame. Eli let out his breath. “What are the songs Mom sings to you?” he asked.
Danny was quiet, thinking. “Sometimes she just tells me stories,” he whispered.
“What stories?”
“Do you know the one about the day I was born?” He smiled, despite himself.
“The warmest day we’d had all spring, I know that. May twentieth.”
“He wanted to take Mom fishing,” Danny said, “remember?”
“Yeah, but he took me too. He drove us south of town, across that pasture and down along the river to Silver Lake, where he borrowed a rowboat from Jebson Mills.” The old bachelor, dead now, had lived for decades in a sod dugout above the water. Ulysses had rowed them across the bay—Eli five years old and Gretta very pregnant—pausing to catch walleyes as they went, four fat ones. Then on Mills Island they’d built a fire on the shore and fried the fish in lard. After, as they lay on the grassy bank in the sun, half asleep, Gretta sat up fast, set her hands on her belly, and said, “Here he comes.”
“Because she knew I was going to be a boy,” Danny said.
“That’s right. And Dad had to deliver you himself. I remember climbing up in a burr-oak and covering my ears to block out the sound of her screams. I remember Dad saying, ‘Gretta, I love you.’ And when I came back down, he was crouched next to Mom and holding you in both hands. You were squirming like a puppy but still covered with the caul, head to toe. We looked right through it and saw you. Dad used his knife to cut it off.”
“Julius Caesar was born with a caul,” Danny said.
That night when they’d rowed back across the lake, there were four in the boat, not three, and Jebson Mills had counted them a couple of times, pointing with his finger and shaking his head.
“I’m lucky,” Danny said. He was uncurled now and lying on his back, one arm flung out in the hay as he stared up into the rafters of the barn, his eyes unfocused, mouth lax, his breath coming easily. Eli described to him how he’d looked after their father removed the slick membrane—wet hair matted, one eye stuck closed as though in a permanent wink.
“Like a pirate, right?” Danny said.
“Well you sounded like one too. Like a mad one, the way you kept howling.”
“I’m hungry,” Danny said, yawning.
“How is your head?”
Danny had to ponder on this for a time. He touched an ear to one shoulder and then tipped his head the other way. “I’m not sure. I’m tired, though, I know that. I’m real tired.”
“Get some rest then,” Eli said. “That’s about all there is to do up here anyway. Sleep for a while. Then we’ll see about getting you something to eat.”