Chapter 1
1851
Monday
Morenci, Michigan
The boy lived inside a world of stories; those told to him and those he told himself. His father could draw down stories from the stars and talk to the moon.
Robert continued to explore the mysteries of nature after his father left, but over time he became wary of the very world that once held him spellbound with wonder and possibility. It became safer to experience life through books. One of those was the Bible, but he couldn’t bear up under the load of more suffering. He took to running off when words or people failed him.
He snuck out of the farmhouse before the rooster’s last crowing, in that peaceful time before dawn when the earth held her breath.
It had been one day since he was told his father was dead.
****
There was no light or movement in the windows of the parsonage. He stroked his horse’s mane and reconsidered what he should do.
“I know, he’s probably sleeping. No, he won’t be mad.”
The nine-year-old climbed the three steps to the front stoop and stared at the wrought-iron knocker, sculpted like a medieval dragon’s head. Most folks didn’t want to touch the thing and reached for the bell instead. He always knocked it on the metal plate, remembering to spread his fingers so the little dragon flames had room to escape.
Rows of metal scales covered the dragon’s cheek, and he traced each one with a gentle touch. A sudden rage, unrestrained, took hold. Robby grabbed the creature, his fingers tightening around the pointed teeth and covering its mouth; he was unwilling to listen to the angry hiss. He banged the dragon’s head on the plate. Three times. Six times. Nine times!
No one came. While slowing his breath, he glanced at Willow, her ears held upright in a startle.
In the half-clouded sky, she sparkled, but he was no longer interested in anything she had to say. It was on the day of his father’s departure, when Robert refused to come down from the tree fort, that he learned her name.
“Look there, Robby, that’s the morning star, Venus. The Bringer of Light. Where there’s light, there’s hope. She’s there to remind you that you’re gonna be all right. I’ll be back, son. I promise.”
Robert had since learned a different story about Venus. She was not a star but a planet, and she had no light of her own; her shine belonged to the Sun.
“Liar!” Though he whispered the word, he knew she heard him. He also knew that his father was within earshot, but he wasn’t comfortable laying the same accusation at the man’s feet. Not yet.
He sighed and pulled the knob. The little bell trilled from inside the parlor, the minister’s canary singing along with the silver bird, mistaking it for kin. He pulled it twice more.
Robert wished his papa could return, but not like a haint hovering in places they had been and not lying in wait in places the boy had yet to visit. He caught the blink of the firefly just as something brushed his shoulder. He spun around. The churchyard was empty.
****
“Aurelius, I believe that’s your young friend.” The minister recognized the rat-a-tat and the parade of threes.
“Well, good morning, Master Robert.”
The boy let go of the knob.
“It’s all right. Give it another tug; make it a good one. Or perhaps three might be better?”
Reverend Charles, fully dressed, was still wearing his house slippers. He waited until the ritual played out.
“Now, young Beowulf, I must insist that you ask for my help before walloping that dragon again. You’re not ready to take him on alone. Oh, my! See now, there’s a bit of char on the plate.”
He handed his coffee cup to the boy and whipped out his handkerchief, dabbing at the spot. “He certainly gets fired up.”
His young protégé narrowed his eyes and snuck a peek, but he didn’t say a word. With a firm hand, Charles guided him through the formal parlor and into his study.
Furnished to the times and the man’s wealth, the parsonage was decorated with mahogany wainscoting, floral wallpaper, and tables with fanciful turnings. Charles gestured to the high-backed leather chair that matched his own, though less worn, and pulled the seated boy closer to him.
The smell of bacon caused a grumbling in the boy’s stomach, the only sound that accompanied his tears. Reverend Charles opened his arms, and the boy jumped in.
“Now, what’s got you in such a flurry?” Though never a father, the middle-aged man soothed him as if he had raised a gaggle of his own.
Ellie, the minister’s cook and right hand, hurried in carrying a tray with a glass of milk, two squares of shortbread, and a pot of coffee. She recognized Robert’s signature knock and took note of the early hour. The man shook his head. Though his coffee was long-cold, she left without a word or a heated pour.
There was an aura of nobility around Charles Sutter, as if he had been born in a time when serfs bowed to kings and labored for barons. He would have tipped his hat when a carriage passed, but dirt would never have found a permanent home in the seams of his trousers. The people of Morenci forgave him for being from the upper crust; their minister had a good heart.
Was someone ill? Had his barn burned to the ground? No, he’d be reeking of smoke. He rested his chin on the boy’s unruly black hair, giving him time to find his words.
Charles grew close to his family after John left for California. He considered each of them: his grandparents, uncle, and older brother, trying not to let his imagination run wild.
To quell his concern, Charles scanned the ceiling-to-floor shelves stuffed with books, portfolios, and daguerreotypes. Aurelius pecked at the ink-stained edges of papers nesting in uneven piles.
Visitors couldn’t resist inspecting the absent-minded mess, shocked that he had forgotten to close the door. Self-righteous women clucked and pointed to the disarray as proof that the minister was long overdue in getting a wife, but no one knew of the tragedy of the man’s circumstance. He had given his heart with unrequited abandon. His dear love was married.
There was one more person in Robert’s family. Alma. His mother. Charles tightened his hold on the boy as if that might prevent their hearts from breaking, even upon consideration.
An imposing dictionary sat open on its lectern, a carved bone pointer lying across the page. With his reading spectacles often misplaced under a pile of newspapers, it helped him make sense of the crowded words.
Grief. Anguish. Sorrow. He listened to the emotions that now sounded inside the child’s cries. They carried a human ring familiar in every home, culture, and over time immemorial. They were all that remained after death laid its claim on the one called. Reverend Charles helped families cope with the cycle of life and death, comforting those who lived and helping the dying accept what was upon them.
“Death delivers us like a babe once again, birthing us from the known to the unknown. You are going home. You’ve done well.”
He put his feelings aside and petted the child, bracing himself for the name. Today, the youngster needed his minister in the holding and the telling. Later, he would need the man.
Someone has died.
Chapter 2
It was 1849 when John Robert Stillman bade his family farewell, off to strike it rich in the gold fields of California. He made too cheerful a promise that he’d return with his pockets stuffed with a better life, his words falling flat on the ears of people who had next to nothing but everything to lose. Well, the words fell flat on most of those ears.
His Uncle Ira and grandfather couldn't persuade Robby to join the family. The boy looked through a hole in the tree fort at the back of his father’s head until he disappeared at the bend in the farm lane.
“Robby! Come down, Grandson.”
Samuel stood on the porch, watching the dust settle.
His wife came over. “You think we’re ever gonna see him again?”
“I don’t feel like climbing up after him.”
“John.”
“Mary, I just can't do that now. Here he comes. I heard a joke.”
“Tell it, Granddad.”
“Sit next to me at supper. We'll cheer each other up.”
Chapter 3
1851
Sunday
The day Robert is told that his father is dead
The Stillman farm
His knock was quick and light, as if he were returning to fetch a jar of sweet cherries.
Robert could tell his mother knew him right off by the way her eyes popped wide when she opened the door. She couldn’t have been in her right mind; she invited him in. No one else was home. Robert took one step at a time, placing himself between them. It was the right thing to do, but he wasn’t sure why.
Pointy. That was the word that stuck to the man as Robert stared at his sharp nose and stabbing eyes. No one ever used his proper name, and that told the boy everything he needed to know.
“That fella don’t make his living by the sweat of his brow; he collects sweat from his tenants then sells it as a ‘good for what ails you’ potion.” Then his granddad called him a ‘damn shyster,’ before coughing up and spitting out a wad of mad.
The fella seemed excited by the tragedy, or at least the telling of it, and Robert wondered how many times and to whom the man had told the tale. His father had been shot in the head.
“Dead? He’s dead? How could he do that to us?” Alma wailed.
She spun on her heels as if there were somewhere she could go. Alma learned from her husband that leaving was easy, but like everything, it was different for women. All she could do was remove herself while remaining in place.
Robert knew from her worsening agitation that she was still listening. Alma wrung her hands until they got away and flew to her head, smoothing her hair and arguing with the few strands that refused to mind. Then they went back to wringing.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Ma’am. Now, there’s still the matter of the $9.00 your husband owes me. I expect your father to take care of that. It’s only right.”
Robert breathed easier when his mother leaned on the table, her head bowed in prayer, but it didn’t last long. She grabbed two glass bottles and hurled them against the hearth, shattering them to bits.
Some amount of time had passed. Minutes? An hour? Robert looked around and saw his mother rocking by the hearth. He couldn’t remember the fella leaving and wondered if he made the whole thing up. His feet felt glued to the planking. Next to his boots were two pieces of broken green glass; knife blades ready for cutting and witnesses to the telling. Robert unstuck his feet and bolted out the door.
He was blood-bound to take flight, carrying his father’s inclinations and his mother’s screams. Shock and fear, pounding, found a home in his heart. Like a sin-eater, the boy obeyed an inherent sense of duty and stuffed down his feelings and any unforgivable vestiges of wrongdoing his father left behind. He removed them from the farmhouse. And from her.
****
Jake came in and flopped his hat on his hook, expecting the smells of supper and the sounds of his grandparents returning from church. He found his mother rocking.
The widow stared at the charred remains of a once well-constructed fire, a thin layer of greasy ash coating the hearth. Shards of glass were strewn across the floor and in the fireplace.
“Ma?” he asked in a careful voice.
She rocked.
“Ma, where’s Robert?”
“He’s dead.”
Jake grabbed the table.
“That damn fool, chasing after gold. Got himself shot dead.”
Jake raced upstairs, looking for his brother, but he couldn’t remain long in their room. The rafters were buckling; the farmhouse was squeezing small. The boy ran outside for air.
His father’s heavy hand taught him to look after Robert. The family knew it was harsh to lay such responsibility on the boy, but they had no choice. This was not Broome County, New York. They were homesteading on the near frontier in Michigan, and his brother’s life depended on him.
John was dead; that heavy hand buried with the rest of him under buffalo-trampled grass somewhere in the Great American Desert. It took a strong will for Jake not to run after his brother. He had to see to his mother first.
His feelings felt mired, like boots sucked into the mud-shit that slopped across the road after a rainstorm. Jake knew there was no stepping over this mess, and he went back inside. I’ll be after you soon enough, Little Brother. After handing his mother a mug holding a couple of pours, he swept up the broken glass.
****
Alma worried that embers, snapping free from an imaginary blaze, might burn her house down. She held tight to the fire shovel, ready to scoop them up and return them to their nest. Jake took hold of the handle to ease it away, but she yanked it back.
A gleam peeked up at her from a slice of glass. When Alma stabbed it with the shovel, it broke into hundreds of tiny glimmers. She tilted her head and listened to the far-off sounds of shattering, a coiled look of rising madness on her face.
She didn’t pay attention to the commotion of the wagon or their voices; it was the pauses rolling long. Jake chose the exact words that would minimize the shock.
Alma watched two sons and four parents through her double-cracked kitchen window. Why don’t they fix that? There was a boy who had just lost his papa, and a young man bearing up under the burden of telling his grandparents that their son-in-law was dead.
“Oh, Alma,” Mary dropped hard into her rocker. “This here is the underbelly of life. Nothin’ we can do about it.”
Her father placed a loose-knit shawl around Alma’s shoulders. “You eat?”
She kept rocking. He told his wife that he needed to tell Ira.
“Go easy on him, Samuel, you know how he frets.”
Alma knew what Jake was up to when he stood and stretched. “Where do you think you’re going? No one can ever find him. We’ll have two of you to worry about.”
They looked at each other for the first time since he came home, the mustard-colored shawl clashing with the crystal blue in her eyes. Same as his.
She knew better than to argue when he rose to the stature of a man, though there was no hint of shadow on his upper lip. He grew up too fast. Damn you, John.
“Jake, are you sure—” Her grandson’s answer wasn’t what cut her off. Everyone jumped when her husband slammed the door on his way out.
“I’ll find him, Grandmother.”
****
Jake scanned what he could see of the 120-acre farm, bordered by marsh, the orchard, and the tributary. They had purchased 160 acres but sold 40 to buy supplies for John’s trip. From the Pointy Fella.
Now, where’s he at? Jake headed north.
****
Robert collapsed in the woodlot. He remembered his father holding him under his armpits, and how he laughed when his body went limp and flopped between his legs like a rag doll. The boy needed to believe that his father would appear if he put his heart and soul into calling him, but neither screams nor prayers could undo the dying on the land or in the young boy’s life.
“Papa!”
Robert’s voice bounced from the rocks to the fence rails before disappearing, unheard, into the evening sky. He grabbed and pulled at leaves, grass, and weeds. The dirt filled the spaces under his nails and darkened the creases on his palms and fingers. Exhausted, he laid his head down on the upturned soil, using dying plants as his pillow. He felt something break inside him, like shattered glass.
****
Jake looked twice at every rock lying humped in the swale. He scuffed along for hours, thrashing the brush with a stick that sent critters scampering into the night.
When the moon disappeared behind the churning sky, Jake sat cross-legged in the dark, holding his stick like a holy staff. The alternating chorus of katydids, rasping in threes, reminded him of his brother. The trills of the tree frogs became a tonal wave that flowed through the forest. Fireflies blinked like sympathetic stars that had dropped from the sky. The ground, as long as he remained motionless, chirped. It was familiar — the night show and racket, a farm boy’s lullaby.
“The moon is a guide showin’ us the way, boys. Hey, you need to find your brother. Jake!”
The boy’s heart jumped him awake, and he looked around, the shadows now menacing. Papa? A moonlit trail cut a swath across the woodlot. Curious, he followed it and found Robert lying on the ground in a tight tuck. Moonlight cradled his body and kindled his hair, black as night. Piles of shredded weeds surrounded his head, looking like an animal had been digging burrows and crafting a crown for him.
Jake kneeled beside his little brother.
“Robby, it’s me.”
********
