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1

I was three months from thirteen when Mama and I stepped off the carriage in the Mississippi River town of Reliance. We carried between us one tattered carpetbag and a hatbox of balding crushed velvet filled with lace-making and sewing notions. And we carried a marriage proposal from a Mr. Lyman Dryfus.

Two other passengers, a consumptive old farmer and a woman in a foreign looking dress, heaved their trunks and disappeared into the arms and wagons of loved ones. The coachman hissed low obscenities to his team; then he, too, continued up Grafton Road, leaving Mama and me alone together on the outskirts of a brick-and-mortar town that looked ready to tumble from the limestone bluffs above. A white haze veiled the sun. Farmland yawned westward while the river pressing south seemed to me the source and end of all the changing colors quilting the Illinois shore.

“Read it to me again,” Mama said. Upriver, a cannon boomed from a trolling steamer, all but its twin stacks, hidden by a thin, tree- lined island. “Madelyn.”

“Said wait by the river road. Don’t see no other river. No other road.” 

“Don’t be smart.” Mama coiled a strand of hair around one f inger, sucked the split ends to a point; she gave her skirts and petticoats a shake as one would freshen long-shelved linen, and then we both became conscious of the figure hulking in the shade of a nearby oak. He was wide through the eyes, his chin studded with soft blond whiskers and angry red blemishes, and his long arms and legs had a dumb restless look about them. I slipped behind Mama, pulled my bonnet low.

“Miss Rebecca Branch?” he asked.

Beautiful women, like Mama, only pretend to be unconscious of the effect their looks have upon men. On the train to Alton, her practiced scowl warded off uninvited attention, and the smile she gave this man—no, boy, a great big boy, slumping into the light— strained Mama’s neck and shoulders. We had been expecting a man with a steady business and dependable income, so his age and the frayed legs of his trousers were suspect.

The cannon boomed. The boy, recovering himself, nodded toward the steam trail. “A girl’s gone missing.”

“That’s terrible,” she said. The boy shrugged.

“If she drowned, they’re looking too far up current.” He deliberated, craning his neck to see me. “Isn’t there only meant to be one of you?”

But Mama, stepping quickly forward, captured his full attention. “And you are Mr—?”

The boy blushed. “It’s Hanley. Just Hanley. Mr. Dryfus’s devil. Work for him. But I’m joining to fight out west, soon as I’m old enough.”

“Hanley, then,” she said and taking him by the sleeve, left me to mind the bags. “Take us to Mr. Dryfus.”

Even with her humble trousseau, Mama maintained the entire journey a desperate, hopeful pride, which earned at once the slack- jawed admiration of men and the denigration of women—and made her even more a mystery to me than normal. In the days that must surely precede her wedding, she planned to stitch every scrap of lace she’d made about the collar and cuffs of her Sunday dress, in the hope that Mr. Dryfus would find her attire frugal, as opposed to poor. For in correspondence with Mr. Dryfus, Mama (that is to say I, because Mama never learned to read or write well) led him to believe she stood to inherit a respectable sum and a modest estate from an aged aunt, who, unfortunately for all involved, did not exist. Except for her hands—square, and callused as a man’s— Mama could pass for twenty. But there was no benevolent aunt, no money, no land.

And of course, I did not exist in the mind of Mr. Dryfus.

No other advertisements in the Matrimonial Times featured mother with daughter, though plenty featured mutually attractive sisters, their hands full of daisies or knitting needles, sometimes a Bible. Mama decided. We both agreed. Better to make explanations as they became necessary. At the time, I’d thought little about omit- ting myself from the page, and nothing of the fact that Lyman Dryfus had included no photograph of himself when Mama had submitted two, a profile and portrait at great expense. His ad read simply:

254—A man of advancing age, adequate height, & weight, with a steady business and dependable income, seeks energetic wife, f it and healthy, with a strong physiognomy. No Catholics.

He was a man. He owned a house, a business. I liked the sound of his name, Lyman Dryfus. Neither of us had known the meaning of the word physiognomy. Dot, the widow with whom we had been living—and very much a mother to us both—decided it must mean beauty, a “strong beauty,” especially since there had been no other mention of appearances. Her dying wish was that we stay this side of the Mississippi, as if that muddy gash separating East from West would prove, even for her spirit, insurmountable, farther away than the spirit realm where Dot’s husband, Sam, had waited with far more patience, she said, than he’d ever managed in life.

Dot needn’t have worried. Ads from men living in the ethereal West promised riches with a brand of reckless confidence that made Mama wary. It was his letters, so passionate and generous next to that ad, which convinced me that Mama should, by all means, fall in love with Mr. Lyman  Dryfus.

I hope you too, he had written, might one day learn to care for the river, to love the current’s heavy pull, its murky unreflective face, hiding alike her deeps and shallows.

And in another: After the first snow in Reliance, but few leaves stop the eye short of the horizon. Plucked cornfields reveal blackened, old-woman skin, flaking and fallow. Color drifts downriver and after the shallows have frozen, before ice locks the riverbanks, the eagles come.

Such a curious contradiction, the ice-locked riverbank, and the fierce free flight of those eagles . . .

He wrote about the sycamores in spring, the wind through the reeds, and I, who was then exceptionally sentimental, found it all terribly romantic—albeit unlike any of Dot’s yellow covered literature. I, nevertheless, felt confident in my reply.

My Dear Mr. Dryfus, I wrote. My soul is sobbing and lamenting at the thought of our great distant and I have been praying our separation willn’t destroy my tinter hart.

I tipped my nose for the scent of mud earth as Mr. Dryfus had described it, but smelled only the cannon’s sulfur leavings. I listened in vain for the soft whisper of his river reeds and could not differentiate sycamore from maple. I had expected the river to fit neatly into his descriptions, but his words had become no more than stacked stones, and the river—its changing colors, its breadth and constant motion—a living thing quite apart.

It made me afraid to meet him.

Main Street, refusing to remain loyal to the meandering contours of the Mississippi, cut straight up the hill. Redbrick buildings, two and three stories tall, presented themselves in formal rows, and the streets they lined imposed a cage over the crumbling bluffs. I could see, beyond a steep green, the columned portico of a courthouse, shaded by a giant oak alive with blackbirds. From all directions up the hill, competing church bells chimed the noon hour. I felt glances but kept my face covered, my eyes on Mama’s boots until we turned down Union Street, an older part of the town I guessed from the blackened brick and frayed trellises.

Here the clatter of Main Street softened. A trio of old men, all knees and elbows, perched like vultures on a bench before the post office, staring openly. I might have ignored them except that we stopped next door, before a narrow brick shop built, like the post office, into the side of the hill. No awning here, no flourish. Painted boldly across the shop window: The Reliance Register. Below in smaller lettering: dryfus’s print shop and jobbing press. And there in the lower left corner of the window, a curious thing: a broadsheet with the outline of a human head divided into a series of irregular quadrants like a county map.

Mama’s breath grew shallow, but she did not waver, even when we heard a scuffing behind the door. A body stopped the gold pinprick of light through the peephole. The shop bell jangled. The door creaked open to a tubby old woman. A film clouded her left eye and her head bobbed, in greeting I thought, until I realized she had no control over the action. In one long look, the old woman cataloged our worldly belongings. Her head stilled. She frowned, stuck her neck out,  sniffed.

Mama straightened herself. “Here for Mr. Lyman Dryfus,” she said.

“I told them there was only meant to be one of them,” said Hanley.

But the woman had shuffled inside, mumbling and gesturing non- sense, I thought, until Hanley answered in the same language and hurried away through a passage under the elbow of an unlit staircase. On the left, the hallway opened to a shop counter, thick with dust, branded with the grimacing shadows of the stenciled window. With a gesture and grunt, the old woman bade us wait by a door on the right and went in. We heard voices through the door, then nothing, and my stomach made a fist inside me.

“I want to go. Mama, hear me? Let’s go.” “Where we going to go?”

The voices inside matched the pitch of our own. “Don’t care.”

But the old woman opened the door, and from the set of Mama’s shoulders, I knew I could do nothing but follow.

“Mr. Dryfus,” Mama said, stepping into the room. She bent in an awkward curtsy, and though I would have preferred to stay hidden behind her indefinitely, I needed to see the man who had written so lovingly of a river.

What I found was a nervous-looking fellow, tall and thin, with a mousy, mustached face, propping himself against the scuffed corner of a large writing desk. He wore a clerk’s vest. Ink spots stained the collar and cuffs of his blouse, but not one hair on his blond head defied that pale, white part. “You,” he steadied himself. Nimble fingers fumbled for the pipe in his breast pocket and gripping it, calmed.

“You are Miss Rebecca Branch?”

His voice proved deeper than I imagined from looking at him, but neither this nor his thick Germanic vowels seemed to surprise Mama. They considered one another, his eyebrows remarkably active for a man whose face appeared otherwise void of expression.

“I told them,” said Hanley through the door behind us. “I said there’s only meant to be one of them.”

Mama’s hand fished behind her, and when I did not take it, she stepped back, linked her arm with mine, and forced her urgency into the shape of a smile. “Say hello, Madelyn.”

“Hello, Madelyn,” I said.

“I think she must be dumb,” said Hanley. “I’m not dumb!”

“Madelyn, please,” and judging this a time when explanations had become necessary, Mama plunged into our tale: how aunty passed so very recently, how she couldn’t leave me, her sister, behind alone. “If there was anyone else,” she said, “anyone else in the world, I would have left her.”

All of this we’d practiced, of course, but practice never made such a hole inside me. Maybe what struck me so hard was the way nerves thickened the Kentucky in Mama’s voice, but in the pregnant silence that followed, the lilting cadence buzzed like flies between my ears and fell dead at my feet.

“You spoke nothing of a sister,” said Mr. Dryfus. “Mr. Dryfus, I . . .”

But Mr. Dryfus, aided by that copper-headed cane, turned his back. Doing so seemed to give him confidence. He limped toward the bookcase and set his hand atop a hollow-eyed ceramic bust, the skull of which, like the flyer in the shop window, was divided by lines into quadrants.

“Some say, Miss Branch, that the eyes are the windows of a man’s soul. Aristotle believed it was the nose. A beak or a snout, he thought, might indicate the insensitivity of a pig, the irascibility of a dog, or the impudence of a crow. We are mirrors of our animal characteristics— animals, except for our ability to reason.” He turned. “And to lie.”

“Mr. Dryfus, she won’t be no problem. She—”

“She will have to eat, will she not?” Neither his color nor his voice rose, but Mama and I both jumped. “I would be supporting her, would I not? At least,” he said, and I did not like the way his voice pitched to a question, “At least until you come into your inheritance, Miss Branch?”

He looked significantly at Mama.

“Aristotle also thought the brain’s function was to cool the blood. But science advances. Our understanding grows.” He paused. “I do not mean to frighten you, Miss Branch. What I mean to say . . .”

At this he took from his pocket one of the photographs we’d sent: Mama in profile, hair curled, dressed in taffeta, a lace collar, holding Dot’s Bible to her chest. The corners of the photograph had been rubbed smooth and he stared as if the image were infinitely more substantial than the woman, flesh and blood, before him.

“What I mean to say is that I might have predicted something like this would occur.”

Something like what? Like me?

“What I mean to say is that your organs of Ideality, Industry, and Secretiveness are remarkably developed.”

He circled with his pipe distinct regions of the ceramic bust and the corresponding regions on Mama’s photograph, then looked up at her as if this had settled something between them. “But great strength often reciprocates in some great weakness. The phenomenon is the same in domesticated animals.”

Mama bristled. “Animals?”

“Domesticated animals,” Dryfus corrected, warming to his subject. “Human beings are domesticated animals, Miss Branch, no less than cattle or dogs. Consider the German shepherd, no the Pekinese, bred for the lap and nothing more, but excellent for their purpose.”

“Purpose, Mr. Dryfus?”

From the angle of her chin more than the tone of her voice, I could tell that fear and indignation were turning to anger. Mr. Dryfus noticed nothing. In fact, he showed little trace of his previous nervousness; for the first time, he allowed his eyes to sweep Mama’s person. The old woman said something. “Turn,” said Mr. Dryfus. Mama turned once around, arms held at a doll-like funny angle; she stared nowhere in front of her. The three of them—Mr. Dryfus, Hanley, the old woman—watched, swallowing Mama whole, her small frame, her full chest, her dark curls framing tragic brown eyes. She seemed to me then like someone else, a character in a book, the beautiful heroine who must be saved. I felt like stepping in front of her, shouting at them. “Stop looking at her like that!”

But I didn’t move, didn’t say a thing.

It was the old woman who spoke again.

“Now your hands,” Dryfus said. “We will see your hands.” Mama stiffened.

“Was I not clear?” He looked from Hanley to the old woman.

Mama offered her callused man-hands for inspection and my insides cracked and bled for her. The old woman bared a yellow smile.

“What purpose, Mr. Dryfus?” Mama asked tightly, holding her hands to her chest “Mr. Dryfus, you said something about . . . What purpose, Mr. Dryfus?”

“I know, Miss Branch, that I am not a young man. Nor do I possess requisite attributes, which might impress a lady of any standing or stature.

“You”—he eyed our paltry belongings—“you are not a rich woman. Nor are you likely to be. Am I right? Am I? And from your letters, neither are you well educated.”

Mama’s hand dug into my arm for silence. Oh my letters! My beautiful letters!

“So, you will forgive me for observing that your prospects in civil society, lovely as you may be, are limited.” Inclining his head at the last word, he took a step back to examine her again, this time with a removed, clinical interest, and began to pace crook-step with his cane, the double row of ink-drawn portraits on the wall as much his audience as we.

“I venture to guess factory work would prove fatal. You might meet some young farmer on whose bleak acreage you would labor the harsh seasons, yourself becoming as used as the land. Or perhaps you might find your way to San Francisco, where your beauty might win the arm of some rich magnate. But—” He stopped. He turned. He pointed his cane at her. “The uncertainty, Miss Branch. The desperation and uncertainty remains, does it not?”

He tapped his cane twice like a gavel and even the old woman jumped.

“You need a husband you may rely upon for shelter and sustenance; I a wife to see Mutter and me comfortably through our latter years.” The old woman, brightening, placed a possessive claw on Mama’s shoulder. “And, of course, a man of a certain age desires, well,” he said, looking down at the bare scuffed floor, “companionship.”

I almost scoffed at this—companionship was not, in my experience, what men desired of Mama—but now he turned those pinprick eyes upon me.

“Which leaves only one question. Your sister.”

I held tight the hem of Mama’s skirt. Of all of our lies, he chose to believe this one? Mr. Dryfus peered closer. “What are we to do with you?”

I won’t do without her. I made a mistake. We’ll go. We’ll go together.

This is what Mama should have said. With so many of our lies in pieces on the ground, she should have told him this one truth.

“She can work. She’s a very good worker.” I let go of her skirt. It was another lie. I was easily bored with tedious tasks; she said herself I was ungrateful and undisciplined, with no desire to be otherwise.

“I would like to see her face,” he said.

“No,” I said. The boy and the shaking old lady barred the door. “Young lady,” said Mr. Dryfus, “you are not in a position to disobey.”

Mama turned me round. Please, she mouthed. Even as I shook my head, she was peeling the bonnet brim from my face. I let her. I stood there exposed before them—until I unbuttoned my skin and rose up and out of myself to where I might not feel but only see.

Taken in parts unrelated to one another, I am not unattractive. Both of my eyes are well shaped, though they do not share the same shape, my left being slightly fuller and higher than the right; my left earlobe hangs long. I possess a distinguished overbite, a version of which I’ve seen in Harper’s sketches of the Irish, and I chew my lower lip when nervous, like now.

But none of these features, which to some extent have softened with time, compelled me to hide behind that atrocious oversize bonnet. I owed this particular modesty to the port-wine-stain birthmark coloring my left side, from forehead to thigh. It was—it is—a lovely shade of red, I think. Lovely for a wine, a rose,  a fine Indian silk . . .

“I see,” he said, “why you might not mention  her.”

I pulled my bonnet back down, thought nothing, felt nothing. “She’ll be no problem to you. She’s a good worker. It would be,”

Mama said, gathering herself, “charitable.”

That word hurt Mama. She considered begging worse than stealing, wouldn’t beg to save her life or mine, and had a deacon’s scorn for anyone who did.

Mr. Dryfus dismissed the word entirely. “No one gives without expecting something in return.” He snatched his hat from the hat tree. “But we can, we will discuss this later, find more suitable accommodations. You are ready?”

“Ready, sir?” “To be married.” “Now?”

“I see no reason to wait.”

 

2

No lace, no church, no preacher. Mama was married in her traveling dress in the courthouse above the town green, by a paunchy little magistrate more intent on his lunch than the proceedings. That night, as Mama and I lay together on a cot in a cramped sloping attic where I was banished until more suitable accommodations could be found, I had already given up on Mr. Dryfus and on Reliance, and could hardly believe Mama did not feel the same.

“He can’t be what you imagined,” I said, fitting myself into her hollows; her breath came quick and her nerves buzzed straight through me.

“Didn’t let myself imagine.”

I didn’t believe her. I had done nothing for the last six weeks but dream about the man who’d written those letters and neither his pinched little mousy face nor his nervous limping footsteps below matched the man I’d constructed—not rich or romantic. Not at all handsome.

In the attic were a few pieces of furniture draped in winding sheets, a pair of traveling trunks, stacks of newspapers nearly as tall as the ceiling, a vanity mirror with a long river-shaped crack down the center. Mama’s expression, visible in the two halves, revealed nothing.

“We could go,” I said. “Mama?” “It’s not that simple.”

“You think he’d be able to stop us?” “Not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

Wind rattled the dormer window. She combed her fingers through my hair. “You need a nightcap. Did you see today, the ladies in their dresses?”

“We could stow away on a steamer.”

“Stop! Stop now, listen to me.” She turned me round and cold     filled the space between us. Words packed her dark eyes, but she said nothing.

“What, Mama?”

“Mind Mr. Dryfus, and his mother.” “Mama—”

“There’s nowhere else to go. Hear? Mr. Dryfus, he’s right. Nothing’s worth desperation. You got no idea. Be grateful you got no idea. No, now look at me! Things are different now.”

“How different?” Back in Kentucky, before Mr. Dryfus’s reply, before Dot died, the husband featured only nominally into our plans. If he, whoever he might be, did not suit us, well, we’d thieve him and run. Looking around, I didn’t see much worth thieving.

“I mean to start over here,” Mama said. “I mean to be a lady.” The word lady like a shoe she was trying to f it. “We got to make our- selves necessary. Hear me? Make yourself necessary. Indispensable.”

She heaved the attic door’s iron ring and, catching her divided reflection in the cracked glass, put one hand to her stomach, forced her shoulders level, smoothed her hair and dress.

“I got to go to him.” “Mama.”

“Call me Rebecca, Madelyn. You got to remember.”

I watched, frustrated, sick with an apprehension I couldn’t name, as she climbed down the ladder away from me.

“Be grateful you got no idea,” she said. Well, I wasn’t grateful. How could I be if I didn’t know what I was being grateful for? I wanted to know, but Mama had always been a silent woman, and the part of her past she’d closed to words had, since Dot died, begun to anger me, and the anger felt, not good exactly, but filling in a way Mr. Dryfus’s wedding supper of coarse brown bread had not. Outside a dog howled. Insects, silent for an instant, pitched into their next throbbing chorus. Knotty eyes glared at me from boxes and stacked barrels; the slanted rafters became the roof of a great toothless mouth fixing to swallow me. I scooted from the cot to the dormer window and opened my scrapbook, my one treasure.

It was nothing special. No cover or binding to speak of, just a cured goatskin shell. Dot had shown me how to sew sheets of fools- cap together to make a book; it hurt me to leave my other scrapbooks behind, for I was sure John’s wife must have burned them. John was Dot’s son. For as long as I could remember, he had been sending lithographed letter sheets with pictures of buildings and views of California and had written almost exclusively about foods I had never tasted and could barely imagine: Pineapple. Mango. Banana. Dot called them hungry letters. “No one getting their fill,” she said, “writes so much about food.”

She needn’t have worried. It was no thin hungry man but a giant who arrived in May of that year. His wife was Mexican and Chinese and something else besides. I flipped through to the page in my scrapbook that said: Juanita digs her fingernails into her palm when John looks at Mama. I wasn’t sure what made me write this down or why, that night, I found myself staring at those words.

Inside my scrapbook, I kept all sorts: Mr. Dryfus’s letters, of course (there were three of them); also a four-leaf clover, a dragonfly’s wing with silver veins webbing the transparent skin, a yellowing piece of cigarette paper, a blade of grass, a torn Confederate note, nine silver fish scales arranged in a circle. None of the lilacs I’d pressed remained intact. They left behind rust-colored impressions of a stem, a leaf. I’d glued a braided clump of Dot’s hair behind the cover, but this hadn’t preserved Dot either, not her voice, which I was already forgetting, or her spirit, nothing. I knew this, but still that fragmented hodge-podge remained necessary to me without qualification—remained, I suppose, a reflection as true as any I found in a mirror, and the only record I had of the past.

Mama, who could spend hours hunched over her lace making, teasing patterns from hopeless tangles of thread, spoke little of her people or her past. Dot blamed the war for her silence. She blamed the war for everything else as well, and when I was old enough to consider such things, I remember thinking the whole of human his- tory must be divided into three distinct eras: before the war, during the war, after the war. The war itself was a knot joining the before and after. When you think about it like that, without the war to bind them, the past and the future might never have met at all but remained part of two different ropes, two different stories, two different countries.

I do know that I was born in the middle of that knot in a wattle-and-daub house a mile outside of Susanville, Kentucky—that’s south-southwest of Somerset, if you’re looking on a map. My father’s name was Landis Wilcox. He was the middle son of Abel Wilcox, on whose land Mama’s family cropped, alongside free Negroes and hired-out slaves. Mama, she thought Landis was going to marry and make a lady of her, but he went away to fight alongside his brother and daddy a good while before Mama came to figure it was a baby ailing her. Landis’s mama, Mrs. Abel Wilcox, called her some- thing filthy and turned her away, which was bad, but made some sense to me. What didn’t was how Mama’s own family could have turned her out, or how they managed to use God as the reason. She was thirteen years old.

I don’t know how, by luck or providence, but it was Dot’s house Mama stumbled upon the night I was born. There’d been fighting. Dot had been crouched for hours behind an upturned table, holding a single-shot blunderbuss, listening to artillery thunder and men and horses screaming. Given the date, the skirmish might well have been part of Zollicoffer’s Fall. But Dot wouldn’t have cared for such details; she’d already lost a brother to one side and a husband to the other and had stopped searching for her son in soldier’s faces. When she heard pounding on her door, she fired. Instead of a soldier dead on the porch, she found Mama in a rag dress and peacoat, writhing in birth pain. The bullet only grazed her shoulder.

Dot, she didn’t think either of us would see morning, tried not to care. But five hours into the labor, she began calling Mama “baby,” at ten began negotiating with God. Fifteen hours and she’d given up tobacco, sorghum, mulled wine, swearing, lustful dreams, and novels; after twenty she was bargaining with her own life, and it was this exchange that apparently proved acceptable. She liked to complain that her life had been given in service of burdensome blessings, but she never made me feel anything but a blessing.

When she was well enough, Mama ran away and left me with Dot. Where she’d gone, why she’d gone, what she’d done to survive those years, I didn’t know, though I liked to imagine she was still out looking for my father, Landis. After a certain age, I stopped asking. Doing so brought a pale blankness to Dot's eyes that frightened me from the answer; I hadn’t missed her that I know of. I don’t remember having been aware she was gone, until she returned a skeleton woman, eyes wild with more kinds of hunger than I could name. And so beautiful. Even I, a child of four, who had never considered such a thing as beauty, was struck by those spooked dark eyes, darting and catlike, those lips, red as radishes. Full lips that suggested an invitation Mama did not intend and combated with a frown, which became the shape of her face at rest. Dot peeled me from her leg, and pushed me toward her. “This your Mama,” she said, but for many years, Mama was a name, like Susana or Mary; Dot carried the meaning, and in Dot’s wrinkled, blotchy face I saw myself.

That is until my eighth year, when I endured a half term of formal education in the Susanville School. Here I learned, in no uncertain terms, that I bore a face distinctly my own. In three months I got into a half dozen fights with town girls who looked at me funny, and had my fingers rapped by Mr. Lynd for standing atop my chair during class. Mr. Lynd, a one-armed veteran—himself known to provoke older boys, then wallop them, just to prove he could—made a point never to look at me. Standing on the chair was the only way I could think to get his attention, and it worked. He threw me out. For years Dot’s son, John, sent nothing but promises from California. Dot took in sewing. Mama sold her lace and made collars from patterns out of a battered Harper’s Bazaar. A Negro named Isaiah and his family cultivated most of Dot’s twenty acres, but cotton had soured the soil and prices were too low for profit. We would have survived fine with the goats and the garden, but we ate well for other reasons. The first, and my favorite, was Hiram Cassidy Main.

We lived only a mile from town, but off the county road; you had to mean to come or, like Mama, stumble blind on the place. Hiram was a traveling agent for the Methodist Book Concern, a polite, taciturn man, hairy all over, with a burned red nose and yellow teeth. In addition to Bibles and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, Hiram sold dime novels and certain other tracts that guaranteed his customers would be in need of holy forgiveness. Every few weeks, Hiram happened by with a lesson or copybook for me (which is how I taught myself my letters) and a romance novel for Dot, not to mention a dozen eggs or a side of pork or a bushel of new potatoes or a shovel. “Why Hiram Cassidy,” Dot would say, “you really shouldn’t have. But what a shame we got no sugar to go with them berries. Rebecca’d make you a pie.” Then she’d send me outside while Mama took Hiram in the back room Dot kept tidy for the purpose. I didn’t question this. Seemed the most natural thing in the world at the time. It was the same for all of the backroom men who made their way to Dot’s house: “Why Hiram, why John, why Wil- son, Albert . . . you shouldn’t have, but what a shame we got no flour, salt, cinnamon . . .”

To Dot’s dismay, Mama did nothing to encourage these men. She thanked them as if they were offering groceries only for smiles, took them in the back room, and came out looking all the more disinterested for their reddened faces.

“Think beauty lasts?” Dot asked one night after a small, muscled farrier, name of Bindle McDaniel, left only one gristled leg of lamb. Mama was squatting in a pot of herb water in the kitchen, cleaning herself. “No sir,” said Dot. “Then where will we be? Better grab one of those backroom men, show some interest. What’s wrong with Hiram, now?” She slapped the meat upon the cutting board. “Or what? You waiting for love?”

That wasn’t it. Mama scoffed at the love stories I read aloud with Dot, just as she scoffed at unicorns or fairies or any other made-up things found in books. At the time, we had enough to eat and a place to live; she had no reason to get married.

Until that spring, when Dot’s son John came back and brought his own wife.

I remember the warmth in the air carried a honeysuckle sweet- ness and the moon was sharp and brittle through the window. I was standing before the f ire reading to Dot from The Lamplighter, a story adhering, more or less, to my favorite formula: pretty, pious, unloved orphan is rescued by a kind, downtrodden man, who finds her a rich benefactor, who transforms her into a lady worthy of adoration, so that she might be loved. (That I was not orphan, pious, or pretty never prevented me from imagining myself as one of these heroines.) “‘No one loved her,” I cried, “and she loved no one; no one treated her kindly; no one tried to make her happy, or cared whether she were so. She was but eight years old, and alone in the world.’”

At which point, Dot was meant to offer a hearty “Poor, poor dear!”

Dot’s attentions were not properly directed upon me, but beyond to a husky lout peering through the window. Mama, who’d been in the barn milking goats, came at him from behind with a pitchfork, but he roughed it away, held her by the neck between me and the blunderbuss I’d grabbed from the hearth. Still Dot did nothing but stare as if he were but an overgrown pumpkin, with awe and not a little bit of horror. “Hi, Mama,” he said.

Neither he nor his wife settled in nicely. In spite of his letters, he was very much a stranger. Dot, who for so long had spoken of her son in a dreamy hopeless way, didn’t seem at all comfortable speaking with him. She ignored his half-breed wife completely. She would never admit to it, but I think having John back, not as the skinny, hairless boy she remembered but as the overgrown stranger time and war had shaped, made her sadder, reminded her of all she’d lost and distracted her from all she had—that is, Mama and me. I don’t think it was brain fever, after all, but disappointment that killed her.

I closed my eyes on the thought of Dot and on the tears welling there and tried to imagine my way back to the river. Nine rungs down the attic ladder. Ten steps down the hall. Fourteen down the stairs. Eight out the front door. How many through town? How many to the river? How many would Mama take with me?

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