In the kitchen Eli peeled and grated three large potatoes into a bowl, added a palmful of mustard seeds, a heavy pinch of dried dandelion, a tablespoon of ground pepper, and just enough water and flour to make a sticky ball. His hands worked on their own, his mind given over to the letter in his pocket, the sweet smell it carried, and the new fears he had now because of it. He was lucky it arrived today, though—he knew that. The regular postman, Smith, was down with a fever, and a man from Moorhead had come out to handle the mail. Smith, of course, would have noted the feminine hand on the envelope and made sure to deliver it in person to their house.

By the time Eli started back to the store, Danny had been tucked into bed, their mother’s, and all the shades had been drawn. The poultice covered his forehead and eyes. Eli took the long way back, stopping to climb the half-dead cottonwood that leaned out over the river, its wide trunk offering a saddlelike seat that Eli leaned back against, trying to calm himself. His heart was beating inside his ears and pulsing in his neck. His hands were weak. He forced himself to take long breaths, and when his heart slowed, he took out his jackknife and sliced open the envelope, careful not to damage the letter inside, which was written in the same hand, though the ink was a different color, not black but a shade of purple that made Eli think of the veins on the tender side of a woman’s wrist. In the upper left-hand-corner was the return address—1020 5th Avenue North, Bismarck, Dakota—and in the upper right, the date: September 10th, 1886.

Dear Ulysses,

I trust this letter finds you healthy and rested from what must have been a difficult journey. It would have meant so very much to Jim that you came, and for me your visit, I hope you know, was a burst of sun in a long gray season.

I’ve been fine and busy since you left . . .

Eli scanned down the page, registering her mention of a garden—ripening pumpkins and late tomatoes—house painters, a new pastor at church, pleasant weather. Then, toward the bottom of the page, her words caught him up again:

Although I wouldn’t wish upon you or anyone else the loneliness I know, at least I can say now that my heart is capable of human feeling again. Thank you. And if future travels bring you this way, you would be more than welcome. But you know as much already.

Yours,

Laura Powers

For half a minute the interior of Eli’s skull was sparkly and white, like his mother’s kitchen on baking days when the air was full of flour, the sun pouring in through the window. Then his head cleared. Above the river a mallard set its wings, tilted in a fast drop to the water, and skated into the calm pool inside the river’s bend. Eli’s stomach twisted inside him. His parents had always been happy together, hadn’t they—except for that fight over the promissory note? Hadn’t they made a habit of taking walks in the evening, holding hands? Hadn’t he spied them kissing sometimes, early mornings down by the outhouse, or after dark beneath the drooping branches of the old birch? Or was that long ago now? He thought about last winter, not even a year past, when his father managed to offend the entire congregation of Our Savior’s, and soon after, lose most of his carpentry jobs, notably the schoolhouse contract. He remembered, too, watching his father pummel a man at the train depot and lose that job also—justified though he had been. All of this leading to their money problems, and finally his leaving. Something had happened with his father, that was certain, something Eli didn’t understand. Yet he was just as certain—or at least determined to be—that one day everything would be set straight.

But whowas this Laura Powers from Bismarck, and how had his father come to know her? Why would he go and visit her? What did she have to do with anything related to their family? And what did that mean: a burst of sun in a long gray season?

Eli supposed the right thing to do was to take the letter home and show it to his mother, yet he dismissed the notion out of hand, because he knew this about women, or thought he did—that jealousy could make them incautious and at times irrational. If he showed her the letter, she’d likely decide that Ulysses was lost to her and give up on him, and then, when he did come home, confront him in a way that would drive him off for good.

In the first days of his father’s absence, Eli had decided he was obliged, on behalf of his mother, to go off and find him. Each week he’d put aside from his wages a dollar and a half and hid it in the loft where he and Danny slept, behind a loose board in the wall. The money was still there, more of it now. He checked on it every day, counted it to make sure his brother hadn’t stumbled across it. He’d also squirreled away a loaf of his mother’s bread and half a dozen eggs that he boiled up one day while she weeded the garden. Then late one night in the middle of August—it was the same night the summer’s long pattern of windless days and thick fogs finally broke—he’d stolen outside and sneaked through town to the depot, where he waited behind the water tank for the eastbound night freight. Partly it was the weather—rain, lightning, a terrific wind—and partly the fear of leaving his mother and brother behind, but mostly it was the image of himself in a rattling boxcar, alone and hurtling east toward St. Paul, a city he’d never visited, that made him turn around and walk back home in the driving rain. There was no evidence, after all, beyond his mother’s hunch, that St. Paul was the place to start looking. In fact next time he’d be heading west when he left, not east, his destination certain—at least the first leg of it would be—and nothing was going to stop him.