in some way, spoiled by so much attention and prone to go out on a limb. He thought of that dynamic in this second marriage, joining the big sister of one family with the baby brother of another, and how their slight year’s difference in age meant so little now, yet those family roles persisted. “Why would somebody make such mean accusations?”
He could feel her eyes studying his face as he struggled to keep Sarah from grabbing his glasses and lip whiskers. “I’m flabbergasted,” he said. “It’s a wild-goose chase, to be sure.”
“You think it’s Stiles?”
“Well...” He imagined the newspaper editor’s mean, close-set eyes. “No. I wouldn’t expect this of him, though he keeps a grudge. I really thought it was the professor. Speaking of which, we’d better get dressed and hitch the wagon.”
She fixed him with that dark gaze a moment longer, then took the baby from his arms and went into the house. Jake chased Ezekiel about the barn, and Jeremiah walked after them slowly and asked the boy to help with the wagon. The scythe hung from a support pole, and Jeremiah set it into the bed carefully.
THEY ROLLED SLOWLY on wheels fashioned long ago by his father, under the canopy of a live-oak savannah and the riverside willows, a family of four in their Sunday clothes heading into town but branching off near Vallejo’s Lachryma Montis and climbing above the Mexican estate to the Mountain Cemetery. Here on a clear golden rise the dead had their view of river and town and distant bay, of the gleaming rails snaking along the gravel bar and slipping atop the creosote-soaked bridge trestles, of the witch-hat Presbyterian steeple riding the meetinghouse roof to one side and the more rounded adobe mission bell tower to another.
Jeremiah gripped the green-flecked handle and swung the long, curved blade to clear the Queen Anne’s lace and wild anise from his mother’s grave, the thick grasses gone dry and brittle with midsummer. Lucinda, with Sarah on her shoulder, picked kitten ears and golden poppies with Jacob while Jeremiah labored. He shed coat and vest as the sun climbed the sky at his back and thought not so much of the dead here remembered by granite and redwood slabs as of the boy speaking his father’s words.
Five graves needed clearing, and when the work was done, and the blade returned to the wagon bed, and the waistcoat buttoned, he held the babe and watched his wife kneel in prayer. He noticed that color in her cheek that bespoke some disapproval and knew it had to do with the telegram and the letter of the morning. His eyes had sought hers a few times, but she had turned away at each entreaty to help the boy with flowers or coo to the babe, and now she addressed the tall erect stone inscribed
1824–1864 Beloved Husband and Father
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