mountain man in deer leather, came to the cabin with the story and something of the boy’s outfit, the felt hat and powder horn, and that was all Jeremiah knew of it. His brother drowned, and his father wandered off without explanation—so the story went. Jeremiah had that one picture in his mind of the brother carrying him but nary a one of their father besides a vague, bearded shadow presence near Mother at the fireplace. The old man was remote as God throughout the boy’s childhood, his absence a bitter reminder of Jeremiah’s cursed health and lineage.
Out of the loss of husband and her favorite child, out of the months and hardwood seasons of stoical darkness and snow and silences, came a new bond with Mother and her ancient Bible. While she had the girls dig, plant, milk, and toil in their clearing in the woods, Mother and the son who should have died, youngest of a brood of five, began the Old Testament. Jeremiah placed verse to memory, then discovered the sense of deciphering sound from letters on the frail pages. The book was large and leather-bound with a Latin missal as appendix, and Jeremiah spent hours tracing its tiny letters with his fingers and giving them voice, even the ancient Romantic tongue. By his seventh birthday he was the best reader between two rivers of Eastern Missouri. The words floated up from the tender pages with a musty scent as of sorrel mushrooms hidden beneath a cover of dried leaves, and the boy devoured them quickly.
Mother was Pennsylvania Dutch and had been given to Father, a long-bearded, frightening, melancholy stranger from Virginia, when she was little more than a child. He was an apprentice to a local smith her father traded with and was thought to be a man of great faith who’d suffered a great loss. She wept nightly the month before and after the marriage, but her heart warmed to the new life as mother to a darling boy in a cabin the couple built by hand in the Missouri Territory. In conversation with Jeremiah, she likened Daniel to Job, a man who had been tested to the limits of his faith with a previous wife and three children killed by Indians in Kentucky and tested further, when given a second family with her later in his life, when God took his first and favorite son in a wilderness flood.
“He’s testing him even to this day,” she said, and Jeremiah pictured a wild-bearded man covered with boils and scabs, wandering the wilderness, shrieking at the heavens.
“But God give him another family,” the little boy said after some thought. “Four of us and you.”
“Yet snatched away the favorite.”
“Mayhap,” the six-year-old Jeremiah said, recalling that one clear vision of the golden-haired brother lifting him, “but it don’t make sense to me. As a test, I mean.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Mother swept the hair from his forehead and kissed him there.
“I just wonder sometimes if He gets too much on His griddle or something and kills the wrong feller.”
She yanked his earlobe. “Lands! Don’t you ever question the works of the Lord, Jeremiah! Nor say anything disrespectful to the memory of your brother!”
“I didn’t mean no disrespect,” he replied, “I was only thinking, Mother. I mean, a feller can make a mistake if he’s got too much on the fire, is what I meant. And it didn’t make no sense killing Dan’l Junior, did it?”
His mother’s tears served as a reminder to tread softly around certain subjects, especially those dealing with God and his brother. And when the boy was near the same age as the brother had been upon his death, a man with a flowing white beard rode up the trail from the forest. Late-October drizzle and its mist in the trees made the figure appear spectral. The boy watched from the manger as the horseman walked the stallion to within a yard of the cabin and stood it, towering above the porch.
Mother and Ruth stepped out of the cabin. The old whitebeard had a weathered and resigned aspect under the large-brimmed hat. He scowled down at the two of them and seemed to scrutinize each momentarily before making pronouncement: “We must be off for Oregon this spring. I come to get you, as the drought is upon us and this country no longer provides.”
The two women stared up at him, openmouthed. “Where are the other three?” the man asked.
“The older girls have married and gone downriver,” Mother responded in a small voice. “The boy is abed with the ague.”
The old horseman scratched behind an ear. “We’ll make the Missourah jump at Independence.” Jeremiah, watching in secret, realized that this old stranger was his father. He closed the manger door silently and listened in darkness.
“There is no easy turning back on such a journey,” the old man said, and the boy in the darkness imagined himself and his brother camped in a tepee among savage Indians out on the frontier beyond the Missouri. Mother called for him, and yet he hid a while and stifled his rasping gasps for air. The last light of day came through a hole in the door and projected a coin-sized white circle on the wall opposite it, which seemed a tiny, precise, upside-down vision of the tree line and their little cabin. And years hence Jeremiah would observe the photographer’s craft and think of that projection as the image
from the camera obscura, or
• THREE •
6 AM
the dark room
where he and his wife had lain an hour earlier had a shelf of photographs, and here was the one of the old patriarch in his only suit and the ubiquitous sweat-and-smoke-stained frontiersman’s round-brimmed hat. The man’s beard shot out from the sober mouth like a round spray of white water over a boulder. The eyes were so light as to appear washed out by the wonders, or terrors, they’d seen. His father’s image had been cut to fit a heavy necklace favored by his mother on Sundays. Jeremiah took the tintype to share with the gathering before the family house.
And if it were true, if somehow this little redheaded boy had been born with the soul of the old man inside him, what would it be like to see this grizzled image of your previous self? Not wishing to frighten the lad, Jeremiah pocketed the picture with the shotgun shells and carried it a few yards off to the lawyer, who had just finished helping his wife and child into the hotel carriage. “Our driver assures us that we can tarry no longer,” the young man said. “What’s this?”
“The man whose farm this was.” He watched the attorney study the tintype. “He passed five years hence.”
“We got to keep schedule,” Smith said in a gravel voice. He flicked a whip across the hindquarters of one horse, and the wagon started up without the lawyer. Jeremiah boosted the young dandy onto the buckboard and trotted alongside.
“Mind if I pay a visit? You’re in the hotel?”
“Please, please do!” From under the man’s arm the boy’s head peeked, and as the wagon rolled down the lane the child and Jeremiah stared into each other’s eyes and slowly, simultaneously, lifted arms to wave.
THEY SAT a while in the dooryard, this family of four, the parents aged almost half a century while the children were at the very beginning of life. After some time of sitting and listening to birdsong, lost in their private thoughts, the little boy ran to the chicken coop and the mother placed the baby girl in the father’s lap and went into the house. Sarah pulled on her father’s gray brush of mustache and gurgled excitedly. Jeremiah, staring into her dark eyes, wondered if the babe had memories beyond the six months since her emergence
