The farmers had run outside to protect their fields and fill their larders. They simply shot their rifles into the air. There was no need to aim. There was no way to miss. The bird mass coiled into the air and rose like a giant snake when the shots began. The dead plummeted and the living fell on the oat fields, stripping them in minutes. In trade for their crops, the farmers gathered the bodies into bushel baskets, not even bothering to collect them all. A handful of shots resulted in more dead birds than anyone could eat.

But Father hadn’t been home, so he was seeing this for the first time. He was greatly affected by the terror of the dying birds, which drowned out even the noise of the guns. They died in inconceivable numbers.

The next day he went to the market and bought whole wagonloads of dead birds. He purchased a coffin and a cemetery plot, and he held a public funeral.

A crowd gathered. “What madness prompts you to such carnage?” Father shouted in anguished tones. “To the sin of killing these admirable creatures, with their fair colors and soft, tunable voices? Oh, you men are made of stone! Where is your mercy?”

The crowd was amused at first. The mood sobered when he compared the innocent birds to Christ on the cross. Then he said that Christ had been crucified for the sin of eating meat—no crucifixion without the loaves and fishes was his reasoning. Then he said that the Hindoos had the only true religion. He was arrested on the spot.

“Currently imprisoned for telling the truth to scoundrels,” he’d written his father, who’d read the letter aloud to Mother while Rosalie listened unnoticed. “When, when, when,” Grandfather asked, “will he tire of these mad freaks?”

—

In 1835 Asia was born.

—

In 1836, the year Rosalie turned thirteen, they lost Henry Byron. They were in England at the time, the whole family plus Hagar but minus Grandfather. Much as he now hated America, still he hated England more. Besides, he said, he had work to do. He was translating The Aeneid into English. He was trying to retain its rhythms while reworking it as a play for Father to star in.

Grandfather had spent the weeks before their departure creating months of lesson plans for Henry—science and literature and philosophy. Henry could do simple sums in his head when he was only four. By five he could read Father’s reviews in the newspaper and the news of the day as well. He would sit in a kitchen chair, reading aloud to the women as they cooked and cleaned, charming them all by lisping his way through words like spectacle and glorious. Sometimes Father’s reviews described him as inebriated, a word Henry mispronounced without correction. Ann Hall told them that inebriated meant full of spirit, and for a long time, the children all believed inebriated was the very highest praise until Grandfather, in an unkind moment, told them otherwise.