The impact of Johnny’s birth on Rosalie is profound. He’s such a happy child. He calms her down; he bucks her up. One day, she is passing the graveyard, carrying him against her shoulder. Oh, pretty! the ghosts say. Little pretty. Little darling. They curl about him, blow gently to close his eyes, cool his cheeks. They suck at his milky breath. They whisper about the way he smells. Clover, they say. Butter. Kittens, but they are only being nostalgic. He smells like nothing of the sort. Still Rosalie takes note of how uninterested in her the dead children are while Johnny is in her arms. She notes the absence of their customary menacing clinging. They are all love.

Rosalie begins to take Johnny everywhere she goes and, with Johnny on her hip, she finds that she can go everywhere. She takes him to church and feels that her feud with God is ended. She takes him to the creek to see the fish and the snapping turtles, and the dairy to see the cows, to the cabins to see Ann and Joe, to the neighbors to see Aunty Rogers. Everyone is entranced with him.

A year passes. He’s growing into a beautiful, charming, affectionate boy. He loves Ann in particular and can often be found in her lap or gripping her skirt in his fist, letting her drag him about the kitchen as she cooks. The farmhands tease Ann about her new white son.

Even envious Asia is besotted. She insists on holding him, sobs and screams if he crawls away. When Mother looks at Johnny, Rosalie sees in her face a desperate, hungering love. Father begins to make plans for him, the sort of plans they haven’t heard since Henry died. And Rosalie allows herself to think that maybe, just maybe, the child who can heal her broken family has been born at last.

ix

Grandfather has had enough of the Mitchells. He packs his trunks and moves angrily out, freeing up another bed. He lets a small room in Baltimore and never sets foot on the farm again.

Six months later, he quietly dies, just after Christmas, alone in the night, of unknown cause. Father is off on tour, so an undertaker with offices near the Front Street Theatre takes charge of the body until Father’s return. Father doesn’t bring Grandfather back to the family graveyard, because Grandfather left the farm of his own free will and Father believes in freedom.

Instead he chooses a grave in Baltimore, puts up a stone with an epitaph in Hebrew that translates to—

I take my departure from life as from an inn—

Thee I follow to the infernal kingdom

Of the most renowned ruler

Thence to the stars.

Rosalie thinks that Grandfather probably likes having an epitaph only the highly educated can read.