Around the time Father knew Houston best, around the time they were riding the steamboats on the Mississippi, tearing up the saloons together, regaling the audience on the stools with inebriated extemporaneous speeches on liberty inspired by Homer and Shakespeare, the Cherokee changed Houston’s name from the Raven to Big Drunk. Father doesn’t tell them that part. Nor how comical the Cherokee found them, tiny Father in his flowered waistcoat and brass buttons, hulking Houston in his blanket and sombrero, stumbling drunkenly along the streets, roaring their politics and their poetry.

Without these details, it all sounds grand. Edwin thinks that he would also like a Cherokee name. Obviously, the Cherokee won’t give him one. He’ll have to do that himself. Obviously, it won’t be in Cherokee since Col-lon-neh is the only Cherokee word he knows. But it can’t be in English. Maybe Hebrew? How would you say “the Raven” in Hebrew? Father will know.

Father has moved on to Andrew Jackson, another one-time friend, dead now almost two years. This leads to a brief Byronic melancholy:

Let my pure flame of Honour shine in story,

When I am cold in death—and the slow fire,

That wears my vitals now, will no more move me

Than ’twould a corpse within a monument.

The bit elided in this account is the letter he wrote during his old friend’s presidency, calling him a damned scoundrel and threatening to cut his throat as he slept. Possibly he was joking. The Cherokee have a special name for Jackson, too—they call him the Indian Killer. This also goes unsaid.

Father soon cheers up again, complimenting Rosalie on the leeks and potatoes, which she did not cook, Mother on the fish. Yes, fish! Suddenly Father, who once thought it murder to eat an oyster, has decided they should all be eating fish. None of the children like fish, so this is nothing to celebrate. Plus Rosalie has told Edwin how Father once said that he’d killed Mary Ann and Elizabeth by eating meat, so Edwin wonders which of them is being put at risk this time on account of a cod he doesn’t even want.

Himself, of course. He looks up from his plate to see Father gazing at him fondly. “I’ve made a decision about our Ned,” Father says. He leans back in his chair, drawing it out. “Momentous.” He is all twinkle and trill. At last he gets to it. “Ned will be a cabinetmaker.”

This is a shot to the heart.

“He’s very skilled with his hands,” Father says genially, obviously believing Edwin will be pleased with the compliment and the plan. “Look how quickly he picked up the banjo.”