“I was a baby,” Edwin says. The woman stares at him in a way that makes him nervous, so he goes on to say something he wouldn’t have offered ordinarily. “My brother Henry died there.”

“I hear you have a lot of brothers,” the woman tells him, as if Henry was someone he could easily spare. She is still pinning him with those gimlet eyes. “I was hoping to speak to your mother.”

Edwin makes it past her and up the steps. “She’s gone to the farm.” It’s a relief to shut the door.

He forgets about the woman. Being alone in his house is so unusual he’s not sure it’s ever happened before. He walks from room to room, seeing how it feels to be alone in each of them, and sure enough, it feels different in the kitchen than it does in his parents’ bedroom, different in the parlor than it does upstairs. He has a sense not so much of being alone as of being invisible, an intruder in his own body. As if, when no one is watching, he ceases to be.

He lies down on the settee and the last words he thinks before he sleeps are

“O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?”

But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he.

He wakes when Asia and Johnny return from school. They’re as perplexed as he by Mother’s sudden departure. “Something must be wrong on the farm,” Asia says. “Maybe something happened to the Mitchells?” But whatever is wrong made Rosalie cry and she wouldn’t cry over the Mitchells. Edwin thinks it must be Ann or Joe Hall. Perhaps Rowland Rogers has sold away one of their children. That would certainly account for the tears. But it wouldn’t be a secret, no reason to keep it from the rest of the family, so this answer doesn’t really work either.

—

Nothing matters more than family, Father always says. Edwin makes a private vow to find Asia and Johnny less annoying in future. This lasts barely an hour, which is when Johnny calls him into the backyard. He’s grinning, the sun hitting his dark hair and turning it into golden shine. On the bench in the gazebo is a lumpy, jumpy, snarling flour sack. From it, Johnny carefully withdraws two cats. He’s tied them together in such an ingenious way that if either one struggles, it will slash the other with its claws. One of the cats is gray and starving, the skin between its ribs sunk as deep as Edwin’s finger. The other is black, plumper, a cared-for cat. Both are spitting and yowling, scrapping and bleeding. Father’s rule, that no creature is ever to be injured, is less clear in the city than it was on the farm. It’s less clear to Johnny than it is to Edwin.