“Now!” It did not occur to me that we could not go the moment we had agreed on our destination, for, being altogether unacquainted with travel, I was not aware that it cost anything. I supposed, moreover, that if we needed money for our dinner on the train (I already saw myself eating a pork chop and as many bananas as I wanted) he, like Betty Brunson’s father, the dentist, could “sell a bond.” For this, I believed was the prerogative of a father. Whenever anyone said, “I wish I had a ukulele,” or “I wish I had a solid gold barrette,” Betty would reply, “Why don’t you ask your father to sell a bond? Daddy always does.” I had always had the vague idea that my father’s bonds would be German and therefore less easily disposed of but that in an emergency he could market them.

“I am thinking,” he said with a sigh, “that it might be better if I went on first and got things lined up, you might say, and then sent for you. By that time I would have the corral built and have you a nice little palomino horse. It’s a long way out there. You would get sleepy.”

“How far?”

“Maybe as far as two thousand miles. I expect it’s five days or so on the train. A long, long way, Sonie girl.”

“I want to go with you, Papa. Now.”

He stiffened and stood up. My mother was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, her shadow so long it fell the length of the room and, making a right angle turn at the juncture, continued up the wall. She was pale and her staring eyes seemed uncommonly large. It seemed to me that they were never so beautiful as when she was angry. The whites of them were immaculate, not marked, as most eyes are, with shabby red tendrils, and the iris was so dark the pupil was nearly invisible, but in the sun or in the lamplight as tonight, an amber ray appeared intermittently in the iris, ending in the profound depths of that rich center. When my parents drank together, my father would gaze into her face and murmur, “Die wunderschöne Augen! Die magische Augen!” Tonight, in her sickness or in her despair or her fury, whatever it was that had driven her out to us, these eyes seemed, because of their wonderful and awful size, to be holding back their lids with effort.

Her black hair, pouched with white combs into a pompadour, hung to her waist and swung heavily with the movement of her body; it shone like a blue-jay’s feathers. She stroked one hand with the other and in the hush we could hear the muted hissing of the skin being rubbed. On her tight forearm, I saw that there was a long scratch that had been painted with iodine.