“About whether it’s ill-gotten or not, well, you can’t look at it that way. Indians ate the heart of Father Marquette and farmers stole land from the Cherokee; in Mississippi they raped and sold brown women slaves and the Union Army looted Savannah; railroads pushed Chinamen into tunnels with explosives tied to their backs and now train robbers stuff money into grain sacks. The world rocks a little off balance and then it adjusts itself. There’s misery in every human enterprise and whether the outcome is good or evil depends pretty much on who you’re talking to at the time.”

Julia looked at me with one of those “do tell” expressions. “And who have you been talking to?”

“Bill,” I confessed.

She put her head back where it had been. “Bill. That’s what I thought. At least Bob doesn’t make believe.”

“Nope,” I said. “That’s his real attribute. Bob neither shirks nor confuses.”

13

MISS MOORE TOOK A stagecoach from her bungalow to my mother’s Kingfisher farm where she helped with the canning and made applesauce and left a cigar box with two hundred dollars in it hidden behind the apricot preserves. At the standard Sunday meal with the family, she said she was moving to Guthrie to hunt work as a seamstress. Ben and Littleton ate like machines but my brother Bill let his fork clink on the plate and looked at her as he drank a glass of milk.

My sister Nannie Mae’s husband J. K. Whipple leaned over his mashed potatoes, his tie sliding in gravy, to see Eugenia at the end of the table. “What about Bob? Where’s he hiding these days?”

“I honestly can’t tell you,” said Eugenia. “Bob and I have split up. For all eternity.”

“Well, that’s a bolt out of the blue,” said Ben.

My frail mother folded her napkin. “Just the same, you’re welcome here irregardless, dear. You don’t have to be relatives to visit.”

Whipple whispered into his wife’s ear and giggled. Nannie Mae frowned. “Oh shush.”

The next morning Eugenia sat in a shawl and coat beside Whipple in his decorated sulky. The woodrows were furred with white frost that was turning to sweat in the sun. She could see the horse exhale as he walked; steam curled off his back.

“I take it that’s true what you said about you and Bob going your separate ways. It isn’t just a smoke screen?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I could see how you’d profit if you threw certain people off the track.”