She pushed open the dining room swinging door. “I could bring applesauce up from the cellar. Have you had applesauce with lamb chops? That’s one of my favorite combinations.”

His voice was croaky. “May I ask where you’ve been?”

She looked at his white shirt, his narrow, hunched shoulders, the black dye stain on his neck. “Certainly.”

He waited. “Where?”

“A cousin in Ingalls was sick with the stomach flu. I had to stay up with her all night. Mercy, I hope you don’t catch it. I seem to be immune.”

She walked outside and lifted the broad cellar door, letting it whump in the snow. She got a jar of red applesauce from the board shelves and screwed off the lid and smelled it. She leaned her forehead against the earth wall.

14

MY BROTHER BOB LEFT Woodward soon after Bill came up with his proposition and he stayed in a sod house until late December with an Osage Indian on Bluestem Lake near Pawhuska. They fished from a row-boat for smallmouth bass and crappie and fried them with bread. They’d sit in the weather in rickety chairs and smoke shredded weed in clay pipes they’d made. All of this is contained in his copious diaries of that period—the temperature varied only thirteen degrees in his entries; there was a skin of ice on the lake every morning; a fish froze near the surface and birds walked around it on the ice, cocking their heads and pecking. Sometimes it would be three hours before the Indian and Bob said anything to each other. The Indian believed that he could fly around the chimney at night; he would walk into the house as Bob made breakfast and say, “I have been flapping my arms.”

I guess Bob was bored stiff with that because he saddled a mare and spent a weekend with me in Big Jim Riley’s bunk-house, pitching pennies, cooking brass for a bullet mold, and stringing Glidden barbwire with me in the cold. I’d nail the wire snug and look up to see Bob shivering with his hat pulled down, his coat collar up, his hands pushed deep in his pockets. “We’re going south, darn it. I didn’t rustle and rob trains to end up with sniffles and fingers about to freeze off.”

By that time, Eugenia had put the first and last month’s rent money down on a small, peeling house in vacant Greer County, which was then Texas land, a hundred miles southwest of Oklahoma City and twenty-five from the nearest settlement. The furniture and kitchenware came from the Montgomery Ward mail-order house in Fort Worth, charged to her husband’s account.