And what of Julia? It worked out that I didn’t see her for over a year, but we kept up a mail correspondence that kindled our affections far better than my clumsy courtship ever had. I have always been somewhat daunted by female emotions, and flat-out amazed at the way they spend love as if it wasn’t something to save and purse away somewhere, so it was probably best that I was gone, for my sweetheart then was undergoing a romantic spell that soon would have exhausted me.

For instance, when the family still lived near Coffeyville, Julia would ride up to visit my mother and chat about me as they baked cherry cobbler. And she’d sit with my sisters on the white iron bed I’d slept in and, while Leonie swiveled in a dress she’d sewn, Julia would close her eyes and try to imagine me sleeping beside her there—the springs squashed down, my brown arm disposing of a pillow, my nose flattened against her thigh. She assumed my perspective and saw the kerosene smut on the ceiling, the plaster chip near the window sash, the crude pencil marks on the wallpaper that spelled, “I HATe coLLaRd GReeNs.” She discovered shirts of mine in the closet and ironed them just for the chance to press them hot to her face.

She stayed with my brother Ben and his family for a week while his wife recovered from their fourth child, and Julia used her evenings to study Ben at the dining-room table as he tacked together a wren’s house, and she’d find me in his eyebrows and jaw. She’d say, “You’ve got brown hairs on your wrists just like he does,” and Ben would look bewildered. And when Charles or Henry stopped by for coffee, she’d bake butterscotch cookies just to hold my brothers there long enough to quiz them.

“You’re asking the wrong fella about Emmett,” said Henry. “All I remember about him was that he made believe he was Jesse James’s son. This would’ve been when he was eleven years old. I mean he was convinced. You remember that, Ben? He had it all laid out how he was going to revenge his pa by killing Robert Ford. He was a character, even then. He couldn’t talk about a walk to the privy without some embellishment.”

“He was colorful all right,” said Ben. “Plus he’s got brown hair on his wrists just like I do.”

Julia dug out the Dalton family Bible and memorized birthdays and deaths. Sometimes she’d wake up when her father did and like a good wife have a special breakfast of blueberry flapjacks and sausage patties waiting for him when he returned from his morning chores and kicked off his boots in the pantry. “What’s this supposed to mean?” he’d say.