“But who crashed?” I had asked my father when our own lives began to spin toward disaster.

My father told me that too many people had gambled with their money and then panicked when it looked like they might lose it . . . which, in fact, made them lose even more, and made them poor, and us along with them.

“I don’t understand.” I remember looking up at him, expecting a better explanation than that. “Did we gamble with our money?”

He shook his head.

“Then why did we lose ours, too?”

“Not ours, right off. But people who have no money don’t pay a tailor to make their clothes, and they don’t buy new clothes when the ones they have will do.”

My father was more than a fine tailor. His clothes fit us like second skins. And the vines and flowers he stitched into his hems and cuffs were more than beautiful. They were like signatures. Like signatures on paintings.

“But Mother is a teacher,” I said. “Do you mean that people are too poor now for school?”

He shook his head again. “No, I don’t mean that. Quite the contrary. More music right now would do everyone a world of good. But I’m afraid music is one of the first things to go when a school is in trouble. And we’re not the only ones leaving. Half the town has gone away, moved in with kin, or just . . . moved. To live on the road, in the rough, looking for work. Which means not so many children in the school anymore. And no need for all the teachers they once had.”

No need for my mother.

And so we lost his shop first. And then our house. And then the life we’d always known.

Which was when I understood the other name that people used when they talked about the crash. The Depression, they called it. The Great Depression. Which meant something dreadful and dark.

I didn’t need my father to tell me that. It was in my mother’s face. My sister’s face. Somewhere more distant than that, in my father’s eyes, but there all the same.

—

We took Capricorn with us when we left town, though we didn’t know how we’d feed ourselves, let alone a dog.

When we arrived at our little portion of mountain, we tied up our new cows, piled our belongings under a canvas to save them from the weather, and lived in a crooked tent while we built our cabin.