Jesse turns the pages. Daddy kissing a shovel at the mine. Peg in her coffin after a fever took her. All us on a trip to the ocean. I say to Jesse, You’re fourteen here and I’m seven. See, Jesse says, you remember. I say, I like this picture of Mama where she’s smiling. I run my finger over her face. You’re my special child, she told me, the one’ll be with me forever. The one’ll take care of me when I’m old. I will, Mama, I said, don’t you worry. And I did. I was the one took care of her after J.P. moved to Norfolk to work at the shipyard and after Jesse went away. He run off one night and we didn’t see him again for thirty years.

’Cause you turned, I say to him. It wasn’t safe no more for him in Monongah. He had to hit the road. He had to light out for the territory. I asked him was he an outlaw in those days. He said, Buddy I was whatever I had to be. Claudine the girl who turned him the one he run off with got dusted somewhere along the way and he’s been sad ever since.

In Monongah the world kept turning as Mama would say. Daddy got blown up in the explosion at the mine. J.P. broke his neck falling off a destroyer he was building. Aunt Beulah ate a bad mushroom and her liver quit. In the end only me and Mama was left. When she got sick she sent for Jesse. Turned out she knew all along where to write him. I asked why she was calling him home. I said, I can keep looking after you. I don’t doubt that hon, she said, but who’s gonna look after you?

It snowed the day she died and for a week after. The gravedigger said he got blisters on blisters planting her in the frozen ground. Jesse bought her a new dress to be buried in and a casket with white silk lining. I didn’t tell nobody he was back. Only me and Cousin Ray knew. Jesse said he’d give Ray the house for holding the funeral and keeping his mouth shut. If you give him the house where’m I gonna live? I asked Jesse. He told me not to worry.

The next night he sat me at the kitchen table and said he was leaving again but this time taking me with him. I asked where we was going. Out West, he said. Where the buffalo roam. I asked him could I get a horse because I didn’t know nothing then. I hadn’t been anywhere or seen anything. That’s why he was able to trick me like he did.