Billy looked at the rotting pumpkins in the fields and fixed the bam and the landscape in his mind. He decided that when he got home, he would draw a picture of it as a present for his new Daddy Chal.

The following Friday, Mother Superior and Father Mason came into the third-grade room and whispered quietly to Sister Jane Stephens.

“Will all you children please stand and bow your heads?” Sister Stephens said, tears running down her face.

The children, puzzled at the solemnity in Father Masons voice, listened as he spoke, his voice trembling: “Children, you may not understand the way the world situation is going. I don’t expect you to. But I must tell you that our President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated this morning. We will now say a prayer.”

After he said the Lords Prayer, the children were sent outside to wait for the buses to take them home. Sensing the awesome sadness of the adults, the children stood and waited silently.

That weekend, as the family watched the news and the funeral procession on TV, Billy saw that his mother was crying. It pained him. He couldn’t stand to see her that way or hear her sobbing, so he closed his eyes …

Shawn came and stared at the silent pictures on the TV screen and at everybody watching it. He went up to the set and put his face close to it, feeling the vibrations. Challa pushed him out of the way. Shawn went to his room and sat on the bed. He discovered that if he let air out of his mouth slowly, with his feet clenched, it would make the same funny vibrations in his head—something like zzzzzzzz … He sat and did it alone in his room for a long time. Zzzzzzzz …

Chalmer took the three children out of St. Josephs and enrolled them in the Circleville city school system. As an Irish Protestant, he wasn’t having anyone in his family going to Catholic school; they would all have to go to the Methodist Church.

The children resented having to change their prayers from the Ave Maria and the Lord’s Prayer—grown-up prayers they all were used to by now—to the children’s prayers Challa had to say, especially “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

Billy decided if he was going to change his religion he was going to be what his father, Johnny Morrison, had been— Jewish.

Chapter Eight

(1)

Soon after her marriage, when they all moved to the nearby city of Lancaster, Dorothy discovered that Chalmer was unusually strict with the four children. No talking at the dinner table. No laughing. The salt had to be passed clockwise. When company came, the children had to sit up straight, feet flat on the floor, hands on their knees.

Kathy was not allowed to sit on her mothers lap. “You’re too old for that,” Chalmer said to the seven-year-old.

Once when Jimbo asked Billy to pass the salt, and Billy, unable to reach that far, slid it over partway, Chalmer shouted at him, “Can’t you do anything right? Nine years old, acting like a baby.”