The lumberjacks left in the middle of summer; by the time they went, Jonathan had dynamited enough stumps to make room for the house. He smoothed the ground and laid cement for his own wooden house precisely as Bessie had taught him to lay it for the Stokes’ wooden house when he was twelve years old. When the shell was largely finished, he took Sarah out to see what he had done. They left Rayner with Eliza for the afternoon and walked through the woods together. They sat beneath the big cedar tree; she spread out a blanket, unpacked a few tidbits to eat, and there she brought two years of celibacy to an end. She tickled his nose with a frond of sweet-smelling cedar, much as he’d tickled Rayner’s when the three of them had first gone out to look at this stretch of land together; she laughed when he pulled away, loosened her strawberry blond hair, then the delicate, cloth-covered buttons of her blouse.

He’d built a cupola for mating swallows on the roof of the house, a pretty dome atop a circle of fluted pillars; he’d whittled it in the evenings when it got too dark to work outside and put it in place only a week or so before. It stood there smiling down on them that summery day. ‘Have you ever seen swallows mating?’ my uncle Atlas asked me. ‘They fly up high into the air, body to body, wings aflutter; they swoop and bank together. It’s the most beautiful of all love-making: the coital kiss of swallows.’

By the time the house was ready to move into, Sarah was pregnant for the second time.

9

My father Rayner, with his romantic emotional spillage, is the one who keeps me. Fortunately for me, he’s dead – fortunately for him, too: otherwise, neither one of us could afford the likes of me: cripples are expensive. That suicide attempt of his was high drama: police, sirens, write-ups in the papers, even an entry in California’s medical history: ‘62.3 ounces pumped from this patient’s stomach’, and yet he survived. A few months later he had the stroke that should have killed him as surely as the nembutal before it, but he was a strong man; he lingered on for a couple of years, a basket case, unable to speak or understand. In the end he died a natural death from another stroke. He’d taken out one of those policies that pay vast sums if you die young – and of natural causes. My mother got it all when he died at fifty-four, just weeks under the deadline. When she died, a year later, the lion’s share of the $2 million came to me, to the youngest sister: the one who needed it. This was twenty-five years ago; the capital has doubled since.

Whatever would Jonathan have thought if he’d known his little Rayner would leave $2 million to his children? to anybody for that matter? Rayner of all people! There was Jonathan, working all day for the railroads for money to buy seed, working half the night, too, to plow and plant his own land by the light of the twenty-foot-high piles of cedar splinters that he’d dredged out of the soil chunk by chunk, collected together, and set fire to; they burned for months on end. By the time his daughter Gwendolyn was born, he’d planted his first two acres. Cinch bugs destroyed his first crop, just as Sarah had prophesied, and so destroyed his plan to buy her a piano, a pelmet (whatever that was) and curtains. The next harvest succeeded, but because the first had failed so disastrously, all the profit went back into the farm. Again, no pelmet; again, no piano. Not even a Christmas cactus. When their second son was born in 1905, Jonathan was working a hundred miles away for another farmer and couldn’t afford to come back for the confinement. He didn’t get home until spring, dirty, thin and unshaven. Gwendolyn ran out to meet him; she was a round, sturdy child, with fat, pink cheeks and a bossy manner. He asked her what the baby’s name was.