Buck had his banjo out. He plucked while Tennie and Victoria and Utica and Anna danced round the fire, and when they were tired of dancing they lingered outside. Utica reclined in the dirt, muttering Shakespeare to the embers. Buck sat in the darkness beyond the fire smoking and sipping whiskey while Anna leaned against him and mumbled into his beard. Victoria and Tennie sat in dilapidated rockers on the porch, whispering to each other. They ignored Gob, who stood for a while and watched them, then retreated into the orchard. His mama had become acutely intolerant of his grief, and his unbelief offended her. She had abandoned her attempts at reconciliation, and she was cool to him, lording over him her certain knowledge of life beyond life. Tomo was alive and well in the Summerland; Gob’s mama said it did not behoove a son of hers to lack faith in that certainty. Gob hated her for saying this, and hating her, with the pure, furious hatred of a child, made it much easier to take leave of her and the others. Watching them from the orchard, he was whispering goodbyes again. Goodbye mill pond, goodbye mill, goodbye house. The Urfeist had made departure from Homer a condition of his tutelage. Homer was only his summer retreat — he had stayed too long already. If Gob wanted to learn from him, he would have to accompany him to his winter quarters. They would leave not just because the Urfeist found Ohio intolerable in the winter, but because it was no place for him to teach what Gob needed to learn.
Gob was about to go to the grave again and say his last goodbye to Tomo when he heard laughter at the house. It was just one person laughing, at first — it sounded like Tennie — but then the others joined in, and he could hear his mama’s high, clear laugh floating above the rest. Before Tomo died, Gob hadn’t got mad over every little thing. He did not have Tomo’s temper. But he suffered a flare of temper, that night, as bright and hot as the one that had burned against his mama when she afflicted him with her hideous lie, and against the Urfeist when he taunted him with his own finger. Gob ran back through the orchard, towards the remains of the fire and the dark shapes around it. They were still laughing when he got there. His mama and Tennie had come down from the porch. They were standing with the others near the fire, laughing and holding their bellies. Gob stood before them and raised his arms. In his coat, and in the darkness, he looked like some baleful spirit, but they laughed harder when they saw him. It was likely that they were laughing at some remark of Tennie’s, or some crude joke of Buck’s. It seemed to Gob, though, that they were laughing at him, or worse, at Tomo, or worst of all, at Tomo’s death. He ran towards his mama, stopped just before her, and shoved his wounded hand in front of her face.
“Have you forgotten?” he asked them all. “Have you forgotten already?” His mama stopped laughing and reached out to gather him into her arms, but he ducked away. Before he ran off, he made her a promise. “I am dead,” he told her quietly. “I am dead, and you will never see me again. I’m going to the war.”
It was dramatic and delicious, that pronouncement. It made him feel better as nothing else had. It put an excellent feeling in him, how her proud face fell at his words, how it suddenly filled with hurt, as it ought to have for Tomo.
She followed, but the black coat made him difficult to see. Even with his leg, he escaped her. He ran up to the high hills of the Urfeist, thinking, Goodbye, I hate you! at all of them.
His new teacher was waiting outside the cave. “You’re late,” the Urfeist said, and though he had the paddle in his hand, he did not use it. He sat on a rude cart, among a collection of trunks and crates.
“Have you nothing to bring?” the Urfeist asked. Gob said that he didn’t, but he had filled his pockets with dirt from Tomo’s grave. The Urfeist put out his hand and helped Gob up onto the cart. “Away, Paymon,” he said to his horse. They started off down a path that Gob had not noticed on his previous visit, and he half expected it to close up behind them. Gob looked back at the dark cave mouth until they made a turn and it was lost among the trees. “Your happiness is irrelevant, and may even work against your cause,” the Urfeist said, putting his arm around Gob’s neck. “But I think you will like your new home.”
PART TWO. THE GLASS HOUSE
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands! how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
1
“YOU ARE YOUR BROTHER’S IMAGE,” SAID CAPTAIN BROWER. This wasn’t exactly true. Will and Sam Fie looked alike in the face, but Will was a much bigger boy. He stood six foot three in his socks, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and he wasn’t the least bit fat. Sam was three years older, but had had to leave off beating on his little brother by the time Will was twelve. Will would catch the punches easily, and Sam’s fist was like a crab apple in his big hand. “If you’re half as brave as him, we’re lucky to have you.”
“I’m not,” said Will. Captain Brower thought he was joking. Will was strong, and stubborn, and often obedient, but if bravery had been one of his qualities, he would not have been frightened to stay at home. He would not have been afraid to open the door to his bedroom when his mother brought the news of his brother’s death upstairs. The door had shaken as if assaulted by a strong wind, and Will had not wanted to open it because he thought, just for a moment, that a door could bar such news from your life.
Captain Brower was in Syracuse to help recruit replacements for those who had fallen, like Sam, at Bull Run. He had written a letter, saying that he would like to venerate in person the parents who had raised such a boy as Sam Fie. But before Brower could visit, Will had proceeded to Syracuse with a forged letter, in which his mother expressed her love for Sam’s captain. Here was her other son, whom she could not dissuade from going to the war. She vouched for Will’s age, and asked Captain Brower to take good care of him.
In fact, she had spit on the Captain’s name and his offer to visit, calling him a murderer, and saying, “How dare he show his face here?” Over meals that for Will were at first a hard chore and then a deep misery, she’d accuse Captain Brower of having sent Sam to his death. Then she would pound her fist against her heart, and put down her head to cry while Will and his father stared at their cooling meat. They would remain that way for so long that Will imagined they might sit like that forever, a miserable tableau vivant. Some enterprising fellow might come along and cut away a wall of their house, so curious people could pay a dime to file by and peep in on them. There would be a sign: Toll of War in Onondaga County, New York — September 1862.