But Father’s arrival improved nothing. Rosalie ran outside to meet him when he came galloping in on his black-and-white pony, still dressed in his tights and cape, thwacking Peacock’s sides with the flat of Hamlet’s sword. He dismounted, handed the reins to Joe Hall, the farm manager, pushed Rosalie aside without a look, and demanded to see Mary Ann, a week dead now and buried. “Show me,” he said. “Show me,” he shouted.
It was a bright, sunny, cloudless day. Mother appeared at the door, summoned from Elizabeth’s bed by the sound of his voice. She stepped onto the grass. She was still in her nightdress, her hair gone wild. He was caked with make-up and dust, as if his face was melting away. Horrid half-replicas of her mother and father. Rosalie was frightened of them both.
And yet, she was also hopeful. Father would fix things. It was why he’d come racing back. She took Henry’s hand, his fingers wet since they’d recently been in his mouth, and they followed Joe Hall, Father, and Mother along the path to the graveyard. Already Father was shouting that he could restore Mary Ann to life and this was a level of fixing things Rosalie hadn’t known was possible. Her heart lifted. “Bring me a shovel,” Father told Joe.
Joe didn’t move.
But the shovel was right there, leaning against the railing. Three steps and Father had it in his hands. “She wouldn’t have died if not for me,” Father said to Joe.
“God’s will,” Joe said. “Nobody’s fault.”
“God’s punishment,” said Father. “I’ve fallen from my beliefs, been careless in my habits. And God noticed.”
The ground was loose over Mary Ann’s coffin, easy to move. He dug and Mother sobbed, begging him to stop; he was breaking her broken heart, she said. And while all this was happening, Ann Hall suddenly arrived to take Rosalie and Henry away. “We don’t need to watch this,” Ann said, even though Rosalie desperately wanted to. Why couldn’t she be there at the moment Mary Ann opened her eyes?
She sat with Henry on the grass in front of the cabin, leaning against Ann’s legs, until Father came stumbling up the path with Mary Ann’s coffin in his arms. Mother floated behind him in her cloud of insanity.
Ann told Rosalie and little Henry to go upstairs. They ascended slowly until Ann was no longer watching and then they sat together on one of the upper steps. It was smooth and cold and sloped a little in the middle where people put their feet. “It’s all right,” Rosalie told Henry. “Father is fixing it.”
They could hear Father talking to Mary Ann, but they couldn’t hear what he was saying. They couldn’t hear Mary Ann answering. And then there was a roar as Father’s grief consumed the heavens and Rosalie knew Father had failed. She knew then that she’d always known he would, even though only a few minutes before, Father failing at anything had seemed impossible.
The dead child was the only child that mattered. Father refused to leave the coffin, even to go see June or Elizabeth. He refused to have Mary Ann reinterred. Late that night, when no one was watching, he slipped from the cabin with the coffin and the child, hiding her somewhere in the considerable acreage of the farm.
Joe was sent for and he searched through the dark for many fruitless hours until the dogs finally led him right. Neighbors came, their lanterns swinging over the lane in the black night—Mr. Rogers and Mr. Shook and Mr. Mason. They gave Father drink and then forced him into the bedroom, where he shouted and called them names. They kept him confined while Joe returned Mary Ann to the earth. Ann wasn’t there to shield Rosalie. Rosalie saw it all.
* * *
—
June survived, but Elizabeth died and Father’s being there didn’t stop it. He began a punishing regime of penance, putting stones in his shoes and walking long distances on them. Hagar cooked meal after meal that no one ate, scraping the food from the plates and into the run where the dogs were. Father canceled all his upcoming engagements. He wrote to his closest friend, Tom Flynn, saying he couldn’t leave his wife or she would kill herself.
Somewhere, in the midst of this tumult and agony, Edwin was conceived. He was born in November that same year with the stars and the caul, all as Rosalie had said.
When Father returned to his tour, he found that he could now summon the passion he needed only with drink. He played Louisville, where he witnessed firsthand the exuberant slaughter of the passenger pigeons, the same thing that twenty years earlier had so shocked Audubon.
Young as she was, Rosalie had also been through a pigeon year. She knew that you heard them before you saw them, a far-off sound of wings, like a ceaseless thunder, and, inside that, a song like sleigh bells. They passed in one continuous mass overhead, an ocean of birds, blotting out the sun for hours. There was no sky when they flew over, only pigeons above, in ripples of color, blue, gray, purple. Droppings fell like snow.
The farmers had run outside to protect their fields and fill their larders. They simply shot their rifles into the air. There was no need to aim. There was no way to miss. The bird mass coiled into the air and rose like a giant snake when the shots began. The dead plummeted and the living fell on the oat fields, stripping them in minutes. In trade for their crops, the farmers gathered the bodies into bushel baskets, not even bothering to collect them all. A handful of shots resulted in more dead birds than anyone could eat.
But Father hadn’t been home, so he was seeing this for the first time. He was greatly affected by the terror of the dying birds, which drowned out even the noise of the guns. They died in inconceivable numbers.
The next day he went to the market and bought whole wagonloads of dead birds. He purchased a coffin and a cemetery plot, and he held a public funeral.
A crowd gathered. “What madness prompts you to such carnage?” Father shouted in anguished tones. “To the sin of killing these admirable creatures, with their fair colors and soft, tunable voices? Oh, you men are made of stone! Where is your mercy?”
The crowd was amused at first. The mood sobered when he compared the innocent birds to Christ on the cross. Then he said that Christ had been crucified for the sin of eating meat—no crucifixion without the loaves and fishes was his reasoning. Then he said that the Hindoos had the only true religion. He was arrested on the spot.
“Currently imprisoned for telling the truth to scoundrels,” he’d written his father, who’d read the letter aloud to Mother while Rosalie listened unnoticed. “When, when, when,” Grandfather asked, “will he tire of these mad freaks?”
* * *
—
In 1835 Asia was born.
* * *
—
In 1836, the year Rosalie turned thirteen, they lost Henry Byron. They were in England at the time, the whole family plus Hagar but minus Grandfather. Much as he now hated America, still he hated England more. Besides, he said, he had work to do. He was translating The Aeneid into English. He was trying to retain its rhythms while reworking it as a play for Father to star in.
Grandfather had spent the weeks before their departure creating months of lesson plans for Henry—science and literature and philosophy. Henry could do simple sums in his head when he was only four. By five he could read Father’s reviews in the newspaper and the news of the day as well. He would sit in a kitchen chair, reading aloud to the women as they cooked and cleaned, charming them all by lisping his way through words like spectacle and glorious. Sometimes Father’s reviews described him as inebriated, a word Henry mispronounced without correction. Ann Hall told them that inebriated meant full of spirit, and for a long time, the children all believed inebriated was the very highest praise until Grandfather, in an unkind moment, told them otherwise.