FitzWilliams gestured to the bottle.
—He gave me that, you know. Duchess, I mean. Despite everything. Despite all of it, last night he came here and bought me a brand-new bottle of my favorite whiskey. Just like that.
FitzWilliams took a deep breath.
—He was sent away to a work camp in Kansas, you know. At the age of sixteen.
—Yes, said Emmett. That’s where we met.
—Ah. I see. But in all your time together, did he ever tell you . . . did he ever tell you how he came to be there?
—No, said Emmett. He never did.
Then after taking the liberty of pouring a little more of the old man’s whiskey into both of their glasses, Emmett waited.
Ulysses
Though the boy had already read the story once from beginning to end, Ulysses asked him to read it again.
Shortly after ten—with the sun having set, the moon yet to rise, and the others retreating to their tents—Billy had taken out his book and asked if Ulysses would like to hear the story of Ishmael, a young sailor who joined a one-legged captain on his hunt for a great white whale. Though Ulysses had never heard the story of Ishmael, he had no doubt it would be a good one. Each of the boy’s stories had been good. But when Billy had offered to read this new adventure, with a touch of embarrassment Ulysses had asked if he would read the story of his namesake instead.
The boy hadn’t hesitated. By the waning light of Stew’s fire, he had turned to the back of his book and illuminated the page with his flashlight beam—a circle of light within a circle of light within a sea of darkness.
As Billy began, Ulysses felt a moment of worry that having read the story once before, the boy might paraphrase or skip over passages, but Billy seemed to understand that if the story was worth reading again, it was worth reading word for word.
Yes, the boy read the story exactly as he had in the boxcar, but Ulysses didn’t hear it the same way. For this time, he knew what was to come. He knew now to look forward to some parts and dread others—to look forward to how Ulysses bested the Cyclops by hiding his men under the pelts of sheep, and to dread the moment when the covetous crew unleashed the winds of Aeolus, setting their captain’s ship off course at the very moment that his homeland had come into view.
When the story was over, and Billy had closed his book and switched off his light, and Ulysses had taken up Stew’s shovel to cover the embers, Billy asked if he would tell a story.
Ulysses looked down with a smile.
—I don’t have any storybooks, Billy.
—You don’t have to tell a story from a book, Billy replied. You could tell a story from yourself. Like one from the war overseas. Do you have any of those?
Ulysses turned the shovel in his hand.
Did he have any stories from the war? Of course, he did. More than he cared to remember. For his stories had not been softened by the mists of time or brightened by the tropes of a poet. They remained vivid and severe. So vivid and severe that whenever one happened to surface in his mind, Ulysses would bury it—just as he had been about to bury the embers of this fire. If Ulysses couldn’t stomach the sharing of the memories with himself, he certainly wasn’t going to share them with an eight-year-old boy.
But Billy’s request was a fair one. Generously, he had opened the pages of his book and told the stories of Sinbad and Jason and Achilles, and of Ulysses’s namesake twice. He had certainly earned a telling in return. So setting the shovel aside, Ulysses threw another log on the fire and resumed his seat on the railroad tie.
—I have a story for you, he said. A story about my own encounter with the king of the winds.
—When you were sailing across the wine-dark sea?
—No, said Ulysses. When I was walking across the dry and dusty land.
* * *
? ? ?
The story began on a rural road in Iowa in the summer of 1952.
A few days before, Ulysses had boarded a train in Utah, intending to travel over the Rockies and across the plains to Chicago. But halfway through Iowa, the boxcar in which he was traveling was shunted onto a siding in order to wait for a different locomotive, which was scheduled to arrive who knew when. Forty miles away was the junction in Des Moines, where he could easily catch another train headed east, or one headed north toward the Lakes, or south to New Orleans. With that in mind, Ulysses had disembarked and begun working his way across the countryside on foot.
He had walked about ten miles down an old dirt road when he began to sense that something was amiss.
The first sign was the birds. Or rather, the absence of them. When you’re traveling back and forth across the country, Ulysses explained, the one great constant is the companionship of birds. On your way from Miami to Seattle or Boston to San Diego, the landscape is always changing. But wherever you go, the birds are there. The pigeons or buzzards, condors or cardinals, blue jays or blackbirds. Living on the road, you wake to the sound of their singing at dawn, and you lay yourself down to their chatter at dusk.