Quietly picking up Billy’s backpack, Emmett carried it to a spot beneath the hatch, where the air was a little cooler, and sat with his back to the wall. Unfastening the backpack’s straps, he removed Billy’s canteen, twisted off the cap, and took a drink. Emmett was so thirsty he could easily have emptied it, but they might not have a chance to get more water until they arrived in New York, so he took a second swallow, returned the canteen to the pack, and securely refastened the straps just as his brother would. Emmett was about to set the backpack down when he noticed the outer pocket. Glancing at Billy, he undid the flap and removed the manila envelope.
For a moment Emmett sat with the envelope in his hands as if he were trying to weigh it. After taking a second glance at his brother, he unwound the red thread and poured his mother’s postcards into his lap.
As a boy, Emmett would never have described his mother as unhappy. Not to another person and not to himself. But at some point, at an unspoken level he had come to know that she was. He had come to know it not by tears or open laments, but by the sight of unfinished tasks in the early afternoon. Coming downstairs into the kitchen, he might find a dozen carrots lying on the cutting board beside the chopping knife, six of them sliced and six of them whole. Or returning from the barn, he might find half of the laundry flapping on the line and the other half damp in a basket. Looking for where his mother had gotten to, he would often find her sitting on the front steps with her elbows on her knees. When quietly, almost tentatively, Emmett would say, Mom?, she would look up as if pleasantly surprised. Making room for him on the step, she would put her arm over his shoulder or tussle his hair, then go back to looking at whatever it was that she had been looking at before—something somewhere between the front porch steps and the horizon.
Because young children don’t know how things are supposed to be done, they will come to imagine that the habits of their household are the habits of the world. If a child grows up in a family where angry words are exchanged over supper, he will assume that angry words are exchanged at every kitchen table; while if a child grows up in a family where no words are exchanged over supper at all, he will assume that all families eat in silence. And yet, despite the prevalence of this truth, the young Emmett knew that chores left half done in the early afternoon were a sign of something amiss—just as he would come to know a few years later that the shifting of crops from one season to the next was the sign of a farmer who’s at a loss what to do.
Holding the postcards up to the moonlight, Emmett revisited them one by one in their westward order—Ogallala, Cheyenne, Rawlins, Rock Springs, Salt Lake City, Ely, Reno, Sacramento, San Francisco—scanning the pictures from corner to corner and reading the messages word for word, as if he were an intelligence officer looking for a coded communication from an agent in the field. But if tonight he studied the cards more closely than he had at the kitchen table, he studied none more closely than he studied the last.
This is the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park, it read, and every year on the Fourth of July it has one of the biggest fireworks displays in all of California.
Emmett had no recollection of telling Billy about their mother’s love of fireworks, but it was uncontestably so. When she was growing up in Boston, his mother would spend her summers in a little town on Cape Cod. While she hadn’t spoken much about her time there, she had described with an old excitement how the volunteer fire department would sponsor a fireworks display over the harbor every Fourth of July. When she was a child, she and her family would watch from the end of their pier. But once she got older, she was allowed to row out among the sailboats that were swinging on their moorings so she could watch the pyrotechnics while lying alone in the bottom of her boat.
When Emmett was eight, his mother learned from Mr. Cartwright at the hardware store that the town of Seward—a little more than an hour from Morgen—had quite a little celebration on the Fourth of July, with a parade in the afternoon and fireworks after dark. Emmett’s mother wasn’t interested in the parade. So after an early supper, Emmett and his parents got in their truck and made the journey.
When Mr. Cartwright had said it was quite a little celebration, Emmett’s mother had imagined it would be like any other small-town festivity, with banners made by the schoolchildren and refreshments sold off folding tables by the women of the parish. But when they arrived, she was stunned to discover that the Fourth of July in Seward put to shame any Fourth of July that she had ever seen. It was a celebration that the township prepared for all year and to which people came from as far away as Des Moines. By the time the Watsons arrived, the only parking was a mile from the center of town, and when they finally walked into Plum Creek Park, where the fireworks display was to take place, every square inch of lawn had been claimed by families on blankets eating their picnic dinners.