Chapter 3

After working our way through the pot of pepper stew and playing our usual game of draughts—he called it checkers—we said good night. I went to my room and shucked down to the short linen breechcloth that was my underwear. I couldn’t abide long johns like a lot of fellas wore.

The house was dark. Timo didn’t spend much on candle wax or coal oil, so reading like I usually did before taking to bed wasn’t possible. Teacher’s Mead was always bright with yellow light strong enough to make out the dimmest print in my grandfather’s well-thumbed collection of books. He’d managed to corral works by Poe and Hawthorne and Fennimore Cooper, not to mention Shakespeare and the Holy Bible. Although nothing but a toddler when he died, seemed like I could remember him holding Alex and me on his knees, reading to us right up until the day a canker in his chest spirited him away. Of course, that was most likely remembering from hearing my father telling it over the years.