The Distancers

Though for no other cause, yet for this: that posterity
may know we have not loosely through silence
permitted things to pass away as in a dream.
--Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594)

In downstate Illinois near the Mississippi River, there was an old house that belonged to my family. It was a small clapboard house built in the classic heartland style, with a big yard, lush gardens, and the inevitable white picket fence out front. It stood on the outskirts of Edwardsville, right where the last streets gave way to open countryside. It was a beautiful place. When you looked out from the porch on a summer's day, you had an unbroken view of meadows and fields and remote blue hills shimmering in the golden heat. You'd swear that nothing had ever happened there more dramatic than a passing thunderstorm.

The house played a big role in my family history. My great-grandfather built it at the turn of the last century; my grandfather grew up there, and it's where my mother spent her summers when she was a kid. By the time of my childhood it had been firmly established as a kind of private sleepaway camp for our family. As soon as school was let out for the year, our parents would take us from the Chicago suburbs to Edwardsville, where they'd leave us for weeks or sometimes months at a time. One of my cousins claims there was a year when her parents didn't come back for her until Christmas.

I can't remember how often I stayed there myself, or how long those stays lasted; they've all blurred together into a kind of eternal Tom Sawyer-ish reverie. Back then Edwardsville was a postcard-perfect midwestern town, a place of towering shade trees and well-tended hedges, placid side streets and meandering back alleys. It was an ideal setting for childhood adventures. It was where I graduated from a tricycle to a bicycle, and from softball to hardball; the first tree I ever climbed solo was a weeping willow by the picket fence, and I still remember finding a cicada shell stuck to a branch at its heart, like a statuette of martian jade.

But mainly what I remember about the house are its gardens. They were mazes of flower beds that filled up most of the enormous backyard; each year that I visited, they'd spread further around the side of the house and out toward the street. The few times I dared to venture alone into their interior, I was immediately lost in a disorienting riot of brilliant colors and intoxicating smells. There were endless beds of red and yellow tulips, bristling stands of zinnias and asters and snapdragons, towering skylines of gladioli and sunflowers, fog banks of Queen Anne's lace, and rose trellises as intricate as fireworks. And then there were the bumblebees. They floated down every path -- swarming in the long sunlit aisles, hovering and drifting and clustering and swerving from blossom to blossom like commuters in an aerial city. That was a heady sight for a suburban kid like me, who'd been taught to think of all insects as rare and threatening invaders.

But then there were always lessons at the house. It was really a boot camp in what are now called old-fashioned values. Our four hosts -- my great-aunts Hilda and Helen and my great-uncles Marty and Eugene -- made it plain to us that everything said and done and thought there was swathed in morality and custom. We learned the proper way to be deferential to our elders, the proper way of washing our hands before meals (the soap was scratchy and smelled of coconut), the proper way of saying prayers at bedtime (on your knees, out loud, hands folded on the bedspread, an adult auditor present). There was a proper way to say please and thank-you at the dinner table, and, more crucially, a proper time to say them -- the airspace above the table was as crowded as O'Hare, and a wrongly calculated grab at a bowl or pitcher or platter as it passed from hand to hand could cause a disastrous midair collision.

Edwardsville was the first place where I understood what manners were for. Back home they made no sense; they seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of meaningless gestures parents foisted on kids to test their obedience. But here they were unobtrusively essential. They allowed people who may not have even liked each other much to get along effortlessly in the closest quarters. They were a way for tradition, faith, courtesy, and habit to exchange places in a ceaseless dance.

At the heart of these lessons was Sunday morning at church. This was the most essential ritual, and it was the only one I never quite mastered. You had to be awake, scrubbed raw, crammed into your best clothes, and lined up on the front porch before the church bells started tolling. No matter how early I started, I was always late. By the time I reached the porch, with soap still sticky behind my ears and my shirt buttoned wrong, the whole neighborhood had already come streaming past -- girls in white blouses and billowy pastel skirts, boys in white shirts and long pants and strangle-knotted ties, men in ancient, spotless suits, and women in brilliant dresses emblazoned with storms of birds and flowers. Sometimes, when we were all hurrying down the now deserted street as though late for the Ark, the bells were already falling silent. Sometimes we were racing against a morning thunderstorm billowing up in the high summer heat, so that as we overtook the last stragglers, we found the steeple in dazzling white starkness against the black western sky, standing tall like a rebuke to the turbulence of the trees.

Inside, the air was suffocatingly sultry and the pews were hard. People sighed and rustled and coughed; they fanned themselves furiously and glared daggers at their neighbors as though blaming them for the heat. The minister stood at a plain pulpit of varnished blondwood before a big window of clear glass. He spoke softly but forcefully about the immanence of God in the world around us and the dire certainty of His approaching judgment. Sometimes the storm broke over the church as he spoke, and his words were drowned out by the wild drumming of rain on the glass -- but he never acknowledged the fury around him even by so much as raising his voice. Then the black clouds behind him would unravel, and the sunlight would come pouring through the window in furnace-hot shafts; and as my suit dissolved into scratchy ooze and the hymnals burned to the touch, I understood what it felt like to be caught in the crosshairs of God.

Our hosts were really the best possible exemplars of this way of life. The four were all around sixty when I first stayed with them, and to me that was as old as Methuselah. Their hair was white, their faces had tectonic wrinkles, and the touch of their skin was dinosaur leathery. But their laughter bubbled out of them in a ceaseless froth, as though welling up from a hidden spring. To this day, whenever I think of them, I remember that sound: Hilda's bright trill, Helen's wheezy, half-smothered chortle, Marty's haw-haw bray, and Eugene's rare, lone snort like a stone dropped in a well. It was a kind of laughter that radiated well-being, acceptance, faith. Just being around it made you exhilarated, even when you were the target.

And you could be certain you would be the target, sooner or later. The four of them were brutal about everything they didn't like, and the main thing they didn't like was the world outside Edwardsville. That included us: they thought we were citified, willful, too big for our britches, forever putting on airs. When I had to start wearing glasses, they spent that entire summer, with ever-replenished hilarity, calling me "Four-eyes." Once one of my cousins staged a play she'd written, with the rest of the kids as actors; and our hosts broke it up by standing in unison and booing and hissing and pelting us with wadded-up Kleenex, until the author ran off in tears.

In a way, that was their real lesson -- reticence. All their instruction in correct behavior, in modesty and practicality and self-reliance and respect, really came down to this: There is never a good time to talk about yourself. Your problems are nobody's business. Your triumphs are nothing special. Never boast, never complain, never reveal, never admit, never take pride, never expect a compliment, never look for sympathy or commiseration or approval. The only thing more offensive than asking a personal question is answering one; the most important goal in life is to keep your distance.

There were moments when they succeeded too well. It sometimes happened in the evenings, as we sat around the big dining table: everything would just stop. The deck of cards would lie unshuffled; the conversation would dry up; the laughter would die away, like a sweet breeze in the summer heat. Our four hosts would sit motionless, their heads bowed, staring fiercely at the floor. I learned better than to say anything then: any attempt to lighten the mood would be met with glares of hostility and incomprehension. There was absolutely nothing to be said; no thought was impersonal enough, no emotion that wouldn't be in bad taste. As the silence deepened I'd feel as though they were fossilizing before my eyes: those Germanic peasant foreheads, those round cheeks, those hatchet noses, those glinting, heavy-lidded, suspicious eyes -- they were like stone trolls in a forest glen.

That was when I was most acutely aware of how little I really understood about them. In all the years I'd been coming there, I'd never heard them say a word about their past. They never gossiped or reminisced; by the time of my last stay, when I was twelve, I still didn't know the first thing about their lives. Why were they all sharing the house? How exactly were they even related to each other -- were they all siblings, two married couples, what? And why, if they loved children so much, did none of them have children of their own? I didn't know, and nobody would explain it to me. It was as though they'd already slipped out of reach.

It was only during that last summer that I got up the nerve to pry. I approached Helen, the one I always thought of as the nicest of the four. I don't remember my exact question; it was something like "Have you all always lived here together?"

The effect on her was astonishing. She seemed to rear up and exhale flame, like a startled basilisk. "In my day," she gasped out, "people didn't talk about themselves." She eyed me with annihilating contempt. "And especially not to the children."

***

Today there's nothing left of the family in Edwardsville. My relatives are scattered around the heartland and the Pacific Northwest -- steady suburban home owners for the most part, churchgoing Republicans, devotees of skiing and stomach stapling and SUVs. But they still talk about the house sometimes. The talk is invariably affectionate, even devoted. The house was, one of my cousins said to me recently, "a place where anyone could feel truly loved."

But they also think its part in the family story is long over with, and they aren't interested in preserving its memory. A few years ago, when the question came up of what to do with the property, the word went around that anybody in the family who wanted it could move in rent free. There were no takers. The house was fine as a daydream, but nobody actually wanted to live there. On the other hand, there wasn't much enthusiasm about selling it, either. One of my aunts told me she wanted the house demolished: we were done with it now, and she'd rather see it destroyed than occupied by strangers.

I'm sure that's a sentiment the house's inhabitants would have understood. They didn't mean to leave anything of themselves behind. No colorful anecdotes, no fond memories, no diaries; only a handful of letters and a thin scattering of mementos. This is the way things have always gone in my family. Most of my ancestors deliberately lived without drama, without attracting the slightest notice from the outside world, as though being visible was no different from being immoral. It's as though they all wanted to pass through their lives unobserved by anyone but God.

As far as my relatives today are concerned, that's just the way it should be. For them, the story of the old family house is simple. The people who lived there were happy -- more than happy: their lives were steeped in a kind of sweetness that we can only envy now. And maybe that's true. At least, the history of the household, as far as I've been able to reconstruct it, really was remarkably placid and unruffled for quite a long while. But I keep remembering a conversation I had with an old family friend, somebody who'd known several generations of the Edwardsville house, all the way back to my great-grandfather. I asked her, "Do you think they were happy?"

I was half expecting her to dismiss my impertinence with a thunderclap of rage, the way Helen once had. Instead, she thought for a long while. Then she emitted a slow sigh.

"I suppose one or two of them might have been happy, in their way," she said. "But they sure were good at hiding it."

***

My great-great-great-grandparents Peter and Elizabeth Sehnert came to America from Germany around 1850. They had no friends or family waiting for them when their ship landed and they knew absolutely nothing about the New World. So they used a simple method to find a home. They rode the trains inland as far as the trains could go.

It took them more than a week. They travelled in swaying monotony from the industrialized cities of the Northeast through the newly cleared farmlands of Ohio and Indiana. Only west of Chicago did the settlements thin out and the landscape start to look almost pristine. The train service out there was sporadic and the cars were almost always empty. People said you could ride a train through Illinois from sunup to sundown and not see another living soul except the conductor.

The Sehnerts reached the end of the line at a country station just short of the Mississippi River. They could have kept going; a lot of people did. Those were the years of the Gold Rush and the great westward migration: as fast as new settlers were arriving in Illinois, the old ones were packing up, selling out, and heading west to California. There weren't any bridges yet across the Mississippi, and there were so many people, wagons, and animals piling up at the ferry points that the wait for a crossing sometimes lasted for days.

But the Sehnerts weren't tempted. The journey west was overland through Kansas, or by steamship up the Missouri, through a dangerous country that seemed to be over the edge of the world. So they stayed on what they thought of as the civilized side of the river. They bought a small farm in the open country near Greenville, Illinois.

***

The name "Sehnert" is an old one. It goes back deep into the Middle Ages and the ancient farming communities along the Rhine. (It has an archaic and peculiar sound even to a lot of Germans, who tend to think it's a misprint of "Schnert.") Peter and Elizabeth arrived in America with the vast weight of their ancestral values still intact. They were humble, God-fearing, churchgoing, intensely taciturn people; they would no more complain about their lot in life than they would ask a neighbor for help in an emergency.

But there was one way in which they couldn't help but stand out. They were Catholic.

The heartland in those days was thinly settled but thick with eccentricity. It was a world of ranters, fire-tongued preachers, Pentecostalists, snake handlers and river baptizers; and the tide of new immigration from Germany was bringing in a florid assortment of socialists, Freemasons, Fourierists, labor agitators, mesmerists, and radical utopians who wanted to get back to the land. ("Latin farmers," they were called, because all their knowledge of farming came out of Vergil's Georgics.)

There was only one thing all these people agreed on: Catholics weren't to be trusted. There were a lot of reasons. Catholics owed their primary loyalty neither to the old country nor the new, but to the sinister pope sunk in the corruptions of Rome; they held weird rituals involving blood; their confession box was a fount of indecency. One of the most popular forms of literature in those days was the hard-hitting mock-journalistic exposé of the secrets of the Catholic church. They were widely distributed and avidly read - with good reason: once you got past the somber introductory warnings, they proved to be about the adventures of lascivious priests and the goings-on in orgiastic nunneries.

So Catholics like the Sehnerts had to be discreet. Their parish church was a modest white clapboard steeplehouse hidden down a meandering dirt road. Most Sundays there was no priest. Catholic priests were rare sights in southern Illinois in those days; one could be counted on to pass through Greenville only a couple of times a year. That meant no mass, no confession, and no communion -- only a devotional meeting conducted by the parishioners themselves, following guidelines supplied by the local church hierarchy. (Church officials assured the faithful that, whatever it might say in the catechism, private repentance was acceptable in the eyes of God if there was no priest available to hear confessions.) A Protestant spy would have been bitterly disappointed; the services were decorous and mouse-timid, compared to the ecstatic, rafter-shaking revival meetings of their neighbors.

Things were just as restrained at the Sehnert farm. There were no images of the Virgin on display, no crucifixes, no catechisms. The family didn't own a Bible. The only mystical book that Peter was ever observed perusing was the Farmer's Almanac.

But this is not to say there was no spiritual drama in Peter Sehnert's life. The way the family remembers him, there was nothing in his life but spiritual drama. He was the archetype of the thundering patriarch, half hard-hearted farmer and half Old Testament prophet -- the sort of man who saw the hand of God in everything, from early frosts to summer droughts, from the weakness of a newborn baby to the vigor of a young calf.

Men like Peter knew what God demanded of them: unceasing struggle against unforgiving odds. Peter's standards were passed down to his descendants. My family has always been contemptuous of the lazy, the weak, the self-pitying, the fallen, and the soft -- the categories into which Peter assigned just about everyone he ever met. He regarded such people as being fit only to be cheated. So while nobody ever forgot his rages, even more memorable was the sight of his rare, deep-glowing bliss when he got the better of a neighbor in a business deal.

Otherwise, his chief glory was his solitude. He took no interest whatsoever in the outside world. He was not known to spread gossip or listen to rumors or read newspapers or pass the time of day with anyone. Whole days went by without his saying a word to his wife and children.

This wasn't an uncommon way of life. The heartland was scattered with immigrant families doing just what the Sehnerts did -- not so much starting their lives over as starting the world over, like Noah and his family after the flood. Many were seen in town only twice a year, at spring planting and at harvest; they'd do their business as quickly and tersely as they could and then ride out again, vanishing down the ragged dirt tracks between cornfields to resume their existence alone with God.

There used to be a story in the family -- it was still current in my childhood -- about just how isolated Peter was. They said that he was wholly oblivious to the Civil War (or, as they called it in Illinois, the War of the Rebellion). He was too old to fight, and his sons too young; so the whole event passed him by. He finally learned about it one spring morning when he was out working in the fields. That was when he heard a mysterious noise: a sweet distant humming that seemed to come floating toward him from all directions, fading and surging again as though it were emanating from the land itself. The church bells were ringing out to proclaim that the Union had been preserved.

***

Peter's idyll lasted more than twenty years. But history finally caught up with him after the war. Agricultural prices went into a catastrophic decline and farms throughout the Midwest began failing. Peter was a stubborn man and kept going through several disastrous seasons. But at last his health and his finances were ruined. He lost the farm in the mid-1870s and he died soon afterward.

***

Peter's oldest son John Louis took over as head of the family. Nobody thought he was half the man his father was. He had no interest in farming, in hard work generally, or in a life of righteous isolation. Even in his early childhood he was running away from the farm; he'd escape into town and spend days with the idle kids outside the general store, until his silently ferocious father arrived to collect him. Nor did he have any use for religion. In later life he had a taste for gambling and for the ladies; he would blandly lie about this to the priest each week and complacently kneel for communion.

But he did inherit one thing from Peter: a love of making deals. He liked to be known as a sharp businessman, in an age when "sharp" meant something close to "outright larcenous." When he was a young man, he started going by his initials, because "J.L. Sehnert" made him sound more like a tycoon.

Soon after his father died, J.L. met and married a town girl named Franciska Spengel. She was from a German Catholic family that lived in Highland, Illinois. She had no more desire to be a farmer's wife than J.L. did to be a farmer -- so they borrowed money from her parents and opened a hotel in the small town of Pierron.

Pierron was a wholly typical Illinois farming community. It was a cluster of freshly built houses around a train station deep in the countryside. The houses were white clapboard, with peaked roofs and railed front porches, and their neatly manicured lawns were edged by flower beds and ringed by picket fences. The business district consisted of a barbershop, a feed barn, a general store, and a smithy. There was also a government building made of stone that served as a combination courthouse, county clerk's office, jail, and emergency storm shelter. The total population was around two hundred people, and rather more chickens, cows, horses, and pigs.

Pierron had never seen anything like J.L.'s hotel. It was a smart two-story building with a sprawling stable attached. Above the door was a big carved sign bearing the slogan, "The Oakdale House -- Ample Entertainment for Man and Beast." Its saloon had brass railings and a bar of varnished wood; on the second story were rooms to let, spartan but clean, with fresh linen on the beds and lace curtains on the windows. The hotel caused a sensation when it opened. The saloon immediately became the unofficial town hall, and everybody knew to look there first for the sheriff, the justice of the peace, and the local notary.

J.L. and Franciska had several good years in Pierron. Their first children were born there in the winter of 1875, in the attic room above the Oakdale saloon: twins, George and Mary. George was a weak child, but he survived; Mary died in infancy, nobody bothered to record why. The third child was my great-grandfather John Sebastian, afterward known as Bosh. He was born in January 1876; the town barber (who doubled as the doctor) was in attendance, while J.L. tended bar downstairs. It was said in the family that Bosh arrived in the middle of a blizzard so fierce the bar's customers never noticed the cries of either the mother or the child.

***

In the mid-1880s, the citizens of Pierron finally got around to naming the streets, so the post office could make regular deliveries. They strained their imaginations to come up with "Main Street" and "Railroad Street." But there was no debate at all about what to call the dirt track in front of the Oakdale. It was named "Sehnert Street." To this day, that's the biggest honor anybody in my family has received.

But the Oakdale never made much money. While the saloon did a steady business, the rooms were almost always empty. J.L. had to come up with countless short-term schemes to keep the place afloat. His best idea was to buy newfangled farm equipment, train his hotel employees as operators, and lease them out to local farmers for the spring planting and the fall harvest. When this didn't make him rich, he gave up. He sold the hotel in the summer of 1888, and he and his family left Pierron for Edwardsville.

***

Edwardsville was the biggest town in the county. In fact its population of 3,000 made it one of the biggest towns in Illinois. To modern eyes, it would have looked like an idealized image of bucolic peace: it was a cluster of slanted roofs and white church steeples nestled among green forested hills. But its inhabitants thought of it as a bustling industrial zone. It had coal mines, machine shops, factories, and several towering flour mills. (These last were notorious fire hazards, and over the years they all went up in titanic blazes that the whole town gathered to watch.) It also had a big commercial district. The streets were unpaved, and in summer the reek of the horses was overpowering, but the storefronts were brick and stone, and several blocks had even been wired with electric streetlights. They were switched on from dusk to midnight whenever it was cloudy.

The town was also large enough to support an old-fashioned, fully articulated class system, of the notoriously suffocating heartland variety. There were aristocrats in hedge-hidden mansions, who measured out their lives by cotillions and charity balls; there was a relentlessly churchgoing middle class; and there was a rowdy working class whose taste in entertainment ran to burlesque revues and raree-shows. There was also a thriving German community. As in a lot of downstate towns, the German-born and their children made up between a third and a half of the total population. The Germans had their own groceries and bakeries and meat markets; they had their own newspapers (brought in from Saint Louis and Chicago); there were classes conducted in German in the public schools; many of the Protestant churches had regular services in German, and the German Catholics had their own parish church, strictly segregated from the Irish -- it was an imposing stone building that stood across from the town square, with its own full-time priest.

There were ten hotels and rooming houses in town. They too had a caste structure. The top of the line was fancy indeed: the Saint James Hotel. It was at the heart of the commercial district. It was three stories of pale, elegant brick topped by a mansard roof. The interior had plush carpeting, deep-varnished mahogany, and polished brass. It even had an 800-seat theater where local drama clubs and visiting professional companies staged performances - though it was called an opera house, not a theater, because "theater" was a vulgar word; it connoted burlesque.

J.L.'s new hotel was far down the scale from there. It was a two-story clapboard building, with a saloon on the ground floor and the rooms to rent upstairs. It stood on the southwest edge of town, in an area of recently cleared woodland along the new commuter railroad corridor, a couple of hundred yards down from the station. "Sehnert's Hotel" was painted in huge letters just beneath the roofline to catch the eye of new arrivals peering around uncertainly on the platform.

Sehnert's Hotel was austere, the beds were hard, the saloon was dark and loud. But it was a popular and prosperous business from the first. (German-run saloons and hotels were preferred by the Anglo working and middle classes, because they had a reputation for cleanliness and propriety.) The clientele were commercial travelers, itinerant craftsmen, laborers looking for work at the local factories, and farmers up from the country for a day or two to buy equipment and supplies -- anybody, in short, who'd be impressed by the slogan: "First-class Service, Reasonable Rates, Courteous Treatment."

In the saloon, the regulars were local workmen and clerks and small businessmen, anyone who wanted to sit around and drink and get into furious arguments about the burning issues of the day: Free Silver and the Farmers' Alliances and the signs of the end-time. Sometimes a traveler brought out a fiddle and played for drinks -- an old country air, or a mournful ballad about the assassination of President Garfield. There was a battered upright in back where a regular would pound out tunes. When the men danced, the unvarnished plank flooring thumped and rumbled like a drum.

I have a family heirloom that suggests something about the quality of their lives. It's an authentic Sehnert's Hotel coffee cup. Doubtless the Saint James served its coffee in enameled china with floral patterns; at Sehnert's it came in a featureless, unglazed, off-white mug as thick as an elephant's hide. The absence of a handle was part of its practical design. It was intended to be filled with scaldingly hot coffee and clasped firmly between both palms. That was the only warmth a workingman was likely to feel in his hands in the course of a long winter's day.

***

The hotel was a great success for J.L. But he never attained the social status in Edwardsville that he'd known in Pierron. His name pops up here and there in the town records and in period newspapers, usually among the donors to charitable causes -- but never at the glittering top of the list, only in the gray, prudent lower middle. He was a member of the German-American businessmen's lodge, the Druids - a respectable lodge, but not socially of the first rank. The prestigious Anglo lodges, the Freemasons and Odd Fellows, never invited him to join. And of course nobody ever offered to name a street after him. In Edwardsville a saloon wasn't a fit business for respectable people.

He grew to be the model of the classic barkeep. He had a moon face, a hatchet nose, and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair. He was powerfully muscled but carried a big gut behind his barman's apron. His manner was brusque and his English guttural. He was famous for his needling, malicious sense of humor. "A great kidder," people called him - which didn't mean he was funny, exactly; it meant that he really knew how to get under your skin.

People also said he was a great ladies' man. He flirted, ponderously and relentlessly, with every woman he met, from the neighborhood matrons to the chambermaids. Franciska looked the other way -- it was what she expected of any man.

But he had another flaw neither she nor anybody else in the family could forgive. He was lazy. For all his scheming, Franciska did the real work of running the hotel.

Nobody ever called Franciska lazy. She was one of those iron-willed Victorian matrons who saw life as backbreaking labor with no hope of earthly reward. In family photographs she invariably appears in a forbiddingly heavy, out-of-season ankle-length dress, and her face is frozen in a mask of stony suspicion and disapproval. If she took any joy at all in existence -- and I've never heard anybody claim she did -- she found it in the flourishing of her family and the steadiness of her faith.

Her marriage to J.L. may not have been happy, but she never thought happiness was the point. Obedience was -- if not to him, then to her church and her culture. She attended mass three times a week, and she was highly disapproving of the priest for his lackluster penances. She had no use whatever for the life outside. She never traveled as far away from home as Saint Louis, she spoke nothing but German with her family and friends, and she learned only as much English as she absolutely had to, to deal with customers and tradespeople at the hotel. She took "be fruitful and multiply" to be the fundamental commandment: she had seven children, six of whom survived infancy, and they all grew up with her stern presence at the center of their world.

She set the children to work at the hotel almost as soon as they were old enough to walk. They made the beds and emptied the chamber pots; they scoured out the cuspidors and swept the vomit-clotted sawdust from the saloon floor. The candles and the oil lamps deposited a thick layer of greasy soot on every surface, so the walls and floors had to be scrubbed every few days, and the upholstery and curtains had to be washed weekly. And there was a ceaseless avalanche of laundry. The linens and the bedsheets were spectacularly foul, since they were used by guests who rarely bathed more than once a month.

Before school each day the children waited and bussed tables in the dining room. That was their biggest job. Hotels like Sehnert's were expected to lay out a staggering breakfast - every morning there'd be fried steak, eggs, pancakes, honey-cured ham, pork sausages, fresh biscuits in bacon gravy, and fruit pie. Lunch and dinner were lighter: usually cold meats, hard-boiled eggs, fresh-baked bread, and boiled potatoes; they were set out on a buffet table at the back of the saloon. The customers were demanding and brusque, and tipping was unknown. Instead the children were routinely cuffed or slapped by customers for making mistakes.

At the end of the day, the children slept in a stifling cubbyhole at the back of the attic, with two narrow beds and a window overlooking the train tracks. Even then the work wasn't done. When trains arrived after sunset, one of the boys would be roused by the night clerk, and he'd have to go over to the station and greet the passengers piling down onto the dark platform. Winter or summer, with snow piled high along the tracks or cicadas shrieking in the weeds, the boy would wait till the noise of the train died down, and then he'd hold up a lantern and cry "Hotel, hotel, hotel!"

***

The children all went to an English-speaking public school. Unlike their mother, they were eager to assimilate. They worked hard at speaking an accent-free English -- that is, whenever Franciska was out of earshot. They also shed their German names just as soon as they hit the school yard. The oldest son, George Adolph, developed a lifelong amnesia about his middle name. The youngest sons, Wilhelm Louis and Emil Richard, were always called Louie and Dick. The youngest daughter, Hermina, became Minnie. The oldest, Franciska, named for her mother, first called herself Frances and then settled on Daisy.

None of them made it past the eighth grade. There was no need for more learning when the course of their lives was so clear -- the boys would go into their father's business, and the girls would get married, have children, and work as hard as or harder than Franciska did. Their education had been made up mostly of memorizing rules - rules of English grammar, arithmetic, and long, cumbersome systems of weights and measures, rods and poods and yards and bushels and dry quarts. But there had been other lessons as well, and these the children wholly absorbed. They became unquestioning believers in all the books' homilies about duty and practicality and cheerful obedience, which were illustrated by stern warnings about children who defied their parents and were immediately trampled to death by speeding milk wagons. To the end of their lives, they lived as though the schoolbook version of morality was the only kind possible. Or most of them did, anyway.

***

John Sebastian Sehnert, my great-grandfather, was an odd man. From his earliest childhood, people shook their heads over him and said he was bound to come to no good. He was an idler, a woolgatherer, indifferent to authority, dreamily impervious to punishment, unintimidated by anybody else's opinions. At school, he perversely insisted on re-Germanizing his name, by pronouncing it in the heaviest Teutonic accent he could muster: yo-hann say-BOSH-tyan. When the other kids made fun of him he just laughed and repeated their jokes himself. That was how his friends and even his family came to call him Bosh.

The name stuck; it suited him. He had a lifelong love of bosh, of nonsense and irrelevant fantasy. He loved bad jokes and worse puns; he invented childish parodies of popular songs and sang them with operatic passion. He was the class clown, the goof, the one who couldn't stop laughing at the silly names in the schoolbooks. To the end of his days he thought education meant high-sounding nonsense made up of equal parts of Cicero and Hiawatha.

His only real talent was for playing hooky. He practiced it incessantly -- sometimes his brothers had to escort him forcibly into the schoolhouse to keep him from flunking out. His real education was in geography: he learned every road and creek and woodland for miles around Edwardsville. He knew every barn and backcountry church, every derelict cabin, every farmhouse where he could cadge a free lunch, every fenced-in shack where a family kept its lunatic relative -- the wild-eyed uncle who'd nailed up hex signs to ward off the evil eye and would wildly charge at trespassers from the cornrows while shouting verses from Revelations.

Bosh did manage to finish the eighth grade. After that he had a meandering career around town. There was always a relative or a family friend or a business associate of his father's who'd help him out with a menial job. Over his teenage years he was a grocery clerk, a telegraph messenger, a photographer's assistant, and a shoe salesman. His employers were always taken by his air of kindheartedness and imperturbability, and always ended up exasperated to a fury by his daydreaming.

His longest-lasting job was train conductor. When he was nineteen he got hired by a midsize passenger line that ran between Toledo and Topeka. He worked the milk run from Saint Louis to Springfield. It lasted for a couple of years. But he never liked it much. In those days train travel in the Midwest was famous for swarming confusion: every car was a carnival of salesmen, remittance men, immigrant families, preachers, hustlers, and drifters. He was worn out by the sight of them, and made homesick by the interminable vistas of unfamiliar farmland streaming past the tracks. Eventually he quit and resumed his aimless life around town.

He became a familiar sight in Edwardsville's saloons. People said he was the only one of the Sehnert boys who'd rather be a saloon's customer than its owner. He became a fiend for billiards, which he mastered in endless afternoons of solitary practice. He got to the point where he could beat just about anybody in town. He started playing for money, and picked up enough to indulge a newfound taste for fine clothes. He learned to wear suits fashionably loose, the tie and handkerchief just slightly askew. In this attire he strolled into the classiest billiard rooms downtown, the ones with green baize and polished brass and varnished mahogany; he carried himself with the negligent grace of a riverboat gambler come ashore for a day's amusement. Even as he trounced his opponents, he treated them with grave respect -- so grave, in fact, that nobody could tell if he was kidding.

His father put an end to this career. J.L. understood laziness all too well, but he wasn't going to watch any son of his make a fool of himself. So he took Bosh into the family business and gave him the one job everybody thought he could handle: deliveryman.

So twice a week Bosh loaded up a big beer wagon and drove its horses between Edwardsville and Pierron and Highland. He liked the job - particularly the solitude. Usually he rode alone, with a shotgun in case of hijackers, and he had nothing to do except watch the familiar hills and forests drift past. Still, it wasn't as easy as it sounds. The roads hadn't changed much since the days of the first settlers. They were fine in the summer, when they were baked solid by the sun and softened by dust; and they were passable in winter, after the ruts had been filled in with ice and hard-packed snow. But the thaws of spring and the long rains of fall made them a soupy misery: a journey of a few hours could turn into a day and night of torture as the wagon lurched from one bottomless mud hole to the next. Bosh took pride in his growing skill at maneuvering through the maze.

But it was the sight of him perched atop the wagon that finished him off in the eyes of the town. A hundred years later, one of the local gossips could still remember the judgment passed on him then. "Everybody liked Bosh," she told me. "But they all said the same thing about him. His problem was, he just had no ambition."

***

Sehnert's Hotel was notorious for the speed at which it ran through hired help. Those were hard times, the 1890s, the worst that America would see until the Great Depression; a lot of people were out of work, on the road, grateful for any day labor they could scrabble up. But even so, some of the hardiest cooks and maids and clerks couldn't endure the ferocity of Franciska's taskmastering -- and of the women who could, most were scared off by J.L.'s lumbering, undeflectable flirtatiousness. It wasn't until the turn of the century that they found a chambermaid who proved resistant to both.

Her name was Agnes Gross. She was twenty-one. She was broad and big-boned, with a flat nose, a wide, plain face, and masses of dull brown hair. She had a spectacular temper. No one was better at conveying furious resentment at Franciska's demands; and her look of sullen hatred whenever J.L. contrived to be alone with her was enough to get even an elephant like him to shy off. But she had one other quality that trumped any of her defects in the Sehnerts' eyes: she had a limitless capacity for hard work.

Agnes had been born in the town of Alhambra, about fifteen miles east of Edwardsville. Her family was much like the Sehnerts: in fact they'd come from the same Rhinelander province, and had similar success in America as farmers and tradespeople. Agnes's brothers were pharmacists and grocers; a couple had been gandy dancers on the railroad; one opened the county's first telephone service -- he had forty clients, and his wife operated the switchboard from a curtained alcove in their parlor. And, like the Sehnerts, the family had a faint hint of the disreputable hovering over them, though in their case it dated from a single incident. Agnes's father August had been a wagon maker until his factory burned down in the mid-1870s. Decades later, people in Alhambra were still saying darkly that the fire had been no accident.

Agnes had been on her own since she was fourteen. She'd never gotten along with her family: she was iron-willed and disobedient and she'd run away several times while still in grammar school. Once she'd left home for good, she spent years working in factories and living in cheap rooming houses. In her late teens she came to Edwardsville and drifted into domestic service. Sehnert's was the first hotel she'd worked at, and she hadn't decided yet if it would be her last. She didn't have much use for her employers and was thinking of moving on -- that is, until she met Bosh.

He was twenty-four then: a good-humored young man with a round face, disorderly hair, and kindly eyes. He was known to everyone as a ne'er-do-well and a soft touch, someone who couldn't be trusted to carry out the simplest errand, but who would empty his pockets to the last penny if a friend or a new acquaintance or a passerby was in need. When he began to notice Agnes -- hanging around the hotel in the afternoons as she made the beds, fearlessly teasing her when she was in a foul mood -- she couldn't tell whether he was imitating his father (with far more delicacy) or taking pity on a plain girl. It was a long time before she would admit to herself that he was serious.

His family had no idea what to make of this romance. On the whole, they approved -- J.L. was heard to say that Agnes was just the girl who could beat some sense into Bosh. But there was a sticking point, at least for Franciska: Agnes was a devout Lutheran. The crisis was resolved when she agreed to convert to Catholicism. It was the only instance on record where she did anything for the sake of somebody else's feelings.

Bosh and Agnes were married in March 1902. The custom of a church wedding with the bride in white wasn't common then among German Catholics; the service was at the priest's house and Agnes proudly wore a new blue dress. The wedding day was brilliant -- cloudless, windy, and warm, the first thaw of spring. The streets of Edwardsville became rivers of mud and Bosh's skill as a driver failed him -- a few blocks from home the bridal carriage got stuck up to its axles. His efforts to free it grew so ornately frantic that the whole wedding party was caught up in a wave of giddy hilarity, and everyone arrived at the priest's house disheveled, mud-spattered, and teary-eyed with laughter.

The newlyweds moved into their own room at the back of the hotel's second floor. There was inevitably some gossip around town about the speed of their engagement and why a hotel owner's son would marry a chambermaid. But it was silenced when the first child, my grandfather Clarence, was born a decorous eleven months after the wedding.

***

Bosh's older brother George was an artist -- everybody said so. When he was a teenager he was apprenticed to a local brewmaster, and afterward he started brewing beers and ales for Sehnert's Hotel. He concocted the sweetest pilseners, the most chocolaty bocks, the fizziest weisses, and the richest spiced Christmas ales. Sehnert's became one of the most popular brands in town, and orders poured in from saloons and taverns all over the county. J.L. had to expand the brewery; he moved it out of the hotel basement and rented space at a warehouse downtown. When the money started flowing in, he decided to sell the hotel and run the brewery full-time.

It was a seller's market. After the Spanish-American war, the new century had brought boom times to the heartland. J.L. waited for the right buyer, closed a deal shortly after New Year's 1905, and immediately bought a big new house for the family.

The house was on Brown Street, a quiet residential street on the southeast side of town. It was a squat, solid brownstone - the sort of solemnly respectable place where the blinds were kept drawn and the afternoon stillness was deepened by the tock of the grandfather clock. But J.L. liked things lively. He filled the house with family and friends: three generations of Sehnerts and a floating population of visitors, houseguests, and out-of-town cousins. It was a rare meal when fifteen or twenty people didn't sit down together at the dining room table.

Meanwhile the new owner of the hotel bought almost everything in it: the bedsteads, the unmonogrammed sheets, the anonymous mugs and plates and coffee cups. All he needed to do was paint out "Sehnert's Hotel" on the clapboard and paint in "Liebler's Hotel." There was only one item he had no use for: a newly arrived box of Sehnert's Hotel letterhead. That J.L. brought home with him.

I have one of those pages in front of me now. Somebody has used it to write a brief account in German of J.L.'s life -- the childhood on the farm, the Oakdale House in Pierron, the move to Edwardsville. Scrawled across the top in English is: Died 12:40 AM 25th day of December 1905.

***

J.L. was fifty-five and strong as an ox. But in those days death came with little or no warning, from any of a thousand untraceable causes; that was a time when even an unnoticed blister could prove fatal. Part of the gossip that circulated daily across the back fences and along the laundry lines all over town was who had fallen mysteriously ill, who had died overnight, who had been seen only yesterday looking in the pink of health. All that the Sehnert children and grandchildren ever knew about J.L.'s death was this: from then on, Christmas at the Brown Street house was a day of mourning.

***

The oldest son George took over as head of the family and proprietor of the business. It didn't take long for everybody to realize he wasn't cut out for either job. He was a niggler and a worrier, quick to fire anybody who challenged him and maniacally suspicious about being cheated. At home he proved an overbearing tyrant who presided gloomily over the dinner table and lashed out at anybody who dared to lighten the mood.

It wasn't long before he started losing both workers and dinner guests. Bosh, the least valuable employee, was the first out the door.

Bosh had grown somber and preoccupied since his father's death. For the first time in his life he'd started to talk about moving out and buying a place of his own. After he quit the brewery, he took a job of uncharacteristic seriousness: apprentice machinist with a local freight railroad company. He worked at the roundhouse -- a loud, smoky, sweltering place filled with the shriek and clang of metal on metal and the roar of escaping steam. The work was exhausting and dangerous, but Bosh was at last learning the rudiments of a trade. He impressed everybody by displaying a previously unsuspected capacity for backbreaking work.

Each day he walked to and from the roundhouse along Troy Road, the main highway south out of town. A few blocks from Brown Street it led him past the last house and into the countryside. It was no longer the untouched world out there that it had been in his childhood; there were now several big blotches of new construction. He passed a brick factory with a churning smokestack, a brass foundry, and a huddle of makeshift wooden buildings around the shaft of a coal mine. Bosh had to walk an extra half a mile or so before the pristine stillness of the prairie resumed. There, in the summertime, the rustling of the tall grass and the buzzing of bees could still be heard hundreds of yards away, and in the winter the snow hissed like snakes along distant lines of fence posts. There was rarely any traffic. The clop of a horse resounded minutes ahead of its arrival, and the rumble of a wagon gathered strength as slowly as a thunderstorm.

Another half mile down the road was a rail crossing. Bosh followed the tracks west to a cluster of spurs and sidings, where the roundhouse and the repair barns stood. The land on either side of the tracks was sparse and meandering, poor soil for farming. That's why Bosh was so surprised to see on his commute, one spring morning in 1907, men alongside the tracks with surveying gear.

He knew at once what it meant: somebody was interested in buying up the land and building houses. He then had the only big practical idea of his life. If he acted quickly, he could still afford to buy land there and build a house himself.

***

He'd never even considered being a property owner before and had no idea how to go about it. His brothers had to arrange everything for him. But that wasn't too difficult: the boom times in Edwardsville meant that banks were eager to lend. All Bosh really needed to get a mortgage was a couple of hundred dollars up front, and proof of a steady job. His brothers decided that the money was his fair share of their father's estate; and as for the job, they encouraged him to apply at the N.O. Nelson Company, the prestige employer of blue-collar workers in Edwardsville.

The Nelson company manufactured fine porcelain and brass plumbing fixtures. It was the creation of an eccentric industrialist, one of the last of the 19th-century experimenters in utopian philosophy. His factories - a brass foundry and a porcelain shop - were models of modern design: long, low buildings with rows of immense arched windows and double rows of skylights, ivy flourishing on the walls of whitewashed brick. They stood in the grassy fields to the east of Troy Road, looking like newfangled greenhouses.

Nelson also built housing for his workers where he could put his ideas and whims into practice. He created a whole village, which he named Leclaire, which he carved out of the woodlands southeast of town. Leclaire had generously sized houses on elegantly curving streets; the streets were named after Nelson's heroes, Longfellow, Lincoln, and Ruskin. There were no local laws or police officers, and an elaborate barter system was used in place of money at the village stores. Even Bosh, who wasn't about to give up his new property to live in Leclaire, still shared in employee benefits unheard-of at ordinary factories, such as free medical and dental care.

But once Bosh started at his job, he discovered that the aura of modernity stopped at the foundry door. The fury of the cauldron, the endless roils of steam and smoke, the dancing shadows of the work crews, the squeals and hisses of the molten brass, the shriek of the drills, and the peacock-tail plumes of sparks from the saws -- it was all overwhelming and intoxicating on first exposure. But there was little about it that would have baffled a brassworker from the Renaissance.

Bosh quickly got the hang of it. Nelson didn't believe in specialization; every employee was expected to understand the operation of the whole plant. So Bosh learned his trade in a steady circuit down the hall and back again. He began at the cauldron. This was where a crew used long, charred oars to stir a fierce sludge of copper and zinc. They periodically dumped in a load of hissing salt (to flux the oxides) and the scraps and defective castings left over from the last shift. In the middle of the hall were other teams of workmen. They were setting the enormous mazelike sand molds. To save time, the foundry made dozens of pieces in a single cast; so after the bellowing alarm, when the cauldron was tilted and the molten sludge was poured, after the cast had cooled and the fused sand was scoured away, what was revealed was a surreal tree of pipes hung with dangling faucet-fruit. At the far end of the hall was another team with saws and drills; they cut the tree apart and loaded the pieces into hoppers, which they rolled out the main doors toward the shipping department on the other side of the grassy plaza.

After Bosh completed his first successful circuit through the foundry he was instructed to repeat it; after that to repeat it again. Then he was promoted to shop foreman. It was the most responsible position he'd ever achieved and it proved to be the farthest reach of his ambitions. He stayed at the job for the rest of his life.

***

In less than a year Bosh owned three adjoining plots along the railroad tracks -- almost a third of an acre of land -- and his house was ready for occupancy. It was a spartan place even by the austere standards of the day. There were four rooms: kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and parlor (which, as was the custom, was strictly reserved for guests); plus a basement pantry and an attic. It had a coal furnace but no electricity or plumbing. Fresh water was drawn from a hand pump in the yard by the kitchen door, and there was a two-seater outhouse by the back fence.

He and Agnes furnished the house at a bankruptcy auction for a nearby farm: they came home with a load of carved chairs and knobby bedsteads and a battered but magnificent oak table for the dining room. The walls in the kitchen were whitewashed; in the rest of the house, they put up fashionably dark floral wallpaper. They hung three pieces of art in the parlor: a tinted lithograph of Abraham Lincoln, a second of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, and a third of Lincoln on his deathbed titled Now He Belongs to the Ages. Out back, in the huge yard, Bosh planted a vegetable garden and a little orchard of peach trees.

The family and Bosh's friends all thought a little house along the railroad was a step down from the house on Brown Street. But that didn't matter to Bosh; he loved the place the moment he first set foot in it. Many years later, toward the end of his life, he told his daughter Helen that every time he returned to his house, even from a trip to the grocery store, the sight of it made his heart leap.

***

In 1910 a commercial traveler for a big midwestern brewery passed through Edwardsville and happened to sample Sehnert's Ale. He was so impressed that he immediately sought out George Sehnert and offered him a job as a brewmaster. The brewery was in Joliet, on the other side of the state -- but George accepted on the spot. A month later, he and his wife and children left Edwardsville and never came back.

That was the end of the family business. Nobody even considered hiring another brewmaster; they knew they'd never find one as good as George. They sold off the brewery and they left the last remaining kegs of George's finest to go cloudy and sour at the back of the warehouse. It wasn't long before George's art was forgotten. Only the family remembered the stories of how good the beer had been - but not so much as an empty bottle or a label has survived among the family's heirlooms.

George's departure was also the signal for a more general exodus from the Brown Street house. The next to go were his brothers Louie and Dick: they opened a small saloon in the old German neighborhood on the north side of town, and when that proved to be a success, they each bought a house nearby. (After Prohibition came in and the saloon was closed down, Louie took up farming; Dick, who had a head for figures, became a land surveyor for the county.) Their sister Minnie married a man named Joseph Maclean who worked with Bosh at the Nelson company: they moved into a little house in Leclaire. The last daughter, Daisy, married a grocer named Jim Revelle. She soon accompanied him back to Topeka, Kansas, where he'd inherited the family business.

That left old Franciska. In 1905, she and J.L. had moved into the house to preside over a brood of children and grandchildren; ten years later she was living in the house alone.

Franciska didn't take well to solitude. She grew querulous and demanding, much given to bending the ears of visitors about her unworthy children. Her particular target was Bosh. Bosh was the only one of the children to come by regularly and to stay longer than duty required. She never tired of calling him a fool to his face, while praising him to everybody else as her lone example of filial piety. He never got angry with her. He insisted on bringing along his children and filling the Brown Street house with their giddy, door-slamming, silence-shattering vitality. He even managed to coax Franciska out of the house for the occasional carriage ride around town.

Franciska hated most of what she saw. In those years the town was making a grand gesture of welcome to the new century by paving the streets. The commercial district had already been torn up; concrete sidewalks had replaced the wooden planking, and rows of electric streetlights were sprouting like vines. Now the work crews were invading the residential neighborhoods. The soft clop of hooves on dust was replaced by the rattle of wheels on brick; the new streetlights lit the town up all night, and over every main street and intersection, trolley wires loomed.

A bigger calamity awaited her. When the Great War came, her immediate family was spared; her sons were too old to serve and her grandsons too young. But the German culture of Edwardsville disappeared overnight. German stores changed their names and pulled their German-made goods from the shelves (or risked having their windows broken); schools dropped their German classes and the churches their German services; anybody heard speaking German on the streets was taunted and sometimes physically harassed -- it wasn't unusual for children to throw rocks at German speakers while their parents cheered them on.

Nor did any of the old culture reemerge from hiding after the war was over. On those rare times when Franciska left the house she found few traces of the world she remembered. Everybody spoke English on the streets and in the stores; most of her grandchildren didn't know a word of German. Only a scattering of old street signs -- Krafft Street, Schwarz Street, Eberhardt Avenue -- remained to prove that Germans had ever been in Edwardsville.

***

There were bonfires at the crossroads on Halloween, and fireworks in the parks on Decoration Day; the churches were standing room only on Easter and Christmas, and all church bells rang out at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. People went to Wild West shows in the town square, and saw theatrical companies put on shows at the opera house; on any clear, warm evening, Bosh and Agnes could walk with their children across Troy Road to Leclaire Lake, where people swam and strolled on the grass as a brass band played. The calendar was crowded with fish fries and church dances and ice cream socials; every week there was at least one occasion when the whole town gathered.

During the dog days of summer, the Chautauqua came through. Full-page ads and schedules of events were published in the local paper, and the clerks in stores all over town sported big red-white-and-blue buttons that read I'm Going! and I've Got My Ticket! The Chautauqua was held in a wide meadow in the open country east of town. Every day for a week, people swarmed out to its tents to hear oompah concerts, lurid arias from operettas, solemnly edifying lectures, and sword-clacking enactments of scenes from classic drama. It was a sort of tamed and secularized relic of the wild revival meetings and river baptisms of the old times.

And there were parades -- for national holidays and local ones, for any reason or none at all. The town was always eager to spend an afternoon cheering. Sometimes it seemed as though history manifested itself only in the changing procession of floats. At the centennial parade of 1914, the automobile made its first major incursion. Cars were still rare sights then, and it would be decades before horse-drawn wagons altogether disappeared from downtown. But the cars came down the parade route in a chugging, rattling, exhaust-banging line, draped in bunting and swarmed by brilliant balloons, every auto in private hands in the county. There were fifty of them in all.

***

At Bosh's house on Second Avenue, it sometimes seemed as if history would never arrive. "Second Avenue" had a grand sound, but it was still only a ragged dirt track off Troy Road. The nearest streetlight was a mile away, and from the front porch on any clear night you could see the Milky Way in full flood above the trees. There were times in winter, as the house shook in a blizzard, when it seemed as lonely and isolated as a pioneer homestead. When they were snowed in, Bosh would gather the family around the kitchen stove and tell stories -- the terrifying folktales he'd heard in his own childhood about the witches' sabbaths in the forest glades and the Erl-King riding in mad pursuit down winter roads at night, hungry for children's souls. At other times he would give dramatic readings of the Sunday funnies: as the wind roared in the chimney and snow pelted the windows he would act out the latest antics of the Katzenjammer Kids or hold his audience spellbound with Little Nemo's voyage to Mars.

***

Bosh and Agnes had six children. The oldest, my grandfather Clarence, seemed to everyone like a throwback to the early days of the family. He had the old Sehnert look: stocky, firm, with a moon face and blobby nose and a bristling crop of wiry dark hair. He was a slow-talking, slow-thinking boy who had none of Bosh's easy camaraderie with strangers. But he did have a sense of humor -- a peculiarly subterranean one that emerged only at the worst possible moments, in the form of jokes that he alone thought were funny. When he was a senior in high school, he was assigned Edwardsville's industry as a theme; he got up before the class, announced that he had chosen as his specific subject the local coal mines, and began, "Coal is black as hell."

That was as far as he got. The teacher sent him to the principal and the principal expelled him. It was the standard penalty in those days for using profanity in school.

But Clarence was stubborn. He spent the following year idling around town; he took up pool and became almost as good as his father (his friends started calling him "Jasper," after a riverboat gambler in an old melodrama). But all the while he was determined to go back to school. The following fall he reapplied, repeated the twelfth grade -- stone-faced and impervious to the teasing of his classmates -- and graduated. He was the first of the Sehnerts to get a high school diploma. And he was the last, for another twenty years.

***

The second son, Oliver, died when he was a year and a half old. A note in the family records reads: Scalded in the bath. Maybe it was a sign the world was changing that somebody bothered to note a cause.

***

The oldest daughter, Pearl, was born two years after Oliver. She was strong, pretty, and exuberant. The town gossips said she was a good girl but maybe a little too eager to get out of the gate.

She dropped out of school when she was fifteen, and Bosh got her a job in the Nelson company shipping department. This was considered relatively dainty work -- most of the crew were women. Pearl spent her day filling up crates with brass plumbing fixtures and porcelain sinks and toilet bowls; before she got used to it, her hands were chafed raw by the wood and the needlelike straw packing. The crates went from her station down the line to be nailed shut; then they were loaded up on skids and swung on a big winch out through the wide doors of the department to a boxcar waiting on a siding. Men worked the winch, and in the swelter of summer they shrugged aside their modesty with their shirts. One of the men was huge and loud, with a booming laugh and an odd, unplaceable accent. His name was Cecil Bilyeu.

People said Cecil had come up the Mississippi from Cajun country -- an idea that lingers in the Sehnert family to this day. But the Bilyeus were in fact descendants of French trappers and homesteaders who'd settled Illinois hundreds of years before the first German or Englishman arrived. But wherever he might have come from, he stood out. Unlike the dour and proper inhabitants of Edwardsville, he was wild, profane, and open-hearted, with a boundless appetite for good times. Almost as soon as he and Pearl started flirting with each other, they were having tumultuous fights and passionate reconciliations that were the talk of the Nelson company.

Bosh and Agnes didn't know how to deal with this crisis. Agnes was furious at Pearl and wanted to forbid her from seeing Cecil. Bosh came up with a compromise: Cecil could attend Sunday dinners at the Sehnerts' so long as he would promise never to see Pearl alone. Cecil agreed.

It wasn't an arrangement destined to last. A couple of months later, Pearl turned sixteen. On Christmas Eve, she and Cecil worked a half shift at the Nelson company. They left the factory together. About what happened next, Cecil always liked to say, "We just couldn't think of anything better to do." They got in his battered truck and drove down the snow-buried roads to Greenville, Illinois, where they found a justice of the peace and got married.

They were too afraid of Agnes to tell her what they'd done. For weeks afterward they lived separately. Pearl went home to Second Avenue each night, while Cecil returned to the small house on the east side of town he shared with his mother and sister. It was Cecil's sister who put an end to the charade. One February day when Cecil was at work, she found the marriage license in his bedroom, and out of spite, she sent it to the local newspaper. The following morning Bosh was greeted at the foundry by friends congratulating him on his daughter's wedding.

Bosh got angry then. Everybody said they'd never seen him so angry. He marched out of the foundry and across to the shipping room, where he confronted Pearl and demanded an explanation. She confessed on the spot. He ordered her go home and tell her mother.

She left the shipping room in the middle of the shift and trudged home along Troy Road through the snow and fog. Afterward she thought of that as the most important walk of her life. She reached home and confessed to her mother. Agnes was furious -- but Pearl refused to back down. She demanded to know what Agnes had against Cecil. Agnes drew herself up into a haughty silence, and then deflated.

"Oh, I like Cecil just fine," she said. "But it's never going to last. All you two ever do is fight."

And that was the end of the showdown. By the time Bosh returned from work, mother and daughter were reconciled. The next day Cecil took his bride home with him at the end of the shift, and for the first time they spent a whole night together.

***

Bosh and Agnes's second daughter, Hilda, was a different kind of rebel. She wore lots of makeup and bought glossy magazines to ogle the ads. In high school she hung around with a fast crowd. Most of Edwardsville's young people gathered at the roller rink after school; but Hilda snuck out of the house at night and drove off with her friends to country roadhouses, where they drank bootleg beer and listened to jazz bands.

When she was sixteen, she told Bosh and Agnes she was going to drop out of school and become a saxophonist. Bosh shrewdly promised her that if she'd stay in school, he'd buy her a saxophone. She agreed, and Bosh presented her with a top-of-the-line model. She spent a few dismal weeks tormenting the house with bizarre blats and wails and groans. Then she announced that she wanted to drop out of school to become a secretary. This time Bosh promised her that if she'd stay in school, he'd buy her a typewriter. She practiced typing for one day; then the typewriter moved up to the attic to keep company with the sax.

The next time Hilda said she wanted to drop out, Bosh came up with a new deal: Hilda could quit school only if she'd agree to take care of old Franciska, who was still living alone in the Brown Street house and growing increasingly frail. Hilda accepted at once.

She had no idea what she was in for. Franciska was nearly blind, but she still wanted the house kept immaculately clean and orderly. She taught Hilda the ancient routine of households in Edwardsville, in which every day of the week had its specific dawn-to-dusk task. Monday was washing day, Tuesday ironing day, Wednesday housecleaning day, Thursday bread-baking day, Friday the day for shopping and soap making and sewing, Saturday for bathing and cake baking, Sunday for church and the family dinner at Bosh's house. (That was the only day when Franciska was willing to leave Brown Street.) The schedule was so strict that the sight of washing put out on the clothesline late in the week would bring all the neighbors over to find out what was wrong.

While drilling Hilda in clothes boiling and floor scrubbing and wallpaper scouring, and teaching her to always stir the soap clockwise as it was simmering (it was bad luck to stir the other way), Franciska bombarded her with an unending lecture on values. In the decades since her husband J.L. had died, Franciska had hardened in her view of the world. It was imperative to be married. It was irrelevant whether one's husband was faithful. One owed one's husband utter obedience even if one despised him -- because one's true obedience was to God, and a bad husband like J.L. was only a test that God had sent.

Listening to Franciska made Hilda bone weary and heartsick. But she stayed, and she learned.

***

The next son, Eugene, was a shy boy who sat silently at the dinner table with his head down and excused himself the instant his plate was clean. He never spoke in class, was an indifferent student, and barely managed to drag himself through to the tenth grade. Bosh got him a job at Nelson, and he spent a year learning how to cut and polish porcelain slabs into sinks and toilet bowls. He worked hard without ever losing his perpetual air of sullen distraction. All he really wanted was to be left alone, and his only genuine enthusiasm in life was hunting.

The countryside around Edwardsville was mostly fenced in and cultivated by then, and the big game of the old times was long gone. But farther from town there were woodlands and meadows where deer lingered and marshlands swarming with waterfowl. Eugene took to spending days at a time out in the deep country. He was particularly fond of the area around Alhambra, the town where his mother had been born and where her family still lived.

In recent years there had been the beginnings of a cautious rapprochement between Agnes and her relatives -- they said they'd be willing to talk to her again if she'd leave the Catholic church, and she was considering doing it. When Eugene introduced himself, he was welcomed with open arms. He grew close to Agnes's brother August, who owned a big farm just outside of town. August gave Eugene permission to hunt in his fields and pastures, and often Eugene returned home to Edwardsville with rabbits, a deer haunch, and a couple of big buckets overflowing with wild blackberries and morel mushrooms.

On the farm Eugene made his best friend. This was August's younger brother Frank. Frank was a reclusive figure who rarely left the farmhouse and didn't like to be approached too closely; he's avoid eye contact and duck away as though looking for the nearest shadow. It was a legacy of his childhood, when he'd suffered such a bad case of eczema he couldn't go out in public. His family had home-schooled him and kept him soothed in ointments and swathed in loose wrappings of cotton, the only clothing he could tolerate. Nor had that been the end of his misfortunes. One day when he was ten, his brothers were shooting arrows at a fence and thought it would be funny to push him up behind the knothole they were using as a target; he lost an eye. He was somebody who, as the family said, "had a tough break in life."

But by the time Eugene met him, things had changed. He had been cured of his eczema - though nobody could say exactly how. The story came down in the family that "Frank met a doctor who suggested he try and rid himself of it, which he did." In any case Frank had grown up to be a gaunt but oddly handsome man with a roguish eye patch. He remained profoundly grateful to his brother August for taking him in. One of his nieces remembers: "Frank did everything for August. He kept house, cooked, canned, baked darn good bread, washed, milked, farmed, you name it. August said Frank did everything for him but have a baby, and he would have done that if he could."

Frank hated strangers. But he gradually unbent around Eugene, and sometimes even accompanied him on his hunting trips -- pointing out good blinds and hard-to-spot cuts in the most tangled underbrush. He couldn't do any shooting because of his eye, but he was a good companion who knew how to keep silent. He and Eugene sometimes spent whole days together with no company but Eugene's hunting dogs. Both men were perfectly content not to say a word.

***

Bosh and Agnes's youngest child, Helen, grew up to be tall, big-boned, plain, and ungainly. She was more soft-spoken even than Eugene -- except that in her case something always seemed to be stewing behind her silence, some grievance she wouldn't disclose. She hated to be noticed, detested being made fun of by her siblings, got red-faced and unintelligible whenever she was ever called on in class. She never talked back, but sometimes a sly, lemon-tart look crossed her face, as though she'd just thought of the snippiest comeback in the world but had too much self-regard to say it.

She had few friends, and only one that lasted - a girl named Irene, who lived across the train tracks in a house on First Avenue. Otherwise her main pleasure in life was the movies. There was a movie theater opposite the old town square (it had once been a burlesque house where Al Jolson and W.C. Fields had played), and Bosh took the whole family there every Saturday night. Bosh loved the comedies; sometimes as they walked home he would imitate Charlie Chaplin and make a mad silhouette against the night sky, twirling and prancing and kicking up clouds of dust from the road. But Helen was wild for exotic romances, The Sheik and The Count of Monte Cristo. She was inconsolable for weeks after Rudolf Valentino died.

***

For years it seemed as though graduating from high school was going to be Clarence's only accomplishment. Even with the diploma he had a hard time finding work. Just like his father, he went through a lot of jobs -- so many that afterward the family couldn't remember them all. He did day labor at the radiator factory; he clerked at stores around town; and he spent one miserable winter trudging from door to door selling "real silk hosiery."

His best job was with a local passenger railroad. He sorted mail on the daily run between Saint Louis and Chicago. He knew nothing about either city when he started, and he never saw any more of them than their rail terminals. But day after day, as he looked up addresses in the battered street guide and shoved the envelopes into the pigeonholes labeled with the names of the branch post offices, he gradually built up mental images of the city grids -- what ethnic names were clustered in what neighborhoods, which business districts were flourishing and which were getting dunned by mobs of creditors. He got to the point where he figured he could find his way around either city blindfolded without having set foot on a single street. So in the summer of 1926, he announced to Bosh and Agnes that he was moving to Chicago to try his luck there.

***

The house on Second Avenue was always crowded. Besides Bosh and Agnes and the flock of children, there was also a floating population of visiting cousins, friends of friends, and overnight guests who wouldn't leave. Bosh liked to keep up his father's old tradition of hospitality: it was a rare meal where fewer than a dozen people sat down at the dining room table. At bedtime cots and mattresses were strewn over the floors of every room, and on the hottest nights people moved out to the back porch and the yard and sprawled like lions on the veldt.

The big occasion each week was Sunday dinner after church. Everybody in the neighborhood had a standing invitation. Agnes cooked an enormous pot roast (the menu never changed, even in the height of summer) and laid out heaping bowls of side dishes: string beans in porked vinegar, mountains of mashed potatoes and corn, gleaming ponds of corn relish, and clutches of fresh-baked biscuits. There were flagons of wine and pitchers of fresh milk and spiced lemonade; dessert was peach pie topped with cinnamon ice cream. When the weather was fine, everyone ate in the backyard, at long picnic tables draped with red-checked tablecloths beneath the thin shade of Bosh's peach orchard. Sometimes the freight trains came trundling past the back fence, trailing their squalls of cinders; the regulars became adept at hurriedly covering up bowls and platters with their napkins or with empty dishes. When the weather was cold or foul, everybody crowded around the heavy old table in the dining room, with the spillover at the kitchen table, and jokes were called back and forth through the open doorway. Toward twilight, if the sky was clear, everyone moved out to the front yard and sat together watching the lanterns of the wagons slowly bob through the dark along Troy Road.

***

In those days the southern edge of Edwardsville was creeping toward the house like a glacier. Across the tracks on First Avenue there was now a new row of bungalows; down the wandering dirt track on Second were a couple of sprawling houses and a poultry farm. Clapboard storefront buildings were springing up on Troy Road, bringing with them streetlights and electric lines. Bosh paid to have the house wired: a new pole drooping with a spaghetti-tangle of cabling was planted just outside the picket fence, and soon Bosh was proudly showing each new visitor how every room in the house had its own outlet.

Bosh was a familiar figure around the neighborhood by then. Everybody up and down Troy Road recognized his gentle lope. Sometimes he dressed to the teeth and sauntered downtown to play pool, but he was always willing to stop and chat with new neighbors and passersby along the way, and frequently he'd throw away whatever he was planning to do that day and help someone out with a carpentry project or plumbing repair. He always surprised people with the thoroughness and quality of his work -- especially if they'd observed him lolling about his own house like a pet dog. When the trains came by, Agnes and the children would race through the backyard rescuing sheets from the clotheslines, while Bosh would be seen dozing in his hammock under the back porch eave, sheltered from the hot black showers of cinders falling all around him.

When Prohibition came in, Bosh was the first in the neighborhood to take up winemaking. The bottles he brought up from his basement soon became the treasured high point of Sunday dinner. Everybody agreed he was an exceptional winemaker -- though they couldn't help shaking their heads over the absurd flavors he insisted on bottling: dandelion, peach, blackberry, apricot. But he was surprisingly diffident about beer. He never bothered to make his own; like the rest of the neighborhood, he bought it at a corner tavern on Troy Road that languidly masqueraded as a laundry (men's long johns hung in the window, and a stack of shirt boxes hid the taps). Unlike everyone else, he didn't take the time to chill it.

"That was such terrible beer we had then," one of his neighbors told me. "Just dreadful. And then seeing Bosh drink it warm -- imagine how that tasted!" It had been seventy-five years, but the memory still made her shudder.

***

The neighbors remembered Agnes, too. She was Bosh's keeper, the household's taskmaster, and the children's disciplinarian. She'd never much cared whether the children stayed in school -- she was fond of saying that book learning never did anybody any good that she'd ever heard of. But she was determined that they be devout churchgoers. She'd never been happy pretending to be a Catholic, and a few years into the marriage she told Bosh she wanted the family to begin attending a newly built church of the Disciples of Christ.

Bosh agreed; he was indifferent to religion. But for Agnes it was a return to something deep and comforting. The Disciples of Christ had none of the somber rituals of the Catholic church, nor the wilder goings-on typical of the Protestant churches in the deep country. Ranting, testifying, snake-handling, speaking in tongues -- to her this would all have been as strange as the witches' sabbaths in Bosh's stories. Instead the stress was right where she preferred it -- on good fellowship, sensible obedience, and a clear conscience.

***

In the mid-1920s Bosh found a new extravagance: radio. The first battery-operated sets were appearing in Edwardsville's stores then -- units that could be plugged into wall outlets were still a few years away. Bosh bought the fanciest model he could afford. You had to listen through headphones, and the only controls were two unmarked knobs that changed the frequency and the volume in unpredictable ways. Bosh spent hours hunched over it, twiddling the knobs and straining to make out anything at all through the undifferentiated roar of static.

Most of what he heard was wholly mysterious. There were horrible wailings and bellowings like demons caught in a thunderstorm, strange chirps and beeps of unknown provenance, and eerie jumbles of distorted music and voices from competing stations that were broadcasting on the same frequency. Only at rare intervals, as though in the lull of a gale, was there something recognizably human -- a faint voice ranting a sermon, a lonely fiddle sawing out a fragmentary melody. Then the roaring drowned it out again, and no touch of the knobs, however patient or incremental, could recapture it.

There was a game popular among radio enthusiasts in those days that Bosh and a few of his friends began playing. They would hang on to a recognizable broadcast, no matter what it was, until the announcer identified the call letters and location, and when they compared notes the next day, whoever had heard the most remote station was the winner. They called it "distancing," or "DX-ing" - "DX" was the ham radio code for "distance."

Distancing depended on the fluky way radio signals bounce off the ionosphere at night: a station a thousand miles away could briefly come in more clearly than one on the other side of town. Bosh and his friends mostly heard a scattering of broadcasts from around the heartland -- backcountry music from Illinois and Missouri and Kentucky, down-home bands playing "Sail Away Ladies" or "Down the Old Plank Road." But sometimes they'd dimly catch jazz from Chicago or the somber boom of classical music from New York. And once, long after midnight, Bosh heard a tinkle of marimba music and a faint voice unmistakably announcing a broadcast from a ballroom in Havana, Cuba. That made Bosh, at least for a while, the town's champion distancer.

***

Clarence spent his first winter in Chicago living in a cheap rooming house on the Near North Side and working the occasional day labor at the big factories north and west of the Loop. The view from his room was of smokestacks and slag heaps along the slate-gray river and the unbroken overcast sky. He was miserably lonely.

Edwardsville, Ill

Feb 7 1927

Dear Son

Well I guess you think that I have forgotten you because I don't write but you know your dad and I have poor eyes and can't see. I got your dad's glasses on now which he got from grandma but they don't fit my eyes very well. You'll have to excuse us both for not writing.

I thought if I would write you a letter once, maybe it will bring you good luck finding a job soon. I certainly feel sorry for you that you always have such bad luck. But hope you will soon find one. Work is very scarce here. Hilda came home yesterday. She gets home once a week but she wishes she could come home to stay it is so lonesome at grandma's. It sure is warm outside today. I guess there will be lots of sick. It is too warm for this time of the year. So take care of yourself that you don't get sick.

The radio is working pretty good but your dad won't have it so loud. Takes too much juice. Needs 3 new A batteries every 2 weeks. He sure enjoys it so what is the difference.

How are the cookies getting along or can't you eat them.

The roads in front of the house are awful poor, the worst I ever saw them.

Well, Clarence I see I am going uphill so you will have to excuse my writing. I never noticed it till I had this page half wrote.

News is scarce around here, besides I never go away. Well I hope this letter reaches you by February 9th and have a job by the time you are 24 years old. Please enclosed find 3 bucks for a happy birthday. 1 buck is from Hilda. She also wishes you a happy birthday and hope you have good luck for a new job.

Well I don't know any more new so I will hope that you have good luck which we all hope you have. Will close with love from all to you.

Answer soon

Mother

Shortly after that, Clarence's luck began to change. He got a job as a taxi driver. He still hadn't seen much of the city firsthand, but there were few applicants who knew the street grid as well as he did. And while he wasn't particularly skilled behind the wheel -- most of his driving practice had been with a friend's pickup truck on the empty back roads around Edwardsville - that didn't turn out to be much of a handicap. The traffic in Chicago was a daylong paralysis of automobiles, trolley cars, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons; one more bad driver was hardly noticed.

The cab company worked the German neighborhoods on the North Side. Clarence spent his shifts shuttling along Lincoln Avenue; it was a rare event when a passenger wanted to go as far as the Loop. Lincoln Avenue was where the German Catholics lived (the Protestants were mostly along Milwaukee Avenue to the west), and for Clarence it was like a vast dream-version of the old German community he remembered from his childhood. There were coffee shops and flessmarkets and brauhauses and corner bakeries where English was never heard; there were pharmacies stocked with the latest in homeopathic and herbal remedies; there were newsstands bursting with arrays of Teutonic eccentricity (newspapers and magazines devoted to naturism and magnetic healing and National Socialism); there were houses and storefronts and factory buildings with strange black turrets and spikes and battlements, like illustrations from a book of Gothic fairytales.

Clarence decided to move there. He found a boardinghouse on Sacramento Avenue just off Irving Park. The owners were from Edwardsville, and they turned out to have known the Sehnerts slightly; they welcomed him in like the prodigal son.

The boardinghouse was on a quiet block of old brownstones -- the sort of placid urban block where cats skittered safely between the rows of parked cars and kids played stickball and jump rope in the middle of the street. A few doors down was a big stoop where a group of young women gathered in the evenings. Clarence made a point of sauntering past them at the end of his shift. He was too shy to make eye contact. But he did quickly get the impression that one of them was making a point of positioning herself to watch him go by.

Her name was Mary Galambos. She had just turned twenty-three, which made her a year younger than Clarence. She was half German and half Hungarian. Her father had emigrated to Chicago from Budapest in the 1880s. He'd gotten a job at a German-language printing press on the North Side, been promoted several times, and ended up marrying the boss's daughter. Mary was their youngest child. She was small, plump, round-cheeked, and athletic. To Clarence she was as exotic as a gypsy.

They took to strolling up and down Sacramento Avenue together in the evenings, under the watchful, mocking gaze of her friends. He told her a little about Edwardsville, and she pretended to be charmed -- small-town life struck her as hopelessly dull. She described her life, and he didn't have to pretend to be enchanted. She was working that spring as a jockey at the little racetrack in Lincoln Park. He told her that he wanted to come see her race. She laughed and said not to bother, the races were fixed. Each morning a scary, stone-faced man from one of the North Side mobs came around to tell them the day's winners.

But Clarence came anyway. He rode the trolley car on his day off and joined the crowd at the rail to watch the horses thunder past. It was a gorgeous day: the grass was green, the trees were in flower, the sun played across the gray and brown mountain range of lakefront skyscrapers. He wasn't besotted enough to place any bets. But he did cheer wildly when Mary won the last race. She laughed when she saw him coming into the winner's circle to offer his congratulations.

Afterward they strolled through the park and the zoo. She talked about how beautiful and mysterious the park had been in her childhood -- the fancy dress of the aristocrats, the clop of the horsedrawn carriages, the old trees shrouded in evening mist. Back then there had been skating on the lagoon in winter; a fully loaded beer wagon with a team of horses would be driven back and forth across it to test the ice. Clarence told her that his father had driven a beer wagon for years. They paused by the statue of Goethe at the north end of the park, and she was amused and appalled when he confessed he didn't know who Goethe was.

Clarence had never met anybody like Mary. She hadn't finished high school (she confided to him in dread secrecy), but she was determined to be cultured; she was forcing herself through a self-imposed literary boot camp, and had just finished Tom Jones and was now starting on Tristram Shandy. Clarence was baffled by the idea of reading any book for pleasure, much less for status. Nor could he keep up with her whirl of opinions about current events; to him all the news was as remote as a war in China. But he was enchanted by her conversation even when -- or mainly when -- he had no idea what she was talking about.

He also responded well to her impatience and her ambition. From the first, she nagged at him about his job. It was high time, she informed him, that he quit driving a cab and find something respectable. Thinking of the stories he'd told her about sorting mail, she kept at him to apply for work at the Chicago Post Office. It took her months of needling persecution before he agreed. But at last he dragged himself downtown, and to his lifelong shock was immediately hired. After training at the behemoth main office, he was assigned to the new Municipal Airport just opening on the southwest side of town.

The airport was little more than a weedy lot about a mile square, with a couple of cinder runways, a row of hangars, and a makeshift terminal. Even on the busiest days no more than a dozen commercial airplanes took off or landed; they were mostly eight-seaters and they each carried a couple of small sacks of mail. Sometimes hours went by with no motion anywhere inside or out. The wind socks hung limp on their tall vanes, the pilots and mechanics played poker in one of the hangars, and in the mail room Clarence dozed at his desk.

On his days off he spent every moment with Mary; they rode horses and went to the movies and talked in cafes for hours. Her family was Catholic, and he started attending mass at their parish church. (He didn't tell Agnes about that.) One late-summer evening they were walking along Clark Street when they were caught by a sudden squall. They ran for shelter and found themselves standing under the archway of the new Reebie building. The façade was an ornate terracotta mockup of an Egyptian temple - everything Egyptian was fashionable then, after the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. Clarence and Mary had just seen some foolish epic at the Biograph about the pharoahs. As the rain careened down around them, he kissed her and called her his Gypsy Cleopatra. A few weeks later he asked her to marry him.

***

The whole family came up from Edwardsville for the wedding. None of them had ever been in Chicago before, and when Clarence met them at Union Station they were huddled together like refugees. They were dazzled by his assurance as he led the way out into the streets. The scale of the city oppressed them, the interminable rows of brownstones and the furious bustle of the commercial districts. And they were intensely suspicious of Mary's family. Agnes in particular was in a black mood -- the news had been broken to her that Clarence had converted to Catholicism for the ceremony.

The wedding reception was spread along most of the backyards of their block of Sacramento Avenue. It was a cool, clear day. White bunting draped the picnic tables, and white balloons jostled up from the fence gates. As the cloudless twilight came on, people lit up dozens of paper lanterns. Agnes and her daughters sat hunched together in a defensive knot, glaring at anyone forward enough to approach them; they kept casting worried glances at the city lights and the encircling brownstones and crisscrossing power lines as though they were under siege.

But Bosh was at his most exuberantly charming. He told jokes, offered toasts, and danced with his new in-laws. Afterward, people said it was a damn shame his friends back home couldn't have seen him. At the end of the evening, he gave Mary a special present, a gleaming brass horseshoe he'd cast at the foundry for her. "Always keep it with you for luck," he said, and Mary did.

For the rest of her life she could barely talk about him. "He was a wonderful man," she'd say, "just wonderful." And her eyes would fill with tears.

***

Soon after returning from Chicago Bosh began to feel sick. He thought at first it was just bad digestion, the ordinary price of getting older. But he got steadily worse. His stomach burned constantly, and there was blood in his stool each morning. A couple of times without warning he doubled over in pain. He didn't believe in complaining: months went by before he said anything to Agnes and months more before he nerved himself up to visit the doctor. The diagnosis was quick. He had colon cancer.

In the spring of 1929 he had to quit work and stay in bed. Friends and neighbors constantly came by to keep him company, and the house took on the air of a permanent, desultory party. He tried to rouse himself each Sunday to preside at the dinner table -- but by summer he was too weak and the dinners came to an end. After the neighbors had to stop coming to the house, they went on helping in discreet ways. When Helen was on her way home from school somebody might lean out over a fence or from a kitchen window and invite her for dinner; that was a code letting her know that she shouldn't go home.

By the end of summer Bosh was on his last legs. The doctor was paying a house call when Agnes, in a fit of fury, demanded he do something. The doctor burst out that he was helpless, unless she wanted him to stick a red-hot poker up Bosh's rear to burn the tumor out. From the next room they heard Bosh weakly calling out that they shouldn't bother -- he felt as though they'd already done it.

The doctor prescribed opium. But by then it would have taken a lethal dose to dent the pain. Instead, Bosh began asking his few permitted visitors, with a great show of conspiratorial whispering, if they could smuggle him bottles of peach brandy.

In the end, only Agnes could bear to be in the house for very long. She sat at the bedside, talking to Bosh about whatever came into her head. Sometimes she prayed -- but Bosh just rolled his eyes and smiled. Sometimes she sang to him. Mostly she talked about their children -- about how Clarence was doing in Chicago, and whether he and Mary would make them grandparents soon; or about some crazy thing Cecil had said to Pearl; or about how Hilda had grown so much more responsible staying with Franciska; or about whether Eugene and Helen would ever stop being so shy.

Bosh would appear to listen, though his gaze wandered off and he stared vaguely at the sunlight on the wallpaper. Those were his good days. On his bad days his screams were so loud they could be heard by the crews of the passing trains.

***

Bosh died in October 1929. Agnes was left in a bad way. The doctor bills had cleaned her out, and she hadn't had a paying job since her days as a chambermaid at Sehnert's Hotel almost thirty years before. She knew that the family would do what it could to help her. But she also knew that the main burden was going to fall on her two children still living at home, Helen and Eugene. That didn't bother Agnes a bit. She took it for granted that children should support their parents -- even if it meant putting their own lives aside, permanently.

Helen was sixteen then, and just starting her junior year in high school. She was determined to graduate, because that was what Bosh had wanted. But Agnes informed her that further schooling was out of the question. So Helen dropped out and got a job as a seamstress at a local dressmaker. (She was hired through her Aunt Minnie, who had been working there for several years, ever since she'd lost her husband to cancer.)

Helen had no particular talent for the job. She was clumsy with her hands, she hated the interminable hours and painful difficulty of the work. But she never complained -- not to her employers, not to Minnie, and especially not to Agnes. She remained bitter, though, for the rest of her life. Almost seventy years later, she was still saying how unjust it was that she'd had to quit school. "I was the best speller in my class," she said proudly, "and the best out-loud reader. And it was surprising, as I was the shy, reserved kind."

But things may have been even tougher on Eugene. He was eighteen, and with his brother Clarence away in Chicago he thought it his duty to be the man of the house. One of his father's old friends at the Nelson factory got him a job as a laborer in the porcelain shop. But that lasted only a couple of months. Nelson was doing badly that winter, and all their new hires were soon laid off. Eugene worked briefly as a handyman. After that he stood in line at the local factories each morning, only to be told there was no work.

By spring he was hopping trains to nearby towns and looking for day labor. Now and then he did pick up a few bucks -- but that barely paid for his meals, and he was having to travel farther and farther for less and less of a return. So one night in early spring he told Agnes and Helen he didn't want to be a burden on them any longer; he was heading out on the road and wouldn't be back until he'd earned enough to pay for his keep. The next morning he was gone.

***

Over the spring of 1930, Agnes and Helen got used to having the house to themselves. They settled into a routine. They slept together in the big brass bed -- Agnes couldn't bear to be alone in it at night. Each morning Helen walked to work at the dressmaker, while Agnes stayed at home and did the cooking and cleaning. She'd always been a good cook, and she liked to keep a spotless house. On weekends Hilda came home from her grandmother Franciska's house on Brown Street, and they opened up a fold-out cot for her in the master bedroom.

Bored with life on Brown Street, Hilda wanted to enjoy her brief spells of freedom. She coaxed Helen into going with her to the roller-skating rink on Saturday evenings -- that was where all their old school friends gathered. But Helen never liked skating; she was too shy and too clumsy. Whenever she had a choice she went to the movies instead. Hilda wanted her to be more social than that, and even went so far as to locate a potential date for her. Helen approached Agnes for permission to go to the rink with this man -- chaperoned by Hilda, of course. Agnes said absolutely not. Helen was furious, but she acquiesced. She didn't mention men or dating again for years.

***

That summer, Agnes's daughter Pearl and her husband Cecil announced they were expecting their first child. They were around the house on Second Avenue a lot in those days, doing what they could to help Agnes cope. Cecil was an especially welcome presence. He was the only man left: Bosh was gone, Clarence was in Chicago, and there had been no word from Eugene in months. Cecil took upon himself all the heavy tasks. As autumn came, he hauled the coal and stocked wood for the stove and laid in the staple goods -- big sacks of flour and sugar and coffee. He also kept the house riled up with his incessant teasing. He was especially rough with Helen. He liked to tell her that she had to get out from under Agnes's thumb before she soured into a lemony old maid.

The autumn was warm and wet, and Troy Road and Second Avenue were rivers of mud. Helen slogged off to work each day in high boots as though she were going swamp wading. (She had to walk up Troy Road a half mile to where the pavement began, and she rode the trolley car the rest of the way into town.) One December morning after she'd left and Cecil had set out in his pickup truck to the general store, Agnes and Pearl started in on a big job: cleaning out the stovepipes in the kitchen. Pearl was standing on a chair rehanging the last section of pipe when her water broke.

The labor was brief. Cecil was barely back from the store when the baby was born. They all knew immediately that something was wrong. The baby didn't emerge red-faced and furious but silent and pale as wax. The cord was wrapped around her neck. For the rest of her life, Pearl believed that hanging the stovepipes was what did it.

Cecil took care of everything. He drove off again in the pickup truck and came back an hour later with a little wooden box and a lacy white blanket. It was still the middle of the day; Helen wasn't back from work yet, and Pearl was too weak to move. Cecil and Agnes went together to the old Catholic cemetery where the Sehnerts had their family plot, and he dug a little grave next to Bosh's headstone. In those days you needed no ceremony or official record to bury anyone -- certainly not a stillborn. But the cemetery's director did happen to come by and asked for formality's sake what the baby's name was. That was something they hadn't discussed. But Cecil spoke up.

"Helen," he said.

***

A few weeks later, on a murky evening of heavy snow, Agnes saw someone coming through the back gate by the outhouse. She was about to get the shotgun when she recognized the silhouette: Eugene. As he shrugged out of his coat and shook off the snow he was revealed to be both gaunt and muscular; his clothes were ragged, his hands were callused, and he was so suntanned he was almost black.

He wouldn't say anything about where he'd been. He seemed, if possible, even more quiet than when he'd left. At mealtimes he sat sullen and hunched, with his arm around his plate as though someone were going to steal his food. He was also broke. He had nothing to show for his months on the road but a couple of dollars. Agnes paid him a quarter a day to haul the coal and keep the furnace stoked -- enough pocket change to buy cigarettes and the occasional beer.

On weekends he headed over to Alhambra to visit his uncles August and Frank. Sometimes he helped with chores, or went hunting with them in the deep recesses of the countryside. Occasionally the three would drive out to a woodland crossroads, and take a snow-buried track to an isolated farmhouse hidden in the trees. That was the local brothel. Eugene gladly spent what was left of his money there. But the rest of the time he was ill at ease and bored. As soon as the spring thaw came, he was off on the road again.

***

As 1931 ended, Franciska died in the old house on Brown Street. Her death came on Christmas Eve -- she'd survived her husband J.L. by one day short of twenty-six years. Hilda moved back into the house on Second Avenue, and the children divided up the furniture and sold the property. They couldn't have picked a worse time and they got a rock-bottom price. But by then they were grateful for every penny.

Pearl and Cecil left town the following year. He was out of a job: the Nelson company had gone under. But Cecil didn't stay idle long. He heard from his family that a small farm belonging to one of his uncles had lost its tenants and was standing empty. The farm was outside the town of Bourbonnais, on the other side of the state. Cecil immediately took Pearl there and settled into the farming life.

That same year the old coal mine up the tracks was shut down. Its abandoned equipment was hauled away to the scrap yard, and when the cold weather came the neighbors tore apart the derelict buildings for firewood. Then there was nothing left but a slag heap that had spontaneously combusted a few years earlier (it would go on smoldering for another thirty years). Further on was the brick factory, running half shifts and often idle for weeks at a time. Toward town was the Nelson company, now shuttered, its whitewashed walls peeling and its skylight windows broken. Its utopian workers' village had been absorbed into Edwardsville -- in exchange for accepting its laws and police, the villagers got a sewer system and electricity.

In town, there were long rows of boarded-up businesses. Helen's job with the dressmaker vanished and she never found out why; she arrived one morning to find the place padlocked and the owner gone. After that she could get only day labor at a local shirt factory.

She joined the Garment Workers Union, and they occasionally found piecework for her.

In the spring and summer of 1933, there were big parades through town celebrating the new National Recovery Administration. The NRA's symbol -- a blue eagle with the motto "We Do Our Part" -- began appearing in store windows. (It meant that the store owner had agreed to pay a minimum wage.) The NRA brokered a deal between the clothing industry and the Garment Workers Union, and Helen got called in for steady work at a dress factory in Saint Louis. After years of scrounging, she was bringing home $15 a week. It seemed to her like a miracle. She was always fiercely pro-union after that; the old employees called her the NRA baby.

***

During those years, Hilda and Hilda and Agnes were better off than almost anybody they knew. They had something worth its weight in gold: a house owned free and clear. Bosh had paid off the mortgage, and the property was still in an unincorporated area where the taxes (and services) were negligible. They had a big vegetable garden, fruit trees, and a chicken coop. The money that Helen brought home was more than enough to buy the basics -- milk, meat, flour, and coffee. Helen even had change left over for the movies. Things were tougher in the winter when Eugene was home and there was an extra mouth to feed. But even if he arrived with empty pockets, he was always willing to do all the hard labor around the house for cigarette money. And besides, he was always gone in the spring.

***

When Eugene went on the bum, all he had to do was walk along the railroad tracks. About a half a mile down from the house was a little copse by a stream where a hobo jungle had sprung up: it was a cluster of lean-tos and tents and collapsing sheds around a patch of trampled ground. The jungle would start to empty out whenever one of the big trains approached. It was tense, jumping a train. Everyone had to stay hidden in the trees until the last moment to be sure no railroad bulls were watching. Then they'd dash forward and lunge at an open boxcar door, or the ladder on the side of a coal hopper, or a stray rope dangling from the cargo lashed to a flatcar -- anything at all to get on board before the train cleared the curve and picked up speed on its way west.

The train ran through open country for several miles and then gradually lost itself within the old, decaying network of spur lines and abandoned industrial strips on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. Across the wide, gray waters was cinder-brown Saint Louis, perpetually wreathed in smoke. Eugene would usually make his first stop there; he found temporary shelter in one of the countless sprawling shantytowns that had flowered in the city's vacant lots and derelict factory grounds. "Hoovervilles," they were called, in honor of the president.

The biggest Hooverville in Saint Louis was alongside one of the train yards. It covered nearly a square mile and had a population of several thousand: more people were huddled there than in the whole town of Edwardsville. But Eugene rarely stayed more than a night or two. It was a squalid, loud, chaotic place, filled with the stench of open sewage and smoke of countless trash can fires. Toward dawn each day there would be a general exodus, as people swarmed out to join the lines snaking to the big soup kitchens, or to the few factory gates around town that weren't already hung with NO JOBS signs. Eugene didn't bother with any of that, after a first few tries. Instead, he sauntered along the tracks until he could catch a likely looking outbound freight train, destination anywhere.

Most of what he found on his travels was just like what he'd left behind. Wherever the trains passed, he saw the homeless sleeping in every park and town square. Cities had armed guards posted at their dumps to prevent people from scavenging them for food. Vagrancy was a felony in much of the country: an encounter with the wrong cop or the wrong judge could earn you a couple of years on a chain gang. Some towns, meaning to be kind, put up huge warning billboards along their main roads and by their rail yards that read Homeless Men Keep Moving -- We Can't Take Care of Our Own.

Eugene mainly stuck to the rail lines west of the Mississippi. The land there still looked barely settled. The coal towns along the Rockies and the lumber towns in the immense virgin pine forests of the Pacific Northwest were separated by endless reaches of desolation; days would pass, and all Eugene would see would be the occasional ill-defined dirt road, or a long line of fence posts along a distant hilltop, or a grain elevator sitting on the horizon like a tower in a fairytale. During the Dust Bowl years, the desert had spread into the heartland: the trains passed through wastelands that had once been cultivated fields but where derelict farmhouses were now half buried in blown topsoil. Once he watched a dust storm billow across the prairie. It was like a sickly thunderstorm of yellow, brown, and black, and when the fringes of it passed across the tracks, the train was engulfed in furious dust that stung like a cloud of wasps.

He was never comfortable riding the rails. But he did get used to it eventually. The hoboes had figured out every single place on a moving train where a human being could fit. Eugene tried them all at one time or another -- from the high heaps of coal in the hopper cars to the big rods beneath the flatcars that skimmed just a few inches above the rail beds.

Boxcars were the best rides. But you had to pick them carefully. If you were too close to the engine you could get caught in a shower of live cinders that might put out an eye or scar you for life. Eugene got into the habit -- learned from the longtime hoboes -- of riding with a rag tied across his face. There were other dangers. The cinders sometimes set fire to the heaps of straw where the hoboes slept. Then, too, a good safe boxcar, one toward the caboose, was usually crowded, and riders could be murderous in defending it.

Sometimes there was no choice but to climb up onto the boxcar roof. That was the most dangerous spot of all, particularly on long, lulling night journeys. There was nothing to hold onto if you dozed off and started to slip. That didn't keep anyone from riding there, though. One of the most common sights of those years, seen everywhere the railroads ran, was a freight train bearing a single-file line of travelers on its back, like the fins of an enormous lizard.

In the old times, the hoboes had had their own language and their own mythology -- a secret world of Okies and bindlestiffs, of John Henry and Boxcar Bertha and the Emperor of the North Pole. Some of that was still current when Eugene went on the bum. Sometimes people in the hobo jungles passed an idle evening singing the old songs, and sometimes a firebrand from the Wobblies would give a political speech (there were Hoovervilles where a red Wobbly membership card was required for admission), and always there was the chatter about what city might have work, where the local cops and the railroad bulls were most vindictive, what you'd do if you got to Easy Street.

But the traditional hobo culture was being washed out by a flood of undifferentiated misery. There were millions of homeless people in those years, and few had any use for the romance of the open road. Nor did they go in much for camaraderie. You were never asked where you were from and how you'd ended up on the bum. People shied away from that because of the implication that your hard times were your fault. Everybody kept their distance. Anyway, it was hard to open up and make friends because life was too chancy. If your hand slipped as you jumped for a coal-hopper ladder, or you lost your balance as you clung to a boxcar roof on a mountain curve -- then in the blink of an eye you were separated from a newfound friend forever.

Eugene followed the great tides of migrant and seasonal labor around the west. He got road work and construction work. He logged in the summers and worked farms at harvest time. One year he spent a month in Nevada, the site of Boulder Dam, the great federal project of those years. But he couldn't stick it out. The men slept in a tent city in a waterless canyon below the construction site, and the temperatures at night rarely went below the mid-90s.

His best job came later that summer, when he worked as a field hand at a big farm in northern California. The owner was impressed enough with his dedication to keep him on as a handyman after the harvest. He slept in a bunkhouse and got three square meals a day. One of the other hands had signed up for a correspondence-school course in electrical work; after he dropped the books in impatient incomprehension, Eugene picked them up and read them cover to cover. He did so mostly out of boredom; the payoff came months later, when he lucked into another big construction job, and he could understand what the electricians were doing. He found that he had the beginnings of a trade.

Each year, as the fall ended and the snow line began creeping down out of Canada, he joined the general migration south. By the time of the first hard freezes in the Midwest, he'd reached a familiar hobo jungle in a strip of woodland along a railroad junction. There'd usually be a few other travelers lingering there. They usually had a fire going in a corroded trash can and a mulligan stew simmering; someone would lug a battered bucket down to the creek for water, and when the stew was edible somebody else would rouse the sleepers huddled in the lean-tos.

Then the sound of an approaching train would come rumbling through the frosty air. There'd be that familiar flurry in the jungle: everyone staked a place along the tracks to make their jump. Eugene always made as if to join them -- but he'd hang back unobtrusively until the caboose sailed past. Then he was alone. He sauntered down the spur line that led out of the forest. Past the trees was a tangle of low shabby roofs and chicken coops and outhouses and tumbled wire fences. People wouldn't look twice at a hobo walking along the tracks there; nobody noticed when he turned aside and vanished through the back gate of his home.

***

One night in the winter of 1937, John Galambos, my grandmother Mary Sehnert's father, stayed out late at his favorite tavern. The tavern was one of those corner places that were scattered through the residential neighborhoods on the North Side of Chicago: a dark storefront on an elm-arched side street, marked by a cluster of small neon signs in the window, like the magic words in fairy tale -- Blatz, Pabst, Hamms, Schlitz. The tavern's interior was dank and somnolent. The regulars nodded at the bar like shaggy toadstools. For whole evenings, the only noise was the buzz of a boxing match on the radio. John could spend hours there undisturbed, alternating beer and peppermint schnapps.

That particular night he exited into a snowstorm. The sidewalks were deserted and the windows of the brownstones were dark. He launched himself across Irving Park Road in the middle of the block, and had almost reached the other side when a car came roaring out of the glittery murk and hit him. He landed in a bank of ice and snow between two parked cars. Fresh snow gradually covered him over. In the morning, somebody noticed the weird shape in the snowbank and the frozen blood trailing down toward the pavement. The driver of the car was never identified.

***

John's widow Eva couldn't bear to stay in Chicago. She moved to Arizona to live with her sister. The family brownstone passed to her daughter Mary and Mary's husband Clarence. They had been living with their children on the Southwest Side, near the Municipal Airport where Clarence worked. But Clarence gladly accepted the commute to and from Ravenswood for the chance to be a homeowner.

Clarence and Mary had three children: my mother Dorothy, my uncle Bob, and my aunt Nancy. They grew up as classic Chicago neighborhood kids. They knew every side street and alley in Ravenswood and remained absolutely blank about the city beyond. The family did its shopping at the big commercial district at Belmont and Ashland, and on summer nights rode the streetcars down Western Avenue to Riverview; the kids went to double features at the movie palaces on Irving Park, and drank their phosphates and root beer floats at the drugstore fountains on Lawrence. Dorothy doesn't remember ever travelling as far from home as the Loop before she was a teenager.

It was a world wholly enclosed by the low, steeple-spiked skyline. Within its maze of ancient brownstones the kids played jump rope and jacks beneath endless corridors of elms. The leaf canopy was so tightly interwoven the streets were like twilight at high noon. Dorothy remembers you could walk for a block during a summer thunderstorm without feeling a raindrop. Everywhere the kids went, they were watched over by an unobtrusive network of neighborhood monitors: flocks of clucking hausfraus and idle men sitting in front of lodges and social clubs. Anybody odd or unknown or threatening would set off warning bells in bakeries and cafes and butcher shops and brauhauses all over the North Side.

The Sehnert home itself was dark and stifling, like every other home in their neighborhood. Clarence and Mary kept it as it had been in her father's time. There were overstuffed armchairs and tasseled lamp shades, prints of Hungarian country scenes on the walls and a row of painted beer steins on the mantel. Nor was it livened by Clarence and Mary themselves. They were stern parents, neither unloving nor indulgent. They expected obedience from their children and they got it; they didn't much care about child rearing otherwise. Dorothy says she can't remember a single time in her childhood when her family did anything relaxed and companionable, even sit around the kitchen table and laugh.

Clarence did all right by his family financially, even in the worst years. But he had become a diffident, secretive man. He took over the basement and turned it into his workroom, and he spent every available moment hidden away there, carving or drilling or lathing or sanding. He was never happier than when he was fitting together the dowels of a rebuilt chair. He was affectionate towards the children at times. But his affection tended to emerge in oblique and ineffectual ways. One autumn he disappeared from their lives entirely, only to reemerge at Christmas with a gift from Santa: a fantastically carved miniature zoo where they could keep all their toy animals. When he was present, he tended to be taciturn and abrupt. He thought his main duty as a parent was to enforce Mary's orders. To this end he manufactured a series of handmade paddles for Mary's use in disciplining the children -- and long afterward, when the children were all grown and married, he presented each of them with a paddle for the disciplining of his grandchildren.

Mary was quick-witted, hot-tempered, and unsympathetic. Her ideas of parenting boiled down to "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and "Children should be seen and not heard" -- maxims she would repeat with firmness and immense good humor, as though savoring the misery they caused her kids. But she was also determined that they be clever and literate. She bought a set of classic illustrated novels and required the kids to read chapters aloud to each other every night. They made their halting way through Treasure Island (their favorite) and Northwest Passage (a bore) and Howard Pyle's King Arthur (too hard to read, but the illustrations were magical). Sometimes Clarence hung back in the doorway and listened, and though he'd never read a book in his life, he found himself rooting for Jim Hawkins and sneakily admiring Long John Silver.

Mary enjoyed laying down the law to the kids about what the world was like and what they should expect from it. "Nobody owes you a living," she was fond of saying. "It's a cold world out there." She was nominally Catholic -- at least, she took the children to mass every Sunday -- but she had no interest in Christian doctrine and was particularly scornful of the idea of charity. "Anybody who'd take a handout," she'd say, "is the lowest of the low." During the years of the Great Depression she regarded the swarms of homeless and destitute as object lessons for her children: the trash-can scavengers and the somber-faced sleepers in the parks were layabouts who'd brought their troubles on themselves.

But that's not to say Mary was cold. She was passionate - but only about Clarence. This made them the subject of endless gossip around Ravenswood. Everybody watched them with a kind of astonishment, as though there were something unnatural about a husband and wife so much in love. Even their children shook their heads about it fifty and sixty years later. They'd always known they weren't even in the running for their parents' affection. Dorothy says that all her life when she thought about a warm and loving family, what she pictured was the house in Edwardsville.

***

It was their annual expedition: as soon as school let out for the year, Clarence and Mary would take the kids down to Edwardsville and leave them there for the summer. Then they went off alone together.

They invariably set out right at dawn on a day in early June. By midmorning they were out of the city and headed southwest on Route 66 -- the great "mother road of America," that cut diagonally across Illinois and swept on through the heartland and the southwest to California. In those days it was notorious for its awful traffic. Wrecked and abandoned cars were heaped on its shoulders; the billboards were so thick on either side that the landscape for miles at a time was blotted out. Sometimes they'd top a rise and see nothing ahead but a motionless, hooting double column of cars, trucks, buses, and tractors stretching all the way out to the green horizon.

They never reached Edwardsville before dark. There was always a big party to welcome the children for their summer stay, with the whole neighborhood invited. But Clarence and Mary were usually so restless to get back on the road, they wouldn't even stick around through dinner. Today, asked where her parents went, Dorothy expels a long, slow sigh and says, "I have absolutely no idea." Nancy laughs and says, "God knows."

***

The first sound the kids heard in the morning was the squall and squeak of the hand pump just outside the kitchen door. Hilda was beginning the day by drawing a bucket of water. The kids lingered in bed, wat