PROLOGUE

Letters from Abigail to her half-brother, Sebastian
From DARROW’S KING

December 7
	It has been many years since last we met or communicated, I know, but I can think of no pleasing reminiscences with which to regale you.  Little by little, the past is obliterated by the present.  It is the present that I want you to know.
	This is an eccentric but steadfast place where knowledge, like variety, is the height of impertinence and skill is a necessity unrelated to intelligence.  People are tutored by nature and circumstance.  To survive, alone, certifies success.  The population is small and distinguishable by role or inclination.  There is the Blacksmith and the Barkeep, the Reverend, whose church is the second floor, front parlor in our boarding house hotel, the Sheriff, the Deputy, the Storekeeper and a small populace comprised of Farmer Pickett, the Rancher Tilson (four horses, twelve cows, one bull, twenty-two chickens, three pigs and a goat), Farmer Johansen, Gladney, the Miner, and Doc.  There is “Homesteader” – a name shared by a dozen or so families who must stand the test of time before their names – if they can remember them – are resurrected behind “Farmer” or “Rancher.”
	There are four seasons, easily distinguishable from the window of our room.  There is mud under thick, black clouds; then ice and snow under slate, gray skies; dust in sunburnt blue; and, finally, a vague lushness in bright blue.  The last endures for but a week near the end of May and is my favorite.
	I once promised to make a shawl for the landlord’s widow because she admired one of mine.  She insisted on buying the yarn although I had some.  She gave me “a little something” for my trouble.  She has since become my agent.  Although paying for socks and sweaters and shawls is an outrageous extravagance for most of the people here, to own something of mine has become a mark of success that pales only when the first crop has been harvested or a calf has been born and survives its first season, but a success that eases the wait for other things and is somehow comforting.  I charge little and knit well and do not think much of my resourcefulness.  It came to me too late.
	I have an identity here.  Tradition and circumstance lend a hand to see that I am known by my craft.  I am The Knitter and since my address is the sick room on the hotel’s top floor, I have a single visitor, my agent and landlady, the Widow Horton.

February 16
	That Rob is well is our one great delusion.  I have had ample time to think that a single, malicious bug has lain dormant since his childhood and come suddenly alive to be reckoned with.  The monster that once hid under his bed or lived in the forest has escaped fully grown and Rob, who is responsible for everyone, responsible to no one, called on stubborn, audacious will and ignored it.  It began quietly enough, after all.  He had a cold one winter and we treated it routinely.  But it would not go away.  Not entirely.  Not that spring or that summer, and he doubled his resistance to it until one day, in the middle of our second harvest, he could not get out of bed.  There was a moment that morning when I understood at once and very clearly that I could not behave as if anything were amiss.  That if Rob ever caught me considering him ill and in my care, he would despise me utterly and irretrievably.
	When he was delirious, we didn’t believe it.  When he lay in bed for weeks, we did not believe.  Not the blood on his pillow or the loss of our farm or finding ourselves long term residents within four walls, two flights above the salon and the saloon.
	I have never considered myself particularly clever, but I have a feeling for certain things and, during rare moments of quiet inertia, I am suddenly alert vaguely anxious, listening for something that is ever beyond my hearing, beyond my grasp.  It is always the same.  I do not know when the feeling will come or why, only that it does and is somehow as familiar to me as those things I do know well.  There are those times when I understand the word “consumption” and am surprised by the notion that while I have refused to believe with him all this time, the  monster has broken through Rob’s last defense and found somewhere in him – behind defeated charm – that my responsible unbeliever has the temerity to die.
	I have accepted this without thinking, like a hole in his sock and I despise him because I know, too, what it means to be both responsible and helpless to do anything about it.

March 14
	It is inconceivable to me that a home can be a place with but four walls.  I don’t hate this room, my four walls, but I have grown to despise the necessity for it.  Our room isn’t big enough for my spite and there is too much to do.  So, you see, knowledge is impertinent after all.
	I am coaxed outside every morning and as many afternoons as weather permits.  The Widow Horton feels that I would benefit from sun and fresh air and whatever companionship I can find not closed in by four walls and an illness that kills but does not exist.
	We love this town as much as anyone can who is just passing through.
	One morning, after I had come in from my walk, I bent over Rob to see if he was still fevered from the night before.  He took hold of me, pulled me down onto the bed and covered me.  Then he said, “I’m a dead man.  Do you hear?  I am a dead man.”  And I thought, “How English of him.”  Second son of a second son, his determination to bring me here, to raise children here, now seems to me almost Biblical in an angry God kind of way, but how English he has remained in spite of everything.
	I would have thought that a church would have been among the first buildings to be erected in town, but it was not.  In fact, none will be built until next year at the earliest.  The Reverend Fitzgibbons keeps his study on the second floor in a corner of the parlor that has become his church.  I have passed this room many times and not gone in.  Some day, I will.
	When there are too many people to be seated comfortably on the parlor’s couch and a pair of worn, brocade covered chairs, services are held in the saloon, which is closed on Sundays and so, available.  The Barkeep doesn’t much like this arrangement.  There are his girls to consider.  Their rooms are at the back of the saloon and, as they tend to sleep late on Sunday mornings, the services are somewhat inconvenient for them.  The Widow Horton has never heard him say so, but she believes that The Barkeep is only afraid of losing his girls to the baptismal font.  She has no problem with the transition between sin and salvation and when he complains, she reminds him that his saloon is rented from her (according to some arrangement which she has alluded to but will not divulge) and may be called upon to be a church and if he and his girls don’t like it, they are free to rent elsewhere.  They should be up and dressed and distributing hymnals.  Hers, the Widow Horton’s, is a respectable hotel, after all.
	I suppose I should have been shocked as she recounted their dispute, but I enjoyed myself, listening, and since I had promised that I would one day attend the services, I was pleased to be drawn into the scandal so memorably.

June 3
	Eventually, I was present to witness the attendance of The Barkeep’s girls at Sunday services.  Though no one else paid any particular attention to them, I could not help staring.  I may even have smiled.  The Reverend Fitzgibbons had chosen “the woman at the well” for his sermon and these middle-aged beauties in their faded Sunday best brought out their most vivid recollections of behavior appropriate to the occasion.  I was delighted.  They sat behind me at a table to my left.  I could not help but think that they regarded mine as the example to follow.  Suddenly conscious of my every movement, of my voice in song and litany, I felt as if we could have been anywhere.  As if our efforts to be good, like so many children in stiff, new clothes, had transformed our surroundings and then, transcended them.  And we could not have been more ordinary if we had been in a white, steepled church at the edge of town.
	I would not have been surprised if after the last “amen,” a bell had begun to sound.  And as if every one of us forgot for a moment who and where we were, we gathered at the door in a polite receiving line with The Reverend at its head and introduced ourselves around.  “Charming service, Reverend.”  If any of the Barkeep’s girls had been acquainted with anyone in the congregation, no one let on.  
	Mattie, the eldest of these women, came to me.  She smiled.  I smiled.  She introduced me to some of the others and I, for my part, made sure that she met the various Farmers’ and Ranchers’ and Homesteaders’ wives who had come that bright morning.  Our solemn pretense went on until everyone had gone.
	They must have me confused with someone else.  Rob and God.

August 28
	The world seems decrepit from over use.  This four-walled world, at least.
	Rob does well in warmer weather, though the dust bothers him.  The Widow Horton and I measured our window and had the Blacksmith build a frame, which we covered with cheesecloth.  It hangs on hooks before the window and is kept moist to keep out dust that wants to be everywhere.  One morning, I heard voices outside.  I could not understand what was being said and that I could not understand drew me to the window irresistibly.  I could not see out, though, because of the cheesecloth.  Frustration built up in me.  The musicality of their banter – a proverbial gaggle of women, I thought – pulled at me, nudged my memory more subtly than a familiar smell.  Not European.  No.  Russian, perhaps, though Debussy possessed the same complexity, sounds layered in light.  There was an undercurrent that I could not put my finger on.  Pain, perhaps.  Loss.  The weight of history.  A present absence.  Rob stirred.  I had been staring at the cheesecloth covered window for some time.  I breathed in the last of my rumination and returned to my labors, but I knew that I would listen for those voices again and debate whether, hearing them, I would flee the room, abandon Rob’s side, run un-decorously down the stairs and into the street and throw myself at their feet.

August 30
	Our game is altered.
	Rob has become less himself as someone old and doomed and pleased with himself for having persevered so long.  He dislikes whispering – like most of the appurtenances of the sick room.  Tiptoeing has grown particularly disturbing to him and the feeling that he is being left out of the few activities that pass in our room for a life.
	I do my knitting in a chair beside his bed.  When he can sit up, he talks to me or reads.  When he cannot, I read to him from the well-thumbed books that have been our library for the last three years.  When the Widow Horton visits, we talk full voiced while he dozes.  Often, he speaks out as if in his sleep, sometimes, incoherently and sometimes, as if he has guided our conversation all along.  It has occurred to me that once we have gone, this room will be known as The Sick Room and that the Widow Horton will reserve it for the sick, the halt, the dying who will come here after us.  There will always be someone whom she will decide is in need of healing or a quiet place in which to die – whether there is anything terribly wrong with them or not.

October 25
	I walked past the mirror on the landing and did not look up because I knew that I would not recognize the woman I saw there.  I had a vague idea that I would be surprised at how much she had aged and I thought that while I would come to like her eventually, to look was an adventure that could wait.  
I recall those last months on our farm.  Working late in my garden.  Supper was on.  I waited for Rob to come home from the fields.  On my knees, working my own small patch of soil around my own string beans.  Rob came out of nowhere.  Was suddenly in my line of vision as he walked up the stairs to our screened in back porch.  He seemed so formidable to me then.  Utterly alone.  I knew that he attended to every detail of the work in the fields, pastures and barns that day and I could see the weight of the future everywhere on him.  I was the woman he needed me to be.  The one thing that was the same in the world’s pernicious changing.  I will have to wait until he dies to find out differently.
	I feel cheated.  I will come to know the woman whose reflection looks out at me from the mirror down the hall, but she will never make Rob’s acquaintance, nor he, hers.  The woman on her knees in the garden will remember him with love and never know why, exactly.  Just that his illness has come closer to him than she has or ever will and I am jealous in my way of its power over us.

November 11
	Are you there, Sebastian?  When I think of you now, it is as a man who could not stay at home for longer than it took to say hello to family and friends and announce the itinerary for his next, great leave taking.  I remember you laden with gifts from far flung lands.  Always bestowing.  Glad, I thought, to see me.  But I was always relieved when you had gone.  Yearned not for your presence as much as for your presents.  Anticipation of your return.  Someone would eventually come with a telegram and a date would be fixed to the calendar of our lives.  The day – always approximate – when you would be home again.
	Rob has gone.
	I found myself in the company of the bartender’s ladies once again.  There were too many mourners for the Reverend’s parlor.  The casket was laid out between two chairs in the saloon.  One of the farmer’s wives played a rickety piano.	The Reverend Fitzgibbons delivered a fine eulogy.  No one cried, although the ladies dabbed dutifully at their eyes with handkerchiefs that had been folded and stored for so long that they would not unfold entirely.	I cannot remember a time so deeply quiet or with so much pending.