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snapped and broke, and fell—and she lifted herself up into the night.

V
    The Trip and the Task
    Titus and I left first thing, next morning. My wife didn’t like it any, but she understood and I kissed her good-bye with a promise I’d be home in a few weeks. That was all she asked, really. She wanted me to be home before the next baby came.
    In some respects, it was much easier going from east to west. That’s the way the world expects you to go—following gold, or land, or whatever other opportunity you see fit to chase. But getting back to Kentucky from Iowa was a hop, skip, and jump affair of trains, carts, and borrowed horses. It felt like swimming upstream.
    On the way back, by way of passing time and trading gossip, Titus told me everything he knew about what was weird and wrong about Heaster Junior’s will.
    ***
    Heaster’s daddy, a man of the same name, had owned a couple hundred acres there in that county. He’d bought some of it, and some of it had been offered to him as a commission after the American Revolution. Rumor had it, he’d worked with Daniel Boone on the Wilderness Road, cutting through Virginia up to the big brine lakes in Kentucky, around where I grew up.
    ***
    I didn’t know if that was true or not, though. Everybody and his brother in Kentucky makes some claim on Boone. Everybody knows someone who knew him, or worked for him, or put him up for the night. Everybody claims they’re kin to him, somehow down the line. And as I heard it, Daniel was one of a dozen kids or so—and he had ten or twelve of his own. So I’m not saying everyone’s lying, I’m just saying that lots of people can say things that might be hard to prove.
    But as I know it, Boone got around all over the Commonwealth. He liked to cut his name into trees and rocks when he went surveying for the government, and it was his job to explore the territory and clean it up for living on. So it’s possible Heaster Senior worked for him at some point.
    I’m not saying it’s a fact.
    But one way or another, Heaster Senior ended up with a whole passel of property, and all it took was a few generations to fill it up with the squabbling families that produced me and Titus.
    And when the old man died, his holdings went to Heaster Junior.
    ***
    Heaster Junior was 99 years old when he finally passed, or that’s how Titus counted it. It’s a wonder we tend to be such a long-lived bunch, given how little we ever had to eat and how little medicine we ever got. When I think about my own children now, living in good farm country, with good farm food and even a doctor when they need one…I think that maybe, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, they’ll live to see a century themselves without any trouble.
    But those men, the Heasters (as folks used to call them collectively, when they were both alive), they were tougher than leather.
    Now they’re both gone. It’s like the end of a chapter in a history book.
    Don’t misunderstand me. It didn’t break my heart that they weren’t around anymore. I never knew Heaster Senior; he died before I was born. But Junior? Junior was a mean old devil.
    Deep down I know that once, Heaster Junior must’ve been a young man. Once, he must’ve been a little boy, and maybe he laughed or giggled at his momma or his sisters. Maybe once he picked a flower or roughhoused with a puppy, and maybe once he’d been a handsome young man.
    But as long as I knew him, he was ancient and hateful. If there was any good reason for how mean he was, I never heard it.
    Some people said it was because he never had any sons, just those four girls. Some people said he’d got his heart broke by a woman. My mother said his ornery spirit was due to the way he’d turned away from God, and he was getting the happiness he deserved; but my mother would say that about anyone she didn’t like.
    Maybe there wasn’t any good reason.
    Anyhow, he beat his first, second, and third wives—and he would’ve beat the fourth if