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“go work on your puzzle.” He waits, glancing down. “Your puzzle,” he says, leaning into her plank-like face. She walks to a small table next to the wall, fingers jigsaw pieces in a cardboard box.
    Kurt sits at our father’s oak desk, checking inside one drawer after another. I take an armchair across from him. He wears jeans and a plaid cotton shirt whose faded red blocks and tight shoulders are familiar. Was it Sam’s?
    “So let’s get this over with,” Kurt says, setting a box of shotgun shells and a bird whistle next to a kettle of bones Dad kept in the same spot. “I’m meeting Nyank at the farm in twenty minutes.”
    “Nyank?” Kurt’s frankness is typical but never mean-spirited. “Do I know him?” The name sounds familiar.
    “Wade,” he says. “Wade Nyank?” I frown, and he adds, “Sam’s friend. Remember him telling how Nyank almost lost his ear at 32 Bluffs?”
    “Oh, yeah, how is he?” I guiltily resent Kurt knowing what seemed a confidence Sam had shared only with me.
    “Okay, I guess.” Before I can ask how Kurt and Wade became buddies, he reminds me of why I’ve driven here. “You can’t come to the meeting with Terezie.” He shoves the whistle in his shirt pocket.
    “What do you mean I can’t come?”
    “Cut the crap, Sarah. You can’t join the game at halftime and expect to know which play to run.”
    A football analogy. Sometimes I forget this is Texas. “ You cut the crap, Kurt. A priest doesn’t deny counsel to a dying woman simply because she reminds him of his sins.”
    He stands and walks to his gun cabinet. “I’m sure that was your version of an insult,” he says, taking out a 12-gauge, cracking open the stock. “You honestly think you’re the expert.” The gun snaps shut. “Here,” he says. “Catch.”
    “No,” I call, but the weapon is already airborne, so I grab the handle with one hand, the pump with the other, clutching the contraption to my chest. “This better not be loaded,” I say. I lay it on top of the desk and sit back, rubbing my eyes.
    “Like I said, you’re no expert.”
    “Expert on what?”
    “On Sam.”
    “That’s absurd. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “No, it’s important. It’s the reason you shouldn’t come to the meeting.”
    “That won’t work, Kurt. Nothing’s going to keep me from being in that room.”
    “You think Sam told you everything, don’t you? Well, he didn’t. You act like you’re the smart one, battling us poor morons.” He leans close. “Trust me. There are some things you don’t know.”
    I want to say, and some things you don’t know either . “I don’t get it. Could you be a bit more specific?”
    Kurt taps my shoulder. “You’re not the only person he was close to.”
    “Look,” I say standing, “if you know something that affects Cornelia’s situation, you’re morally obligated to reveal it.”
    He squints, picks up the gun and walks to Emma. “Let’s see if Mom’s home,” he says, and Emma rises. He follows her to the doorway, so I shoulder my purse. “As far as Cornelia’s concerned, you don’t need to get your panties in a wad. She’ll have her transplant; you can bet on it. ‘Cause Terezie’s going to sign our agreement, guaranteed. Then we’ll all shake hands and trot politely back to our corners.”
     

 
    C HAPTER 4
    1961
    W HEN MY GRANDFATHER leased his new farm in 1910 to tenants—Antonín Cervenka, his wife and four children—the family hired Otis Settle to help them grow corn and cotton and tend turkeys, Durac hogs, White-faced Herefords. My grandfather admired Otis’ agricultural knowledge and his stamina, even at fifty-seven, while bundling cornstalks or swabbing the cattle’s occasional lesions. But Otis’ childhood years as a slave to Sam Houston, captor of Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, first president of the Republic of Texas, so impressed my grandfather that he hired Otis to be the janitor of his medical