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and his pen he’d made out of a eagle feather.” Otis drew a large S in the air, for Sam, certainly, but I couldn’t help but think, Sarah. “He sat hisself right there and wrote a letter to the folks in Virginia, telling how wrong it was for anybody to steal away them Indian boys.” Lucky Otis, I thought, to have known such a person, a real live John Wayne.
    The second story described Houston’s death in 1863, when Otis was ten. “I slept right there on a pallet in his sick room,” Otis said, his hands still. “At sundown, everybody was crying, and I was moaning ‘cause the best friend I had or would ever have on this earth, somebody—’cause I was young, a little under what you are now—somebody I thought of as a sort of papa, he was dying. Even then, while I seen him all yellow and dragged down, I knowed my years working for Master Sam was to be the best of my life. Finally, he whispers, ‘Margaret! Margaret! Texas!’ and that great spirit lifts right off the bed like a light and flies its way out to the beyond.”
    Nothing could prepare me for the effect these words had—Otis, so close while he told the story, and slightly younger than I, so he said, when he’d watched his substitute father die. Some nights after I’d relived this scene with Otis, I had a dream. John Wayne, his face streaked red and yellow, held my hands as we danced around a campfire, until he, like Sambo from the racist book my mother gave me, turned into butter, melted into light, a disappearing star.
    o
    In May 1961, Otis was a remarkable 108, long beyond doing much except shelling peas, emptying the dishwasher, or wistfully telling stories. My mother’s favorite story started on a morning that May when Ruby, Otis’ wife, made a call from my grandparents’ house to Mother, the only adult Pelton she could reach.
    Sitting with her legs crossed, holding a cigarette, my mother would begin her performance by explaining that my grandmother had left earlier for Gatesville to lead some prayer group in a close study of Paul’s letters to the Ephesians. Ruby, she said, had called, crying and “jabbering God knows what” over the phone. “After I figured out who the heck it was, all I could make out was Otis’ name.”
    Even though they were relatively close in age—my mother was forty-one then; Ruby was fifty-eight—my mother, I should note, never liked Ruby, saying, “That trashy woman’s just plain mean.” The first part of her accusation hadn’t been verified, as far as I knew, and the second part I’d seen demonstrated only once, on a Sunday morning after church.
    Ruby had stood with Sam, who was eleven at the time, at my grandparents’ kitchen counter. I watched while talking to Gran’s parakeet, whose cage sat atop a pole in the hall by the door. With a gingham apron wrapped over his Sunday suit, Sam kneaded dough on a strip of wax paper, something I planned to tease him about later. Ruby smiled, plumping her girlish cheeks. She secretly reminded me of Lena Horne, a favorite singer of my mother’s. Mother obviously didn’t notice the resemblance, and would say whenever Lena appeared on TV, “She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.” Ruby patted her curled bangs and handed Sam a rolling pin with the teasing caution, “Best not to squeeze all the breath out, honey. These going to be biscuits, not bullets.” When he grinned, sprinkling flour onto the linoleum, my mother walked in with freshly picked bluebonnets, needing a vase.
    “Don’t have a conniption,” she said. “I’m only—” but she stopped, her face the shade of Mercurochrome. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” she asked Ruby, who never liked her coming into Gran’s kitchen. Mother yanked the ties to Sam’s apron. “Go find your brother,” she said, removing the gingham with a flourish. “You’re not allowed to bother Ruby.” Spotting me, she scowled. “You too, skedaddle. What’s wrong with you children?”
    Sam rolled his