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after his marriage to Amelia, he sold the bulk of their land and bullied his way into a job with the New York Railroad, where his engaging, gregarious, and tireless personality disguised a rapacious capacity for stealing freight contracts away from the Erie Canal. As soon as the canal was finished in 1825, it proved to be slow and feeble in comparison to the speed of the railroad. Nathaniel believed that despite the inherent dangers of rail travel—the crashes, the bridge collapses, the derailments—no one would want to put their goods on an open barge in Buffalo to be dragged by a team of mules when you could place the freight on a railcar and have it arrive in Manhattan in two days. Two days when the canal took at least two weeks! The railroad was in constant battle with the legislature; the state’s debt from the canal was still a financial burden, the railroad an upstart that threatened the state with bankruptcy if the canal could not retain enough contracts to pay off the cost of building it. Nathaniel thrilled to the battle, Amelia less so. The job rendered him frequently absent.
    Two years after the marriage, Amelia’s parents died, and Amelia and Nathaniel moved back into her childhood home, a three-room clapboard on the rise that ran toward the Shaker settlement. When children finally did come, five years after their marriage, their lives became a negotiation. Amelia could no longer stay in a woman’s home for days before the woman gave birth. Husbands had to come and find her when labor started, always risking that Amelia wouldn’t be able to respond if Nathaniel was away.
    One dawn in June of 1842, Amelia sent word from a neighboring farm that she was just about to return home. An hour, two at the most, the boy reported to Nathaniel. But Nathaniel had to catch a train at eight a.m. He was due in Buffalo that evening. He stood at the bedroom threshold and made a calculation. Amelia was just a half mile away. Their two-year-old twins were asleep in their cribs—Mary restless, but still sleepy, Jenny quiet, her thumb in her mouth. The boy had said Amelia was coming in an hour. Two at the most. He could wake the twins and load them into the wagon and hurry them cranky and unfed to Amelia, or he could let them sleep alone in the house for an hour. The light was soft; a breeze billowed through the gauzy summer curtains. An hour. That was all.
    When Amelia returned home that evening after failing to save her neighbor from a sudden hemorrhage, her girls were standing in their crib, their faces wet with tears and mucus, their nightgowns stained with urine.
    The argument when Nathaniel returned home went like this: I had to go to Buffalo. The railroad needed that lumber contract.
    But you should have brought the children to me at the Stephensons’.
    You sent word that you were coming home.
    Dolly bled suddenly, I couldn’t leave.
    I didn’t know. If I had known, I would have brought them to you.
    But how could you abandon them?
    Amelia’s distrust, once roused, could never fully be put to rest. From then onward, she took the children with her, even in the middle of the night. She ordered them to dress, don shoes, bring their blankets. While Mary sleepily complied and Jenny and Christian cried, Nathaniel argued, even as the husband of the laboring woman stood leery at the door. But Amelia would not relent. The children went—on with the bonnets, on with the boots—the twins propelled by a watery memory of an echoing stretch of time inhabited by terror and hunger and finally, their mother’s tear-stained face, bent over the crib in which they had been confined. That vestigial memory of abandonment made them follow Amelia out the door to fall asleep in the wagon as she barreled down washboard roads after worried husbands.
    They became vagabond children. When they were younger, they played with the children of the laboring mother; when they were older, they hauled and boiled water, and listened to birthing cries in