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hand-pulled cart. Bald Horace taught the boy all about livestock and when to pick peppers depending on what color you wanted them. He taught him how good Mississippi dirt smelled of a damp morning, how fine the rising sun felt on the back of the neck. All these skills were topped off with his mama’s instruction in manners, making him a good old boy, more or less, by the time he was nine, except he couldn’t shoot worth a dang and he didn’t know what bravado was nor how to imitate it. He wasn’t stoic at all, in fact, he was something of a secret crybaby. All those things had to come to him later on at a hard and high price. Until they did, he made enough of a show to fool most of the people he met.
    That Mickey Moe, people said. Poor mite. No daddy, a half-crazed, sour old mama. Left on his own to grow like a weed in the wind. But it’s a good wind from a proper direction, Lord knows. Look at him. He could pass for any Christian boy you care to name. A very good wind, indeed.
    His daddy would have been proud.

III
Guilford, Mississippi, 1944–1952
    E VEN AS A CHILD, M ICKEY Moe Levy didn’t remember much of his father and what there was was second-hand, formed by the stories of those who consoled him after the man was lost to time. There were photographs of a short, moon-faced man with round, innocent eyes, an improbable nose, prominent ears, and a fringe of ginger hair beating a fast retreat from the center of a shiny head. When he studied them, Mickey Moe often wondered what his daddy found so funny about cameras, since in nearly every shot his head was thrown back and his mouth was posed as if he were Santa Claus letting go with a string of ho-ho-ho’s. Once, when he was seven, he tried to spend the whole day tossing his head with his mouth shaped in an O to find out what it felt like to be Bernard Levy, happy all the time, but Mama told him to cut it out at two in the afternoon as he was giving her the heebie-jeebies. He quit without achieving insight.
    Among the stories he heard, one he felt the need to corroborate by the time he was twelve and doubts, great and small, had set in, was that his daddy was immeasurably rich, a Midas of sorts, a man with a golden touch when it came to all types of business, one to whom even the princes of the Sassaport family came for advice and support if difficult, contentious decisions were to be made. When the boy was old enough, he questioned this reputation, because Mama and his sisters cried poor day in and day out. One of his peers suggested to him that chests of gold might be buried in his backyard or greenbacks stuffed in the walls. Although he could not make a proper search without the women screaming holy heck, he dug enough holes in the garden to appall Bald Horace and poked sections of wallpaper in the upstairs rooms with a three-tined fork. He hadn’t the nerve to deface the front parlor where the women received or the dining room where they sometimes entertained, deciding that if his daddy was sane, neither had he. He poked through enough flocked velvet to conclude there must have been an off-site location where the family fortune was stashed.
    During his adolescence, he was preoccupied with determining likely locales. In summer, he spent as much time as his chores and paper route would allow parked in a hard chair at the public library. He figured if he studied topographical charts of all the undeveloped land between Guilford and Memphis along with maps of the populated and cultivated areas and the twists and turns of the great river as well, he might find an echo of a clue mentioned in his daddy’s letters and personal papers that Mama kept tucked away in a cardboard box in her closet, the ones he sometimes read by stealth when she left the house. Why shouldn’t there be congruities between the maps and the paperwork, places where landmarks were mentioned, Mississippi tributaries admired or feared, towns and roads visited and traveled over and over? He came up