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forehead.
    â€œI’m not really tired.” But his eyes were fluttering even as he spoke. “Can I have my marbles?”
    â€œTomorrow, Harry. You’ll play with them tomorrow.”
    â€œI just want to hold them.”
    She smiled. He was her boy still, not a politician in those wild, drunk towns, as Andrew insisted he’d become. On the floor, she found the little bag of cat’s eyes and placed it in his palm. His fingers twitched, but before they could close, he was out.
    For hours, Annie Mae kept the poultice pressed to Andrew’s flesh, massaged him gently with her mixtures of sugar and leaves: Choctaw cures she’d learned shortly after arriving in the Territory.
    She shivered, recalling those grinding first days. When they’d first got to Lehigh, Andrew’s brother, Lee, who’d promised to find them a place to live, was gone. His wife, June, had the law after him—he’d never actually divorced her, he’d simply disappeared. Posters showed up on every wall in town, describing Lee’s beefy build, his thin brown hair, declaring his wife and kids destitute. Finally, June found herself a fine new man, printed her own divorce notice in the paper, and that was that. To this day, no one had heard from Lee.
    Annie Mae and Andrew had missed the first Oklahoma land-rush by a good nine years, but cheap lots were still available for families willing to work them; Andrew claimed sixteen grubby acres (at just over a dollar apiece—money he borrowed from the bank) west of East Cache Creek. Within a month, he’d met and befriended officials from the Osage Coal Company over near Krebs and the Rock Island outfit out of Alderson. They wanted the red oak on his land. Immediately, he began supplying them and helping them build their mines.
    How did we ever get through it? Annie Mae thought, feeling again her loneliness at home and the depth of Andrew’s exhaustion. How do we get through it now?
    Each week, he hauled the timber over amber hills, vales punched flat into the land, in the wagon he’d brought from Texas. Sometimes its wheels sliced through thickets of fleshy brown mushrooms, he told Annie Mae, and the whole forest filled with a scent as dark and honeyed as boiling sugar.
    The fellows he supplied with logs, the mining operators, were “ruthless capitalists,” he said, like the landowners his father railed against in Bonham, but they treated Andrew well as long as he kept the lumber coming. He had a child to feed, so he took their money without much thought.
    Meanwhile, Annie Mae had stocked her shelves with flour and cornmeal she’d bought off the backs of traveling salesmen, set up a sewing machine, hung in her kitchen a large calendar mailed out each year by the Citizens National Bank of Oklahoma City. On it she marked the dates of Harry’s first haircut, his first coherent phrases. By the kitchen door she stacked magazines she’d bought in Walters, a town of eight hundred, two dusty miles down the road—the Farmer-Stockman, Capper’s Weekly, Comfort . The family used them in the outhouse, fifty yards away down a narrow, bushy trail.
    She felt leaden with memory now as she washed her husband’s face, delicately, as though his injury were a threat to her, too. Life could crumble in a heartbeat. Harry moaned in his sleep. She went to check on him. He’d rolled on his side, twisting the sheet around his legs. The marbles had slipped to the floor; one by one she picked them up.
    She kissed Harry’s cheek, drew the sheet to his chin. One day, when he was still an infant, she remembered, she was hanging clothes on a line when she heard a rustling behind her. She turned and saw a small Indian woman standing by the side of her house. Annie Mae was so startled she dropped her clothespins. Harry slept in a basket nearby.
    â€œI came to see you,” said the woman. She didn’t move.
    â€œYes?” Annie Mae stood