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come along. “I’m big enough,” I told him. “I can work like a mule. Look at these muscles.” I flexed for him. I hoped he might forget how I’d let him down before.
     
    He stopped and pinched my bicep with two fingers. “You’re strong, all right,” he said. “But I need someone to stay here and see to it that those two women don’t kill each other.” He flashed me a rare smile.
     
    “You like having her home too, huh?” I said.
     
    His smile faded some. “I think it was God’s will that brought her here.” I considered what he said. “Don’t say it like that, Papa. People only call it God’s will when something bad has happened they can’t control.” This was about the longest conversation he and I had ever shared. Aunt Hazel being here had changed things. “A providence,” I told him. “You ought to call it a providence that she is here with us now.”
     
    A wistful smile curved the corners of his mouth. “You’re awful smart.” He patted me on the head and continued on down the path that would take him to New Ulm and beyond that to the shady dark of the north woods.
     

    The next day, while Mother took eggs into town to trade for salted meat, Aunt Hazel opened the carpetbag and showed me some of her treasures. I sat on the bed beside her while she took out a red leather tome bound in rawhide. When she unwrapped the book it smelled of dried spices and earth. The pages seemed as dry and breakable as leaves, rustling gently as she turned them over. “Onionskin and vellum,” she told me. “It’s all I could get hold of inside the asylum. One of the doctors allotted me a few pages each month.” The handwriting was spidery, each page cross-hatched to conserve paper. To read one you had to hold it vertical and then horizontal.
     
    “What is it?” I asked.
     
    “My journal,” she said. “Though there are many stories here. I suppose even yours.”
     
    “I can’t read a single word,” I said, squinting.
     
    “My pa kept such a book and I thought the very same thing. Inside it were formulas and spells concerning childbirth and water-witching as well as dried specimens of flowers and herbs. He collected folklore when we lived in Missouri.”
     
    “Grandpa Jakob? You mentioned him last night. Why did we ever leave Missouri?”
     
    “Oh, that was a long time ago,” she said. “1859. Yes. I was even younger than you then.”
     

SALINE SPRINGS,
MISSOURI
1859
     

BOOK OF WONDERS
     
    T HERE WERE THOSE who said Judas hanged himself from a redbud tree and ever after it grew stunted and strange. If you were to touch one of the flowers when the tree blossomed in April darkness you would see a vision of the devil. In the spring of 1859, the redbud that grew along the pasture fence put forth its blossoms a month early. Windstrewn, the red petals nestled against the cabin walls of the Senger family and lay like drops of blood in the dormant grass.
     
    There were many things said and some were true and some were foolishness. Children of this age and place went about with muslin bags of live crickets strung around their throats to cure the whooping cough. They forbore from killing bullfrogs, fearful that such butchery would cause the cows to give bloody milk. When the moon waxed, they crept up on their reflections in still pond waters and waited for the image of their true love to rise to the surface. And they believed that in the center of a dogwood blossom, if you looked closely, lay the image of a crown of thorns and a brown stain like rusty nail.
     
    All these things were said and many more, and they were written down on loose-leaf vellum pages that a Bohemian immigrant named Jakob Senger cobbled together and called the Book of Wonders . A short bow-legged man with a dark, bristling beard, his one hobby was the collection of this folklore. In any weather he would hitch the brood mare to the swift phaeton buggy and set out to interview soothsayers, water-witches, and country