Not one of them was seriously hurt, but John C. had taken a bump in the church, though it made him no sillier than usual. It would have been a double blow to lose a child or lose their home on top of losing their fortune, and she was not sure she could have stood either, though in hindsight, perhaps better they had been forced to start all over and go somewheres else. As it was, the earth shakes was what did in Jams. He wandered back home that Sunday night in a daze, as if the world itself had fallen in on him.
After the rubble had been cleared and the windows replaced and the cracks mostly plastered, Jams sighed at the state of things and went to bed and stayed there for four days. He made no complaint other than feeling powerful tired, and he could rouse himself to have a meal at eleven in the morning and seven at night and to visit the jakes, of course, but otherwise he slept like a newborn. His brother could not lure him with a hand of monte or faro or the prospect of a night in the hells, and Flo herself slept on the couches in the parlor downstairs for better egress should the shocks revisit. She left her husband alone. On the fourth day, the twins, unaccustomed to having their father lay about, jumped upon the mattress and then his prone body till he fought back, wrasslin’ little Zach and Jeb as though a child hisself again. “C’mon, Pa.” Jeb smacked him with a wooden sword. “You can be Johnny Reb and I will be Tecumseh Sherman and march you to Atlanta.” Their father roared at the boys and chased them in his nightshirt, pausing only at the top of the stairs to catch his breath.
After supper that evening with the whole family, at which he seemed to brighten and return to his old energetic self, Jams climbed back up the stairs to the room with the crack just under the roof. He sat quite still in a chair and watched the stars pass by, not greatly participant in the conversations that surrounded him, but not ignoring the others either. Jessie read from Hawthorne to the others, and Ebenezer and Flo discussed the reports of damage around town from the shakes. But Jams just sat and did nothing, and this pattern he repeated several nights in a row—to All Hallows’ E’en—doing little till supper and retiring to watch the constellations turn, or if there was no stars, to stare at the clouds or the rain, and once or twice, let the fog seep through the fissure and engulf him and the chair and the whole room altogether, like they was in a dream. Through this routine he passed the time as if a man a leisure and not the head of house bound for ruin. When his brother asked him to go out for a game of poker or to hear the Mexican crooners or see the magicians from Siam now down at the hells, Jamie begged off. “Not tonight, but you go on and say whaddyaknow to the boys. I think I’ll just rest a bit.” And so he did, night after night, day by day.