All two-year-olds have terrible tempers, Mother says, but the others didn’t, not like this. In the face of Asia’s fury, Edwin surrenders his boats and his pebbles. Asia has them all now. Her cheeks dry in an instant. Already she has the beauty Rosalie lacks, dark hair, dark, shining eyes.
So does Edwin, who comes to lean against Rosalie, his bony shoulder cutting sharply into her upper arm. He smells like the biscuits they had at breakfast. Mrs. Elijah Rogers, their neighbor, had to teach Mother to make biscuits and corn bread on the kitchen’s hearth when she first arrived at the farm. Now she’s teaching Rosalie. A childless woman herself, she dotes on the Booths, all of whom call her Aunty. “I don’t think your mother had ever cooked before,” Aunty Rogers once told Rosalie, either to let her know that Mother was a real lady or else that Mother had been strangely incompetent by Bel Air standards; Rosalie has never been sure which was being conveyed. Mother’s biscuits are fine now, but not as good as Aunty Rogers’. Or, to be honest, Rosalie’s.
“The frog is sleeping,” Edwin says. This doesn’t sound like a question, but is. He wants to be told he is right. Edwin only asks questions when he already knows the answers.
“Old Mr. Bullfrog sleeps through the winter,” Rosalie says. “He only wakes up when summer comes.”
“Old Mr. Bullfrog is very old.” Edwin is feeding her her lines.
“Very very old.”
“A hundred years.”
Bullfrogs don’t live a hundred years. They are lucky to make eight. Grandfather says so. And yet Rosalie cannot remember a summer out of earshot of the enormous, bulbous frog. On warm evenings, when the insects are humming and the birds calling and the water rushing and the wind blowing and the trees rustling and the cows bawling, still that deep, booming groan can be heard. Neighbors a mile distant complain of the noise.
“At least a hundred years. He saw the American Revolution with his very own eyes. He drank the tea in the Boston Harbor.” Rosalie feels her voice strangling in her throat. Henry Byron had always been the author of Old Mr. Bullfrog’s rich and consequential past.
Some neighbors once approached Father with a request that the frog be killed in the cause of peace and quiet. Father refused. The farm is a sanctuary for all God’s creatures, even the copperhead snakes. Father doesn’t believe in eating meat and once, Mother says, rose up in a saloon to point his finger at a man enjoying a plate of oysters. “Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!” Father said in the same voice he used to play Macbeth. Sometimes you think Father might be joking, but you never can be sure.
Asia has finished throwing all of Edwin’s boats and stones into the water. She turns in his direction a face shining with triumph, but immediately clouds over with the realization that Edwin hasn’t been watching. She steps towards them and Rosalie shifts Edwin to her other side so he can’t be pushed about. His knees soften until he’s sitting in her lap. Asia comes to do the same, crowding into Rosalie’s arms, taking up as much room as she can. Heat pours off her. Rosalie feels Edwin becoming smaller.
“Do you want to hear about you?” she asks him. He does. It’s his favorite story.
“On the night you were born,” she says, “Father was in New York being Richard III.”
Rosalie remembers it as a terrifying night, but that’s not the way she tells it. She skips the difficulties of the birth, Mother’s agony, the moment the midwife told June to ride for the doctor. She skips the icy ground and her fear that June was riding too fast and the horse would lose her footing, or not fast enough and the doctor would arrive too late. Mother had had six other children and never needed the doctor before.
Rosalie tells Edwin instead that there was a shower of stars that night, lasting more than an hour. How, just as June was leaving, a great meteor exploded over Baltimore—Rosalie throws open her hands to show the explosion—and June rode on while the sky above him rained down stars.
She says that Edwin is the family’s seventh child and that he arrived with his caul still over his face. The caul has been saved in a small box in her mother’s cupboard. It has the feel of a well-worn handkerchief. Edwin has been shown this, but he won’t be allowed to touch it until he is older.
All these things, Rosalie says—the stars, the caul, the number seven—they mark Edwin as extraordinary. “This child will see ghosts,” the midwife had said when the doctor had gone and she was again in charge. “He will never drown. Men everywhere will know his name.” She took Edwin and swaddled him more tightly. There was something reverential, ceremonial, in the way she handed him back.
Before, Rosalie has always left out the part about seeing ghosts. Today she forgets. She feels Edwin stiffen at this news. So far, he’s shown no evidence of greatness. He’s an inactive, fragile, anxious boy.
The ten-year gap between Rosalie and Edwin is where all the dead children are.
ii
The Dead
Frederick was the first to die. He died away from home, off in Boston where Father had gone to try his hand at managing the Tremont Theatre. Mother had joined him there, taking Frederick, who was too little to leave behind. Ann Hall, their farm manager’s wife, and Hagar, a servant with no last name that either she or anyone else knew, cared for the rest of the children in their absence.
In November, only a few months past Frederick’s first birthday, he died. Rosalie hadn’t seen him since the summer. She missed his first words and his first steps. She desperately missed her mother. She was five years old.
The how and why of Frederick’s death have never been made clear to Rosalie—an accident, but nobody’s fault, is what she gathers, or maybe an illness. Father’s experiment at management had lasted only two months and then, when he’d gone off to New York to perform again, Mother had remained in Boston with Frederick for another few weeks, arranging the move back. When Mother finally came home, she came home alone.
Father followed soon after, bringing Frederick, or at least a little coffin and everyone said Frederick was inside. Rosalie remembers how Mother hardly spoke for weeks, how she no longer appeared at bedtime to check the cleanliness of their hands and necks, or to kiss the children she still had. She remembers Mother’s grief as peculiarly listless. There were no bouts of uncontrollable weeping, only an endless silent stream of tears. It was as if Frederick had taken her spirit along with him when he went, leaving only a Mother-shaped husk behind.
Rosalie remembers the exact moment she first understood that she was responsible now for Henry and for Mary Ann. She shared a bed with Mary Ann and one night, as Rosalie was crying quietly to herself, Mary Ann also began to cry. She was only two years old and didn’t have the words to tell Rosalie why, except that she said that everyone was always crying.
“I’ll stop,” Rosalie told her and made an unpersuasive, gulping attempt to do so.