of the firelight but not far because there was only a quarter moon in the sky and the night was rather dark. The high grass of the riverbank gave way to sand, and I found a spot a few dozen yards from the Schofields’ encampment and laid the blanket out on the beach. The stars were legion, and the Milky Way was a soft, blurry arc across the heavens.
“I’ll stay a bit, if you like,” Maybeth offered. “It’s kind of scary out here.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said.
We sat on the blanket, and Maybeth crossed her legs and rubbed the patch that covered one knee.
“I had a nice dress,” she said. “Blue. But I gave it away.”
“Why?”
“Janie Baldwin needed it more. She was picking strawberries from a garden in town, stealing them, really, and a dog attacked her. Tore her dress almost completely off her. The Baldwins, well, they’re worse off than we are.”
“Your family’s nice.”
She looked back toward the glow of the fire. “I worry about Papa.”
I thought of my own father and how he’d made his living supplying the whiskey for men like Powell Schofield. I wasn’t sure what do with that.
“There’s my star,” she said, pointing toward the upper glimmer in the cup of the Big Dipper.
“Your star? You own it?”
“I claimed it. There are more stars in the sky than people on earth, so there are plenty to go around. I claimed that one because if you follow the line that connects it with the one below, you’ll find the North Star. It helps me know where I’m going. What star is yours?”
“The one below,” I said. “The one that connects and helps show the way.”
We gazed at our stars until Maybeth said, “I better go back.”
“Thank you for the blanket.”
I thought she would leave then, but she stayed a moment longer. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen,” I said. It was almost true.
“Me, too. Do you know Romeo and Juliet? Shakespeare?”
Because of Cora Frost, I knew about the playwright. I vaguely knew the story line, two people who were in love and it didn’t turn out particularly well for them.
“Juliet was thirteen and Romeo wasn’t much older,” she said. “People married young back then, I guess.”
Watching her across the fire earlier that evening, I’d thought about kissing Maybeth Schofield and had tried to imagine how that might feel.
“Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good night till it be morrow.”
In the quiet after she spoke, I stared at the river, a ghostly, starlit flow before me, and thought again what it would be like to kiss Maybeth Schofield.
“Buck?”
I turned my face to hers, and she leaned to me and pressed her lips against mine for the briefest of moments. Then she stood and ran back to her family’s camp.
I lay that night staring up at the two stars that would forever be connected in my thinking, filled with a fire that was completely new to me and whose burn was not pain but infinite pleasure. “Maybeth,” I said aloud, and there seemed such a sweetness on my tongue.
Then I thought about Albert and Mose and Emmy, and once again I was afraid, terrified that maybe I’d lost them forever. It wasn’t just fear that stabbed at me, but guilt as well because, for a little while, in the company of the Schofields, I’d forgotten them. What kind of brother was I?
* * *
MORNING CAME EARLY in the newly dubbed Hopersville. When I rolled over in my blanket, I could smell the cook fires already burning. I sat up, looked at the river, a broad reflection of a rose-colored sky, and I knew what I had to do that day.
Mrs. Schofield had her own cook fire going. A black pot half-filled with water hung over the flames, and a sooted coffeepot had been set among the embers at the fire’s edge. No one else seemed to be up yet, and Mrs. Schofield sat alone with a steaming blue enamel cup in her hand. She smiled at me.
“Are you always an early riser, Buck?”
“When I have things to do,” I said.
“Do you drink coffee?”
I didn’t, but I was almost thirteen, old enough to marry, at least in the old days, and I figured I must be old enough for coffee, too.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Grab yourself a cup from that red crate in the back of the truck.”
The tailgate was down and on it sat the red crate, which contained cups and