brothers.”
* * *
SISTER EVE SAT with me. It had been nearly two days since she’d first come to the hospital. My mother’s condition hadn’t changed.
“I pray,” I told her. “I pray with all my heart. It doesn’t seem to help. Do you think there’s any chance Emmy could have another one of her fits?”
Sister Eve smiled. “She doesn’t really understand this gift she’s been given, Odie. Not yet. She will someday. I would love to help her in that, but it’s up to her.”
“Maybe you could just hit me on the head and I’ll get a gift of some kind, too. One that’ll help my mother.”
She smiled again, gently. “I don’t think it works that way. And you’ve already been given a gift.”
“What gift?”
“You’re a storyteller. You can create the world in any way your heart imagines.”
“That won’t make it true.”
“Maybe the universe is one grand story, and who says that it can’t be changed in the telling?”
I wanted to believe her, and so I imagined this:
My mother finally woke. Her eyes slowly opened, and she turned her head on the pillow. When she saw me, her face lit with a brilliant radiance and she whispered, “Odysseus, Odysseus. My son, my son.”
EPILOGUE
THERE IS A river that runs through time and the universe, vast and inexplicable, a flow of spirit that is at the heart of all existence, and every molecule of our being is a part of it. And what is God but the whole of that river?
When I look back at the summer of 1932, I see a boy not quite thirteen doing his best to pin down God, to corral that river and give it a form he could understand. Like so many before him, he shaped it, and reshaped it, and shaped it again, and yet it continued to defy all his logic. I would love to be able to call out to him and tell him in a kindly way that reason will do him no good, that it’s pointless to rail about the difficulty of the twists in that river, and that he shouldn’t worry about where the current will take him, but I confess that even after more than eighty years of living, I still struggle to understand what I know in my heart is a mystery beyond human comprehension. Perhaps the most important truth I’ve learned across the whole of my life is that it’s only when I yield to the river and embrace the journey that I find peace.
My tale of the four orphans who set sail together on an odyssey isn’t quite finished. Their lives went far beyond the rolling farmlands and high bluffs and river towns and remarkable people they encountered on their meanderings that summer. Here is the end of the story begun many pages ago, an accounting of where the greater river has taken all the Vagabonds.
* * *
CLYDE BRICKMAN, IN his full confession to the Saint Louis police, maintained that it was Thelma who’d shot Albert’s father, the man I think of as my father, too. It didn’t matter. Brickman still went to prison, not just for his part in that killing but also for the embezzling he’d been party to with his wife while they ran the Lincoln Indian Training School and the bootlegging and all the additional crimes revealed by the ledger and other documents Albert had taken from the Brickmans’ safe. When asked why he’d held on to all those letters, Brickman said he’d thought that someday he would try to repay the money he and his wife had stolen from the Indian families. I considered it just another lie meant to mitigate whatever sentence might be handed down, and I hated him all the more.
During World War II, while fighting in Europe, I received word from Sister Eve that Brickman had died of consumption. Near his end, he’d sent for her and for Emmy, and they’d visited him as he lay in his prison hospital bed. He asked their forgiveness, which they freely gave. He made one request of them before his passing: to intercede on his behalf with me and Albert and Mose and beg our pardon, too.
Of all that we’re asked to give others in this life, the most difficult to offer may be forgiveness. For years after that fateful summer of 1932, there was a heavy stone of anger in my heart with the name Brickman etched upon it. For me, the journey that had begun in a small canoe