didn’t end until, with the gentle urging and guidance of Sister Eve, I was finally able to let go of my enmity. In that moment of release, I also let go of any need to believe in a Tornado God, and I began to have my first inkling of this great river we are all part of and to see how right Mose had been when, comforting a grieving Emmy on the banks of the Gilead, he’d told her she was not alone.
I didn’t return to Saint Paul with Albert and Mose, nor did Emmy. We chose Saint Louis, I with my mother and Emmy with Sister Eve, who would guide her in so many necessary ways to a full understanding of her remarkable gift.
There’s no single road to redemption. My mother did come out of her coma, but ever after her legs were useless. When Lucifer bit Albert and the doctor had advocated amputation of the affected limb, I’d darkly imagined the beggar’s life my brother might have led. When I learned the truth of my mother’s injuries, I fell into despair imagining much the same tragic outcome. I selfishly urged her to embrace a profound belief in God so that Sister Eve might help her to be healed, but like Albert, she simply could not. Instead, she reached into a deep well of courage inside herself and proved to be every bit the woman I’d hoped I might find when I headed for Saint Louis. Though bound to a wheelchair, she set about creating a new kind of life. She’d been designing and making her own clothes forever, and she determined to do the same for others. She bought the empty fudge shop on the corner of Ithaca Street and turned it into a dress shop where she sold her creations. Three of the young women who’d been in her charge stayed with her—to my great relief, Dollie among them—and she taught them her craft. It was a slow go at first, but my mother was not above a little bit of blackmail, and she tapped the wealthiest of her former clientele to buy dresses for their wives. Eventually, her reputation as a designer spread. By the end of the Great Depression, gowns from Maison de Julia were all the rage among women of the Saint Louis elite.
At eighteen, Albert enrolled in the University of Minnesota to pursue a degree in engineering, multiple degrees it turned out. But every year, once the upper Mississippi River was clear of ice, my brother and Mose worked on the Hellor with Truman Waters and Cal. I often joined them, and Emmy did, too. On one of our early spring trips downriver together near the end of those days, Mose, on a whim, tried out for the Saint Louis Cardinals as a walk-on. He made the farm team, and a year later they brought him up to the majors. Emmy had once predicted that he would be a famous ballplayer, which was not precisely true, but he twice led the league in RBIs. They called him the Silent Sioux Slugger, and the baseball cards that bear his image and stats are highly prized now.
When World War II commenced, like millions of other young men, Albert and I donned uniforms. Despite his gimp leg, which was the legacy of the snakebite, my brother’s mechanical genius was an asset too valuable to let pass, and the navy took him. He rose quickly in rank and was finally put in charge of the powerful engines of an aircraft carrier. Near the end of the war, that great vessel was sunk, victim of kamikaze attacks. Although the carrier was abandoned, Albert stayed aboard, seeing to the safe evacuation of as many of his engine room crew as possible. My brother had been a hero to me his whole life, and he died a hero’s death. In Albert’s honor, my firstborn son proudly bears his name, and in a leather case on a shelf above my writing desk, I still keep the Navy Cross given for my brother’s sacrifice.
Mose played three full seasons with the Cardinals, but early into his fourth a fastball caught him in the head, in much the same way the paperweight he’d thrown years earlier had clipped Clyde Brickman. The blow damaged his left eye, and the brief career of the Silent Sioux Slugger was over. But that didn’t end Mose’s love of the sport. A year later, he returned to Lincoln School,