and slip into the wood, where they wait, real patient. Inside the cottonwood, they’re dull and lightless, like you see here. Then, when the great spirit of the night sky decides that more stars are needed, he shakes the branches with his wind and releases the stars. They fly up and settle in the sky, where they shine and sparkle and become the luminous creations they were always meant to be.” He looked at the star in that cottonwood branch with a kind of reverence. “And we’re like that, too. Dreams shook loose. You boys and me and everybody else on God’s earth. Your people, Geronimo, they got a lot of wisdom in ’em.”
Mose smiled as broadly as I’d ever seen.
“You didn’t like the story?” the pig scarer asked me, because I wasn’t smiling like Mose.
“It’s fine, I guess,” I said.
“You like it here, Buck?”
“It’s hard work.”
“Let me see your hands.” He studied the calluses on my palms. “You’re used to hard work.”
“Doesn’t mean I like it.”
“Everything’s hard work, Buck. You don’t wrap your thinking around that, life’ll kill you for sure. Me, I love this land, the work. Never was a churchgoer. God all penned up under a roof? I don’t think so. Ask me, God’s right here. In the dirt, the rain, the sky, the trees, the apples, the stars in the cottonwoods. In you and me, too. It’s all connected and it’s all God. Sure this is hard work, but it’s good work because it’s a part of what connects us to this land, Buck. This beautiful, tender land.”
“This land spawned a tornado that killed Emmy’s mother. You call that tender?”
“Tragic, that’s what I call it. But don’t blame the land. The land’s what it’s always been, and tornadoes have been a part of that from the beginning. Drought, too, and grasshoppers and hail and wildfire and everything that’s ever driven folks off or killed ’em. The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or, hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.”
“Those orchard trees were in pretty bad shape before we got here. You love this land so much, why’d you let them go to hell?”
“Failed ’em, Buck, plain and simple. Failed ’em. That’s on me. But finding all of you in that old potting shed has proved to be a blessing, and I feel refreshed.”
I wondered if this was the same man who’d nailed the window shut in Emmy’s room and had shattered the liquor bottle against the barn wall and had cried his heart out under the oak tree. In a way, he was just like this land he loved, killer tornado one minute, blue sky the next. I wondered if it was the alcohol that caused the changes. Or was it just who he was and had always been, and maybe that was why Aggie had left him. If, in fact, that’s what she’d done.
“Tell you what, Buck,” he said. “If you need a break, cart that wood to the barn. There’s a chopping block near the potting shed. You’ve seen it. Dump those sections, and before you come back, fill the wooden bucket at the pump with water and haul it here. I’m feeling a little parched. Think you can do that?”
“I can do it,” I said.
“What do you think, Geronimo?”
Mose smiled and gave a nod.
“Don’t dawdle, Buck. Work to be done. And I want a report on how things are coming along at the still, too.”
I put the morels into the cart, but when I grabbed hold of the handles, I could have sworn I was lifting five hundred pounds. I threw all my weight into the effort and the cart began to roll.
I dumped the wood at the chopping block next to the shed, grabbed the morels I’d collected, and went inside the barn to check on Albert’s progress with the still.
There was something in my brother that compelled him to do a job right, whatever that job was. The little still he’d built for the pig scarer—copper cooker and coils of copper tubing—was a thing of shining beauty. At the lower end of the coiled copper, which was called the worm, sat a clean, half-gallon glass milk bottle collecting the hooch as it dripped.
Emmy was with Albert. She wore a different dress that day, a little blue jumper. She knelt in front of the