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side," said
    Lavinia. "As well she should." From time to time, though, Margaret had a ghostly
    recollection of this bit or that bit--of her hand reaching up into Lawrence's hand, or of
    him handing her a bit of a crab apple, or of her bonnet hanging over her eyes so that she
    couldn't see anything except her feet. He might have sat her on his shoulders--he
    sometimes did that when she was very young. Nevertheless, it was a fugitive memory,
    however dramatic.

    Margaret remembered other things that she would have preferred to forget. She
    remembered that when Ben was thirteen he went with some cronies down to the
    railyards. They found a blasting cap, which one of the fellows attached to the end of a
    short length of iron rod that they had also found. Employing this rod, they rubbed the
    blasting cap against some brickwork to see what might happen. When it exploded, the rod
    flew out of the boy's hand and entered Ben's skull above the ear. He was killed instantly.
    None of the other boys was hurt, and they carried the body home as best they could. Dr.
    Mayfield met them at the door, and this was the first news they had of the death of Ben.

    That winter, Lawrence contracted measles, which led to an inflammation of the
    brain. The source of the original infection was what Lavinia had always feared, a child
    who was brought to see Dr. Mayfield. Elizabeth, Beatrice, and Margaret succumbed as
    well. But they were fairly young, and Lawrence was almost sixteen at the time. They
    lived and he did not.

    And then, one evening about six months after the death of Lawrence, for reasons
    of his own that Lavinia later said had to do with melancholic propensities, Dr. Mayfield
    retrieved Ben's rifle from the storeroom behind the kitchen and shot himself in his office.
    Lavinia found him--she had thought he was still out with a patient, but, upon awakening
    very late, she heard the horse whinny out in the stable. She went to Dr. Mayfield's office
    to investigate and discovered the corpse. Margaret remembered that night--the sounds of
    running feet and doors slamming, the whinny of a horse, and a shout either half rousing
    her or weaving into her slumber. What she remembered most clearly was that when she
    and her sisters got up in the morning, there was once again a large closed coffin in the
    parlor. Their father was gone, and Lavinia, who had been sickly from so many
    pregnancies and so much grief, was a different person, one the girls had never known
    before. She was entirely dressed, her bed was made, and from that day forward, she never
    complained again of the headache or anything else. Margaret was eight; Beatrice had just
    turned six; Elizabeth was not quite three. On the day after the funeral, which Margaret
    also remembered, Lavinia moved the girls to her father's farm--it was the practical thing
    to do, and Lavinia said that they were lucky to be able to do so. She told Margaret,
    because she was the oldest, that death was the most essential part of life, and that they
    must make the best of it. Margaret always remembered that.

    GENTRY F ARM, not far from Darlington, down toward the Missouri River, was
    famous in the neighborhood, a beautiful expanse of fertile prairie that John Gentry and
    his own father had broken in 1828. Before the War Between the States, Lavinia's father
    and grandfather owned thirty-two slaves, quite a few more than was usual in Missouri-they raised hemp, tobacco, corn, and hogs. When Lavinia was twelve, John Gentry gave
    his oath to support the Union, unlike several of his neighbors. Two of his cousins went
    off to join the Confederacy. After the war, John Gentry's loyalties were questioned all
    around, and so he married his daughters to suitors of unimpeachable Union sympathies.
    Martha married a man from Iowa who fought with the Fourth Iowa Infantry; Harriet
    married an Irishman from Chicago; Louisa married one of those radical Germans from
    the Osage River Valley, who, though her grandfather never liked