Prologue

Natchez, Mississippi 1867

Clay McCall sat on an upturned flour barrel. He felt a cool breeze through the window behind him as he shaved curls from a piece of pine. He held the wood between his knees and worked slowly with the blunt blade, turning it with his other hand, the shape transforming beneath the knife. Gradually, a wooden horse emerged. Its legs were too thick, so he pared them down. Its head was bent a little as though it had found grass.

Three children watched from the dirt: Bill, Mary and Tucker.

“Will it stand?” Tucker asked.

“It will if you quit breathing down my neck.”

“I ain’t breathing down your neck.”

“It’s an expression that means you’re near enough that I can smell what you ate for breakfast.”

Tucker looked offended. “I didn’t have no breakfast.”

The boy’s cheeks had gone hollow last winter. He was nine. He wore a shirt with one cuff missing and trousers tied up with rope at the waist. Behind him, little May sat with her bare feet tucked beneath her skirt. She had a runny nose and a strip of old blanket pinned around her shoulders.

Clay put the knife down.

“Well, can you smell mine?” he asked.

“Beans!” May said.

Clay smiled. “Correct!”

“That is all we ever have,” Tucker groaned.

“Not true.”, Bill objected, scratching at a rash on his leg. “Last Tuesday we had beans with salt pork.”

Tucker scowled. “No pork in mine.”

Clay considered this. “Then someone stole your pork.”

“Who?”

“Likely a very small, very hungry thief.”

May gave a quiet laugh. Tucker was still studying the wooden horse.

Clay set it on the barrel. The horse leaned slightly, then settled on all four legs.

“There,” Clay said.

Tucker reached for it.

“Hold on. It’s not finished,” Clay said. “What does a horse need?”

“A rider,” Bill said.

May lifted her hand. “A feed tub?”

“And a name,” Tucker said.

Clay nodded gravely. “You cannot ride a horse without a name.”

“I’ll remember that!” Bill said.

Clay began to carve another hunk of pine. The children pressed close again. Rain had beaten the backyard into hard gullies. A fence at the far end slumped inward where two boards had come loose. Beyond it stood the washhouse, black with damp along the lower planks, and the gray roofs of Natchez.

The orphanage had once been a respectable house, or so Franklin said. He had run it for as long as Clay could remember, but he had no memory of it being so. It was a long, two-story building with peeling white paint, a sagging porch, and windows that rattled when it was windy. Too many children, and too few beds. The younger ones slept two and sometimes three to a mattress. The older boys were put in the attic when there was room, and on the floor of the schoolroom when there wasn’t.

The kitchen roof leaked. The privy stank in summer. In winter, the coal stove was kept low to spare fuel, and boys woke with their breath white in the dark.

But it was home.

Clay had slept in the attic since he was ten. He had learned which floorboard creaked near the stairs and which window could be opened with a bent nail when the heat became too close. He knew where mice ran behind the walls, and he knew how to catch rainwater from the broken gutter in a clean bucket before the roof dirt collected there. He kept watch over the younger children who cried after nightmares.

He blocked out a little rider and worked around the head to build a crooked hat.

“That is supposed to be me,” Tucker said.

“It is supposed to be whoever owns the horse.”

“Then it’s me.”

“Fine. You’ll have a very handsome face.”

Tucker frowned at the wooden figure. “His face is a lump.”

“You’re a hard one to please.”

May reached toward the shavings. “Can I have a doll?”

“I made you one.”

“Benny took it.”

“Boys don’t like dolls,” Tucker said. “Benny put it in the stove.”

May’s mouth opened.

Clay turned his head toward the kitchen door. “Benny did what?”

“He said it was cold,” Bill said.

“It was cold,” Tucker said, as if this settled the matter.

Clay rubbed a hand over his jaw. Benny was five. He had spent the winter coughing. The boy’s fingers were often blue in the mornings.

“All right,” Clay said. “I’ll make another.”

May watched him. “With hair?”

“With hair.”

“Yellow hair.”

“Yellow hair costs extra.”

“I’ve got a button.”

She dug beneath her blanket and brought out a brass button, green at the edges. Clay recognized it. It had come from one of his old shirts.

He took it from her palm and examined it.

“A fine button,” he said.

“It was my mama’s.”

Clay knew it was not. May had been brought in at two years old with no memory of her mother. But he did not give it back.

“This doll will have the finest yellow hair in Mississippi.”

May smiled. She had a gap where one of her front teeth had fallen out.

Clay bent over his work again. The wood smelled clean and sharp in his hands. It was one of the few things he liked about the place: there were always broken crates, ruined chair legs, and scraps from repairs. Things that other people threw away could become something.

Footsteps sounded on the porch. Not. children’s feet. Clay kept shaving the little rider’s hat, the back of his neck tightening. Visitors meant chaos, whether they brought good or bad news. The door creaked.

Jack Horton waited at the open doorway, hand resting on the porch rail. He was Franklin’s clerk, though clerk made him sound grander than he was. He kept the ledger, collected donations when there were any, and went into town for flour, lamp oil, and coal. He had a narrow face and sandy whiskers. Today he wore his good coat, buttoned despite the mild air, and a black hat pulled low.

The children saw him and went quiet.

Jack did not look at them. His eyes settled on Clay.

“Mr. McKenzie wants a word.”

Clay set the knife on the barrel. “Franklin? What does he want?”

“In his office.”

Tucker drew the horse close against his chest.

Clay stood. At nineteen, he had grown taller than Jack by an inch or two, though he was lean enough that his shirts hung loose from his shoulders. His blond hair had fallen into his eyes. He pushed it back with the heel of his hand.

“May,” he said, “do not let Tucker trade that horse for marbles.”

“I would never,” Tucker said.

“You traded your shoes for marbles.”

“They were poor shoes.”

“And now you have one less pair.”

Clay looked at May. “Keep the button safe. I’ll need it.”

She closed her fist around it.

Then he followed Jack inside.

The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and old ashes. Children’s voices came from the schoolroom at the front of the house, repeating sums in a tired chorus. Clay passed the dining room, where two long tables stood bare except for tin cups turned upside down to dry. The windows had been patched with paper after the last hard wind.

Jack led him to Franklin’s office at the end of the hall.

Franklin McKenzie sat behind a desk made of dark wood. It had belonged to the founder of the home, a minister dead these twelve years. Franklin had kept it polished even as the rest of the building came apart. Papers lay in neat stacks before him. There was an ink bottle, a pen, and a small brass cross mounted on a piece of walnut.

“Take a seat, Clay,” Franklin said, not meeting his eye.

Clay remained standing.

Franklin’s forehead tightened a little. His hair had gone gray at the temples. He was forty-seven, though he seemed older in the weak light from the window. Clay remembered him differently. Franklin with his sleeves rolled up, carrying two sick boys to the infirmary after the fever. Franklin laughing when Clay had fallen through the chicken coop roof at eleven. Franklin teaching him letters at this very desk when Clay had been too restless to sit in the schoolroom.

That man had thinned out over the years. Times were tough, but these days, Clay suspected there had never been too much room for gentleness in him in the first place.

Jack shut the office door behind them.

Franklin looked down at the papers. “We have received notice from the county. They intend to send six children here by the end of the month.”

Clay waited.

“The McCready place outside of Fayette burned down. Their parents are dead. The youngest is not yet three.”

Still Clay waited.

Franklin put both hands flat upon the desk. “So, there aren’t enough beds.”

Clay’s face did not change. He looked past Franklin to the wall, where a map of Mississippi had curled loose at one corner.

“I know,” he said.

“You are nineteen now.”

“I know that too.”

“And you’re able bodied. You have skills. You can find work.”

Clay gave a small breath through his nose.

“You have got my work picked out for me, then?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll be the one to find it. I’ll start asking around, and perhaps next year—”

Franklin looked at him directly. “You have one month.”

The words settled in the office. From upstairs came the drag of a chair, then a child’s sharp cry that quickly cut off.

Clay looked at the brass cross on the desk. He could see dust caught in the carved lines of it.

“One month?” he asked.

“I would give you longer if I could.”

Clay turned his eyes back to him. “You would, would you?”

Franklin’s jaw flexed.

Jack shifted near the door. “Clay, the home cannot keep—”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Jack’s face reddened.

Clay stood with his hands at his sides, the cut on his thumb from carving still bright and fresh. Franklin had told him once that a man ought not to speak angrily if he could help it. Angry words were easy to spend and hard to undo.

He had remembered that. He wished, at that moment, he had not.

Franklin said, “You have been a help here.”

“Kind of you to notice.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Then why send me away?”

“Because Tucker sleeps on a pallet near the stove. Because there are two infants sharing one cot in the girls’ room. Because the roof over the attic will not hold another winter if I cannot find money for repairs. Because every week someone comes to this door with a child and no place else to leave them.”

Clay’s gaze dropped to the floorboards.

There was a dark knot in the wood near his boot. He had tried to pry it loose when he was small. Jesse had caught him with a nail in his hand and boxed his ear for it. You split that board, Jesse had said, and old McKenzie will know it was us. Clay had asked how he would know. Jesse had only pointed at the nail. Clay had not thought of Jesse in a long while.

For a moment, Franklin seemed about to speak. Then he took a folded piece of paper from the desk drawer and held it out.

Clay didn’t take it. “What is that?”

“A letter of reference. For work. It says you are honest—that you can handle livestock, mend harness, work wood, keep accounts, and read.”

“You wrote all that?”

“I did.”

Clay took the paper. The seal was dark red wax. His name was written across the front in Franklin’s careful hand.

He slid it into the inside pocket of his shirt.

“Thank you,” he said, biting down anger. Clearly, this had been in the works a while. Franklin had wanted him gone longer than he might admit.

Franklin nodded once.

Clay turned toward the door.

“Clay.”

He stopped.

“You need not go far,” Franklin said. “Natchez has work at the river docks. The mills may take you. Speak to Mr. Booth at the livery. Tell him I sent you.”

Clay had his hand on the knob.

“I’m not staying in Natchez.”

Franklin’s brows drew together. “Where will you go?”

“I’ll find out.”

Jack moved aside to let him leave.

The hallway seemed narrower than before. Clay walked through it without looking into the schoolroom or up toward the attic stairs. He went out the back door, and straight to the washhouse.

The children were waiting.

Tucker had dirt on one cheek. May still held the brass button. Benny stood beside them in a shirt that was too large for him, his pale hair sticking up at the crown. He had heard enough to understand something was wrong.

“Are they putting you out?” Tucker asked.

Clay stopped.

Children did not need much explanation. They lived close to the facts of things.

“Not today but soon,” Clay said.

“Why?”

“We need beds for little ones.”

“I’m little,” Tucker said.

“You are getting large and troublesome.”

Tucker looked down at his bare toes.

Clay crouched in front of him. “Listen. Nobody is putting you out. Do you hear?”

The boy nodded.

Clay took the small horse from Tucker, checked the legs, then handed it back.

“I’ll be here a month,” he said. “That is enough time to make May a doll that can’t be burned in the stove.”

“What doesn’t burn?” May asked.

“Well, that’s a good point. Stone?”

“I don’t want a stone dolly.”

“Then you’ll have to guard the doll from Benny.” Clay winked.

Tucker looked toward the house. “Where will you go?”

Clay followed his gaze. The orphanage rose behind them, tired and crooked in the afternoon light. One of the upstairs windows was open, and a sheet hung out of it, gray with washing.

He had nowhere. Not truly.

But he had one month. He had his hands. He had a knife, a few coins beneath a loose floorboard in the attic, and the old place beyond the hill where he had hidden things since he was small.

He looked down at Tucker.

“West,” he said. “That’s where people go.”

“California?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s far.”

“So I have heard.”

“Will you find gold?” Tucker asked, wide eyed.

Clay picked up the shaving knife from the flour barrel and folded it shut.

“If I do, I will buy this place a new roof.”

Tucker smiled despite himself.

Clay headed for the back door. Before he went in, he looked once toward Franklin’s office window. The curtain was drawn.

Then he went upstairs to the attic and began sorting what was his. He’d have to take as much as he could fit in a pack. His time here was coming to an end.

He let it sink in.

Chapter One

The orphanage settled slowly after supper that night. Boards creaked beneath bare feet. Rain had come through the roof above the girls’ room again, and Clay had set three chipped bowls beneath the leaks. The smell of damp plaster and boiled turnips sat in every room.

Clay lay on his pallet beneath the window and listened.

Across from him, two boys shared a mattress so worn the ticking showed through in places. One of them had his arm thrown over the other’s chest. Their feet were black with dirt. At the end of the row, a boy Clay didn’t know well had cried himself to sleep into his pillow. Those were the worst kind. The kind you couldn’t get to talk about it.

Clay turned toward the wall.

One month.

Franklin had not spoken to him since. He was so silent, the way old men get. He spent days reading ledgers on his desk, counting sacks of flour, and spoke of beds as though boys and girls were no more than hay bales. The man had begun to see people as numbers. Clay supposed it was due to hard times, but hard times brought out the best in good men. A man of courage would never tire, not when it came to God’s lost children. Not the ones who needed love most of all.

Clay shut his eyes.

When the house had gone quiet, he rose. He pulled on his boots and trousers, tied his shirt at the throat, and slipped down from the attic, his footsteps quiet so he didn’t wake the others.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Water dripped from the eaves onto the packed ground. Beyond the orphanage, a lamp still burned in the kitchen of Mrs. Bell’s house. Clay would make sure to visit her soon, as she was getting too old to visit them as frequently as she had when he was younger.

Clay went through the garden with no lantern. He knew every place where the ground dipped, every root that rose from the soil. At the far fence he climbed over, catching his sleeve on a nail. The cloth tore with a small sound.

On the other side stood the old cottonwood. Its trunk had split years ago after a hard wind. One half had fallen toward the creek, but the rest of it still stood crooked and broad, with roots pushing above the ground like knuckles. Clay had been coming here since he was eight years old. At first he had only hidden marbles and a rusty button he’d found by the road. Then Jesse had shown him how to hollow a place beneath the roots without letting rain collect there.

“Never put all you own under one roof,” Jesse had said.

Clay had asked him why.

“Houses burn, kid.”

Jesse had grinned when he said it, as if it were a joke. He had been seventeen then, big already, with dark hair that never stayed combed and a way of looking at a person that made them feel he knew what they meant, not just what they said.

Clay crouched at the roots and pushed aside a flat stone covered in moss. The earth beneath it was as dry as a bone.

He reached into the hollow and brought out an old biscuit tin, a bundle of oilcloth, and a narrow wooden box with a brass clasp that no longer shut properly. He sat beneath the cottonwood, set the things around him, and opened the box.

There were two pennies inside. A fishhook. A blue glass marble. A carved whistle that had cracked down one side. A little wooden horse with three legs.

Clay picked up the horse; it was not unlike the one he’d made that morning.

Its missing leg had broken off when he was ten. Jesse had said he ought to throw it away.

“It can’t stand,” Clay had told him.

“Then make it another leg, you big galoot!” Jesse had said teasingly.

Clay had whittled a peg from a twig and fitted it into the broken place. It had not matched, but the horse stood after that. He’d carved endless things since then, but horses would always be his favorite.

He set it down and took out the photograph.

It had faded around the edges and curled from damp, though he had wrapped it twice to keep it dry. A photographer had come to the orphanage some years ago at the mayor’s request, and taken a picture of the boys. Having their likenesses preserved had been something of an occasion; most of the children had never sat for a photograph before. A charitable gentleman had paid for copies, and Clay had kept his ever since.

The photograph was still surprisingly clear. A dozen boys stood stiffly on the orphanage steps, their faces solemn beneath the bright sun. Clay recognized himself only because Jesse had written his name in pencil on the back. He was small and thin, his blond hair hanging into his eyes.

Jesse stood beside him, one hand resting on Clay’s shoulder. On the far end of the row stood Franklin McKenzie. Franklin was the only one smiling. He had never been a man for broad smiles. But his mouth was turned up, and his eyes were not as hard and tired as they were now. One of the little girls was holding his hand.

He looked at Jesse.

The memory came as plainly as if it had been laid out before him.

Jesse on the back steps, sewing up a tear in Clay’s coat with a needle too small for his rough fingers. Clay had been fourteen and angry over a fight. A bigger boy had shoved Jeremy into the wash trough, and Clay had bloodied the boy’s nose before anybody could stop him.

“You swing like you’re chopping wood,” Jesse had said.

“I knocked him down.”

“You did. Then his friends knocked you down.”

“He shouldn’t have shoved Jeremy.”

“No.”

“So I was right?”

Jesse tied off the thread with his teeth. “Being right don’t keep your ribs whole.”

Clay had looked at him. “What was I supposed to do? Just stand there?”

“No.” Jesse laid the coat across Clay’s lap. “You learn when to strike, and you learn what happens after.”

A few weeks later, Jesse had left for the army. He’d said he would write. He’d pressed his old whetstone into Clay’s hand before he went.

“Keep your knife sharp,” he had said.

Clay had waited for the letter.

It had never come.

He slid the photograph back into the box and closed the lid.

The creek moved black beneath the trees.

Clay sat awhile with his elbows on his knees. He didn’t know precisely where he would go, though he’d said California. Men came through Natchez with stories of that place—work on ranches, and land a man might earn if he had the strength to hold it. There were trails. Wagon parties. Rivers to cross and mountains beyond them.

It was more than he knew.

He put the photograph into the oilcloth bundle, then returned the box and tin beneath the roots. The things could stay there. A man did not need marbles where he was going.

Clay went to see Mrs. Bell.

Her house stood close to the orphanage, white paint peeling from the porch rails. She was outside, smoking a pipe. She was the only woman he’d ever seen do that. Her hair was wrapped beneath a faded blue scarf. She looked over when Clay came through the gate.

“You’re up late.”

“So are you.”

“I’m old. My teeth don’t let me sleep.”

Clay leaned against the porch post. “You got a pipe for me?”

“I got a second pipe. Was Harold’s once, but I ain’t got tobacco for two.”

Clay smiled, and she studied him. “Franklin told you, then.”

Clay looked down at the wet grass around his boots.

“Word gets around,” Mrs. Bell said, softly now.

“Seems it does.”

She went inside without answering. Clay heard the cupboard open, then the scrape of tin against wood. When she returned, she had a small sack.

Mrs. Bell placed the sack on the step between them. “Three tins of beans. One of tomatoes. There’s salt wrapped in paper. Don’t let it get wet.”

Clay looked at the sack, then at her.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know that.”

“I can pay you when I find work.”

“You’ll pay me by eating it instead of starving proud.”

Clay let out a breath through his nose. “That sounds fair.”

“It’s as fair as it’s going to get.”

He took the sack. It was heavier than it looked.

***

By noon the next day, half the neighborhood knew.

Mrs. Bell had told Mrs. Alvarez next door, though Clay knew she would deny it if asked. Mrs. Alvarez told the blacksmith’s wife while buying lamp oil. The blacksmith’s wife told her husband. By the time Clay reached the smithy, Mr. Pike had a battered frying pan waiting beside the forge.

“It’s got a bent handle,” Pike said.

Clay picked it up. The handle leaned left, but the pan was solid.

“I can straighten it.”

“You can. But then you’d have to give it back.”

Clay smiled.

Pike grunted and reached beneath his bench. He brought out a tin cup, a cooking spoon, and a narrow pot with a lid.

“That one don’t leak,” he said. “I tested it.”

“You keep travel pots around?”