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could argue with Dr. de Bouton until Judgment Day,—and he did argue with him of an evening, until they were both near insensate with liquor; and he once rode all the way across Mr. Boerum’s estate to fetch Mrs. Friedlander, who could only stroke the poor infant’s bald head and prescribe her a tincture of slippery elm,—but I knew the cause of my sister’s deformity, and was stunned by the magnitude of the wrong I’d committed. My parents had told me their parents’ God was a blackguard, and Pappy had impressed on me that his Lord was terrible fierce; but if this God of his and the domine’s could turn so capriciously on an infant, His heart was even darker than my own. I was sick with unhappiness. I dreaded pulling the covers from my face each morning, for fear my features would some daybe revealed as deformed as my nature. I still found my sister uncanny, but could not imagine her being ferried across the straits to live for all eternity in dun brown New-York. Who would tend her, so small and frail? I thought the Other Side must contain some safeguard against such an eventuality: some cold, grim orphanage in which she might lie listlessly about with the stillborn and those taken by the pertussis & diphtheria before being baptized, damned forever through no fault of their own. Our brothers and sisters might be there also, but each would feel himself in a private hell, as none had lived long enough to earn a voice or a name; they would have no means by which to recognize one another.
    And so I prayed God to spare her. I prayed she be able to stand with me in the dooryard, the salt breeze on our cheeks, & eat the spicy roots of onion grass. I did not bother to ask for a lusty voice or a long life for her;—now young Nicolaas Luquer’d been drowned, and I knew how many babies went down in the churchyard unnamed, I knew it was no use, begging. The bargain I sought to strike with God was, if He would let her live three or four summers more, He could do with her as He pleased.
    It seems as impossible to me as it must to you the Creator would do business on such terms, but again I found my prayer answered. That very day, my sister began to suck more greedily at Johanna’s milk-soaked rag; the next, she accepted some of Mrs. Friedlander’s tincture, and later took the breast. Though she’d shriveled to a sack of saffron skin and chicken bones, she began to fatten; and her complexion soon faded to a cherry blossom pink. She sprouted some wisps of dark hair. My father resumed the careful superintention of his grain and distillery, & Dr. de Bouton returned to his usual, solitary tippling. I missed having him around the house; I had been fascinated by the bushy black brows beneath his snow-white hair, and had liked watching them move as he spoke. At summer’s end, my sister was brought into the church and christened. I never learned by what means my parents chose her name, but I think they must have meant to call her,—with a different sort of irony than that with which they’d named me, or else reverting in those dark days to the faith & fear of their childhoods, with no ironickal import whatsoever,—our
Pearl
of great price, our kingdom of Heaven.
    So you see, in my imagination my sister was always tied to the worldbeyond, in a way your Aunt Temperance,—born the next summer, and named, as I had been, according to your grandfather’s queer sense of humour,—never could be. From the moment she arrived, Tem could call for my attention as surely as if she were a mosquito in the bedroom; but each time Pearl whistled (an otherwise rude habit for which she early showed proficiency, and which she imbued with uncommon grace) or opened her mouth in a rasping laugh, she reminded me by how fine a thread she was moored to this world, by how narrow a margin I had escaped punishment for my sin. You will learn soon enough how otherworldly a thing a small child can