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anvil and Rosalyn toddled into the fire, that the sheer unspeakableness of that horror (the way her little back had lifted off with the poultice like the skin on a pot of boiled milk) had hurled him headlong into the arms of God and away from me who would never, after all, have taken her away from him, andwho mourned her more than any Heavenly Father ever could. But justice had nothing to do with it. No, like a small stone deflected off a larger one, my brother had spun off toward the Almighty, though to my mind the events of that morning could just as well have cast him the other way.

IX.
    The rains arrived that September, storm after storm pulling across the sky, though by that late date their only purpose seemed to be to wash away the cinders. “The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust,” my brother had observed at the height of our troubles. I anticipated a new verse shortly.
    We continued to make our regular pilgrimage to Gideon’s porch, the air suddenly sharp and cidery with fall. I recall one night in particular—deep and blue and beautiful. Stoneman’s pond lay still and dark as water in a bucket. As we passed I saw a single ring spread against the deepening sky, reminding me for some reason of an evening in Scotland when, cramped and sore from the road, we had persuaded the driver, an old man with a small, dangling mole on the side of his neck that I kept wanting to pluck, to stop the carriage so that we might stretch our legs. We had stepped out onto a rough country lane, somewhere outside Edinburgh. There had been a pond there. And an evening star. And another fall coming on. My God, how young we had been then. And how very fast the wheel did turn.
    I remember that Gideon, whose literary tastes tended to the ponderous if not downright inscrutable, had been reading a novel by a man named Melville, whose descriptions of his own amorous adventures in the South Seas a few years earlier had caused such a fuss and set the ReverendSeward and his brethren to clucking and fluffing their feathers. The new novel, I gathered now, was not nearly as amusing. No caressing breezes. No Marquesan maidens climbing naked up the chains, their jet-black tresses dripping with brine. Mr. Melville had apparently traded debauchery for Descartes, the lovely Fayaway’s charms for Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, and produced a tome whose sheer weight gladdened the good doctor’s heart.
    He had been thinking, he said, about a passage in which the author described the dead as setting forth from this world like travelers reduced to a single carpetbag, free of all their worldly possessions. He paused, taking his time. I can still see him leaning over without uncrossing his legs, opening the tobacco pouch lying by his side, carefully stuffing the bowl of his pipe. He placed the stem between his teeth. “What would you put in that carpetbag?” he said, tilting the lamp glass with one hand, with the other holding a splinter to the flame. “If you had one thing, one memory, to take into the afterlife—assuming, for a moment, there is one—what would it be?”
    An absurd, two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind of question. Only humans, I thought, would torment themselves with choices that would never be asked of them. And yet, for whatever reason, the memory that flew into my mind was not, as I would have expected, of some still and blazing moment from childhood before the cholera came to Meklong, or of Sophia’s face that February evening we walked past the snow-covered walls and gabled ends of Montparnasse, but of Christopher as a child, that April afternoon by the stream.
    It had been a late spring. The hills, where they showed through the trees, looked furred, soft as a pelt. We could see him peering down into the water where the crawdads gusted up and back in small puffs of silt, the tea-clear current breaking into bubbles around his legs. To the right, on the gently tilting bank, Sallie and Addy were laying out a picnic in