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the shade.
    “Now that’s something we haven’t seen in a while,” my brother said at one point, pointing downstream with the stem of his pipe. A veritable flurry of orange butterflies was coming down the stream alley—dipping, floating, doubling back. Here and there one would pass through an invisible ray of light coming through the leaves and flare into color.
    Eng chuckled. “You’d almost think they were coming for him,” he said. I glanced at Christopher, who was no more than three at the time. The boy had seen them coming, and had stretched out his arms as though he were a tree. I remember I felt a pang, anticipating his disappointment, aware that the world doesn’t come when we wish it. And then a butterfly settled on his arm. Another on his shoulder. A third on his head. They were all over him, tipping this way and that, climbing awkwardly up his arms. I remember one sat contentedly on the white tip of his ear, fanning slowly like a living flower. A smile of such happiness was on his face that I was struck with the thought that the boy had been born lucky.
    I would take the look on his face, I remember thinking, to remind me of all I’d loved.
    Moon and whiskey had both descended a good way that night before the conversation, wandering about like a dog in no hurry from crops to neighbors to politics, stopped, for a moment, on the subject of photography, which Gideon believed—with the passion of the converted—would some day prove as important an invention as the printing press or the steam engine. He had paid a visit to Henninger’s studio on Cooper Street, and had left full of enthusiasm for glass plates and silver iodide. Within a few years, he said, we would all have our own library of photographs, not just of the Taj Mahal or the Egyptian pyramids, but of our parents, our children. Nothing would be too small.
    We argued, I recall. I said that I had no use for such tinkering. That I could see the past clearly enough already. That I didn’t need the evidence of my losses hanging on my wall.
    Gideon was unconvinced. He said I had a brooding soul, and that brooding, like the mythological snake, not only feeds on itself but grows larger in the process.
    “This is your professional opinion?” I remember asking him. Maryhad long since gone to bed. Gideon was leaning back in his chair, one leg over the other, the bottle by his side like a dog waiting to be scratched. It was, he said. He was offering it to me free of charge. I said I supposed that next he’d be wanting to bleed me for my dark humors. He said it would be appropriate, given my scientific views.
    “And to replace the loss?” I asked.
    He would prescribe a restorative of some kind, he said, carefully pouring us each a fingerful. Something to neutralize the accumulation of bile.
    We were silent for a moment. “Science is a wonderful thing, Gideon,” I said.
    “It is indeed,” he said. He raised his glass. “To science, my friends. And fate, which Mr. Melville here”—he patted the fat book on the table beside him—“tells us always deals the featuring blow.”

X.
    We had emerged, after that long and suffocating season, into a cleansed world, and like travelers who walk into the bruised light after the storm has passed, and who breathe in great lungfuls of air and look about themselves like people recalling, not without tenderness, some small foolishness of their youth, we felt utterly, joyously alive.
    Any final tally of happiness in my life would have to include that blessed month. Death, for a time, had been banished from the garden. We were—every one of us—strong and well. Food tasted better than it ever had before, or ever would again. Laughter came easily. We went out into the air every morning like kings, or children, and strode across our land, looking with pleasure at the things our lives had given us. The world came when we whistled and lay at our feet.
    Perfection. Even the weather played its part. Following the turn