“Any of you, I need that iron key from the ring on the wall.”

  The biggest of them took it clumsily from the hook and brought it, ring and all. Mama dangled the large ring and the key over the mother’s belly, chanting softly,

  “Here’s the circle, open wide,

  Here’s the key to get outside,

  Earth be iron, flame be fair,

  Fall from water into air.”

  The mother cried out in sudden agony. Mama tossed away the key, cast back the sheet, lifted the woman’s knees, and ordered little Peggy fiercely to see.

  Little Peggy touched the woman’s womb. The boy’s mind was empty, except for a feeling of pressure and gathering cold as he emerged into the air. But the very emptiness of his mind let her see things that would never be clearly visible again. The billion billion paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices, for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million futures every second. The future was there in everyone, a flickering shadow that was never visible behind the thoughts of the present moment; but here, for a few precious moments, little Peggy could see them clearly.

  And what she saw was death down every path. Drowning, drowning, every path of his future led this child to a watery death.

  “Why do you hate him so!” cried little Peggy.

  “What?” demanded Eleanor.

  “Hush,” said Mama. “Let her see what she sees.”

  Inside the unborn child, the dark blot of water that surrounded his heartfire seemed so terribly strong that little Peggy was afraid he would be swallowed up.

  “Get him out to breathe!” shouted little Peggy.

  Mama reached in, even though it tore the mother something dreadful, and hooked the baby by the neck with strong fingers, drawing him out.

  In that moment, the dark water retreated inside the child’s mind, and just before the first breath came, little Peggy saw ten million deaths by water disappear. Now, for the first time, there were some paths open, some paths leading to a dazzling future. And all the paths that did not end in early death had one thing in common. On all those paths, little Peggy saw herself doing one simple thing.

  So she did that thing. She took her hands from the slackening belly and ducked under her mother’s arm. The baby’s head had just emerged, and it was still covered with a bloody caul, a scrap of the sac of soft skin in which he had floated in his mother’s womb.

  His mouth was open, sucking inward on the caul, but it didn’t break, and he couldn’t breathe.

  Little Peggy did what she had seen herself do in the baby’s future. She reached out, took the caul from under the baby’s chin, and pulled it away from his face. It came whole, in one moist piece, and in the moment it came away, the baby’s mouth cleared, he sucked in a great breath, and then gave that mewling cry that birthing mothers hear as the song of life.

  Little Peggy folded the caul, her mind still full of the visions she had seen down the pathways of this baby’s life. She did not know yet what the visions meant, but they made such clear pictures in her mind that she knew she would never forget them. They made her afraid, because so much would depend on her, and how she used the birth caul that was still warm in her hands.

  “A boy,” said Mama.

  “Is he,” whispered the mother. “Seventh son?”

  Mama was tying the cord, so she couldn’t spare a glance at little Peggy. “Look,” she whispered.

  Little Peggy looked for the single heartfire on the distant river. “Yes,” she said, for the heartfire was still burning.

  Even as she watched, it flickered, died.

  “Now he’s gone,” said little Peggy.

  The woman on the bed wept bitterly, her birth-wracked body shuddering.

  “Grieving at the baby’s birth,” said Mama. “It’s a dreadful thing.”

  “Hush,” whispered Eleanor to her mother. “Be joyous, or it’ll darken the baby all his life!”

  “Vigor,” murmured the woman.

  “Better nothing at all than tears,” said Mama. She held out the crying baby, and Eleanor took it in competent arms—she had cradled many a babe before, it was plain. Mama went to the table in the corner and took the scarf that had been blacked in the wool, so it was night-colored clear through. She dragged it slowly across the weeping woman’s face, saying, “Sleep, Mother, sleep.”

  When the cloth came away, the weeping was done, and the woman slept, her strength spent.

  “Take the baby from the room,” said Mama.

  “Don’t he need to start his sucking?” asked Eleanor.

  “She’ll never nurse this babe,” said Mama. “Not unless you want him to suck hate.”

  “She can’t hate him,” said Eleanor. “It ain’t his fault.”

  “I reckon her milk don’t know that,” said Mama. “That right, little Peggy? What teat did the baby suck?”

  “His mama’s,” said little Peggy.

  Mama looked sharp at her. “You sure of that?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, then, we’ll bring the baby in when she wakes up. He doesn’t need to eat anything for the first night, anyway.” So Eleanor carried the baby out into the great room, where the fire burned to dry the men, who stopped trading stories about rains and floods worse than this one long enough to look at the baby and admire.

  Inside the room, though, Mama took little Peggy by the chin and stared hard into her eyes. “You tell me the truth, Margaret. It’s a serious thing, for a baby to suck on its mama and drink up hate.”

  “She won’t hate him, Mama,” said little Peggy.

  “What did you see?”

  Little Peggy would have answered, but she didn’t know the words to tell most of the things she saw. So she looked at the floor. She could tell from Mama’s quick draw of breath that she was ripe for a tongue-lashing. But Mama waited, and then her hand came soft, stroking across little Peggy’s cheek. “Ah, child, what a day you’ve had. The baby might have died, except you told me to pull it out. You even reached in and opened up its mouth—that’s what you did, isn’t it?”

  Little Peggy nodded.

  “Enough for a little girl, enough for one day.” Mama turned to the other girls, the ones in wet dresses, leaning against the wall. “And you, too, you’ve had enough of a day. Come out of here, let your mama sleep, come out and get dry by the fire. I’ll start a supper for you, I will.”

  But Oldpappy was already in the kitchen, fussing around, and refused to hear of Mama doing a thing. Soon enough she was out with the baby, shooing the men away so she could rock it to sleep, letting it suck her finger.

  Little Peggy figured after a while that she wouldn’t be missed, and so she snuck up the stairs to the attic ladder, and up the ladder into the lightless, musty space. The spiders didn’t bother her much, and the cats mostly kept the mice away, so she wasn’t afraid. She crawled right to her secret hiding place and took out the carven box that Oldpappy had given her, the one he said his own papa brought from Ulster when he came to the colonies. It was full of the precious scraps of childhood—stones, strings, buttons—but now she knew that these were nothing compared to the work before her all the rest of her life. She dumped them right out, and blew into the box to clear away dust. Then she laid the folded caul inside and closed the lid.

  She knew that in the future she would open that box a dozen times. That it would call to her, wake her from her sleep, tear her from her friends, and steal from her all her dreams. All because a baby boy downstairs had no future at all, except a death from the dark water, excepting if she used that caul to keep him safe, the way it once protected him in the womb.

  For a moment she was angry, to have her own life so changed. Worse than the blacksmith coming, it was, worse than Papa and the hazel wand he whupped her with, worse than Mama when her eyes were angry. Everything would be different forever and it wasn’t fair. Just for a baby she never invited, never asked to come here, what did she care about any old baby?

  She reached out and opened the box, planning to take the caul and cast it into a dark corner of the attic. But even in the darkness, she could see a place where it was darker still: near her heartfire, where the emptiness of the deep black river was all set to make a murderer out of her.

  Not me, she said to the water. You ain’t part of me.

  Yes I am, whispered the water. I’m all through you, and you’d dry up and die without me.

  You ain’t the boss of me, anyway, she retorted.

  She closed the lid on the box and skidded her way down the ladder. Papa always said that she’d get splinters in her butt doing that. This time he was right. It stung something fierce, so she walked kind of sideways into the kitchen where Oldpappy was. Sure enough, he stopped his cooking long enough to pry the splinters out.

  “My eyes ain’t sharp enough for this, Maggie,” he complained.

  “You got the eyes of an eagle. Papa says so.”

  Oldpappy chuckled. “Does he now.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Oh, you’ll like this dinner, Maggie.”

  Little Peggy wrinkled up her nose. “Smells like chicken.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t like chicken soup.”

  “Not just soup, Maggie. This one’s a-roasting, except the neck and wings.”

  “I hate roast chicken, too.”

  “Does your Oldpappy ever lie to you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then you best believe me when I tell you this is one chicken dinner that’ll make you glad. Can’t you think of any way that a partickler chicken dinner could make you glad?”

  Little Peggy thought and thought, and then she smiled. “Bloody Mary?”

  Oldpappy winked. “I always said that was a hen born to make gravy.” Little Peggy hugged him so tight that he made choking sounds, and then they laughed and laughed.

  Later that night, long after little Peggy was in bed, they brought Vigor’s body home, and Papa and Makepeace set to making a box for him. Alvin Miller hardly looked alive, even when Eleanor showed him the baby. Until she said, “That torch girl. She says that this baby is the seventh son of a seventh son.”

  Alvin looked around for someone to tell him if it was true.

  “Oh, you can trust her,” said Mama.

  Tears came fresh to Alvin’s eyes. “That boy hung on,” he said. “There in the water, he hung on long enough.”

  “He knowed what store you set by that,” said Eleanor.

  Then Alvin reached for the baby, held him tight, looked down into his eyes. “Nobody named him yet, did they?” he asked.

  “Course not,” said Eleanor. “Mama named all the other boys, but you always said the seventh son’d have—”

  “My own name. Alvin. Seventh son of a seventh son, with the same name as his father. Alvin Junior.” He looked around him, then turned to face toward the river, way off in the nighttime forest. “Hear that, you Hatrack River? His name is Alvin, and you didn’t kill him after all.” Soon they brought in the box, and laid out Vigor’s body with candles, to stand for the fire of life that had left him. Alvin held up the baby, over the coffin. “Look on your brother,” he whispered to the infant. “That baby can’t see nothing yet, Papa,” said David.

  “That ain’t so, David,” said Alvin. “He don’t know what he’s seeing, but his eyes can see. And when he gets old enough to hear the story of his birth, I’m going to tell him that his own eyes saw his brother Vigor, who gave his life for this baby’s sake.”

  It was two weeks before Faith was well enough to travel. But Alvin saw to it that he and his boys worked hard for their keep. They cleared a good spot of land, chopped the winter’s firewood, set some charcoal heaps for Makepeace Smith, and widened the road. They also felled four big trees and made a strong bridge across the Hatrack River, a covered bridge so that even in a rainstorm people could cross that river without a drop of water touching them.

  Vigor’s grave was the third one there, beside little Peggy’s two dead sisters. The family paid respects and prayed there on the morning that they left. Then they got in their wagon and rode off westward. “But we leave a part of ourselves here always,” said Faith, and Alvin nodded.

  Little Peggy watched them go, then ran up into the attic, opened the box, and held little Alvin’s caul in her hand. No danger, for now at least. Safe for now. She put the caul away and closed the lid. You better be something, baby Alvin, she said, or else you caused a powerful lot of trouble for nothing.

  Prior Restraint

  I met Doc Murphy in a writing class taught by a mad Frenchman at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I had just quit my job as a coat-and-tie editor at a conservative family magazine, and I was having a little trouble getting used to being a slob student again. Of a shaggy lot, Doc was the shaggiest and I was prepared to be annoyed by him and ignore his opinions. But his opinions were not to be ignored At first because of what he did to me. And then, at last, because of what had been done to him. It has shaped me; his past looms over me whenever I sit down to write.

  Armand the teacher, who had not improved on his French accent by replacing it with Bostonian, looked puzzled as he held up my story before the class. “This is commercially viable,” he said. “It is also crap. What else can I say?”

  It was Doc who said it. Nail in one hand, hammer in the other, he crucified me and the story. Considering that I had already decided not to pay attention to him, and considering how arrogant I was in the lofty position of being the one student who had actually sold a novel, it is surprising to me that I listened to him. But underneath the almost angry attack on my work was something else: A basic respect, I think, for what a good writer should be. And for that small hint in my work that a good writer might be hiding somewhere in me.

  So I listened. And I learned. And gradually, as the Frenchman got crazier and crazier, I turned to Doc to learn how to write. Shaggy though he was, he had a far crisper mind than anyone I had ever known in a business suit.

  We began to meet outside class. My wife had left me two years before, so I had plenty of free time and a pretty large rented house to sprawl in; we drank or read or talked, in front of a fire or over Doc’s convincing veal parmesan or out chopping down an insidious vine that wanted to take over the world starting in my back yard. For the first time since Denae had gone I felt at home in my house—Doc seemed to know by instinct what parts of the house held the wrong memories, and he soon balanced them by making me feel comfortable in them again.

  Or uncomfortable. Doc didn’t always say nice things.

  “I can see why your wife left you,” he said once.

  “You don’t think I’m good in bed, either?” (This was a joke—neither Doc nor I had any unusual sexual predilections.)

  “You have a neanderthal way of dealing with people, that’s all. If they aren’t going where you want them to go, club ’em a good one and drag ’em away.”

  It was irritating. I didn’t like thinking about my wife. We had only been married three years, and not good years either, but in my own way I had loved her and I missed her a great deal and I hadn’t wanted her to go when she left. I didn’t like having my nose rubbed in it. “I don’t recall clubbing you.”

  He just smiled. And, of course, I immediately thought back over the conversation and realized that he was right. I hated his goddam smile.

  “OK,” I said, “you’re the one with long hair in the land of the last surviving crew cuts. Tell me why you like ‘Swap’ Morris.”

  “I don’t like Morris. I think Morris is a whore selling someone else’s freedom to win votes.”

  And I was confused, then. I had been excoriating good old “Swap” Morris, Davis County Commissioner, for having fired the head librarian in the county because she had dared to stock a “pornographic” book despite his objections. Morris showed every sign of being illiterate, fascist, and extremely popular, and I would gladly have hit the horse at his lynching.

  “So you don’t like Morris either—what did I say wrong?”

  “Censorship is never excusable for any reason, says you.”

  “You like censorship?”

  And then the half-serious banter turned completely serious. Suddenly he wouldn’t look at me. Suddenly he only had eyes for the fire, and I saw the flames dancing in tears resting on his lower eyelids, and I realized again that with Doc I was out of my depth completely.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t like it.”

  And then a lot of silence until he finally drank two full glasses of wine, just like that, and went out to drive home; he lived up Emigration Canyon at the end of a winding, narrow road, and I was afraid he was too drunk, but he only said to me at the door, “I’m not drunk. It takes half a gallon of wine just to get up to normal after an hour with you, you’re so damn sober.”

  One weekend he even took me to work with him. Doc made his living in Nevada. We left Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon and drove to Wendover, the first town over the border. I expected him to be an employee of the casino we stopped at. But he didn’t punch in, just left his name with a guy; and then he sat in a corner with me and waited.

  “Don’t you have to work?” I asked.

  “I’m working,” he said.

  “I used to work just the same way, but I got fired.”

  “I’ve got to wait my turn for a table. I told you I made my living with poker.”

  And it finally dawned on me that he was a freelance professional—a player—a cardshark.

  There were four guys named Doc there that night. Doc Murphy was the third one called to a table. He played quietly, and lost steadily but lightly for two hours. Then, suddenly, in four hands he made back everything he had lost and added nearly fifteen hundred dollars to it. Then he made his apologies after a decent number of losing hands and we drove back to Salt Lake.

  “Usually I have to play again on Saturday night,” he told me. Then he grinned. “Tonight I was lucky. There was an idiot who thought he knew poker.”

  I remembered the old saw: Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play poker with a man named Doc, and never sleep with a woman who’s got more troubles than you. Pure truth. Doc memorized the deck, knew all the odds by heart, and it was a rare poker face that Doc couldn’t eventually see through.