But the Mallory children, both sick when they arrived, were separated at the wharves, and in the confusion and misery of unloading them, Curran was taken to a fever shed near the hospital, where he was mistakenly put into a room filled with older men who were not expected to live. Fianna Mallory, the chatterbox of the family, fared better and was taken to a fever shed on Emily Street, where she was tenderly nursed by nuns who kept her alive until her fever broke and her strength returned.

  Four weeks later, she walked out of the fever shed and sat on the ground near the lake. It was cold and she was not yet well, and the view of the lake confused her. She had come up a river with her brother and the baby on the slow-moving barge from the island, but this expanse of gray water was enormous, like the ocean she had already crossed. Had she come back to the ocean? Or had she come to another one and would she have to cross it too, and where was Curran who could unravel this mystery? There was too much water, she decided, too much water to think about.

  Near the place where she sat was a tower made of stone. It was the Murney Tower, built to protect the waterfront from American invasion, but Fianna had no way of knowing this. It was a jail, she thought, or maybe the place where people were hung, and she moved away from it, creeping inland, drawn away from the open sky and the water beneath it. There were buildings and houses set away from the water, and she had an impression of stone blocks and smoke blowing from rooftops, of iron gates and bare trees. She was tired and afraid to venture far, but she could see another building, larger than the others, in the distance. It too was made of stone, but it had windows set in neat rows of three all the way to the rooftop, where two great chimneys, square like the building itself, promised fireplaces and heat. She thought it might be another prison or maybe the house where a king lived. She did not venture closer, though, because she did not want to attract attention until she found Curran.

  What she did not know was that the building she was looking at was neither prison nor palace. It was the hospital, specifically the back of it, and scarcely more than a hundred yards away from it, on the empty wasteland hidden from view, a deep trench had been dug, hacked out of hard ground by men working with picks and shovels. With entire families wiped out by typhus, there was nobody left to claim a body or pay for a funeral, and as more than a thousand had died, their remains could not be burned or left to wait for better times. A mass grave was the only solution to so much death. Those who dug the trench may have felt pity for the dead, but it had to be done, and it had to be done quickly. And so, Curran Mallory was thrown into the trench, his face pressed against the back of another, his eyes shut against the life he might have longed for, his body sprinkled with lime in its final blessing.

  Many years later, when the hospital needed room for expansion, the mass grave was exhumed and the remains of the dead moved to a Catholic cemetery at the north end of the city, where they were reburied and blessed and marked with a monument. But not all the remains were found, and when a second excavation took place later, in preparation for a new wing that would house the morgue and the ambulance entrance, the earth produced another skull and a handful of human bones. All construction ceased until the police and the archaeologists could confirm that the remains belonged with the victims of the typhus epidemic of 1847. It seemed the earth had shifted with the first excavation, and the skull and bones had moved away from the others. There was no other explanation, because a bone cannot migrate without a soul to guide it. And when the new hospital wing opened, a plaque was put at the entrance to the morgue that marked the place where the mass grave had been and the bones of Stafford’s Mallory ancestor had lain.

  Fianna Mallory turned nine in the fever shed, and when her hair grew back it was darker in color, almost black like her father’s had been before the famine. She did not cry, because, like many children traumatized by horrific events, she was past tears. She was hungry and weak, but she was alive. There were many others like her in 1847, children who were orphaned and alone, but there were orphanages run by churches and there were local families who needed extra help in the kitchen or on the farm. With a little luck, a child who was quiet, hardworking, and utterly subservient could get by, and Fianna would be one of them.

  After three years in a Catholic orphanage, she was taken in by a young farmer from Tweed whose wife’s inability to keep house was a source of concern to the farmer’s mother. Fianna was twelve, and the nuns, who called her Anna, had taught her to be silent and willing. They had also taught her how to read. She was a girl groomed for convent life, but she had no desire to be a nun and was relieved when the farmer’s mother chose her over the other girls. She left the orphanage happily and went to work for the farmer’s bewildered wife, pleasing even the farmer’s mother with her enthusiasm for keeping a floor swept clean. She learned how to cook and how to plant a garden. She made good butter and bread, and when she had time, she read books that the young farmer borrowed for her from his neighbors.

  On July 1, 1867, two remarkable but not entirely unexpected events transpired. The Dominion of Canada was formed and a Kingston lawyer, committed to the cultural genocide of every Indigenous child in Canada, became the country’s first prime minister. And scarcely more than an afternoon’s drive away, thirty-year-old Fianna Mallory was making a commitment of her own. She had accepted a proposal of marriage from the young farmer, who was no longer young and no longer married to the woman who couldn’t keep her house clean. The farmer’s wife had died, and with the work of a farm and the younger children still in need of care and supervision, the farmer would need a new wife and she would need a new name. And since the farmer’s last name was Hopkins, Fianna Mallory, a girl called Fee by her brother and Anna by the nuns, became Annie Hopkins and soon she would have a son of her own.

  “Can we name him Curran?” she asked her husband when the baby was born.

  “Curran’s a different kind of name around here,” he said. “I don’t know any Currans.”

  “It was my brother’s name,” she answered. “I’d like to be saying that name again.”

  “Well, all right, then,” he said. “Curran it is.”

  “Curran Mallory,” she said.

  “Mallory?”

  “Curran Mallory Hopkins,” she said.

  “It’s different.”

  “Not to me,” she answered. “It’s not different to me.”

  “Well, I guess it’s all right to be different. Not too much, though,” the farmer said. “Call the boy what you like then, Annie.”

  Curran Mallory Hopkins would be the only child born to Fianna Mallory and the farmer from Tweed. He would grow into a nice-looking, blue-eyed boy with black hair like his Irish grandfather’s and he would have an easy temperament like his mother. He would be attractive to other people, and he would do well in the world, marrying a nice girl who produced a healthy son and a few daughters. The farm at Tweed would not go to Curran initially but to one of his older half brothers who would rightfully inherit it when the time came. But the older brother would get sick and need help running the farm at Tweed and it would be Curran who came when help was needed. And to no one’s surprise, when the older half brother died, the Tweed farm was left to Curran Hopkins, son of Fianna Mallory from Sligo, the only family survivor of a famine, a coffin ship, a quarantine station, and the Kingston typhus epidemic of 1847.

  The farm at Tweed, then, would become “the first farm,” as Stafford explained to his wife, impatiently and on several occasions, and it would remain a Hopkins farm for four generations until it slipped away from them and new farms were found.

  “You can let me out here, Stafford.”

  “Here?”

  “Just up ahead. Pull in there. Right here.”

  “I can’t park here, Uncle Christy.”

  “Well, back up a bit.”

  “It’s an ambulance zone.”

  “They’re all away. There’s none there.”

  “They come back.”

  “Now listen to what I’m going to say. I want to say something. You can’t change the past. What happened is what happened and that’s what it is.”

  “I appreciate your observations.”

  “Don’t—don’t get like that with me, Stafford.”

  Stafford knew it would be a mistake to sigh. His uncle was an old man and while Stafford accepted this, he did not wish to stumble now and issue a challenge. He often socialized with men his uncle’s age in New York, Los Angeles, and Aspen, and certainly on Maui, but they were sophisticated men, men of business and accomplishment who understood when to speak and when to be silent. He could not expect his uncle to behave like any of them, because his uncle had different models of behavior guiding him through his senior years. Christy Hopkins was a farmer with a grade-nine education and his role models were other retired farmers, some pushed off their farms by debt and poor health, others still living in the tidy prefabricated homes built far enough away from a main farmhouse to let the next generation raise a family in peace. Stafford knew that his uncle had turned the running of his farm over to his son and had agreed, perhaps foolishly, to move into a small walk-up apartment in Kingston so his ailing wife, Angela, could spend more time with her sisters. Stafford knew also that while his uncle claimed to be happy about letting someone else make the big decisions, it was more likely he missed the farm and regretted leaving it.

  But if Stafford knew that and other things besides, Christy Hopkins knew one thing. He knew that his nephew was a rich man and a big success in the world, and while he was not unimpressed by this or entirely free from intimidation, he was determined now, parked in an expensive rental car blocking the ambulance driveway of the hospital, that he would speak plainly or not at all.

  “Stafford, I pulled you out of that washtub when you weren’t more than three years old and Emmett and me were both there, both of us pounding on the back of you getting the water out, hoping you weren’t drowned in a washtub.”

  “Uncle Christy, please.”

  “Just listen to me. I pulled you out then, Stafford, and I pulled you out of the water a second time off Wolfe Island and we both know why I had to do that. But Bobby’s been dead a long time now, Stafford, a long time, and now his boy’s dead and Marilyn too, and those children, those poor little kids, Stafford, they’re Bobby’s grandchildren. And they don’t need any more confusion in their lives. Not now and not later neither.”

  “I’m not here to confuse anyone.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear. That’s something. But it’s not the whole business now, is it, Stafford?”

  “I can’t. There’s got to be somebody else. What about her side? What about Marilyn’s family?”

  “There’s only one left on Marilyn’s side that can take them and he’s no good, Stafford, and I mean no damn good.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Marilyn’s got a cousin up at Tamworth. When he’s not drunk, he fixes cars. He put a new air filter in Chris’s Dodge and charged three hundred dollars.”

  “For an air filter?”

  “Chris paid, but I wouldn’t have. Chris said he felt sorry for him.”

  “Well, Chris is a good guy.”

  “Well, Marilyn’s cousin isn’t. Marilyn was a good wife to Donny Shepherd and a good mother to those four kids, but she never had anything to do with that cousin of hers, and I know that and so does everyone else.”

  “Uncle Christy, I can’t take them.”

  “You have to, Stafford.”

  “I can’t! I just can’t.”

  “Then what the hell did you come all this way for? What the hell are you doing back here?”

  “I have a meeting with their attorney.”

  “Their attorney? Jesus Lord save the barn—I never thought I’d hear that from a Hopkins.”

  “I have to see their lawyer in the morning. I’m setting up a trust fund for each of them. They’ll be well provided for, and they won’t have to go to Tamworth. They can make other arrangements. They’ll have financial security and a good future.”

  “You sound like one of your TV shows, Stafford. You sound like an advertisement for insurance. Pushing a bunch of words at me that don’t mean a damn thing!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting out of this car.”

  “Uncle Christy, please,” Stafford said for the second time. “We have to be reasonable.”

  “No, Stafford, we don’t.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going in to see Angela. I’m going to sit next to her and say good night. She’ll squeeze my hand and cry and I’ll pat her down. And then I’m going to walk up Barrie to Johnson Street and let myself into the apartment and fix something to eat and then I’m going to watch the sports on the TV and fall asleep on the chesterfield on account of I don’t like getting into the bed without my wife.”

  “I’ll wait here. I’ll drive you.”

  “I like to walk at night. But I’ll need my gloves back, Stafford, if you’re all done with them.”

  Stafford believed that power over other people was maintained, in part, by withholding information. Not all information, of course, but certainly enough to unsettle an opponent by skewering his perceptions and undermining his confidence. Powerful men said little, which invariably forced weaker men into saying too much, as if driven to compensate, eager to maintain the conversation. This was an important prerequisite for success in the business world and essential in the world of public opinion, where it was more than a game but less than reality. It was most critical, however, in a man’s emotional world, where the stakes were higher, and Stafford knew this. But as he handed the gloves back to the old man who now stood outside the car waiting for them, Stafford knew he had been outmaneuvered.

  “Here,” he said. “Take them.”

  “Oh, Stafford,” his uncle replied, and he took the gloves and held them in one hand. “Stafford,” he said again, shaking his head slowly as if Stafford was a boy who had left a gate open or a chore not done.

  He held on to the car door and bent down, his big face filling the gap between Stafford and the cold air rushing in.

  “It’s no easy thing to be happy, is it,” he said.

  And then he walked away, leaving the car door wide open, forcing Stafford to unfasten his seat belt and lean across the full width of the car to pull it shut.

  Stafford turned the car off and waited for the next half hour, hoping his uncle would return, but soon the wail of an approaching ambulance forced him to start the car again and move out of the way. It was only a short drive from the hospital to his hotel, but he felt unable to face the people at the front desk who would greet him warmly and want his needs met. Instead, he drove in the opposite direction until he got to Days Road, which took him north to Bath Road and then to the Collins Bay Penitentiary, to the prison the locals called Disneyland, and there he pulled over and stopped. He was too tired to contemplate what foolishness had brought him this close to the past again and surprisingly incapable of resisting. He wished, though, that he had brought Agnes with him, because she would not tolerate any of this. She would dismiss the strange comments of an old man with a flip of her hand and the sound of his uncle’s voice would fade and disappear.

  “Stafford! Just tell me what happened. Where’s Bobby gone, Stafford? What have you done!”

  “We had a fight, Uncle Christy. We had an argument.”

  “You’re drunk, Stafford.”

  “We had a fight.”

  “Stafford!”

  “He’s gone back.”

  “Gone back? What do you mean gone back? Answer me, Stafford!”

  “He’s walking across.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “He’s walking across the ice, Uncle Christy!”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Bobby!”

  “You can’t get out there from here, Stafford! It’s soft at the edge!”

  “Let go of me!”

  “Stafford, don’t! It’s too soft with the current. We have to go around. We have to go past the point.”

  “Bobby!”

  “Jesus! Somebody grab a stick. Get me that piece of wood there, the big one—throw it flat. No! Don’t come out here. Get back from the edge! All of you keep away! Stafford! Stafford! Oh no. Jesus, no. He’s under! He’s gone under!”

  CHAPTER 14

  Friendship

  For without friends, no one would choose to live though he had all other goods, for what is the use of such prosperity without friends?

  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

  IN THE EARLY YEARS of their friendship, there were no divisions between Stafford Hopkins and Bobby Shepherd except for the broad field that separated one farmhouse from the other. In the middle of this field was an enormous rock pulled out of the ground by another farmer who decided it was too large to move and too troublesome to break into smaller pieces. This rock, left where it lay, would become the place that marked the distant edge of both boys’ worlds, neither of them permitted in their early years to travel past it.

  “You can go to the stone, my darling,” Bobby’s mother would say.

  “Stay near the big rock where we can see you,” Stafford’s mother would tell him.

  It became, then, the place where the two little boys were first allowed to meet, alone and unsupervised, and the walk across the field to the rock would become one of Stafford’s earliest memories.

  “Can I go now?” he would ask his mother, and when she said yes, he could go but she would be watching him, and if Bobby Shepherd wasn’t there, he was to come straight home, he would nod that he understood.