She was seated at the old and weary wooden desk in her used bookstore, making shelf markers for various book genres and thinking of the heirloom roses she had abandoned back in Chicago. With her Bic pen she deepened a fading star design in the desktop while she dreamed of the big overgrown Persian lilac bush that would be coming into bloom with tiny blue wrapped points of buds about to unfurl. Amanda thought of all those dozens of tulip bulbs in reds and yellows and oranges that she had ordered direct from The Hague last year. They would be nearly ready to cut for someone else’s dining table. She was thinking that maybe she had made a mistake in leaving Chicago so abruptly.
Daydreaming about the art institute’s second floor and Van Gogh’s startling gaze, she began to draw little circles in the soft pine wood of the desktop. And then something outside the bookshop attracted her attention.
The tap-tap-tapping was tentative, not consistent or even rhythmic, offering no predictions: tiny little noises breaking into her concentration like the sounds of a pecking sparrow cleaning an area of the cement sidewalk of seeds and sparse weedlings. She was soon compelled to leave her desk chair and stand on the pile of outdated maroon encyclopedias to gaze out the high window and search for whatever was the object of her curiosity.
Amanda had moved to this village only a week earlier and was still in that limbo of not knowing anyone and wondering how, as a recent big-city metropolitan dweller, she might be received in a small village.
She always thought her name was Amanda Willis Stimpson. She grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and all these years her name had suited her just fine. She thought her father had died in World War II. Now at the age of fifty she found that she was never Amanda Stimpson. Her legal name was MacIntosh-Moon Morgan. Many times she thought to herself, What kind of a name is MacIntosh-Moon, anyway?
Her father did die in that war, but was never married to her mother. His name and her name on the original birth certificate—kept secret by a law to protect the sensibilities and reputations of any little bastards born out of wedlock—is Morgan. And so that made her a member of the infamous Morgan clan that settled the village of Morgan’s Bridge, Michigan, fifty miles east of the sandy Lake Michigan shoreline.

***

1848

Why did they stop fifty miles short, anyway? Why didn’t the Morgan brothers keep going west at least until they reached the shores of Lake Michigan, where the water glistened in the evening sun and the shifting sand dunes never stopped moving, even in the dark of night?
Well, Harold L. Morgan’s legs were bone tired and his spirit had long gone weary—and his younger brother, John Franklyn Morgan, was smitten with the dark depths of Mad Mary’s eyes. And they didn’t feel the verve it took to cross the freezing, dreary Rumble River. They simply dug a clearing in the snow for their deer hide hut, and trudged a path, stomping the snow hard beneath their rabbit pelt boots, down to the ice-crusted edge of the river. And that first night, under an inky, starry sky that captured every steamy cloud of breath, they built a good hot fire outside the open flap door of the small, mounded hut and waited for their lives to change.
“Iken hear ut.” Harold Morgan spent as few words as possible, believing he had only so many and he wanted them to last until his last sour suck of life’s breath. He sat awkwardly crossing his thick legs at the side of the hut’s door flap. He pulled in a mouthful of whisky from his tin flask until it billowed out his cheeks like a mating bullfrog and until the liquid could ease down his throat and heat up his belly. He tried to swallow down the belch that followed the gulp.
Franklyn unfolded his long wiry legs, easily got up from his heels, and brushed the dry snow from his butt. He walked around to the fading side of the fire where he dropped to his knees. In his quiet, graceful manner he bent down onto his hands, tipped his head sideways, and blew the sparks into flames, which wrapped themselves around the snapped twigs and melted the snow still clinging to the logs.
“What? What can you hear?” He was irritated that his brother, as usual, had drained the last of the warmth from their old battered flask.
“Listen.” Harold’s big tobacco-stained fingers squashed the few remaining dried leaves down into the bowl of his walnut pipe. Clumsy in his short, stocky body, he grunted against his braided leather belt as he bent forward to pull a smoldering twig from the edge of the fire. He lit his smoke as he looked across the glow of flames at the smudged and greasy face of his younger brother, his only kin left in the world.
For twenty-odd years he had been the father to his brother, when as young teenagers they were suddenly left at the gate of a burned-out homestead and a burned-out family. Now they only had each other, and he loved his younger brother like a good father would. He didn’t suffer the vexations of the other—although they were far into adulthood, he believed them still to be the test of independence.
“Ikin hear the village forming around us just as if they’s chillun come’n outta the woods to their maw.”
Harold didn’t know how right he was, for at that very moment Franklyn’s first and only female contribution to the village was already gestating in Mad Mary’s quickening womb.