PROLOGUE
Kansas, July 1869
It was hot the day of the accident. Beneath the blistering sun, the boys finished their work early and ran down to the creek to jump in the water and have some fun.
Trouble was, being boys, they brought a hatchet.
There is something uniquely brutal about a hatchet. It lacks the grace of a knife and the utility of a full-sized ax. It’s short and stubby and very effective in its limited way, which is the way of destruction.
A hatchet is made only to chop. You can flip it around and smash things with the butt of the head, but then you’re not really using the hatchet. You’re using a makeshift hammer, which is a brutal machine in its own right, though clearly not so destructive as a hatchet.
The spirit of these notions rushed through Conn Sullivan’s head as he tossed the hatchet onto the rocky shore of the creek, but he didn’t hold onto these thoughts, let alone ponder them, until later, when it was too late for pondering, and he faced a tough decision with a different sort of tool.
At the moment, he and his brother forgot all about the hatchet and jumped into the swimming hole, which this year was up against a bend in the creek, where spring floods had washed out the bank beneath a big sycamore, hollowing out a cave under the towering tree and exposing its roots like so many tangled secrets of the world.
The boys dove in and whipped playfully through the water like otters.
They were good swimmers. They were tall for their age—eight and a half, almost to the day—and lean and packed with wiry muscle that made them good workers, fast runners, and the best scrappers of any boys for miles around.
They were handsome boys with straw-colored hair, bright blue eyes, and winning smiles. They laughed easily and never walked when they could run.
Finally, they were twins, the oldest children of Reverend Paddy Sullivan and his wife, Mrs. Anne Sullivan, from whom they had inherited their fair hair, blue eyes, and bright smiles, and who had also brought into this world three other children by this point, all girls, curious creatures that wore dresses and clung to their mother and peered from windows, more like kittens than kids, the brothers thought.
After swimming, the boys got busy seeing what they would catch. They would dig their fingers under a big rock, preferably a nice flat one that wasn’t sunk too deep in the creek bed, lift one edge, and tilt it back.
One of them would hold the stone, and the other would plunge a hand into the roiled-up cloud of muck underneath, grabbing blindly where the rock met the stream bed.
They caught all kinds of stuff this way. Mostly minnows and crawdads.
Crawdads often latched onto a finger or, if the boys were really unlucky, the thin webbing between their fingers. Whenthis happened, the victim would howl with agony, but it was mostly for show and fun. Sure, it hurt. But the Sullivan boys were tough as nails.
The previous summer, they’d dammed up the creek, dug a trench, and cleared out a shallow circular area they called the prison. Everything they caught went into the prison, even in the spring, when they waded the flat rock, one of them waiting with a homemade net while the other pushed suckers toward him like he was driving deer to a hunter. They caught some big old suckers, some of them as long as their arms and as thick as their legs. All of them, large and small, went into the prison.
But then, overnight, they would disappear.
Vanishing frogs didn’t surprise them, of course. Frogs were free to hop away.
They figured crawdads were crawling over the rocks back to the main creek and thought maybe they were led by some innate knowledge given to them by God, the way Pa described the migration of birds and butterflies.
Pa saw God’s hand in everything.
So did Cole.
“We are wonderfully and fearfully made,” Pa would say and hold out his hand, examining it as if it was the first time he’d ever seen it. “God made us in His own image, boys, so it’s up to us to make the most of our gifts and seek a right relationship with our holy creator.”
And Cole would nod, taking it all to heart.
For his part, Conn didn’t doubt his father. Not really. He just didn’t get excited over the Bible like his brother did. They were both good boys with a wild streak. Cole was just a little better, and Conn was just a little wilder.
Cole looked on the bright side of things. Conn tried to look at things exactly as they were.
To Cole, the canteen was half full. To Conn, it wasn’t half full or half empty; it was exactly twice as large as it needed to be.
Despite these differences—and perhaps, Conn thought at times, because of them—they remained thick as thieves, not just brothers, not just twin brothers, but also best friends to the end.
Eventually, when they brought up the case of the disappearing prisoners to their father, he had a good laugh. “You boys have been feeding the raccoons.”
And sure enough, the next day, when they hurried down to the creek and found the prison once again empty of its inmates, they crouched down and discovered the tracks of the raccoons that had been raiding their holding tank night after night.
