“What about your father?” I ask. She shakes her head. “I woke up,” she says, “well, I didn’t really sleep that first night Mom was gone. When I looked out my bedroom [window] in the morning, though, my dad was doing target archery in the yard with my mom’s pillows. She had these like, oversized pillows that Dad hated.” I ask her what color they were. “Mauve?” she said. I imagine the pillows sitting on lawn chairs, clefting in the middle like a slumping heart, her father a deranged Cupid.

That fall, her father began studying the Vocabula Mahakuassica. He liked the idea that if he could just commit 89 words to memory, he could claim mastery of an entire language. Those days, when she came home from school, Jericho would rush her as she removed her shoes, and her father would say, “Testa sis chijerw” (the dog does not bite). If she came home from the skate hop at 1 a.m. instead of midnight, her father would unlock the door with a “Serwquacksi” (you are bad). He made copies of the Vocabula Mahakuassica for her, for the widower next door, for the Lindy farm boys, for Lindy himself, but nobody would match his zeal. Some days, the only words her father spoke to her were in Susquehannock. When he asked her something in Susquehannock, an exaggerated rising inflection lingering between them, she replied with the only phrase she cared to learn: “Taesta zwroncka” (I don’t understand).

On the days Lindy rototilled his land — six teeth per gang stirring and pulverizing the soil—she’d accompany her father to the fields to look for arrowheads. The tillage unburied chips of flint, bodkin points shaped like rose petals, pink or orange or gray. Sometimes they were lucky and found kill sites where Indians scraped meat from hides, and the ground was littered with a half-dozen arrowheads or more. Lindy didn’t mind them looting arrowheads so long as Jericho didn’t harass his chickens.

“I bet you Lindy’s granddad knew the language,” her father would say. “They’re Swedes just like John was.” He spoke of John