once.'
Again, Maria crossed herself 'Six hundred ninety-five people were killed in three states. Winds so powerful that some of the bodies were thrown a mile and a half from where they were snatched off the ground.'
Apparently Maria wished that she'd brought a rosary to dinner. With the fingers of her right hand, she pinched the knuckles of her left, one after the other, as if they were beads.
'Well,' Agnes said, 'thank the Lord, we don't have tornadoes here in California.'
'We have dams, though,' said Jacob, gesturing with his fork. 'The Johnstown Flood, 1889. Pennsylvania, sure, but it could happen here. And that was a one, let me tell you. The South Fork Dam broke. Wall of water seventy feet high totally destroyed the city. Your tornado killed almost seven hundred, but my dam killed two thousand two hundred and nine. Ninety-nine entire families were swept from the earth. Ninety-eight children lost both parents.'
Maria stopped praying with her knuckle rosary and resorted to a long swallow of wine.
'Three hundred and ninety-six of the dead were children under the age of ten,' Jacob continued. 'A passenger train was tumbled off the tracks, killing twenty. Another train with tank cars got smashed around, and oil spilled across the flood waters, ignited, and all these people clinging to floating debris were surrounded by flames, no way to escape. Their choice was being burned alive or drowning.'
'Dessert?' Agnes asked.
Over generous slices of Black Forest cake and coffee, Jacob at first held forth on the explosion of a French freighter, carrying a cargo of ammonium nitrate, at a pier in Texas City, Texas, back in 1947. Five hundred and seventy-six had perished.
Mustering all her hostess skills, Agnes gradually turned the conversation from disastrous explosions to Fourth of July fireworks, and then to reminiscences of summer evenings when she, Joey, Edom, and Jacob had played cards-pinochle, canasta, bridge-at a table in the backyard.
Jacob and Edom, paired, were formidable competitors in any card game, because their memory for numbers had been sharpened by years of data gathering as the statisticians of catastrophe.
When the subject shifted to card tricks and fortune-telling, Maria admitted to practicing divination with standard playing cards.
Edom, eager to learn precisely when a tidal wave or falling asteroid would bring his doom, fetched a pack of cards from a cabinet in the parlor. When Maria explained that only every third card was read and that a full look at the future required four decks, Edom returned to the parlor to scare up three more.
'Bring four,' Jacob called after him, 'all new decks!'
They wore out a lot of cards and kept a generous supply of all types of decks on hand.
To Agnes, Jacob said, 'Likely to be a sunnier fortune if the cards are bright and fresh, don't you think?'
Perhaps hoping to discover which runaway freight train or exploding factory would smear him across the landscape, Jacob pushed aside his dessert plate and shuffled each deck separately, then shuffled them together until they were well mixed. He stacked them in front of Maria.
No one seemed to realize that predicting the future might not be a suitable entertainment in this house, at this time, considering that Agnes had so recently and horribly been blindsided by fate.
Hope was the handmaid to Agnes's faith. She always held fast to the belief that the future would be bright, but right now she was hesitant to test that optimism even with a harmless card reading. Yet, as with the fifth place setting, she was reluctant to object.
While Jacob had shuffled, Agnes had taken little Barty from his bassinet into her arms. She was surprised and discomfited to discover that the baby was to have his fortune told first.
Maria turned sideways in her chair and dealt from the top of the four-deck stack, onto the table in front of Barty.
The first was an ace of hearts. This, Maria said, was a very good card, indeed. It meant that Barty would be lucky in love.
Maria set aside two cards before turning another faceup. This was also an ace of hearts.
'Hey, he's going to be a regular Romeo,' said Edom.
Barty cooed and blew a spit bubble.
'This card to mean also is family love, and is love from many friends, not just to be kissy-kissy love,' Maria elucidated.
The third card that she placed in front of Barty was also an ace of hearts.
'What are the odds of that?' Jacob wondered.
Although the ace of hearts had only positive meanings, and although, according to Maria, multiple appearances, especially in sequence, meant increasingly positive things, a series of chills nevertheless riffled through Agnes's spine, as if her vertebrae were fingers shuffling.
The next draw produced four of a kind.
Whereas the lone heart at the center of the rectangular white field inspired amazement and delight in her brothers and in Maria, Agnes reacted to it with dread. She strove to mask her true feelings with a smile as thin as the edge of a playing card.
In her fractured English, Maria explained that this miraculous fourth ace of hearts meant that Barty would not only meet the right woman and have a lifelong romance worthy of epic poetry, would not only be showered all his life by the love of family, would not only be cherished by a large number of friends, but would also be loved by un countable people who would never meet him.
'How could he be loved by people who never meet him?' asked Jacob, scowling.
Beaming, Maria said, 'This is to mean Barty will to be some day muy famous.'
Agnes wanted her boy to be happy. She didn't care about fame.
Instinct told her the two, fame and happiness, seldom coexisted.
She had been gently dandling Barty. Now she held him still and kept him close to her breast.
The fifth card was another ace, and Agnes gasped, because for an instant she thought it was also another heart, an impossible fifth in a stack of four decks. Instead: an ace of diamonds.
Maria explained that this, too, was a most desirable card, that it meant Barty would never be poor. To have it follow four aces of hearts was especially significant.
The sixth card was another ace of diamonds.
They all stared at it in silence.
Six aces in a row, thus far consecutive as to suit. Agnes had no way of calculating the odds against this draw, but she knew that they were spectacularly high.
'Is to mean he is to be better than not poor, but even rich.'
The seventh card was a third ace of diamonds.
Without comment, Maria set aside two cards and dealt the eighth.
This, too, was an ace of diamonds.
Maria crossed herself again, but in a different spirit from when she'd crossed herself during Edom's rant about the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. Then, she'd been warding off bad fortune; now, with a smile and a look of wonder, she was acknowledging the grace of God, which, according to the cards, had been settled generously on Bartholomew.
Barty, she explained, would be rich in many ways. Financially rich, but also rich in talent, in spirit, intellect. Rich in courage, honor. With a wealth of common sense, good judgment, and luck.
Any mother ought to have been pleased to hear such a glowing future foretold for her child. Yet each glorious prediction dropped the temperature in Agnes's heart by another few degrees.
The ninth card was a jack of spades. Maria called it a knave of and at the sight of it, her bright smile dimmed.
Knaves symbolized enemies, she explained, both those who were merely duplicitous and those who were downright evil. The knave of hearts represented either a rival in love or a lover who would betray an enemy who would deeply wound the heart. The knave of diamonds was someone who would cause financial grief. The knave of clubs was someone who would wound with words: one who libeled or slandered, or who assaulted you with mean- spirited and unjust criticism.
The knave of spades, now revealed, was the most sinister jack in the deck. This was an enemy who would resort to violence.
