Chapter 1

Battle Creek, Michigan

Winter 1891

I was raised in religion, but it was not God who loomed largest over my girlhood and its earliest memories. That was Charles William Post, Charlie, or simply C.W. to those who knew him best. To me, he was only ever Papa.

He cut no particularly imposing figure, what with his narrow frame, standing at just over six feet tall, and his fine, blue-­eyed smile. But the man molded my world, and then he went on and changed everybody else’s as well.

You might say the same about my education, too, for although I went to school for all of my girlhood, it was on Papa’s lap that I did the learning that would shape me. How Papa could spin a story, building worlds in my young mind until I came to believe that just about anything was possible. Because to Papa, anything was. There were the tales of the tall Springfield lawyer whom Papa admired, a family friend by the name of Mr. Abe Lincoln, who taught himself to read as a boy in a drafty log hut with nothing more than a tattered Bible and yet somehow found himself in charge of the White House. Of course Papa—­and then I—­knew all the presidents, but I loved the stories about Mr. Lincoln the best; Papa had made this singular man a friend while they lived in Springfield, after they’d both sprung up from nothing but their own grit and the fertile frontier soil.

Oh, but there were other good stories, too. Papa’s words had me forging across the Great Divide on the back of a mule, just as he’d done as a young man with his brother, my Uncle Cal, the pair of them sifting for gold amid the red mud and the pines. He had me battling Chicago’s Great Fire or else waiting out a night of dust storms in Oklahoma, shivering beneath a heap of scratchy wagon canvas as the coyote yips mixed with the wind skittering against a flimsy tin roof. He talked of pianos that didn’t need human fingers to play and buggies that didn’t need horses to pull them.

It always seemed to me that by the time I arrived in the world, Papa had tried his hand at pretty much everything: he’d been an inventor in California, a salesman in Illinois, a farmer in Nebraska, a rancher in the wild Oklahoma Territory. Success had come in fickle fits and bursts, with plenty of failure mixed in, but he’d managed to wed the sweetheart of his youth in the midst of it all. My mother, Ella Letitia Merriweather, a pale beauty with gray eyes and a reserved demeanor, came from a far more affluent family but the same Springfield roots.

The borders of my young mind and memory can barely contain Papa: fine-­featured, with an easy charm and smarts to best anyone else in the room, a sharp humor and a kind voice—­but then sick. Suddenly and frightfully sick.

It was this sickness that fueled our journey that winter, a journey that would end in a way that none of us, not even Papa, the incorrigible dreamer, could have possibly conceived.

Battle Creek welcomed us with a wall of cold air, the sort of air that stuns, needling your cheeks and causing the breath to stick in your nostrils on the way in. Beside me, Papa leaned on Mother to limp off the Michigan Central line train car and onto the frigid platform. After weeks of travel, we had arrived, and for that I was grateful, but I feared that our stop might be Papa’s final destination.

“Your father is near the end of mortals,” Mother had whispered to me on our long journey up from Texas, both her words and the skin around her lips pulling tight with worry. Our train car had rocked back and forth in a...