Auguste took Pierre's hand, so big and yet so weak, in his own strong, brown one.
"Father, you must believe that you will live."
Auguste heard the others move closer to the bed. Nicole went to stand at the foot. Elysée seated himself in an old spindly-legged armchair brought over from France, his cane across his knees.
Pierre pointed a skeletal finger above his head to a shelf mounted on the white-painted plaster wall, where an Indian pipe lay, its bowl carved of red pipestone, its stem polished hickory.
"Take down the calumet," Pierre said. "Let me hold it."
Auguste took the pipe reverently, with a hand at each end of its three-foot length. Two black feathers with white tips fluttered from the bowl as he put the pipe into Pierre's hands. From the moment he touched the pipe, Auguste's hands were shaking as much as Pierre's. Only he and Pierre understood how much power was in this pipe—power to bind men for life to whatever they promised when they smoked the sacred tobacco.
Pierre let the pipe lie on his chest, his fingers touching it lightly.
"This pipe was given me a few years after you were born, Auguste, by Jumping Fish, who even then was one of the civil chiefs of the Sauk and Fox. It is the sign of an agreement between our family and the Sauk and Fox, fully understood and freely entered into by both sides."
Auguste looked in wonderment from Pierre to Elysée, and Grandpapa nodded solemnly.
Elysée said, "We had spent years exploring the more unsettled parts of the Illinois Territory, and we had decided that here was the land we wanted as our family seat in the New World. In 1809 we bought this land for a dollar an acre at the Federal land office in Kaskaskia. Thirty thousand dollars. The Federal government claimed that the Sauk and Fox had signed a treaty a few years earlier with Governor William Henry Harrison, selling fifty-one million acres, including all of northern Illinois, to the United States for a little over two thousand dollars, a shockingly paltry sum."