06 February 2009 CROWS & CARDS by Joseph Helgerson, Houghton Mifflin, April 2009, 344p., ISBN: 978-0-618-88395-0

"It's the same story the crow told me, it's the only one he know." -- Hunter/Garcia

"'You've got a great-uncle, name of Seth, who's down in St. Louis. He used to be a trapper on the Missouri but has turned to tanning in his dotage. Fact is, I hear tell he's the best tanner there is west of the Mississippi. When it comes to treating furs, he knows himself some secrets. Picked 'em up from the Indians, I shouldn't be surprised. We're going to put you on a steamer with a letter of introduction and see if he'll take you on.'

"Hearing that left me feeling buried alive, with Pa's every word landing like another shovelful of dirt atop me. When it comes right down to it, twelve-year-olds don't have much bargaining power, not with the likes of my pa. So it looked as if I was doomed to learn a trade that didn't have any future at all. What with beaver hats going out of fashion, the fur business was keeling over as we spoke. Beavers themselves were getting trapped out, as was pretty much every other living thing with the misfortune to wear fur and have four legs."

How many of you are first-born sons? If you've found yourself in that position, like Zebulon Crabtree (the oldest of seven kids) and me (the oldest of three), then you know well what it is like to navigate the world without the instruction manual that most younger siblings have ready access to -- thanks to having watched the first-born repeatedly fall on his face. So, if you find yourself overly appalled or skeptical about how easily twelve year-old Zeb falls for the silken spiel of riverboat gambler Charles Ambrosius "Chilly" Larpenteur, and hands over the entire $70 apprenticing fee his pa has had to scrape up for grand-Uncle Seth, then I bet you haven't spent much time stumbling through the world, searching for direction as an oldest son.

And the boy falls hard. By time wide-eyed Zeb steps off that river steamer into 1849 St. Louis, he has lost the money and become Chilly's apprentice, has pledged a blood oath to the Brotherhood of the Gamblers, and finds himself heading for a new home on the outskirts of St. Louis -- an inn, housing a gambling parlor. (Chilly is secretly half-owner of the establishment.) There, Zeb is installed as the keystone to Chilly's scheme for methodically cheating a never-ending stream of men who pass through that gambling parlor.

CROWS AND CARDS is an exceptional coming-of-age story in which Zeb must untangle himself from the web of Chilly's lies about the righteousness of the cheating (Chilly calls it "shortening.") and seek out understanding of what is necessary to become a man of character.

Having been thrown to the world by his father, the boy has the good fortune to be nurtured, instead, by two wise men:

The first is Ho-John, the inn's resident slave who steadfastly burns every one of the meals that he is required to prepare. His feet are permanently chained together, having three times been "caught clinging to a log while trying to swim to Illinois, which didn't tolerate slavery."

"'Do people really think of this place as a gambler's den?'

"'Mostly. And if you're bound and determined to become some kind of gambler yourself,' Ho-John added, 'just don't go thinking you're somebody important. That's all I'm asking.'

"I didn't know how to handle such a request as that, so I didn't say much of anything to it. It was the kind of undermining talk that nags at a person though. After a bit, I said kind of sassy-like, 'So what exactly is it would make a person important?'

"'That's a question every man's got to answer for himself,' Ho-John said, ignoring my tone, 'but owning my own tools would do 'er for me.

' "There wasn't much I could say to that, coming as it did from a slave, who had never owned anything his whole life and didn't have no hopes of ever owning anything either, not unless he ran away again."

The second nurturing male character is the blind Indian seer who is in possession of the golden treasure that Chilly covets as being the key to true happiness. Zeb's first encounter with "the chief" takes place as the river steamer docks in St. Louis:

"Up to then the chief had been staring straight ahead, but now he turned toward the Rose Melinda and gazed at me. You could tell in a flash he was blind, as both his eyes were snowier than a blizzard, not that it mattered. I sure enough felt as though he was seeing parts of me never before seen under the sun, parts I didn't even know I had."

Having, myself, made that lonely journey as a firstborn son who can still well remember how clueless and vulnerable, how lacking of the instruction manual I felt as a twelve year old, I was continually and thoroughly immersed in Zeb's path to discovery. Author Joseph Helgerson, himself, came of age living close to the Mississippi and reading Twain. Helgerson has given us a notable and engaging piece of historical fiction that poses some of the biggest questions with which a young person must come to terms.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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