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My Uncle Jim was on the only commuter train to ever go off an open drawbridge into Newark Bay. This was in 1958, and the conductor, who also died, was either asleep or already dead from a heart attack when the train ran several stop signals and went into the bay on the way into New York’s Pennsylvania Station. Forty-eight people died, including my uncle. His body wasn’t found for a week, so there was at least a hope that he was knocked out or dazed or trapped somewhere, maybe washed up on an island. His wife, Allie, my father’s sister, died of cancer a day and a half after the train went off the bridge.

My father heard about the train wreck on the radio. It wasn’t the usual train Jim took, but when Kurt called his office and Jim wasn’t in, Kurt figured it was possible that Jim had been on the train that had gone into the bay. Jane drove him to the airport, and he headed down to New Jersey.

When my cousins got home from school, my father was there. They had no idea about the train accident. It still wasn’t known for sure that their father was on that train. Their mother died the next day not knowing whether or not her husband was dead. My Uncle Jim could go up and down stairs walking on his hands. No one could believe he couldn’t get out of a sinking train.

The four boys were suddenly orphans. Only the oldest, fourteen-year-old Jim, had known his mother was seriously ill. Steve was eleven. Tiger (Kurt) was eight years old, and Boo (Peter) was only eighteen months. My father packed them up with their two dogs and a pet rabbit, Phee Phee, who bit, and they all came to live with us in Barnstable.

My mother and father, at the ripe old age of thirty-five, struggling financially (ten years prior to Slaughterhouse-Five), took on four more children, two dogs, and a rabbit. Whatever else good or bad my parents did or didn’t do with the rest of their lives, that was absolutely the right thing to do.

There was no way to ask for a replay or argue or complain about Allie and Jim dying. You just had to keep going and do the best you could.

Taking in the orphans turned my parents into instant heroes. Kurt and Jane were looked on with awe and admiration, and everyone wanted to do something to help. It was all over the papers. We fixed up the house some, and my mother became “Aunt Jane” to me and everyone else.

There was no even cursory social-service-type investigation into whether or not this was a family that could or should take care of four orphaned children.

The youngest cousin orphan, Boo, was still in diapers, and he cried and banged his head all the time. He could bounce the crib from one side of the room to the other with ten or twelve head butts. My youngest sister was only a year older than he was and tried to kill him. Jim, the oldest, had had adjustment and socialization issues before his parents died. Shortly after arriving in Barnstable he packed a neighbor’s front door with black powder and lit a fuse to see what would happen. The door blew up.

Our house was huge but had a tiny kitchen and one and a half marginal bathrooms. The Adams relatives, my Uncle Jim’s family, had money but no space for the orphans, so they gave us a new kitchen and laundry room and an upstairs bathroom, but what my mother really needed was help with cleaning and laundry and cooking.

Somehow my mother found Ruby. Ruby was a wonderful baker, especially of pecan sticky buns. They really were very very good, but there was a lot else that needed doing and my mother had a hard time telling people what she needed from them if it wasn’t something they were already inclined to do. I have inherited this from her, along with her gift for visions and voices. So the helping out Ruby could do with the cleaning, cooking, and laundry for the two adults and seven children in a friendly but crumbly two-hundred-plus-year-old house was fit in around the baking of the sticky buns.

My mother asked Ruby if she could make the sticky buns once