Aurora

In William H. Gass’ Novel Omensetter’s Luck, Brackett Omensetter is a ‘wide and happy man’. When he drives his family to Gilean, his cart is loaded with: ‘...flaming tufted comforts and tattercrossed quilts, plumb bags of clothing and sacks of shoes and sewing and a linen tablecloth with stains that were always hidden by the plates; two ladderbacks, a stool and a Boston rocker, a bench of quite hard and eloquent oak, and a drop leaf table whose top was carved into faces and initials by no one they ever knew; jars, a framed view of the Monongahela River, rubber boots; and in boxes: wooden spoons and pans and stove lids and pot-handle holders and pots, tin silverware and nickel-plated medallions and a toothpick, somewhere, thinly tinted gold with a delicate chain, a mezzotint of St. Francis feeding squirrels, some tools for shaping leather, two pewter goblets and thirteen jelly glasses, seven books...; a collection of tobacco tins of toy rings and rice-bead necklaces, amber-colored stones and tiny china figurines and stamped-out metal dogs and cats and horses and two lead hussars in tall hats and bent guns whose red paint had all but worn away; ten- and twenty-penny nails, dolls made from sewn chains of stuffed cloth, small dishes and large crocks, a paper cockade, four flat spiders dead a long time and saved under a stone in the hearth; a saw, a hammer, square, a sledge, other things that were called dolls but were more like pressed grass or pinecones or strangely shaped sticks or queer rocks; any kind of shell whatever– turtle’s, robin’s, snail’s; and not in boxes: a tight bucket and an unassembled plow, a spade, a shovel and an ax, a churn, a wooden tub and washboard, and a great white ironstone basin and a great white ironstone pitcher and a great white enamel pot with a chipped lid that was terribly cold in the morning; a shotgun and some harness and a spinning wheel, a compass in a leather case that always pointed to the west of south, and arrows for the unborn boy to shoot at falling leaves and sparrows in the fall.’ It all arrives in Ohio without incident.