After eleven ominous days of nippy Oregon rain, the sun loomed through the rain-cleansed forests and meadows with an unseasonable vengeance. This unexpected sunlight (for it was only early spring) seeped through the wooden slats of a rough-hewn lodge and reflected off the white teeth of Jacob Breton, a smiling baby boy, just born, dark-skinned, and with incongruently gray-blue eyes'the first baby born to an American in the Siskiyou Mountains of the Oregon Territory.

Off of these new teeth the sunlight's brilliance bounced around the room as if from a thousand prisms, tiny rainbows sparkling in every corner of the room, luring all the Katelmac people from the clan of this tribe, to come witness this amazing baby who apparently brought the sun and the glistening of the dancing rainbows. So the Katelmac people came, for they wanted to see this baby who had revived the sun's return to this beautiful world after eleven days of straight rain. They wanted to see this baby who had choreographed the dancing rainbows in the lodge of his birth. They wanted to see his blue eyes, a rarity among the Katelmac people. They wanted to see his huge white teeth, and how white was he, anyway? It seems this half-Native American, half-American baby boy was born with a full set of adult teeth and a large jaw that forced his facial skin to smile involuntarily.

The people talked, saying all things at the same time.

'He's not so white, but his eyes are blue, blue like the sky on a hazy day, like a blue jay with dusty wings.'

'He looks like us, but he has blue eyes. And his teeth are big.'

'His grandfather he was born with big teeth.'

'His grandfather's father was born with teeth, too, with teeth born too big for his face.'

'And his father's father. And who knows how far back it goes?'

'Look at the dancing rainbows dancing.'

'They're reflecting off his big teeth.'

'The sun came out, so this could happen.'

'It looks like he is smiling at the rainbows and the sun.'

'It's been raining so long raining.'

'Now the rain stops, the sun comes out, and a smiling boy with blue eyes is born with rain stopping and sun shining.'

'This must mean something. Something is going to happen. This is important.'

Just then, on this unusual day of sunlight, at the time of this strange birth, his Katelmac mother rose from where she had given birth and began to speak and there was silence among the people. At his birth she seemed already to know what nobody could know, to know what would happen before it had happened, as the baby grew into a boy, then a boy soon to be a man. As she stood, a strong woman, she warned her American husband and warned the tribe of her Katelmac people, 'A boy who smiles this much, while so young, will smile himself out by the time he grows into his smile.' After speaking thus, she lay back down to recover from giving birth.

And as it would turn out to be, her prophecy would come true. At eleven years of age, when Jacob had actually grown mature enough to become physically capable of not smiling, not only did he stop smiling all the time, but he also actually never smiled again. On his eleventh birthday something would happen then that would make him lose his smile forever. He would be at an age where he could have chosen to smile or not smile, as the case may be, but he did not smile ever, anymore, forever from this day forth, this day of tragedy and violence yet to come. Until then, until he was eleven, he had always smiled constantly. He could not help but smile, because his teeth were too big for his face. His teeth forced him to smile, even in a situation that would not have called for smiling. Even when he cried, as children do, he looked as though he were smiling, which could give others the strangest impression that he was laughing and laughing at weird, even inappropriate times

Then in one day, on the very day of his eleventh birthday, he would lose his smile, forever fulfilling his mother's prophecy, but as it would turn out to be, it wasn't so much that he would exhaust himself of his smile from its overuse as his mother had implied in her prediction, so much as it would be a response to an horrific event, which would change him, as I think it would change anyone, for the rest of his life. And it was indeed this one experience, alone, so traumatic, so shocking that it wiped his face clean of his smile from that day forward. It is true that even after being dispossessed of his smile, Jacob Breton would strangely retain his nickname Smilin' Jake throughout his life, even though after the age of eleven, he was never seen by anyone to ever grace his face with even a shimmer of a smile again.

However, until those miserable, unsmiling years began, Jacob Breton lived his early years with a permanent grin, which although forced by the inherited physical deformity of being born with a full set of adult teeth, did seem to reflect the utter happiness of his earliest years.

According to the memoir Jacob Breton wrote while incarcerated in the Oregon State Penitentiary, the true beginning of his life was not the day he was born, it was the day he turned eleven. He wrote, 'If you take the two ones from the number eleven and subtract them from one anther, you will end up with zero, which is when my life truly began.'

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