brother and I turned away from each other, my father once told us a story about our grandfather and a dog. We were living in Tacoma then, in one of the battered, sagging, rented houses that stretch back in my memory and mark the outlines of a childhood spent unknowingly on the bare upper edge of poverty. Jack and I knew that we weren’t rich, but it didn’t really bother us all that much. Dad worked in a lumber mill and just couldn’t seem to get ahead of the bills. And, of course, Mom being the way she was didn’t help much either.
It had been a raw, blustery Saturday, and Jack and I had spent the day outside. Mom was off someplace as usual, and Dad was supposed to be watching us. About all he’d done had been to feed us and tell us to stay the hell out of trouble or he’d bite off our ears. He always said stuff like that, but we were pretty sure he didn’t really mean it.
The yard around our house was cluttered with a lot of old junk abandoned by previous tenants—rusty car bodies and discarded appliances and the like—but it was a good place to play. Jack and I were involved in one of the unending, structureless games of his invention that filled the days of our boyhood. My brother—even then thin, dark, quick, and nervous—was a natural ringleader who settled for directing my activities when he couldn’t round up a gang of neighborhood kids. I went along with him most of the time—to some extent because he was older, but even more, I suppose, because even then I really didn’t much give a damn, and I knew that he did.
After supper it was too dark to go back outside, and the radio was on the blink, so we started tearing around the house. We got to playing tag in the living room, ducking back and forth around the big old wood-burning heating stove, giggling and yelling, our feet clattering on the worn linoleum. The Old Man was trying to read the paper, squinting through the dime-store glasses that didn’t seem to help much and made him look like a total stranger—to me at least.
He’d glance up at us from time to time, scowling in irritation. “Keep it down, you two,” he finally said. We looked quickly at him to see if he really meant it. Then we went on back out to the kitchen.
“Hey, Dan, I betcha I can hold my breath longer’n you can,” Jack challenged me. So we tried that a while, but we both got dizzy, and pretty soon we were running and yelling again. The Old Man hollered at us a couple times and finally came out to the kitchen and gave us both a few whacks on the fanny to show us that he meant business. Jack wouldn’t cry—he was ten. I was only eight, so I did. Then the Old Man made us go into the living room and sit on the couch. I kept sniffling loudly to make him feel sorry for me, but it didn’t work.
“Use your handkerchief” was all he said.
I sat and counted the flowers on the stained wallpaper. There were twelve rows on the left side of the brown water-splotch that dribbled down the wall and seventeen on the right side.
Then I decided to try another tactic on the Old Man. “Dad, I have to go.”
“You know where it is.”
When I came back, I went over and leaned my head against his shoulder and looked at the newspaper with him to let him know I didn’t hold any grudges. Jack fidgeted on the couch. Any kind of enforced nonactivity was sheer torture to Jack. He’d take ten spankings in preference to fifteen minutes of sitting in a corner. School was hell for Jack. The hours of sitting still were almost more than he could stand.
Finally, he couldn’t take anymore. “Tell us a story, Dad.”
The Old Man looked at him for a moment over the top of his newspaper. I don’t think the Old Man really understood my brother and his desperate need for diversion. Jack lived with his veins, like Mom did. Dad just kind of did what he had to and let it go at that. He was pretty easygoing—I guess he had to be, married to Mom and all like he was. I never really figured out where I fit in. Maybe I didn’t, even then.
“What kind of a story?” he finally asked.
“Cowboys?” I said hopefully.
“Naw,” Jack vetoed, “that’s kid stuff. Tell us about deer hunting or something.”
“Couldn’t you maybe put a couple cowboys in it?” I insisted, still not willing to give up.
Dad laid his newspaper aside and took off his glasses. “So you want me to tell you a story, huh?”
“With cowboys,” I said again. “Be sure you don’t forget the cowboys.”
“I don’t know that you two been good enough today to rate a story.” It was a kind of ritual.
“We’ll be extra good tomorrow, won’t we, Dan?” Jack promised quickly. Jack was always good at promising things. He probably meant them, too, at the time anyway.
“Yeah, Dad,” I agreed, “extra, extra, special good.”
“That’ll be the day,” the Old Man grunted.
“Come on, Dad,” I coaxed. “You can tell stories better’n anybody.” I climbed up into his lap. I was taking a chance, since I was still supposed to be sitting on the couch, but I figured it was worth the risk.
Dad smiled. It was the first time that day. He never smiled much, but I didn’t find out why until later. He shifted me in his lap, leaned back in the battered old armchair, and put his feet upon the coffee table. The wind gusted and roared in the chimney and pushed against the windows while the Old Man thought a few minutes. I watched his weather-beaten face closely, noticing for the first time that he was getting gray hair around his ears. I felt a sudden clutch of panic. My Dad was getting old!
“I ever tell you about the time your granddad had to hunt enough meat to last the family all winter?” he asked us.
“Are there cowboys in it?”
“Shut up, Dan, for cripes’ sakes!” Jack told me impatiently.
“I just want to be sure.”
“You want to hear the story or not?” the Old Man threatened.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Shut up and listen, for cripes’ sakes.”
“It was back in the winter of 1893, I think it was,” Dad started. “It was several years after the family came out from Missouri, and they were trying to make a go of it on a wheat ranch down in Adams County.”
“Did Grandpa live on a real ranch?” I asked. “With cowboys and everything?”
The Old Man ignored the interruption. “Things were pretty skimpy the first few years. They tried to raise a few beef-cows, but it didn’t work out too well, so when the winter came that year, they were clean out of meat. Things were so tough that my uncles, Art and Dolph, had to get jobs in town and stay at a boardinghouse. Uncle Beale was married and out on his own by then, and Uncle Tod had gone over to Seattle to work in the lumber mills. That meant that there weren’t any men on the place except my dad and my granddad.”
“He was our great-granddad,” Jack told me importantly.
“I know that,” I said. “I ain’t that dumb.” I leaned my head back against Dad’s chest so I could hear the rumble of his voice inside my head again.
“Great-Granddad was in the Civil War,” Jack said. “You told us that one time.”
“You want to tell this or you
