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“Well, it was actually more of a slaughter than a war,” he would concede. “It was over in three hours. But it’s quite convenient for the National Museum of Agricultural Implements at Haystacks. They have over seven hundred hoes apparently.”

As he spoke he would spread out a map of the western United States, and point to some parched corner of Kansas or the Dakotas that no outsider had ever willingly visited before. We nearly always went west, but never as far as Disneyland and California, or even the Rockies. There were too many Nebraska sod houses to look at first.

“There’s also a steam engine museum at West Windsock,” he would go on happily, and offer a brochure that no one reached for. “They do a special two-day ticket for families, which looks to be very reasonable. Have you ever seen a steam piano, Billy? No? I’m not surprised. Not many people have!”

The worst thing about going west was that it meant stopping in Omaha on the way home to visit my mother’s quizzical relatives. Omaha was an ordeal for everyone, including those we were visiting, so I never understood why we went there, but we always stopped off. It may be that my father was attracted by the idea of free coffee.

My mother grew up remarkably poor, in a tiny house that was really a shack, on the edge of Omaha’s vast and famous stockyards. The house had a small backyard, which ended in a sudden cliff, below which, spread out as far as the eye could see (or so it seems in memory), were the hazy stockyards. Every cow for a thousand miles was brought there to moo hysterically and have a few runny shits before being taken away to become hamburger. You’ve never smelled such a smell as rose from the stockyards, especially on a hot day, or heard such an unhappy clamor. It was ceaseless and deafening—the sound all but bounced off the clouds—and it made you look twice at all meat products for about a month afterward.

My mother’s father, a good-hearted Irish Catholic named Michael McGuire, had worked the whole of his adult life as a hand in the stock-yards for a paltry salary. His wife, my mother’s mother, had died when my mother was very small, and he had raised five children more or less single-handed, with my mother and her younger sister, Frances, doing most of the housework. In her senior year of high school, my mother won a citywide oration contest which carried as its reward a scholarship to Drake University in Des Moines. There she studied journalism and spent her summers working at the Register (where she met my father, a young sportswriter with a broad smile and a weakness for spectacular ties, if old photographs are any guide) and never really came back, something about which I think she always felt a little guilty. Frances eventually went off and became a nun of a timid and twittering disposition. Their father died quite young himself, long before I was born, leaving the house to my mother’s three curiously inert brothers, Joey, Johnny, and Leo.

It was an astonishment to me even when quite young to think that my mother and her siblings had come from the same genetic stock. I believe she may have felt a little that way herself. My father called her brothers the Three Stooges, though this perhaps suggests a liveliness and joie de vivre, not to mention an entertaining tendency to poke each other in the eyes with forked fingers, that was entirely lacking. They were the three most uninteresting human beings that I have ever met. They had spent their whole lives in this one tiny house, even though they must practically have had to share a bed. I don’t know that any of them ever worked or even went outdoors much. The youngest, Leo, had an electric guitar and a small amplifier. If he was asked to play—and he loved nothing better—he would disappear into the bedroom for twenty minutes and emerge, startlingly, in a green sequined cowboy suit. He knew only two songs, both employing the same chords played in the same order, so fortunately his recitals didn’t last long. Johnny spent his whole life sitting at a bare