Draeger leans close to the dimly lit album. Rubbish; she doesn’t know any more than ...The juke bubbles as he turns a couple of pages of faces: Ah cast a lone-some shadow An’ Ah play a lone-some game. The rain hums against the roof overhead. Draeger pushes the book away, then pulls it back. Rubbish; she doesn’t—He tries to situate himself more comfortably in the wooden chair, hoping to overcome the unruly feeling of disorientation that has been building ever since he twisted that focus knob. “Nonsense.” But that’s the trouble, that is the trouble . . . “This is senseless.” He pushes the book away again. It is nonsense. “Not at all, Mr. Draeger. Look.” (Every danged winter . . .) “Let me leaf through a bit of the Stamper family past . . .” Giddy bitch, the past has nothing to do—“For instance, here, 1909, let me read you”—with the ways of men today. “ ‘During the summer the red tide came in and turned the clams bad; killed a dozen injuns and three of us Christians.’ Fancy that, Mr. Draeger.” The days are the same, though, damn it (days that you feel like pages of soft wet sandpaper in your fingers, the silent pliant teeth of time eating away); the summers are the same. “Or . . . let’s see . . . here: the winter of 1914 when the river froze solid.” The winters are the same too. (Every winter there is mildew, see it licking its sleepy gray tongue along the baseboards?) Or not essentially any different (every winter mildew, and skin rash, and fever blisters on your lip). “And you must go through one of these winters to have some notion. Are you listening, Mr. Draeger?” Draeger starts. “Certainly.” The girl smiles. “Certainly, go on. It’s just ...that jukebox.” Burbling: “Ah cast a lonesome shadow/An’ Ah play a lonesome game ...” Not really loud but—“But, yes; I am listening.” “And using your imagination?” “Yes, yes! Now what” difference should these bygone years make? (every winter a new tube of Blistex) “were you saying?” “Though you’re gone, Ah still dance on . . .” The girl assumes the air of one in a trance, closing her eyes. “As I see it, Mr. Draeger, the ‘whys’ go a long way back . . .” Nonsense! Rubbish! (Yet every winter, feel the hole already forming? Lower lip?) “As I recall, Hank’s granddad—Henry’s father—now let me think . . .” But. Perhaps. (Relentlessly.) “Shadows lonesome.” “Of course there are—” Nevertheless. (Still.) “On the other—” Stop...stop. STOP! DON’T SWEAT IT. SIMPLY MOVE A FEW INCHES LEFT OR RIGHT TO GET A NEW VIEWPOINT. Look . . . Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. So don’t sweat it. For focus simply move a few inches back or forward. And once more...look: As the barroom explodes gently outward into the rain, in spreading spherical waves: Dusty Kansas train depot in 1898. The sun lip-reading the bright gilt scrawl on the Pullman door. There stands Jonas Armand Stamper, with a furl of steam wafting past his thin waist, like a half-mast flag from an iron-black flagpole. He stands near the gilted door, a little apart, with a black flat-brimmed hat clamped in one iron hand, a black leatherbound book clamped in the other, and silently watches the farewells of his wife and three boys and the rest of his gathered kin. A sturdy-enoughlooking brood, he decides, in their stiff-starched muslin. A very a great notion impressive-looking flock. And knows also that, to the eyes of the noontime depot crowd, he appears more sturdy-looking, stiff-starched, and impressive than all the others put together. His hair is long and glossy, showing Indian blood; his eyebrows and mustache exactly horizontal, as though rulered parallel onto his wide-boned face with a heavy graphite pencil. Hard jaw, tendoned neck, deep chest. And though he is inches under six feet he stands in such a way as to appear much taller. Yes, impressive. The stiff-starched, leatherbound, iron-cored patriarch, fearlessly moving his family west to Oregon. The sturdy pioneer striking out for new and primitive frontiers. Impressive. “Be careful, Jonas.” “God will provide, Nate. It’s the Lord’s work we are doing.” “You’re a good man, Jonas.” “God will see to His own, Louise.” “Amen, amen.” “It’s the Lord’s will that you should go.” He nods stiffly and, turning to step onto the train, catches sight of his three boys ...Look: they are all grinning. He frowns to remind them that, while they may have been the ones that argued for this move from Kansas to the wilds of the Northwest, it is still his decision and no other that allows it, his decision and his permission and they hadn’t, praise God, better forget it! “It is the good Lord’s will,” he repeats and the two younger boys drop their eyes. The oldest boy, Henry, continues to meet his father’s stare. Jonas starts to speak again but there is something about the boy’s expression, something so blatantly triumphant and blasphemous that the fearless patriarch’s words stop in his throat, though it is much later before he really understands the look. No, you knew the moment you saw it. Branded there like the leer of Satan. You knew the look and your blood ran cold when you saw what you had unknowingly been party to. The conductor calls. The two youngest boys move past the father into the train, muttering thanks, thank ya kindly for the wrapped lunches offered by the queue of relatives who have come to see them off. Their nervous, wet-eyed mother follows, kissing cheeks, pressing hands. The oldest boy next, with his fists knotted in his trousers pockets. The train bucks suddenly and the father grasps the bar and swings on board, lifting his hand to the waving relatives. “So long.” “You write, Jonas, hear?” “We’ll write. We look to see you folks following before long.” “So long . . . so long.” He turns to mount the hot iron steps and sees again that look as Henry passes from the landing into the car. Lord have mercy, he whispers, without knowing why. No, admit it; you did know. You knew it was the family sin come back from the pit, and you knew your part in it; you knew your part just as surely as you knew the sin. “A born sinner,” he mutters, “born cursed.” For, to Jonas and his generation, the family history was black with the stain of that selfsame sin: You know the sin. Curse of the Wanderer; curse of the Tramp; bitter curse of the Faithless; always turning their backs on the lot God had granted.... “Always troubled with itchy feet,” contended the more easygoing. “Idiocy!” thundered those advocating stability. “Blasphemers!” “Just roamers.” “Fools! Fools!” Migrants, is what the family’s history shows. A stringy-muscled brood of restless and stubborn west-walkers, their scattered history shows. With too much bone and not enough meat, and on the move ever since that first day the first skinny immigrant Stamper took his first step off the boat onto the eastern shore of the continent. On the move with a kind of trancelike dedication. Generation after generation leapfrogging west across wild young America; not as pioneers doing the Lord’s work in a heathen land, not as visionaries blazing trail for a growing nation (though they quite often bought the farms of discouraged pioneers or teams of horses from disillusioned visionaries making tracks back to well-blazed Missouri), but simply as a clan of skinny men inclined always toward itchy a great notion feet and idiocy, toward foolish roaming, toward believing in greener grass over the hill and straighter hemlocks down the trail. “You bet. We get to that place down the trail, then we sit back and take ’er easy.” “Right. We got plenty time then. . . .” But, always, just as soon as the old man finally got all the trees cut and the stumps cleared and the old lady finally got the linseed coating she’d been so long griping about for her hemlock floor, some gangly, frog-voiced seventeen-year-old would stand looking out the window, scratching a stringy-muscled belly, and allow, “You know...we can do better than this yere sticker patch we got now.” “Do better? Just when we finally got a toehold on ’er?” “I believe we can, yes.” “You can do better, may-be—though I truly do have my misgivin’s about it—but your father an’ me, we ain’t leaving!” “Suit yourself.” “No sir, Mister Antsy Pants! Your father an’ me, we come to the end of it.” “Then Father an’ you suit yourselfs, ’cause I’m movin’ on. You an’ the old man do what you please.” “Wait a minute now, bud—” “Ed!” “Just hold your horses now, makin’ up my mind for me what I do, woman. Okay, bud, what egzackly was it you had in mind, just outta curiosity?” “Ed!” “Woman, the boy an’ me is talkin’.” “Oh, Ed ...” And the only ones that ever stayed behind were either too old or too sick to continue west. Too old or too sick, or, as far as the family was concerned, too dead. For when one moved, they all moved. Tobacco-scented letters found in heart-shaped candy boxes in attics are filled with excited news of this moving. “. . . the air out here is real good.” “. . . the kids do fine tho the school as you can well imagine this far from civilization is nothing to holler about.” “. . . we look to see you folks out thisaway very soon now hear?” Or with the dejected news of restlessness: “. . . Lu tells me I should not pay any attention to you that you and Ollen and the rest always put a burr in my blanket but I don’t know I tell her I don’t know. I tell her for one thing I am not as of yet ready to settle that what we got here is the whole shebang and give up that we cannot improve our situation some. So I’ll think on it . . .” So they moved. And if, as the years passed, some parts of the family went slower than others, moving only ten or fifteen miles during their lifetime, still the movement was always west. Some had to be dragged from tumbledown homes by insistent grandchildren. Gradually some even managed to be born and to die in the same town. Then, eventually, there came Stampers of a more sensibly practical nature; Stampers clearheaded enough to stop and stand still and look around; deep-thinking, broodful Stampers able to recognize that trait they began calling “the flaw in the family character” and to set about correcting it. These clearheaded men made a real effort to overcome this flaw, made a truly practical effort to put once and for all an end to this senseless fiddlefooting west, to stop, to settle down, to take root and be content with whatever portion the good Lord had allotted them. These sensible men. “All right now . . .” Stopping on a flat Midwestern land where they could see in all directions: “All right, I do feel we have come about far enough.” Stopping and saying, “It’s high time we put an end to this foolishness that has been prodding at our ancestors; when a man can stand here—and see in every direction and left’s no better’n right and forward’s got just as much sage and buffalo weed as backward, and over that rise yonder is just more flat, more of the same we been walkin’ over for two hundred years, then why, praise Jesus, why go further?” And when no one could come up with a good reason the practical men gave a stiff nod and thumped a worn boot against the flatiron land: “All right. Then this is the whole shebang, boys, right here underfoot. Give up and admit it.” To begin devoting their restless energies to pursuits more a great notion tangible than wandering, more practical than walking, pursuits like business and community and church. They acquired bank accounts, positions in local government, and even, sometimes, these stringy-muscled men, potbellies. Pictures of these men found in boxes in attics: black suits poised with rigid determination before a photographer’s mural, mouths grim and resolute. Letters: “. . . we have come far enough.” And they folded up in leather chairs like jackknives closing and climbing into scabbards.