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thinkable. She could’ve left him the minute he told her about the Great Northern scheme. But again she didn’t. Therefore, all that might’ve happened if she’d never met Bev at a Christmas party, the poems she’d have written and published, the small-college teaching possibilities, the marriage to a young professor, the different children from Berner and me— all that which might’ve happened to her in a revised life, didn’t happen. Instead, she lived in Great Falls, a town she’d never before heard of (so confusable with Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Cedar Falls), lived in one world taken up with us, feeling isolated, not wanting to assimilate, and thinking only frustratedly, complicatedly of the future. And all the while our father existed in another world—his easy scheming nature, his optimism about the future, his charm. They seemed the same world because the two of them shared it, and they had us. But they weren’t the same. It’s also possible that she loved him, since he unquestionably loved her. And given her general unoptimistic frame of mind, given that she might’ve loved him, and that they had us, she conceivably couldn’t face the shock of going away and being just alone with us forever. This is not an unheard-of story in the world.

Chapter 5
    F OR A WHILE, MY FATHER’S DEALINGS WITH THE Indians and the Great Northern must’ve gone smoothly. Although my mother wrote in her chronicle that at this time—it was mid-July—she began to experience “physical ennui,” and for the first time in years began to talk to her parents on the telephone when my father was out learning about selling ranches and overseeing the delivery of stolen beef. Our grandparents had never taken any part in our family life. My sister and I had never even met them, which we knew was unusual, since we were aware of people in our school who saw their grandparents all the time and went on trips with them, received cards and gifts and money on their birthdays. Our Tacoma grandparents had opposed their intelligent daughter with a decent college degree marrying a slick, smiling Alabama ex–fly boy, who set off alarms in their insular immigrants’ world in Tacoma. They had offended my father by letting their disapproval be known. He was insulted by being undervalued, and as a result he never encouraged us to visit them or them to visit us, though I don’t think he ever specifically forbid it—not that they would’ve come to any of the places we lived. Texas or Mississippi. Dayton, Ohio. They had the idea our mother should’ve entered “the professions,” should’ve lived in a sophisticated city and married a CPA or a surgeon. Which my mother told Berner she never would’ve, since she always wanted—being the rare person as she knew herself to be—a more adventurous life. But her parents were pessimistic and fearful and inflexible—though they’d been in America since 1919. And they found it permissible to turn their backs on their daughter and her family and let us all disappear off into the interior of the country. “It would still be nice for you to know your grandparents before they die,” she said to us a few times. She kept a framed black-and-white photograph, taken at Niagara Falls—three bespectacled, miniature people who looked alike, each wearing a rubber raincoat, looking miserable and mystified, posing on the gangplank of a boat (the Maid of the Mists , I now know, having since ridden it myself) that made tours right into the roaring downspout of the falls. It was her parents’ return trip across the continent on their twentieth wedding anniversary, in 1938. Our mother was twelve. Woitek and Renata were their names. Vince and Renny, their American names. Kamper wasn’t their name either. Kampycznski. My mother’s name, Neeva Kampycznski, was a name that fit her better than Kamper, or even Parsons—the second one not fitting her at all. “ There’s a real cataract, there, kids,” she said, staring