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don’t know history” and “fifteen minutes of fame” on the top-cliché list of journalists and bloggers, though generally unattributed. The truth is that life can’t be understood at all. Looking back now, though, it does seem that with every few books Joseph M. Halebecame something of a different person. There was, in Boston, the uncomplicated craftsman, a carpenter who worked with paragraphs and pages rather than lumber, planes and nails. In Bend, Oregon, the heroic novelist swimming heartily upstream of literary fashion. J. M. Hale from Fort Worth, Texas, with a newfound bent for regional writing, laboring away at a rickety card table, expending as much time moving table and chair about in an effort to avoid direct sunlight as he did writing. And here outside Willnot, Joe M. the populist, a man of the people who within the year, taking it to the limit, had uprooted us yet again, to the undiscovered country of hills and hollers to live among squirrel eaters.
    Someone said of Hemingway that each new novel required a new wife. Joseph M. Hale may have needed new screen doors. Longed for, hankered for, hungered for, had lust in his heart for new screen doors, and for new flies outside them.
    Plenty of flies in those hills and hollers. Hunters nailed squirrels to trees, gutted them and stripped the flesh out, left innards and skins behind. The buzz and drone of flies filled my sleep for years after.
    We lived in a house that a local modeled after a photo he’d seen in a magazine ( Life , one imagines) and built “with his own two hands, tree to lumber to roof and floor and walls.” It was a California bungalow gone wildly wrong: flush to the ground with earth showing between planks, proportions all out of whack, none of the corners met true, stand in the front room drooling and drool would soon enough fetch up against the kitchen baseboard.
    Mother set about making, on a Singer that swiveled up magically from what moments before had been a table, our clothes. One morning weeks after we took up homesteading there, myfather and I stood on the porch peering through windows the glass of which removed all angles from the world, bending them into gentle curves. Guided by the tissue-thin paper pattern pinned to it, Mother snipped away at a panel of pale blue cloth on its way to becoming my sister’s new dress. I had voiced some typically snide adolescent remark about her enterprise.
    “You think what I do is any different, Lamar? I string things together to make patterns. Things for people to wear. Maybe that helps keep them warm or feel better about themselves, maybe helps them believe there’s some kind of meaning to it all. All I’m doing is picking stuff up and putting it somewhere else.”
    Mother looked up then, smiled and waved. Through the imperfect glass her hand seemed to have an extra finger.
    “But Clara actually makes things, things that haven’t been in the world before.”
    “Like clothes.”
    “Like this family.”
    Man of the people. Simple patternmaker. Literary outrider and trickster. A magpie sniping from other birds’ nests. Yet he had quietly longed for me to follow in his footsteps.
    Historians cobble up counterfeit accounts of the past, reducing thousands of streams to a dozen currents, overwriting actual lives, the stories of all those people simply wanting to get on in the world they know, with narratives of grand ideas and motives. Our stabs at understanding character are built of the same doubtful materials. We worry out a few select strands from an individual’s life, a baker’s dozen of dominant traits, and use these to form a portrait. When we are all seething masses of contradictions. And of surprise.

5
    I was awake with no idea why. 6:28 on the nightstand clock. First thought: Dickens throwing up again. Or Richard was having one of his sleepless nights. Then I heard the banging.
    The front door opened. Voices.
    Richard leaning into the room.
    “It’s the sheriff, Lamar.” Then,