On Christmas Day, my father and I ride out to the ranch in his white Ford pickup. I’ve been out of the country for the better part of three years, and he wants to show me what he has planned for the place. The previous owner and his tenants left behind the usual junk—rusted-out cars and tractors and farm implements of every vintage, to say nothing of old windmills and mile upon mile of petrified posts and brittle barbed wire.
“We’ll take and move all this junk out of here and get the grass back in shape,” my father tells me with his usual optimism. “I think we’ll put the corrals over there, and eventually I want to build a new shop and machine shed and replace all of this old fence, but for now we’ll take it a couple of miles a year.”
He pauses, looks around. “You know, this place was really something at one time.”
“It still is,” I say.
He smiles. “Maybe someday you’ll have a place just like it.”
“Maybe.”
“Thing about it is,” he says, “when you do, you’ll know it’s yours.”
The land, all the kingdoms of the world, stretches out before us as we drive away.
Part I: The Town
House on Wheels
The house I grew up in was a sprawling brick affair with a four-car garage, a fenced-in patio, and wide lawns of fescue that stretched off on either side of a concrete driveway that more than one neighbor half-jokingly described as “a parking lot.” It was an impressive house, to be sure, but also a little odd. That oddity had to do, at least in part, with the neighborhood where the house was located, which was full of much smaller, two- and three-bedroom bungalows compared to which our five-bedroom house looked like a bloated mansion. But even more than this, the essential strangeness of the house had to do with the fact that it was built piecemeal, with additions and other renovations coming along every three or four years, whenever my mother had managed to put money aside or my father happened to be seized by some new idea he would sketch on the back of an envelope before committing the entire family to its execution.
“Remodeling”—that’s how my parents referred to these seasons of furious activity, which required the family to huddle, refugee-like, in some semifinished part of the house (usually the basement) while the parts undergoing renovation were sealed off with plastic sheeting or blankets tacked into place with framing nails. In some respects, the years of my childhood were filled with little else but these fantastical and interminable “remodeling projects”—or at least that’s the way it felt to me at the time. With few exceptions, all of the work involved in these projects was done by my father and older brothers, although sometimes a too-curious neighbor who stopped by to remark on our progress would be pressed into service for an hour or two, maybe even an entire weekend. In this way, my father silenced any potential outcry against the use of power tools late at night or in the predawn hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings. To complain too loudly was to risk being swept up in the madness that defined and set us apart as a family.
The house I have described as a bloated mansion (and I can already hear both of my parents’ objections to this description) began its life as a three-room shack without electricity or running water in the high wheat country twenty miles north of Dodge City. That’s where it sat, in the corner of an enormous wheat field, when my uncle Harold bought it in the late 1940s. Of course, Harold being Harold, the house didn’t remain that way for long. During the decade or so he and my aunt Marilyn lived there, they doubled its size, adding two new bedrooms and a kitchen, as well as electricity and modern plumbing. By the time my parents acquired the house in the late 1950s, it had the look and feel of your average single-story, three-bedroom, clapboard-sided farmhouse—nothing fancy, perhaps, but clean and serviceable enough. That’s pretty much where things stood when I was brought home from Dodge City’s St. Anthony’s Hospital in the late summer of 1964.
Not long after this, in 1965 or 1966, my mother, who had grown up three hours away in Wichita, began to complain about the eighty-mile-a-day, round-trip commute she made on bad country roads taking my older brothers to and from Sacred Heart Cathedral School in Dodge City. As more than one neighbor pointed out, a bus would have picked the boys up and carried them the twenty miles to a public school on the north side of Dodge, but this my mother, a Catholic convert, would not hear of. So long as there was a God in heaven looking down on her, she was determined to remain blameless in His eyes in all matters relating to the exercise of her faith. If she had to drive eighty miles a day to accomplish that, then so be it. However, if she didn’t have to make that terrible and wasteful drive, well then, all the better. As it happened, my father had reasons of his own to move to town; he and Harold had just bought a salvage yard on the south side of Dodge City, and running this business would soon be a part of my father’s daily routine.
As always happened once my parents decided something, it wasn’t long before they took definitive action. Surveying the available properties in a five-block radius of Sacred Heart, they settled on a red brick house my mother pronounced her “dream house.” “Oh, how I loved that house!” she tells me now, thinking back past fifty years. “I loved everything about it—the yard, the porch, the fireplace, the kitchen and living room. I would lay awake at night, planning where I was going to put every piece of furniture I owned, and even some I didn’t own. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. That’s how excited I was.”
They made an offer on the dream house the same day they walked through it, and that offer was promptly accepted. However, a few days later, the seller called my father to say he had another, higher offer, and did my father care to match it?
Here my father paused ominously. “Another offer,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t aware that this was an auction.”
“Pardon?” the seller asked, confused and perhaps a little intimidated by my father’s tone.
“I made you an offer, and you accepted,” my father said. “We shook hands on the deal. Where I come from, that brings the bargaining part to a close.”
“Ah, well, yes,” the seller stammered. “But you see, now there’s this second offer, and, well, it’s considerably higher than yours . . .”
Here the story breaks into a couple of different variants. According to one version, at this point my father slammed the wall phone into its receiver and turned to my mother, who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a horrified look on her face. “Deal’s off, Pat,” he told her. “I’m sorry, but we’re just going to have to figure out something else to do.” According to another, more detailed version, the plot thickened a month or so after this, when the seller called back to inform my father that the second, higher offer had fallen through, and the house was on the market once again, and did my father care to make a repeat offer? At which point my father is said to have laughed and told the man exactly where he could put every last red brick of that so-called dream house. Even as a very small child, this was the version I liked best, and I refused to have the story told any other way.
Regardless of how or why it came to pass, in the fall of 1966, my father bought a pair of vacant lots on the north side of Dodge City where he dug and poured a basement of the same size and dimensions as the house in the country. When the basement was finished that spring, he hired a local mover to jack the house off its foundations, slide it onto a kind of massive cart, and drag the structure twenty miles cross-country to its new neighborhood in town. This was one of the few times in his life my father ever hired someone else to do a job he might have done himself just as easily, and he soon regretted the decision.
“I should have known something was wrong when I asked the guy what I had to get out of the house before the move,” my father remembers, “and he told me not a thing, just leave it all right where it was. Clothes in the closets, dishes in the cabinets, lamps sitting on end tables. Well, you can imagine how that turned out . . .”
As