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banana bread and two brownies. “Let’s see,” she says when I put them in front of her, “would it be animal, vegetable, or mineral?” Any answer I give would not interest her, though.
    After the meal there is a lull under the yellow and white canopy.Bee’s twins are asleep in their high chairs, cracker crumbs spread in a three-foot circle around them. Their bald heads fall to their chests like sprung toys, and I ask Bee if we should take the boys into my grandparents’ house and lay a blanket on the floor for them.
    â€œOh no,” she says. “They like to sleep like that.”
    As if in response, the breeze quickens and the huge trees—the oaks and the cottonwoods—stir with the softness of nets being cast. It is an old, cool wind that blows in off the Missouri, south through the Lansing orchards, and over the silent, seminal fields of wheat. It is a wind that carries the voices of the Hillcock children who are in the green and sunflowered pasture where only Pig Latin is allowed. Then, too, it is a wind that spirals up a thick, sweet smell from the storm cellar—a little homegrown that burns quick as rope and eases the teenaged boys into the afternoon. For them, the skating rink in Centralia has become boring. The shopping mall in Manhattan is no fun since they can’t drop snow cones onto the shoppers below anymore. For them, Kansas is the cold, dead center of an otherwise teeming world, but I could tell them differently. I could say that the miles of openness—green and gold and quaking silver—might be closer to reality than anywhere else they could drive; that in the seven miles between Circleville and Fostoria there is more meaning than in the entire Rose Bowl Parade.
    Sometime past two or three o’clock—I don’t know; time tapers and descends in those afternoons—the traditional softball game is started. We have no gloves and the ball is rock-hard and lopsided from being left out in the rain, but if spirit counts for anything, we are rich and well supplied. The bases are marked by rags held down with rocks, but the overgrown grass in the pasture where we play makes the bases impossible to see, and so we end up simply running for each other—toward the first and second and third basemen, whoever they are. Once in a while someone hits the ball senseless, and then time flies as we formally search the grass for the ball—a dingy, white speck in a storyteller’s green ocean.
    My relatives do not make spectacular catches, and in the outfieldthey appear as shy, bighearted people among the goldenrod. Whoever steps up to bat is a good-for-nothing, a nearsighted dog, a puny traitor from the other side. The pitches range from halfhearted spitballs to loop-the-loops. Everyone gets a chance to knock the ball to hell, but mostly we tap it to the shortstop.
    My aunts and uncles and cousins are big, loose people. They run the bases, always looking forward. Their thick hair shines like a lesson in light, and when they bend to pick up the ball or merely to scratch their feet there is no misery or misfortune in the world.
    I like to think of the rest of that June day as the softball game. I like to imagine all of us—connected by blood or name or something even less tangible—in a pasture bordered by a creek that eventually runs past Meriden and Valley Falls and the Kickapoo Indian Reservation and empties into the dark, bridgeless Nemeha.
    In actuality, the day does not end in the pasture. It proceeds onto the porch and into the kitchen. There are those who gather in the living room to watch the six o’clock news, and in the front yard someone’s gallbladder operation is being retold with amazing detail and authenticity.
    My relatives do not give up a ship easily. They stay past dark, sometimes past their welcome. Their children are inventive and find games to play in closets and parked cars, at the side of the house, and in the