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leaving. But she always thought more about staying. I remember she read a poem to me at around this time by the great Irish poet Yeats, which had in it the line that said, “Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.” I’ve taught this poem many times in a life of teaching and believe this is how she thought of things: as being imperfect, yet still acceptable. Changing life would’ve discredited life and herself, and brought on too much ruin. This was the child-of-immigrants viewpoint she’d inherited. And while hindsight might conclude the worst about our parents—say, that there was some terrible, irrational, cataclysmic force at work inside them—it’s more true that we wouldn’t have seemed at all irrational or cataclysmic if looked at from outer space—from Sputnik—and would certainly never have thought we were that way. It’s best to see our life and the activities that ended it, as two sides of one thing that have to be held in the mind simultaneously to properly understand—the side that was normal and the side that was disastrous. One so close to the other. Any different way of looking at our life threatens to disparage the crucial, rational, commonplace part we lived, the part in which everything makes sense to those on the inside—and without which none of this is worth hearing about.

Chapter 6
    E VEN THOUGH OUR FATHER’S NEW SCHEME TO sell stolen beef to the railroad went—at least at first—as he planned it, the story later published in the Tribune clearly disclosed it had been a more complicated scheme than the one he’d conducted at the base. There, the Indians trucked the meat in through the main gate. The guards were alerted to let them pass. They drove straight to the rear of the officers’ club, unloaded the beef, and got paid, possibly by my father, in hard dollars right on the spot. He and the officers’ club manager, a captain named Henley, held back an agreed-to share of the Indians’ money and took home their choice of tenderloins to feed their families. Everybody was satisfied.
    The Great Northern Railway transaction, however, had to be different because the Spencer Digby Negro turned out to badly fear and distrust Indians and was also of a skittish nature about his job—a well-paid union job with a high seniority status in the dining car service. This Digby would let the Indians drive their panel truck—which had the sign of a Havre carpet company on its side—to the loading dock at the Great Northern depot and would take delivery of the contraband. But he refused to pay the Indians on the spot—again, for reasons having to do with fearing and distrusting them, and because of needing to check the quality of the meat. Both of these reasons insulted the Indians, who didn’t like doing business with a Negro. An arrangement had to be made, therefore, for our father to come to the depot and receive the money from Digby, but not until a day had passed and Digby had secured the money to pay and had satisfied himself that the meat was of a high enough quality to serve in the dining cars. Digby wanted the two transactions—accepting the beef and paying out the money—kept separate, as if the money wasn’t really for the meat (in case he was caught), and as if my father was the actual provisioner and the Indians only worked for him as laborers. At the heart of schemes like this there’s always something unreasonable, the explanation of which is that human beings are involved.
    THIS ALTERATION in the original air-base scheme put my father into a precarious position. He liked the role of middle man because it made him feel and look competent, and he didn’t see it as precarious (until it was too late). But the new scheme meant that for a day or more the Indians no longer had possession of the beef they’d stolen and butchered at grave risk to themselves, then driven down to Great Falls and delivered in more or less full view—after having already put themselves at