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She put jalapeños in her cornbread. When her new Indiana neighbors came over to say welcome she handed that out and left them speechless and gasping for Dart’s Lone Star beer.
    Dart kept a loaded gun in every room of the house. I disagreed with that, but I didn’t grow up in Texas. His grandfather had been scalped by a Kiowa brave on the Oklahoma border in his father’s own lifetime. I think I’d keep guns, too.
    Both wore boots most days, and if you asked what kind of skin they were made from you got a different answer every time. It might be rattlesnake or alligator, but it might be puppy or chimpanzee. That was Texas wit, and some of their new Indiana neighbors weren’t sure how to respond.
    They had Texas tablecloths and DON ’ T MESS WITH TEXAS bumper stickers. They had just about every book about Sam Houston ever published, and some dubious theories that placed him in the family tree. They had plates on the kitchen wall with cartoon kids saying things like
If we’re good, we’ll go to Texas
. They had every conceivable thing that could remind them of home, and there was no trouble at all until Uncle Dart hung a WHITES ONLY sign up on the front porch.
    Perhaps in Texas that would pass for a charming bit of historical paraphernalia, but people in Indiana expect you to be just as sincere as they are.
    I worked in Box County State Forest seven days a week starting at five in the morning, though only for spring and summer. Dart said I was a birdwatcher, and he didn’t think that a fitting line of work for a young man. I didn’t either. Birdwatchers stand at a safe distance with expensive equipment marveling over colors and wing bars. What I did was track songbirds back to their nests and monitor the progress of their offspring. They were in massive statewide decline and Indiana University, my employer, was attempting to establish why.
    “You’re a little John James Audubon,” said Loretta.
    “Naw,” said Dart. “Audubon was a crack shot. How you think he got his birds to sit still?”
    Each morning in any weather until ten thirty or eleven I patrolled a square mile of forest. There were several othersdoing the same throughout the state, but none nearby. I could differentiate by ear the male and female sounds of thirty-four species. When I heard a female I tried to spot her and follow her home. Some birds are wilier than others, and this could take hours. I also checked on nests I had already found. It is a myth that a mother won’t return to a nest contaminated by human touch. Frequently I took nestlings out to count and inspect them in my hands. Some birds are braver than others, too. A female Hooded warbler will fly her bright yellow body into your chest with all her might until you leave her babies alone. Her mate perches at a safe distance, chirping angrily.
    About half my birds were ground nesters. I found a Louisiana waterthrush nest once eight feet from a whole brood of corn snakes. Sad, but I couldn’t interfere. Twice a week I carried an enormous telescopic pole with a motorcycle mirror mounted at the thin end. Holding this in one hand and my binoculars in another I could just about guess the number and condition of eggs and nestlings in trees I couldn’t climb. The binoculars were heavier than the pole. They were German, about fifty years old. They were so powerful I imagined a previous owner atop a Swiss Alp just watching the whole war from there.
    I knew every tree, ravine, raccoon lair, fox den, and deer run within my square mile. I knew the local humans only by reputation, and I would have preferred to keep it that way: that reputation was one of armed service in the cause of white supremacy.
    Loretta explained to me that there was only one acceptable reason for leaving Texas.
    “God don’t make everyone Texan so it’s a kind of ingratitudeto up sticks and go live somewhere else,” she said. That could apply to my mother, too, but I didn’t point that out.
    “But sometimes God’s a