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little forgetful and he gives you a grandchild from some other place.”
    Dart and Loretta’s first grandchild had recently debuted in Indianapolis, home of their son Dave and his wife, Elia. They handed the ranch down to Dave’s older brother Jack.
    “So you got to go there and make sure the child gets brung up right,” she concluded.
    They were disgusted by some of the things we told them about Indiana. My dad explained turtle shooting, for example. Tin cans worked okay, he said, but you have to arrange them yourself. Turtles, usually sliders, will line themselves up nicely on any log you fix in a lake. Dart and Loretta had a half-acre lake outside their Indiana home with two logs perpendicular to the western bank. There were four or five sliders on each as he spoke, shining in the morning sun. The trick, said my dad, is to shoot one off without the others noticing. It wasn’t something he had done since he was a kid with a .22, but it was common in Indiana.
    Dart and Loretta gave the impression that Texans were a little more sporting.
    I had been sent to Texas for several teenage summers, myself, where Loretta had done her best to bring me up right. She was a woman of very sharp opinions.
    “Git married young, Nate,” she told me. “Older you git the more you realize if you want a horse you gotta clean the shit out of the yard.”
    One aspect of my Texan education was helping Uncle Dart out on the ranch, at which I was spectacularly inept. I once spent two hours on my belly painting one square foot of an old barn. After that I was put on paperwork and other stuffusually left to Loretta. I will say this for Dart: whatever signs he hung on his porch, he was scrupulously fair to his employees. I saw that in the ledgers I used to read when I should have been working, bound I think in the hide of one of his own steers. Sons of his friends got no special consideration. A black man named Moses was his right hand for sixteen years, and he got paid accordingly. I was family, but I got less than minimum wage.
    My dad was dismayed when I told him that, but he explained it correctly, I think.
    “Your uncle Dart takes every man as he finds him.”
    Sometimes over dinner Dart cracked jokes about wetbacks and niggers. When I reported this by phone from Texas to Indiana in hushed tones to my parents they told me firmly that he was a man of a time and a place that weren’t like my time and place. More important, he was my uncle and I should overlook his shortcomings and indiscretions, because he loved me. He sure as hell didn’t overlook mine, I said. They told me to get used to it.
    Loretta put a different spin on things privately one afternoon in the kitchen.
    “He doesn’t say that stuff when you’re not around,” she explained. “He doesn’t hate anybody but self-righteous Yankees, and he’s worried you’ll grow up to be one of them. He’s baiting you.”
    When cousin Dave turned twenty-two he lit out for Mexico and spent several years writing jingles for Mexican radio on his computer. Computers were new then, especially in Mexico. He would get a phrase like “thirty pesos for each tooth” and he had to compose appropriate music for it.
    After six years of that he phoned the ranch to announce he had married a local girl named Elia, and he was coming home.
    They had one month before Elia and Dave arrived. In that month Loretta and Dart spent five hours a day on an intensive Spanish course. “Shouldn’t have bothered,” said Loretta. “Her English is better than ours anyway.” Dart read deeply in Mexican history, and he could name every Mexican state and its capital city, though he had to slow right down for Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Tlaxcala de Xicohténcatl. Loretta bought a tortilla press, which was more work than it was worth. She marked all the saints’ days on the calendar, too. This from a couple who hadn’t forgiven the Alamo.
    Dart still made wetback jokes out of habit sometimes, but otherwise he treated