This disappointed him terribly—he wanted to be with his buddies—but it most likely saved his life. Laura Smith, actually, saved his life. Some general was worried that his men stationed in Alaska were withering away from boredom, so he flew from base to base to recruit a basketball team. Which is why Beard, with his long legs and his Buddy Holly glasses and his small-town ball skills, had to take leave of his unit and get on a ship that toiled its way to Kodiak Island, the men vomiting over the steel sides and into the churning waters.

So this is how you write. You let the writing lead and you simply follow, letting the memories and the images and the language take over; you’re the writer, you get to decide, and a talk is whatever you want it to be. You can decide that Laura Smith, with her wadded-up skirts and her ability to hit students hard, as I was told, is no longer just dust in the Viola Cemetery back behind Crummy’s but that she will and should make her way onto a kind of stage in faraway Anchorage, her name and her accomplishments invoked to people born long after her last layup, people who would have no reason to know or appreciate her or know the hard men with their pale foreheads and their silent sons, those boys who rode tractors while other kids were splashing in city pools, who rode tractors while other kids were being put to bed, who were being woken up at dawn, who were walking in the woods like my father, taking aim at some squirrels and letting others live. This is the power of writing, that joy of recounting, not even my own memories, but someone else’s. Imagining Jeff Crummy as a boy, his father the town ghoul but also a kind of tycoon because he owned a booming business. Crummy’s, with its shining mahogany tables and powder-blue carpet, was where my father’s own funeral was held but where mine will decidedly not be.

A few minutes ago I got up from writing this to make a cup of tea and stare out the window at the birds. And while I was doing that I was thinking about one of the lines up above (before the funeral-home stuff, where, by the way, I made up the details of the blue carpet and the mahogany tables), the part about the men puking over the side of the ship. It made me remember something I saw on television with my father long ago—we were watching a documentary and there were men on boats sitting crammed together on their way to Normandy Beach and their own deaths.