Larry’s father would never have watched a meteor shower in the middle of the night. Or built a teepee and slept in it with his son, cooking their own venison steaks over an open fire. One time, when Nate’s class had been studying the early settlers at school, his dad had given him a piece of snuff to put up his nose. “Imagine you’re some old native chief, sitting around the fire, and there’s this white man, giving you these strange dried leaves that practically knock your war bonnet off,” he’d told Nate. “And you’ve got thousands and thousands of acres of land, and he’s got this magic little tin full of snuff. So you figure, what’s the problem, giving the white man a little land, so long as he gives you more of what’s in the canister. Bingo . . . there went the state of Wyoming.”

“I wish my dad would be crazy like yours just once,” Larry told him the time Nate came to school with an arrowhead he and his dad had found on a trip to Leopold to get a tractor part. They hadn’t made it home till after midnight. “What could I do, Helen?” his father had said, with their dinner long since packed up in Tupperware and put away, and his mother sitting there in her bathrobe with a mad face. “How often does a man get a chance to show his son a genuine Sioux burial ground?”

Other kids Nate knew got things like a puzzle or a paint-by-number set for their birthdays. Last year when Junie was turning six, their dad had come home with a broken-down pony he’d rescued from the glue factory. Junie loved horses, but this one—Junie had named him Bucky—was so skittish from years of abuse that even she couldn’t ride him.

“Some birthday present,” their mother said whenever the subject of Bucky came up. “Your father.”

Most farm kids Nate’s age knew how to drive a tractor and a forge loader. But Nate’s dad let him take out the truck, too, and not just over the fields, but on back roads with real traffic.

“On our road is one thing,” his mother said. “But I don’t want to see our son driving on the highway, Carl. You’ve got to stop encouraging him.”

“Best protection for a boy against an accident on the road is plenty of driving experience.”

“The best protection is not driving in the first place,” she said, ending the conversation.