Our father too always said he wanted to be planted there, among those moldering Indian bones, with a red oak for his monument. Unlike other members of the Lightcap clan he claimed pride, honor, glory in his redskin genesis. Even boasted of it sometimes, even in public, which embarrassed our aunts and uncles. They preferred to stress the Saxon side—that antique strain of hillbillies, bowmen, thieves, peasants, woodcutters and deer poachers stretching back into the murk and misery of medieval England. Those merry times of overlord and gibbet, of peasant and serfdom, of the rack and the wheel which followed the massacre of the English forests. When the trees were gone freedom disappeared. Soon after the time of the death of Robin Hood, betrayed—like Che Guevara—by a nun.

We come from lowly lineage, us Lightcaps, from the worst of a bad lot, escaped bondsmen and indenture-jumping servants, the scum of Europe, the riffraff and ruffians of the Old World. But we have learned to live with our heritage. “Your criticism is greatly appreciated,” says my Uncle Jack’s business card, “but fuck you all the same.” He deals in fertilizer.

Our mother was a Presbyterian. She’d be buried, if she ever consented to die, among her Holyoaks and Gatlins in the official compost pile, the rich good consecrated ground, of Jefferson Church. Her church. Hers—who else kept it going as much as she? Who else played the organ, supervised the children’s Sunday school and conducted the cracked old voices of her geriatric choir week after week, year after year? “You sound good,” I told her once, after she’d apologized for a performance, “you sound downright angelic.” “Well we should,” she said, “we’re all pretty near halfway to Heaven already.”

ON CLOUDY OCTOBER AFTERNOONS the boys followed their father down the furrows of the potato patch. Joe turned up the spuds with a plow hitched to a single bay mare, the old nag we called Bessie. Our father sang as he tramped over the clods, gripping the plow handles, the reins (seldom used) draped over his neck. He guided the horse mainly by cluck and call. “Haw!” for a turn to the left, “Gee!” for the right. And “Whoa…whoa there…” as he paused near the end of the row to look back at Will and Henry and Little Paul.

The boys stooped low above the sandy loam, dragging gunnysacks, resurrecting the potatoes—les pommes de terre, apples of the earth—rich brown solid nuggets of pleasure and nutrition, raw, fried, boiled or baked.

“Don’t miss any, boys,” says Joe, “dig down there. Get ’em out. That means you too, Henry. Mind now, every one you miss costs you a nickel.” The father watches for a minute, dark gaunt face half amused, half serious, then turns back to his plow, clucks at the horse. She steps ahead on ponderous shaggy feet, iron shoes crushing the weeds at field’s edge, turning right—Gee!—as Joe Lightcap turns the plow on its side to ease it around for the return row. The horse clomps into the dried-out drab-green potato plants straggling over the ground. Joe sets the plow, the share digs in, the moldboard rolls the damp earth elegantly up and aside. The buried tubers reveal themselves, ready to be gathered, stored, cooked, eaten.