As I read, I kept waiting for a reference to Lisa, but she didn’t appear. My father wrote about the refinements of piling “an honest cord of wood,” plowing with Belle and Maud, the family horses, clearing the fields of dreaded weeds like Canadian thistle and quack grass, the farm arts of dragging, seeding, cross-dragging, corn planting and cutting, haying, collective shock threshing, silo filling, and gopher catching. As a boy, my father killed gophers for money, and from his later vantage point he understood the humor in this occupation. He started a paragraph with the sentence: If you are not interested in pocket gophers or how to catch them, move on to the next paragraph.

Every memoir is full of holes. It’s obvious that there are stories that can’t be told without pain to others or to oneself, that autobiography is fraught with questions of perspective, self-knowledge, repression, and outright delusion. I wasn’t surprised to see that the mysterious Lisa, who had sworn my father to secrecy, was missing from his memoir. I knew there were many things I would leave out of my own story. Lars Davidsen had been a man of rigorous honesty and deep feeling, but Inga was right about his early life. Much had been hidden. Between Not enough had been put up in the first place and ash and maple will serve you best was a story untold.

It took me years to understand that although my grandparents had always been poor, the Depression had ruined them entirely. The sorry little house my father described is still standing, and the remaining twenty acres of what was once a farm are now rented to another farmer who owns hundreds upon hundreds more. My father never let the place go. As his illness progressed, he willingly decided to sell the house he had lived in with my mother and us, a lovely place built partially with wood from trees he had chopped down himself, but the farmhouse of his childhood he gave to me, his son, the renegade doctor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst who lives in New York City.