‘He was a soldier, a Union soldier – an Irishman—’

‘Dosshouses. Whorehouses. Jails. Graveyards.’

Jonathan worked his way up one San Francisco street and down another. He asked his questions and as he did, he found the picture of his father taking on more detail. The beard was black. Of course it was. One of the eyes had no lashes. There had been a limp. Well, hadn’t there?

‘I never saw anybody like that,’ people said.

‘I see a hundred guys like that every week,’ people said.

This was only the beginning of my grandfather’s search. He scoured the country for his father, for my great-grandfather, for somebody to give him an anchor somewhere, in time, in blood-line, in almost anything at all – somebody whose existence would call a halt to the random meaninglessness of his life. He failed; my great-grandfather was not to be found. Jonathan himself is the beginning. He who had no past is our past, our unmoved mover, our foundation stone: the one we all rely on. But as his train pulled out of San Francisco he stood atop the cars with the steam abillow up around him, that salacious rhythmic pounding of wheels under him, and in his heart, the full and certain knowledge that if he worked at it he could reconstruct a picture of his father so complete that finding him would be no trick at all.

6

Over the hills of California – this is how Jonathan goes – back over the desert and the flatlands, up into the tense beauty of the Rockies again. My own father, Rayner Carrick – Jonathan’s eldest son and my uncle Atlas’s brother – used to fly into rages. My sisters and I cowered behind our bedroom doors while he and my mama screamed at each other. Dishes crashed. The Rockies look to me like that. Up there you can actually see the howling. The earth boils up, flames spurt – then you’re across them and suddenly, abruptly, there’s calm. That’s the way it was with my father, too. The land just lays itself down and sleeps all the way across the plains where little towns glitter at night.

My father’s anger never left him entirely. In this more than in anything else he resembled his own father, my grandfather, Jonathan Carrick. We children learned about this anger the hard way. It dissipated. Then it gathered again slowly, imperceptibly, just like the grasslands of the middle west gather together slowly, imperceptibly across Indiana and Ohio. A haze from the Great Smokies appears in the air, and then these eastern mountains . . . Sometimes the rages carried on into the parental bed at night. What an education for little girls then! The violence of the Smokies is lush where the Rockies are imperial. Then morning and breakfast, down again and on to the daily noise in New York City. From the freight yards Jonathan and College hitched a ride on a passenger train into the wonders of Pennsylvania station.