Louis Aloysius will not reply. He will walk out of the barn and leave Father standing there, lost in a universe of his own making. A few minutes later, Father's father will return, carrying a long double-edged ax. “I never say you could do this,” he will tell Father.
        And then he will chop the dream of Father's young life back into junk.
        The image of Father as he told me this story for the first time, his eyes moist and distant, his hands trembling in midair as his own father lifts the ax, is sketched indelibly in my mind's eye. This image has not only influenced my writing, it raises questions about the ways memory both inspires and limits writers.
        My father's father had come to America from Bavaria. He made his way across the country until he reached Kansas City, where he got a job at the Muehlebach Brewery. Eventually he would rise to the position of Supervisor of Shipping, a title that was much grander than the salary the job paid. He would keep this job until he was in his early sixties, when a crate of beer tumbled off a shelf and knocked him off his feet. He came up limping, with a pain in his abdomen that everyone thought was a hernia. When the surgeons finally opened him up, they found cancer crusting his organs like rust.
        My parents and I were living in Oklahoma at that time, and Father was looking for a new job. He drove Mother and me up to Kansas City to see my grandfather Heller before he died. We stayed with Uncle Oodie and Aunt Eleanor, whom I called “Noanie,” and my growing brood of cousins in a two-story brick house on 31st Street. They would sell the house a few years later when Oodie's employer, UpJohn, transferred him to Denver. Uncle Oodie and Aunt Noanie had nine children; Father and Mother had only me. The ratio was odd, because not only was Uncle Oodie my father's brother; Aunt Noanie was my mother's sister. The double pairing made the nine and me double cousins.
        The mood at my cousins' house must have been somber, but I don't remember the trip that way. “Betty! Big Steve! Little Steve!” Grandma Rose cried when we pulled into the driveway in Father's old beetle-back Dodge. Grandma Rose had a nose even fatter than Father's, and she smelled of a curious combination of Ivory Soap and raw sweat. She was red-faced, like Oodie, with a gravely voice deeper than Father's. I should have paid more attention to Grandma, for Grandfather's condition had been explained to me. But I was distracted by the sleek red Buck Rodgers Rocket Scooter that sat in the driveway, which Bobby and Jimmy and Gary and Greg and Dennis and I would fight over almost the entire time my parents and I were there.
        At some point, we all went to the hospital to see Grandpa Heller, but I don't remember doing that. Taking me to see my grandfather for the last time, to form a lasting impression of him, was the main point of the trip. Father and Mother stressed this. In the decades since, I've asked each of them to describe our hospital visit, hoping to encounter a detail or image that would stir my memory and bring the dying man into focus. Nothing has worked.
        Why can't I remember visiting Grandfather at the hospital?

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