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Show •44 home yesterday." On a side-table a big illustrated book of Western History lay open to a portrait of Jedediah Smith, who crossed California on foot from top to bottom, was ambushed in Oregon but survived to be massacred years later by Mojave Indians on the Colorado River. He was one of my dad's heroes. Next to the book was one of Adam's own pieces of sculpture, a little bronze buffalo two or three inches tall; on the same table were a wooden-handled file, an iron chisel for chipping stone, a hardwood mallet: tools of my father's trade, if you can call a trade what he never made a living from. But he tried all his life; the other things he did-the odd jobs, the stretches of part-time teaching at the community college, the seasons working in the woods-were never allowed to be anything but sidelines. "We were talking about you and that girl, actually," Carlo said. "But Jacob didn't want to tell you. Do you think you'll get married?" "We heard you through the pipe." Carlo blushed but the apples never wavered in their orbits. "Married?" I said. "It could happen." One of Adam's cigar-store Indians stared at me from behind him. My father had started collecting the wooden figures before I was born; planted in odd corners, painted in grim scarlets and greens, they held out bunches of carved wooden cigars to whoever passed by. Most of them had crude |