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Show -213 he throw it out like his limestone paperweight, so that he wouldn't have to dust it off every morning? If that old woodchuck-eater and perpetual child could hang it up so young, what was going to save me? The package shaft was a spooky place, full of soft slithery unidentifiable noises and moving shadows. I think I fell asleep. And in my sleep dead people came to see me, but they had very little to say. My father's mother, whom I knew only from the family album, came first. An early suffragette, she had admired Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman and chained herself to lamp-posts and courthouse railings in Lancaster, Ohio. Her head floated slowly along the wall, taking no notice of beams and metal girders, nor of me either, unless that vague wispy smile was meant for a greeting. She was followed by Johnny Vandemeer, the marble-shooting champion of my sixth grade, my friend, who had his tonsils out and bled to death because of a clumsy doctor. Uncle Harold, no blood relation, an uncle of convenience, winked at me sadly; he was a grass-seed farmer from Sweet Home, at the foot of our green Cascade Mountains. One rainy afternoon he fell off the back of his tractor and the trailing plough ploughed him deep into his own field. Lefty Kellerman was a great high-school pitcher but a bad driver; on graduation night in 1956 he drove his father's new Pontiac up a tree by the side of Route 99 and |