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Show in my f a t h e r ' s house/ 165 beside him. "Haddy, what about my kitten?" I watched him chew, noticing his yellowed teeth and the deepened lines around his mouth and nose. Something had made his eyes beady, and sharpened his features. For the first time I thought him old. "Your kitten was slammed in the screen door," he said without looking at me. "No one was watching out for her." Somehow I wasn't surprised, only sad. "Is she dead, Daddy?" He nodded and a great tiredness bowed his shoulders. Then I understood that he felt it too: that we had left home, never to return again. And that we would spend the rest of our lives trying. In September, we moved sixty miles to a small Nevada town rimmed with sagebrush and blotched with bright casinos. There, the older children could receive ; a passable high school education, and those who were able could get work. The only work my father found that would protect his identity was as caretaker of a large estate in Idaho. One of Aunt Gerda's boys told the phone company what their father did for a living, and it was printed this way in the next directory: R.C. Allred - Grasscutter. Unlike Mountain City, where people had been uniformly poor and uniformly ignorant, our new town had its social strata, the trailer village, the cheap saloons and the red-light houses on the wrong side of the tracks, and the |