Our father was a big-wig at the Oregon Fish Commission, and the freezer in our spacious mock Tudor home in Clackamas was always chock full with wild salmon and bull trout. My twin brother Jake and I gorged on the rich bouillabaisse and fricassee dishes that our mother served up each evening at exactly seven
Stanton sat and listened to the bull make bedlam with a coupling pin and the side of the stationary freight. Though sunlight beamed through the open sidedoor he sat in the gloom between some sacks of poultry feed and a crate of rail spikes, rubbing his face with his hands; labor degraded palms rasped over
Carl figured there just weren’t enough adjoining plots in Our Lady of Sacred Light’s cemetery to accommodate the family in full—the dead and the would-be dead. So, they were split up—father and mother in one space, plots for Carl and Nate in another. Carl’s father was the first to go, and he was gone for
