Free Given World by Marian Palaia

parents, by some miracle I was sure I’d never fully comprehend, seemed to understand.
    When I got stoned I would think about my childhood, which always came back to me in black and white and a barely distinguishable range of gray. We had dogs, and farm animals of the regular kind: chickens, cows, once in a while a few goats. I had a big brother who tried against some pretty ferocious odds to teach me about the world and what was in it. A mother who, against similar odds, kept me steady as long as she could, kept me from becoming a human rocket-propelled grenade and launching myself into the atmosphere, where I’d explode into tiny pieces and rain down on the house and the yard while she watched from behind the screen door: another one gone—the last one, except . . .
    And my dad, who, no matter what, seemed always on the verge of smiling, like he was telling himself jokes, and if you were lucky—if you asked with the right words—he’d tell them to you too.
    Our days: Getting up before the sun every morning and going to bed halfway through Bonanza at night. 4-H. The bus to school, the bus back. A long way between us and everyone else. A lot of alone time. And a war on TV, brought to you by Nabisco.
    I didn’t know—because I never thought it through—that American boys had not been fighting in Vietnam since the beginning of time, or that no one had ever watched a war on TV before. I would watch and look for a face I recognized among the living, but then came the ones they were loading onto the helicopters: the ones that didn’t move no matter how long the camera stayed on them; the ones I maybe should have known better than to think about as hard as I did. But I didn’t know not to do that. You could tell under the tarps and the blankets that some of them had been blown clear apart.
    Boys my age were too young for the war, but older brothers had been going and coming back in shifts, quietly over the years, and no one said very much about it. When they came home, they went back out to work the ranches, and I’d see them on the street or at the feed store and try to match their faces to the ones I’d seen on television. There was a sameness to those faces—something I was too young to identify, but it was etched there, and no one else had it.
    I was thirteen when they let us know they couldn’t find Mick. When the letter came in the mail, my mother wandered around the house for weeks carrying it and talking to herself, saying pretty much the same thing over and over. For a long time, among all the other voices, hers was the one I heard most distinctly, at the most random times, saying, “I thought they were supposed to come and tell you in person.”
    It was as if our house were a birdcage someone had thrown a sheet over and forgotten, in the morning—every morning—to take off. I don’t remember any talking, let alone laughing, or making anyone feel better about anything, though I know there must have been trying. The quiet was blinding and deafening. Even the barn cats stopped freaking out when anyone came close. They perched in the windows at the top of the barn and watched us come and go, as though they knew those were our final days, and anytime now we’d pack up and leave. But I was the only one who did.
    I made it through school, barely, knowing that once it was over, I’d be gone. I left my parents in a parking lot in Havre: my mom waving, some hidden force pulling her away from the bus steps; Dad awkward and incongruous with the baby’s carriage, in the background, where he liked to stay. I wanted to put my bag down and go back for another hug, tell him not to worry, I’d figure it out. Like he said. Mom had that distant look, as if she were the one leaving. And the baby, well. I couldn’t see him. Dad could have had a mess of those boney cats in that carriage. With their eyes closed, meowing and growling like they do. Bye kittens. Good night moon.
    In Missoula, I got my job and rented a