When my grandfather returned to Arkansas -- which he had left as an eight-year-old, stowed away in a wagon in 1878, mixed in with the nine children of a doctor who was being run out of town, the town Alma, near Fort Smith; the doctor didn’t know my grandfather was in the wagon, he called come on and the children came on and he said up, mules, and the mules walked up and the children tumbled into the back of the wagon and there were ten instead of nine, under quilts, on top of trunks, crouching behind crates. By the time the doctor stopped it was too late to take my grandfather back and besides he was being run out of town the doctor was and besides my grandfather had a hard and stubborn streak, even as an eight-year-old, even then he could be as hard and determined as a mule and when the doctor said you going back, come on, we gonna find someone to take you back, I can’t have kidnapping on my hands, been in it already for helping out unmarried girls, I can’t have this, come on you, what is your name, you, Jonah, you going back, my grandfather said no, maybe didn’t even say it, just shook that head, that head that was already an old man’s head, and didn’t even say no, just didn’t go, and went on with them to West Texas and everybody back in Arkansas took him for dead finally, after a few days. No one had seen him go with the doctor, hadn’t even seen him playing with those children, those children who perhaps no one else was allowed to play with because of the shame on the doctor and my people were not from Alma, so didn’t know, but from the country nearby, didn’t know anyone and kept to themselves. Their mother had been a baby on the trail of tears and was mean as a striped snake because of that or just because of being mean. They went back to their lives and mourned his empty place at the table or just the fact that someone else now had to do the milking and they thought they would never see him again and they didn’t see him again for twenty years -- his brother had married a widow and my grandfather walked up the hill to the house for the first time in twenty years and said, I believe I’ll take that little one there, and that was the widow’s daughter, my grandmother, who was fourteen. And that is the story, how it is that my grandfather is also my great-uncle and how it is possible that I am my own cousin, once or twice removed. When I tell the story long, I have to make parts of it up. I can’t always say for sure who said what or what it was exactly that was said and I have had to fill in spaces because it was long ago and most everybody who even ever heard of it firsthand was dead or very old before I was born.