Monday, October 16, 1893, is the kind of crisp red and gold New Brunswick morning you’ll sometimes miss by the time you’ve become my white-haired grandfather in California. Today, however, you’re ten years old and your parents are traveling for work, installing turbines at mills, and leaving your brother, Johnson, newly seventeen, in charge of the farm. This is not unusual. Maybe you’re up early milking cows or filling the wood box before school. When the Intercolonial Railway chugs along next to the river and through the farm, does it stoke a firebox dream to someday become a station master? In any case, for reasons that don’t survive, you will fire an old rifle at a target—probably a circle on a hay bale—and the gun will recoil so fiercely as to dislocate your young shoulder. Here’s what will not happen on this crisp fall morning: brother Johnson will not apply ice, wrap you in a blanket, leave you in the care of a fourteen-year-old sister, and then gallop three miles to the nearest town to fetch Dr. Lawson. Nor will he rush to the farm next door to get help from married sister eldest, almost twice his age. Rather, he will take the gun from you, saying he could fire it without the kick. Will he wield a braggy grin? Bounce the cartridge up and down in his hand? Here’s how it’s done, Pipsqueak. But when Johnson drives in the cartridge, it will explode, the bullet hitting the ground and the cap lodging in his neck, where his severed artery will project quick, rhythmic spurts of liquid, bright and red and tasting of metal. How is it, little one, that you’re the last born of ten, but find yourself profoundly alone right then? The married siblings live elsewhere; two brothers died before you were born and another, when you were just learning to write your name; your eleven-year-old sister is living with an elsewhere sister, and the fourteener sis is on the farm that morning, as nearby as the next room or as far away as the orchard. Whether you’re stunned into silence or a desperate howl, Johnson’s face will be turning eggshell; his breathing, shallow and rapid. The next few minutes will seem both hour and millisecond, while he speaks through eyes wide with terror. MotherMotherMother and Don’t let me die and You are the face of God.

What happens next will become family lore. When Johnson’s eyelashes begin to flutter, the fourteener sis will stay with him, trying to stanch the flow, while you will heave blood-stained brokenness onto a horse and fly down the unpaved road, adrenaline blocking the pain. Dr. Lawson, sister eldest, Dr. Lawson, sister eldest, Dr. Lawson.

Two days later, you will manage to come downstairs, but be too seriously wounded to join the procession for Johnson’s funeral. In your mind, you will see him as he looked every day of your life or as you last saw him on the kitchen floor or as his body rests in church, surrounded by candles and oil lamps, to be buried in darkness, tiny invertebrates slinking between sutured lips and gauze-packed nostrils. Right now, you cannot imagine yourself smiling ever again. Nor can you see ahead, to drinking and drinking and drinking, so much drinking that after your first wife dies young, you send your two oldest sons to stay with relatives until you’ve settled with your second wife, who reputedly chants “Lips that touch alcohol will never touch mine.” At ten years old, you’re highly unlikely to foresee a fourth and youngest son, born to you when you’re forty; you’re even more unlikely to picture his teenage arms later lugging your floppy, inebriated body home from your rail station office and upstairs to bed in your fifties; and most certainly, you don’t yet imagine yourself at ninety-five with my grandmother, in a California apartment, molasses-cookie scented like your home on the farm, but with electric lights, an indoor toilet, and a lap-length swimming pool maintained by a jaunty manager with sun-cooked skin. Nor can you yet picture said son (of teenage lugging fame) as a balding middle-aged dentist who shares a name with Johnson and visits weekday afternoons for a five-o’clock scotch and water, having successfully lobbied his mother—and her reputedly, touchless lips—to let you partake. And on this October morning in 1893, you will not yet see yourself in a red rocking chair, watching female roller derby on color television with a teenage granddaughter who asks questions—but not nearly enough of them—about your past.

So then, my future grandfather, let yourself linger just a little longer under the covers before this crisp New Brunswick dawn and listen for bee-buzz and birdsong, for horses whinnying and oxen bellowing, for hens clucking their egg tunes, for the train chugging alongside the river. Then brew a pot of something steamy and sweet, and watch the dying leaves glow red and gold, as they float to the ground. Savor the mundane milking of the cows, when both of your shoulders are still farm-boy strong, and you and your sister and Johnson might still be snorting a laugh, and he is still in charge, still confident he can teach you how to fire a gun without it kicking, without surprises, without anybody getting hurt.