A Reason to Write

We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

—Robert Lowell, "Epilogue"

My father died when I was five. His skull was fractured and his chest crushed when the truck in which he was a passenger ran off a rain-slick highway near Woodville, Texas, in the spring of 1942, only weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The truck was on its way to Houston, hauling roofing materials for a construction firm out of Dallas. Though it was charged out to my father, it was being driven at the time by his younger brother Horace, a fact I wouldn't learn until many years later. I wouldn't learn until many years later that on the day he died my father and mother were legally separated.

I have a copy of the death certificate. It was given to me by my former mother-in-law, a geneaology buff. On it my father's occupation is listed as truck driver. Under "Manner or Means" of death, the county clerk, or whoever did the recording, has typed in, with classic simplicity: "Truck wreck, hit tree." There you have it. Truck wreck, hit tree. It reminds me for all the world of Humbert Humbert's offhanded description of his mother's cause of death—"picnic, lightning"—in the opening chapter of Lolita. Same economy of syllables, similar associative leap. Let the reader do the work.

I dimly remember my father's funeral: a sea of somber faces floating about two feet over my head, wreaths and hard benches and heaped-up raw dirt. And, when I was eight or nine, I vividly recall stumbling upon a photograph of him in his casket, tucked away under some clothing in a chest of drawers. Other than that incident, with his death my father ceased being a factor in my life. My mother seldom talked about him. No one else in her family, my uncles and aunts and cousins, spoke of him. I was not encouraged to ask questions, so I never did.

What little I know about him, therefore, I have had to pick up in bits and pieces over the years. I know that he was of Irish extraction and that he came to Texas from Haleyville, Alabama, where his own father and mother had been lint-heads, which was the derisive term commonly applied to immigrant Irish textile-workers of the period. I have a faded photograph of him as a toddler perched on his father's knee. His father has a stricken look on his face, and a brow and hairline very much like my own. Others in the picture are his mother, a sister, his older brother James, and the younger one, Horace —who drove the truck that day (and apparently survived the crash). The sister's name was Princie, I think. The photograph (inscribed in pencil on the back "The Lacy Famley") was among a trunkful of Mother's belongings I inherited on her death in 1986. Until then I hadn't known of its existence.

In the trunk were also nearly a dozen photographs of the crumpled death truck, taken from all angles and attitudes, plus a number of shots of the sturdy, bark-skinned tree it had collided with. "Truck wreck, hit tree." In these shots various people can be seen pointing at, leaning against, or simply posing beside, either truck or tree. Who these people are, I don't know. But, since none of them is even faintly recognizable to me, I assume they are members of my father's family.

I grew up in the town of Marshall in east Texas, and for years there rested in the backs of closets in each of the little houses my mother and I lived a .22–caliber rifle and a molasses-colored guitar. These, I came to understand, had belonged to my father. The rifle was a model 1911 Winchester with a hexagonal barrel and a pump action. I fired it only once, when I was about eleven and one of Mother's brothers took me out into...