I never really knew my father. He left my mother when I was a year old and died when I was ten. I remember meeting him only twice, both times at his family farm. A piebald horse stepped on me the first visit, and this man I knew only from photographs handed me an Indian hatchet in hopes of distracting me and stopping my crying. Funny the things you don't forget: a whole world of streaming shadows and all I see is a six- or seven-year-old boy alone on that farmhouse porch with an old tomahawk. His mother and father have gone back into the house together, and this boy's unwrapping the long rawhide tassels and feathers from the wooden handle. Somewhere along the line, the kid has gotten it into his head that the more you use a blade, the sharper it'll become.

And of all the possible moments in my father's life, the only one I have is this: the man returning to the screen door and shuffling back out onto the porch. (One of his legs had been fused straight after a car accident — a year to the day he left my mother, apparently — and I remember holding my breath in fear of that Frankenstein shoe of his, that thick, black, seven-inch sole all worn and crude and dragging behind him.) He stands there, my father, and asks if he can get that strip of leather back for a minute. He must have needed it for something, but I'd already made quick work of it, the rawhide chopped into a hundred pieces, which I hold up to him in the cup of my palm.

Just that wince on my father's face — part disbelief, part disgust, part exasperation — he doesn't say a word to me before turning and going back into the house. Our second visit doesn't go much better. The beagle puppy we brought with us fell between the bales of hay in the barn. My father had to break down the entire hayloft, bale by bale — it was an afternoon of work to rescue the whimpering dog. We never saw my father again after that.

What a testament to my mother that I never missed him. Not once do I recall wishing for my father, or hoping he'd come home, or even talking about him to anyone, except to excuse his absence. He died, I told people, in Vietnam, or in a car accident, or of a heart attack. In my entire childhood I don't recall ever feeling deprived by his absence.

The truth is I would borrow fathers. A guidance counselor, a teacher, a coach, there were men who seemed more like a father to me than my own father. These men were more father to me than my own father, who was nothing but a few snapshots in a picture album, an occasional holiday card (or, rather, the lack of a card), a newspaper clipping of his obituary in my mother's jewelry box:

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