For the next seven years, I was to experience something approaching normalcy in my life. I was far too warped by then to appreciate it, but it was a welcome respite all the same. The year was 1960 and I had just finished the fifth grade (in five different schools), and my mother had met and married her third husband. After their honeymoon, we moved to Denver, Colorado, which is where I was to live for the most part of the next 20 years.

Bill was born and raised in Oklahoma. He was a big man, heavyset but not fat, and never wore a shirt unless he was in a public place or at work. He had blonde hair all over his chest and stomach and wore his pants (always Levi's) a little too low (before it was popular), and he had the meanest expression on his face all the time, and a scar above his right eyebrow. He worked hard for a living, even when he was ill. I don't remember him ever calling into work sick. He took care of us as best he could, which was good enough, and I liked him.

Bill was younger than my mother and had never been married while my mother had been married twice and already had five children. By the time he and my mother were divorced he was supporting seven children in all, and he was barely 30 years old. He named his oldest son Sam - not Samuel, just Sam - and the younger one Joel (my mother's doing, or it would have been just Joe). I have to admire that kind of simplicity. Oddly enough, a Sam that's just a Sam or a Joe that's just a Joe is fairly uncommon.

The one and only time he spanked us kids (and Lord knows we deserved it more than that), he sat out on the front porch afterwards and cried. When I later heard about this, it shocked me - not that he had cried, but that he cared. From then on we started calling him "dad", as that he was. I later learned from my mother that his own father used to beat him with barbed wire, and that he had left home at the age of 13 and been on his own ever since. I can see why.

Bill died of a heart attack when he was 45. I can count on one hand the number of times in my adult life that I've cried, and one of them was when Bill died. As irrational as it is, I was mad at him for dying. Ordinarily my reasoning process would have circumvented the pain I was feeling, channeled it into a different energy, but this time the numb spot I've always maintained firmly in place when it comes to personal loss was breached enough to hurt.

Tom was my mother's fourth husband. Tom was a young man, tall and powerfully built, and his face would turn as red as an apple when he got angry. He was probably a good ten years younger than my mother when they married. I didn't know much about Tom, but I knew that he was physically abusive to my mother. My younger brother, who was still living at home then, hated him intensely.

I met him only once, and that was during a time in my life when I had started thinking, a little more than usual, that something was wrong with me. People who have nothing wrong them don't ask themselves "what's wrong with me" all day long. So I went to see my mother and to get her advice. I may have been crazy but I was at least going to be pragmatic about it. I told her I was thinking of committing myself to Fort Logan Mental Health Center; let the doctors figure it out.

The objectivity I was hoping for was all but lost when I mentioned Fort Logan, as this upset her a great deal and she started crying. She told Tom what I had said, and from the look on his face and the color that had suddenly flashed into it, I knew at once that it was time for me to leave. I apologized to them for causing any trouble and then left before things degenerated into what I then suspected would have been an unpleasant scene involving the local police. It occurred to me that I wasn't the only nut in that house.

Three months later, Tom put the barrel of a .22 caliber pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. After severing one of his optic nerves and boring a hole in his brain that extended to the rear of his cranial cavity, the bullet stopped. Incredulously, it didn't kill him. It would have been better for him if it had. One side of his head is caved in (or scooped out) and he is completely blind and confined to a wheel chair, a vegetable, cared for by his aging parents. My brother, for reasons of his own, and which I understood, kept the bullet.

George, my mother's fifth husband, is an educated, well-traveled man, duty-bound, level-headed and stable in every sense, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude, for many things, and to whom my mother remains married to this day. According to them, this is simply because they are both too old now to go out partying and raising hell like they did when they were younger. They are both in their 70's.

I have no memory of my father, no personal knowledge of the events surrounding his death. I’ve always had to rely on the memory of these events as they exist in the minds of those who know something about them. And finding that my own memory tends to enhance or altogether re-invent history, conforming it to my own image of what it should have been, often times re-casting myself in a more favorable light, I remind myself, that indeed this could be as much a fairy tale as ever there was one. So, bearing these things in mind, I now set down the following details regarding my father's death, which is euphemistically referred to in my family as a hunting accident.

The story goes that my father, Sanford, and two of his brothers, Bill and George, packed their gear and their guns and drove up into the mountains near Flagstaff, Arizona to find a hunting camp, and having accomplished this, went into town for a few beers. After drinking awhile, an argument erupted between Bill and George over a woman, whose name is Lillian. Evidently they were still engaged in this argument when they left the bar and headed back to their campsite. Nothing was resolved on the drive back, and the fighting over Lillian continued and just got worse.

Sometime after arriving back at their camp, George, provoked by his own unchecked passion and the debilitating effect of alcohol on his self-control, picked up his hunting rifle and aimed it at his brother Bill and threatened to kill him. My father, whose obligatory role in the situation up to this point had been that of peacekeeper, now allegedly tries to wrest the loaded rifle from his angry younger brother's hands, and in the ensuing struggle, the gun discharges into his stomach.

A very stupid thing to do. Too stupid, I have always thought. My father had had no part in the argument, had been in the military, was trained in armed combat, had grown up around guns and had used them all of his life; he knew all of the dos and don'ts of handling firearms. And yet, suddenly, when confronted with a man who is pointing a hunting rifle at one of his own brothers, about to commit familial murder, he is so bereft of all knowledge, training, experience and expertise, that he grabs the barrel of the gun and jerks it toward his own gut in an attempt to disarm the man.

And perhaps it is true. Perhaps my father went temporarily insane, much like George had. Or maybe he acted on a whim and decided to commit suicide that day. While I've never been happy with this explanation of events, no one has ever felt comfortable talking about it with me, and whenever people get uncomfortable I never feel comfortable pressing them. So I don't press them and I don't have any answers. What's the difference, I ask myself? I suppose I could look up Uncle Bill before one of us dies, or order transcripts of the trial; I dont know if I'm prepared for that, though. Perhaps, in the end, the fiction is easier to live with. Perhaps my relatives have acted rightly in being so evasive.

The death certificate shows the cause of death was loss of blood due to a gunshot wound in the abdomen; in other words, he bled to death. One of my relatives felt compelled to tell me that my father might have lived had the ambulance not lost its way trying to find the hunting camp, delaying the medical attention he needed if he was to survive. I had to ask. He was buried in Casa Grande, Arizona, my birthplace. He was 25 years old.

I visited my father's grave once, when I was in my late teens. In the ground was a small, rectangular plaque with his name inscribed on it, along with the date of his birth and that of his death. I felt nothing stir inside me. I thought I should at least feel something, but I didn’t. And then I thought I should at least feel something about not feeling something, but I didn’t, really. I've never been back.

George never fully recovered from the incident. The trial was an especially brutal one. I think, too, that his marriage to my mother only aggravated things for him, given the continual presence of my younger sister and I. One night, in Odessa, Texas, which is where we were living then, he suffered from a mental collapse. He had suddenly started accusing my mother of paying people to drive up and down the street just to keep him awake. A few days after that, I asked my mother what had happened to him, as I still hadn't been told anything. She started crying and told me that he was gone and wouldn't be coming home anymore. I was 10 years old. Mostly one institution or another took care of George for the rest of his life. He died several years ago.

Bill married Lillian. They are still married and live in California. They have two grown sons. Bill is probably the only person alive who knows what really happened the day my father was killed. He may have told his older brother Willard, but Willard was on Corrigidor in WWII, where he was in hand-to-hand combat for over 30 days armed only with a bayonet. He might tell me anything. Lillian came home from work one day and found him perched, stark naked, over the kitchen sink, wherein he had defecated. He was smiling at her. Lillian has never allowed him back in their house. On Willard's better days, Bill visits him in his sparsely furnished apartment and they drink beer together. I could swear, when I visited them, that Uncle Bill was never happier than when he was drinking beer with Uncle Willard.