Yeah so here's another thing sounds crazy. I'm maybe 20 minutes full of that Kraft mac 'n cheese Emma always made with whole milk, whole butter, and every whole bit of love she could summon from whatever small place in her still felt it. Love, I'm talking about. This was how she showed it. In her cooking and housekeeping. Excellent at both. Love, not so much. 

And Earl? Well, the first sentence in that frontpage story about the jail annex going in across the street, it used an acronym he'd never seen before—NIMBY—but before all that THE LEGEND BRUCE SHIELDS HIMSELF photographed him (!!), my grandpa Earl I'm talking about here (!!), as he leaned against that barbed wire fence he'd built back in the 70's to pasture other peoples' animals (??). Couple cows, most the time, was all there was space for.

Emma and Earl shared the same fact and fate. Fathers were shepherds. Literal ones. Or had spent a good amount of their lives trying to be.

Shepherds. Right, right. 

Shepherds.

Right.

And okay here's the story I'm trying to tell you, but I have to keep telling other stories in order to get to the place to tell you the one I really wanted to tell you.

Which is exactly the way stories are: they aren't completely true any more than they are either complete OR true, if you catch my drift.

Another way of saying this: when you can answer an honest question any way you want, why would you ever bother with the truth?

Look, I'm working on some history project and I'm in 6th grade and it's a Friday night and I'm at 119 Clinton Dr and I've got my fat spiral notebook with a blue Bic pen mangled into its spine and I'm laying on that rusty-orangey sliding-reclining thing Earl always fell asleep in no later than 7:30 on Friday nights, right after The Dukes of Hazzard; he'd yawn, stretch his big arms straight out in front of him, and nearly fall off that crazy orange recliner, an electric vibrating thing Emma'd ordered for him off the TV while he was out driving truck for Ida-Cal or whatever it was called then; just like the big Harley in the garage, some sort of spite gift.

And what Emma lays on me that night is a big old fat lie.

Or what Emma lays on me is exactly and precisely what happened. And neither can be proven.

And neither can be disproven.

Because what Emma says, it starts with me asking an honest question, asking Emma what she remembered about being from Tennessee even though she was born in Idaho just like me, because that was the only way I could wrap my head around the point of learning history in the first place. I'd already learned about Idaho history, right? That was like the 4th grade. The 5th grade it was some sort of world history because I gave a big fat presentation on Old King Tut and had like all the books in the library on it checked out, all their due dates matching, all the same and in the same watery black ink on the miniature DATE DUE spreadsheets glued into every single one of them.

Because what Emma says, it's her answering a question I asked about what happened to her own mom who'd taken the long train ride out from Tennessee that we were pretending for my project was really a covered wagon ride that took months instead of days; all these decades later, it's still hard to understand how it must have felt when a single train came to take you away to some place close enough for you to get to and different enough to remind you that the whole world never is and never could be all about you.

Because what Emma says, it's her saying that what happened to her mom was a murder committed by one of her siblings' boyfriends who had been at the house when he wasn't supposed to be and then reappeared the next time at the door, late late at night when only an adult would answer, and the next time the boyfriend was at the door he was there with a revolver and but so when Clora opened that door…

Right. Right.

But what Emma says, it can't be proven any more than it can be unproven. I know because I tried. A headline like MOTHER OF 14 SHOOTS SELF AT HOME in the pre-Bruce Shields days of The Times-News, January 1, 1935, buried all the way at the bottom of Page 2, both helps and hurts in the same brutal measures.

And after I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Blaine County Sheriff's Department nearly a hundred years later to see what if anything the investigation into her death showed, the answer came back pretty clear that Clora really did die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound from the single shot of a revolver, 9:30 am on New Year's Eve, 1934, all the way out there on Priest River Road in Picabo.

And golly what a difference a single day makes. Let alone a single year.

Clora's husband Ben was on scene and signed death certificates not only for his wife Clora but would also—within the next few months, anyway—that of his mother as well; in 1936 he would do it again when his brother Chester died from pneumonia, same as Mom; within the next 10 years he'd do it at least one more time, too, for his son and namesake Ben Jr., aged 15, who died after swallowing a stomach full of gasoline on the family farm after his dad fetched himself a new wife, Lucille, who'd railed in just like everyone else in the entire family. Just like everyone else he'd ever known.

What Emma says, it can't be unproven neither. Especially not now. Not with Emma long gone and Clora and Ben Jr. and Lucille and Earl and all them. Weight of history, guess you'd call it, a deep-deep unease. Same unease we all get when there's something you can completely feel but just can't ever see or hear or taste. Definitely not smell. Most definitely can't smell it, that weight.

Look, weight has no smell. Weight is almost entirely and unfortunately feel. Most of the problem quite honestly is right there.

Direct opposite corner, Page 2, there's an ad for the Twin Falls Bank & Trust. It's a thank you to the fledgling community for hosting the bank in the first place and existing long enough for the bank to do the same.

It's also a sobering reminder that there are entire families that wake up to incredible new realities, every single day, realities so beyond their control it's beyond criminal. That morning, New Years Eve 1934, next day's news never ever mattered; sure as hell didn't matter a picosecond past Ben signing Clora's death certificate and burying her not even 70 hours after she took her last big breath in the kitchen and squeezed the trigger in front of everyone.

Look, this isn't some stupid episode of some murder porn TV show or something. This is my actual family I'm talking about here. Which of course means I'm talking about myself again as usual. Audiences of ones and zeroes are homeostatic to me, though. Which is only one way to say it.

And but so here's another: It's impossible to conclude no crime was ever committed in this rough history that's at least 4 generations old now and poised to just keep right on scraping by.

And yet another: None of them ended up owning and operating sheep ranches. Not a single one.

Maybe that's simply because of all the stories Emma and Earl told me about the ranching life neither of them could inherit, let alone sustain, the one story they always refused to tell was neither of them were ever any good at protecting their own flocks.

The one story mattered most.