Dad still spoke with the confidence of a man who had been alive forever, as though he shook hands with Jesus on his way to the cross. When I read my history texts at school, it was still sometimes Dad I imagined signing the Declaration of Independence. It was Dad, fighting in the Civil War. Dad claimed he was born in the wrong century. I could have been a Spanish fisherman, he said once. Or a cowboy. I would have been a great cowboy.
