he used to knock the brick chimney away from the side of the house the way a lumberjack might fell a tree. “I looked at my friend and said, ‘Well, I guess we’d better get out now,’” my mother remembers. “‘This house is headed to town!’” But things did not go so smoothly. Halfway in, the mover cut a corner too close, taking out a stop sign and a row of country mailboxes. A little farther on, the addition my uncle Harold had built on the house began to break away. (“The back bedroom fell off the dolly” is how my mother puts it.) By the time the movers succeeded in shoring up the house and dragging it the rest of the way to town, it was clear to everyone that they were far from being able to lower it onto the newly poured basement. And so the house sat in a field next to the VFW Hall while my mother, six months pregnant, waited anxiously, and my father considered what his next move would be.
What happened next was vintage Bill Rebein. Instead of cutting his losses and getting us into the house as soon as possible, he decided to escalate the matter even further, tearing the plaster out of the original part of the house and replacing it with Sheetrock. And since he was already committed to doing that, why not go ahead and change the floor plan of the house, too, adding an entryway off the back of the house and converting what had been an upstairs bedroom into a dining room? Briefed on these plans in the basement of her father-in-law’s house in the country, where half the family was staying while the other half was farmed out to various relatives and friends, my mother sighed exactly once and said, “I don’t care what you do so long as I’m back in my own house before the baby comes. Those are my terms. Take them or leave them.”
“Oh, we’ll be in long before that,” my father promised, his voice booming with confidence. “After all, it’s not like we’re tearing the whole thing down and starting from scratch, you know.”
All the while this was going on, a much bigger remodeling project, dubbed Urban Renewal, was taking place a few blocks away in downtown Dodge City. Front Street, arguably the most famous city block in all of the Old West, was being ripped out to make room for off-street parking and the widening of Chestnut Street, soon to be renamed Wyatt Earp Boulevard. However, before the wrecking ball arrived to perform this misguided task, all kinds of materials culled from the condemned buildings of Front Street went up for sale. Naturally, my father, a salvage man to his core, was there to pick through the offerings. Among the items he carried away from the auction was a pool table taken from a saloon, hundreds of square feet of suspended ceiling tiles, and a 4-by-8-foot glass door that had once served as the front entrance to the Nevins Hardware store. These and other salvaged materials he stored in an old granary at the farm while the house was lifted onto its new basement and the work of tearing out the old plaster commenced.
“You’d not believe the dirt that was in the walls of that house,” my father remembers, shaking his head. “We shoveled it straight out the front door to use as topsoil in the yard—that’s how much of it there was. You have to remember—that old house sat out there in the country, unprotected by trees or anything else, through the worst years of the Dust Bowl.”
After the new Sheetrock was in, the next step in the project was to finish out the new floor plan, including the new entry at the back of the house, where it was supposed we boys would do the bulk of our coming and going. Here my father was seized by an idea of such surpassing simplicity and brilliance he couldn’t believe no one had thought of it before. Why not use the big glass door that had once opened and closed on the patrons of Nevins Hardware as the house’s back door? With the door’s quiet, self-closing technology in place, there would be no more yelling at kids about slamming screens such as happened two hundred times a day at the farm. Instead, all you’d hear would be the quiet hiss of the door closing tightly on itself. Think of all the money you’d save on heating and cooling bills. And if you needed to look out the back of the house to see what the little devils were up to, all you had to do was walk to the glass door and look straight out. What could be easier or better than that?
While this work of my father’s dragged on from one week to the next, my mother’s pregnancy dragged on, too. It was her seventh pregnancy in a little under thirteen years of marriage, and with each one, the complications grew. The problem was her Rh-negative blood, which could lead to all kinds of potential problems when, as in this case, the baby’s blood was Rh-positive. By late May of that year, when she was thirty-four weeks along, the family doctor who delivered all of us boys was adamant that the time had come to induce labor and “get that baby out.”
“But we’re not in the new house yet,” my mother said. “Can’t we wait a little longer?”
“What’s a little longer?” the doctor asked, eyebrows raised doubtfully. “A couple of days? A week? Remember, this is Bill Rebein we’re talking about.”
Here my mother paused, biting her lower lip. “Maybe you’re right,” she said, laughing nervously. “Maybe it is time, after all.”
And so it happened that my little brother, Paul, was born while the great Move to Town was still under way. He spent a week in neonatal intensive care, then joined the rest of us in the basement of my grandparents’ farmhouse west of town. And still the work on the house dragged on—into its second and then its third month.
“We got very good at camping out down there,” my mother remembers. “Soup heated up on a Coleman stove, baths taken at the end of a garden hose. That’s just the way it was. Either you accepted it, or you risked going crazy. I had a little phrase I would repeat to myself, whenever some new delay or complication would arise. ‘And this, too, shall pass,’ I’d say. ‘And this, too, shall pass.’”
* * *
I was three years old when the Move to Town took place, and unlike my older brothers, who ranged in age from five to thirteen, I have no memory of the time when my family lived far from town in the corner of a gigantic wheat field, surrounded on all sides by mile upon mile of flat, windblown prairie. To me, that whole period is a series of strange, black-and-white photographs featuring skinny, shirtless farm kids riding 1950s-era bicycles or playing baseball in the corner of some dusty, God-forsaken pasture. When I appear at all in these photos, I am the babe in arms, the infant in swaddling clothes whose bald head barely sticks out above the top of his stroller. Nothing about the scene, from the crew cuts my brothers habitually sported to the fact that the pictures themselves were in black and white, resembled any part of my Technicolor childhood. Examining the two eras side by side in family photo albums was like comparing pictures of the Beatles circa 1964 to pictures of the band in its late-1960s incarnations. That same, perplexing leap forward obtained.
Pictures of the house taken during the early years in town show a rectangular structure, twenty feet across the front and forty-eight feet long, with green-and-white aluminum awnings over the windows and a small, sun-splashed front porch covered in indoor/outdoor carpeting the same color and texture as 1970s-era Astroturf. Aside from the strange back door and the fact that it sat in the middle of two wide lots—one of just two homes on that side of the street, while on the other side there were six homes crammed into an equal space—the house didn’t look all that different from other houses in the neighborhood. However, that would change soon enough.
Sometime during our first year in town, my brother Paul decided to ride his baby walker—one of those four-wheeled, legs-through-holes, baby runabouts that have since been banned worldwide—down an unfinished flight of stairs leading to an uncarpeted expanse of raw concrete. When he reached the bottom, the walker slammed forward, and Paul cracked his head on the concrete floor with what has always been described to me as “a sickening thud.” (This is how we discuss the event in my family, our sentences always beginning with Paul himself or else in the passive voice—The door was left open—so that all question of how this could have happened, or who could have left the door ajar, remain unasked.) In the aftermath of this terrible event, Paul was rushed to a small hospital in the middle of Dodge City and from there to a larger one three hours away in Wichita, where things got so bad for so long that my mother removed herself to the hospital chapel, where she remained on her knees, refusing to budge or even to talk, until news of a miracle was brought to her. Only Patricia Rebein and God Himself know what promises were made in that dark little chapel. However, they must have been sufficient, for against all odds, Paul pulled through with no