I had no idea where we were going, and mostly I didn’t care. Anthony was about my age. His chest stood out with muscle from years of farm work. He was a strange mixture of calm and storm. In fact, all of them were. It was an odd fact that though they lived in the middle of nowhere, with utter silence around them as thick as mittens, they all seemed to be somehow overstimulated. The scene in the kitchen had been pandemonium. It had felt like some kind of riot. I was relieved to be in the car, with only Anthony’s occasional comments interrupting the drum of the rain. We went through a little town and pulled up by a church.

We got out and Anthony led me around back to a graveyard. The rain was falling at a good rate, but he seemed not to notice. He had on some kind of threadbare field jacket. I followed him until he stopped at a substantial forbidding Victorian tombstone that looked like the door to rot and doom. It was engraved with my name: SHANLEY. I felt the letters like a verdict I would not survive. This was my grandparents’ resting place.

He invited me to kneel down in the rain and pray, and did so himself. On my own, this would not have been my first instinct. We knelt side by side, on black gravel, praying before a black stone that looked strangely like the slab in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” I don’t know what I prayed for or to. It may have been for an umbrella. I had never met my grandparents, so I had no image or emotional connection to draw on. But kneeling there in the rain, I felt a bond with something dreadful and grand, and I had this thought: These are my people.

OVER the course of days, I asked for stories about my grandparents. You would think that when dealing with people who talked this much, getting information would be easy, but no. When the subject of my grandparents came up, a sudden circumspection would overcome the source. Tony would look vague. My father would become reticent. My cousins would claim to know nothing. Even my Aunt Mary, who talked like Proust wrote (that is, endlessly), even Mary had little to say.

There was a reason. It seems my grandparents had been, at the very least, scary. My grandfather had gotten along with no one in his family except my father. Even the animals would run away from him. When he wanted the horse, he would have to hide in the house while one of his sons fetched the animal, because if the horse saw my grandfather, the horse would be gone. My grandmother was obese and quarrelsome. My grandfather constructed barns and furniture, and then my grandmother would gleefully criticize his work until he exploded. They fought constantly, throwing stools, buckets and whatever else was free. When my grandmother was presented her first grandchild, my sister Kathleen, she tore the pretty bonnet the baby wore off her tiny head, declaring: “It’s too good for her!” When she died, they had to take the banister off the staircase from her bedroom. Such was her girth.

It took many conversations for me to gather this unfortunate news about my predecessors. My living family were solid people and thought it wrong to speak ill of the dead. This was the reason their talk became evasive and cloudy when the subject was raised. It was only over the course of many days that a portrait of the couple emerged. They had been poor, illiterate and vindictive. I wondered how such wonderful eccentric folk as I saw around me were able to spring from such impoverished ground. I never got an answer to that.

Life holds its miracles, good erupting from darkness chief among them.