Pappy’s father was a living ghost, and his mother died when I was a young child. But from time to time, once a year or less frequently, the phone would ring, and his voice would grow folksier, maybe even slower, and he would chat with some relation for an hour, sometimes more. I tried to picture the faces of these phantom men and women who — incredibly, to me — knew who my father was, knew from what world he had come, but imagine as I would, I had no idea what lives they might lead. “Oh, that’s so-and-so from Detroit,” my mother might say, as if that could clarify matters for me. When Pappy hung up, whatever link had been temporarily forged with the past immediately receded from our home, and it was obvious the subject was closed. Sometimes, when I asked him how he learned to fight so well, he would get a gentle, wistful look in the eye and say that his uncles in Longview had shown him how — one of the few memories of home I’m aware of that could provoke a wholly uncomplicated smile.

I should have better understood how fundamental boxing must have been to my father’s sense of himself as a man in the world, as fundamental as books. After all, the evidence, like those books, was all around me. In that basement, we had a treadmill, stationary bikes and resistance machines, in addition to medicine balls, benches and weights. There was a professional-grade heavy bag and a speed bag in the garage, as well as full sets of headgear and scarlet-red Everlast gloves. Only looking back on it now do I realize that my father must have anticipated that he would train us. There would be intermittent lessons throughout my childhood and adolescence, moments of instruction snatched in the hallway or kitchen in which he patiently demonstrated to me where to place my feet, how to hunch my shoulders — chin down, protect the neck — and how to parry a blow. Pappy was unhittable, at least for me, whip-fast with the hands, torso and head well into his 60s. It was beautiful to witness what he could do. Is there anything more wonderful than watching your father soar? Perhaps, I imagine now, it is equaled only in the pleasure of imparting — really transmitting — something of yourself to your child.

One evening thrusts beyond the fog of childhood memory like a rocky peak glimpsed from an airplane window. Pappy takes the scrawny little boy who must have been me down into the basement, puts the gloves on the boy’s fists and then gloves his own hands. It is a hard space, with hard tiled floors cracking to expose the concrete underneath — the most undomesticated part of the house by far. The air is cool and damp on the hottest day of the year. It is an uncomfortable space, with nowhere to sit. You have to stand. You have to work out or remove a book from one of the shelves and read. When you descend into this space, you have to improve yourself in some demonstrable way.

“You ready?” he asks, his Texan accent suddenly ever so slightly more perceptible, or is this a trick of memory now?

“Yes,” the boy of my memory replies, and then his father punches him, with but a tiny fraction of his genuine strength but not in any way like a child of 8 or 9, either. He throws straight jabs, repeatedly, on the chin, which astonish the boy, who has never been hit like that before. Has never been hit at all.

“You need to know how to take a shot, how to feel it on your face,” Pappy explains lovingly but firmly, not jokingly, to the boy, whose mind has begun to race. “That way, once you’re used to it, it can’t ever take you by surprise.” Stunned but determined to own the respect of his indomitable father, the boy nods his assent, wishing he were anywhere else. He withstands several more blows to the jaw and chin, the imprecision of the bulky gloves allowing one to graze the nose, flooding his eyes with salty tears.

The plane of remembrance shoots ahead and the mountain peak recedes; all that’s left are the clouds. I have no recollection of how that session ended, whether on a good or bad or neutral note. I know that Pappy never tried to teach me that strange lesson again, and I didn’t ask him to. As it turned out, I never did muster the discipline to learn how to box. That is not to say I didn’t learn, through trial and error, how to endure a fight. Rather, it’s that everything I knew later to do with my hands, I managed from that day on my own, freestyle — exactly the kind of life-learning my father despises for being unreliable and inexact. But even as a very small child, I understood that Pappy was only showing me the sincerest kind of care. I understood that, for whatever the reason, my father could not relate, not fully, to anyone who hadn’t experienced a certain amount of discomfort in life. And yet, I have always suspected that Pappy didn’t like that lesson with the gloves any more than I did. Though he thought of it as an indispensable part of a masculinity that girds itself for so many inevitable threats, I don’t believe he really wanted me to ever have to rely on my hands.