An odd slant of light through the window, dust misting down, breaking the darkness of the dingy room. The old man sat in the shadows, tentative, trying to start a conversation after two years … but finding it difficult to pick up again as if nothing had happened. Woody held back too, and they circled each other cautiously like fighters at the beginning of a bout, looking for an opening. Luckily there was a knock at the door—a customer—and Woody was alone for a moment, free to look around and get his bearings.

There were two small rooms. The front one, where they’d been standing, was an “office” with two battered desks and not much else. Then a soiled, greasy curtain leading to the back room, where the old man lived. There was a double bed and a dresser in the back room, and his clothes hung from hooks along the thin pine walls. Woody went slowly to the dresser—it was covered with little notes and scraps of paper—and opened the top drawer: there was a .25-caliber automatic pistol and bullets resting on a sheaf of correspondence school courses. Woody felt a warm rush of recognition, and picked out one of the Jimmy DeForrest boxing lessons.

“Did you ever finish that boxing course I sent you?” Charley asked, returning to the room and sitting on the bed.

“No,” Woody answered, embarrassed. “Just never did get the hang of it, I guess.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Charley said, lighting a cigarette. “It doesn’t matter one bit. You can learn something else. Whatever you pick out to do, I’ll read a book on it and be your trainer.”

Charley asked about Okemah, about politics and his old friends there. Woody mentioned the Moores and some of the others, but didn’t say much about himself and said nothing at all about his mother. After the Moores had left for Arizona, Woody stayed around town for a while and then decided to get out and see the world. He headed south toward the Gulf of Mexico, playing his French harp and hitching rides, hoping to find the Mosiers, friends from his gang-house days, who’d moved to a farm down around there. He’d considered hopping a freight at first, but shelved that idea after an Okemah friend, Miles Reynolds, lost a leg when he fell between two boxcars (for the rest of his life, Woody only used the trains as a last resort: they were too dangerous and uncomfortable). Still, he did spend a lot of time in the hobo camps at the edge of railroad yards on his way south. Invariably, they’d have a fire going and a stew bubbling, and wouldn’t be averse to sharing it. More often than not, the hoboes were simply migratory farm workers moving on to the next job. An estimated 200,000 of them followed the wheat harvest north across the plains each summer, and thousands of others were fruit pickers, cowboys, and boomers. It was a pretty dreary life, but they developed an elaborate mythology and customs to make it more palatable. They took names like Denver Fly and Mobile Mac, Poison Face Tim and Dick the Stabber. They told long, improbable tales around the campfire—“ghost stories,” they were called—about legendary hoboes, good towns and bad, and railroad bulls like East Texas Red who took a special delight in making their lives miserable. They made up songs about life on the bum: some dripping with overripe romanticism, but others with a rough honesty that cut through the myths … and Woody soaked it all in.

He spent the early part of the summer of 1929 on the road, nibbling at the edge of hobo culture, but never really becoming part of it. He passed through Houston, reached the Gulf, and eventually found the Mosiers, who were happy to see him: they needed all the help they could get on the farm. But hoeing figs wasn’t exactly Woody’s style—manual labor never was—and he soon headed back north to Okemah. When he arrived home, there was a letter from his father waiting. Charley wanted him to come to Texas and help run a rooming house in the oil-boom town of Pampa.

Actually, Charley had been rather charitable in calling it a rooming house. It was a long, rickety two-story building made of cheap pine and corrugated tin slapped together—part of a tumbledown, sleazy block of fleabag hotels, ptomaine cafés, and speakeasies. On the first floor, there was a long room with rows of cots stretching out behind the office where Charley lived. The beds were occupied in eight-hour shifts by oil-field workers who paid a quarter for the privilege. They called it a “cot house,” but with the young women who lived and worked in private rooms upstairs, that wasn’t an entirely accurate description either. On warm nights the women would sit out on second-floor porches all along the street soliciting customers, and the respectable people in town called the area “Little Juarez.” Charley’s job was to collect the quarters from the oil-field boys, the weekly rent from the women (who handled their other finances independently), and make sure the place didn’t become so disgusting as to force the patrons elsewhere. It wasn’t exactly dignified labor, but the family was happy to see Charley taking a step back into the world again.

For a long time after they lowered him from the train, Charley had seemed more dead than alive. He’d lie in bed all day, flat on his back and quiet, smoking cigarettes. Occasionally he’d turn on his side with a great deal of pain and effort, and read a book. Mary Jo and George regularly harvested sheep pills from the pasture to be made into poultices for his open wound. Sometimes they would sit by his bed and ask questions. “How’d you get burned, Papa?” Mary Jo would ask, and Charley would say that some oil had spilled on him when he’d been working on a car and it exploded when he lit a cigarette. “What happened to Mama?” George would ask, and Charley would explain that she’d been bitten by a mad dog and had to be taken to the hospital. He rarely talked about what really had happened, not even with his sister Maude, but often they’d hear him sobbing alone in his room.

Maude refused to indulge his sadness. She was a tiny, eternally cheerful woman with a scratchy voice who insisted on being called “Skinny Granny” by all the children. She was married to a gaunt farmer named Robert Boydstun, who was as quiet as she was gregarious, and completely tolerant of her penchant for orchestrating family mob scenes. Maude and Robert had two daughters, Allene and Geneva, but there always seemed to be a half dozen other children running around the house, to say nothing of the assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins. By some curious telepathy, the entire Guthrie clan had decided to converge on the panhandle simultaneously, and half of them usually could be found at the Boydstun farm. Even Jerry P. himself had left Oklahoma to spend his last few years with several of his children in Amarillo.

The Boydstun farmhouse was a speck of life in the vast emptiness of blue sky, quivering wheat, and rolling grassland that stretched for hundreds and hundreds of miles in all directions. It was a small house with large rooms, especially the kitchen, which had broad plank floors that Maude scrubbed with lye water each day. The furniture was threadbare and ordinary except for an old pump organ, but there was an incredible abundance of food—a vegetable garden, a meat locker, a basement filled with preserves in glass fruit jars, a barn full of milk cows, and a wood-burning stove that always seemed to be a confusion of steaming pots and kettles. Maude was known to cook corn bread and beans for entire threshing crews during harvest season … and even on a slow day, there were nearly a dozen Guthries of all ages, sizes, and dispositions ready to hunker down at the long kitchen table when Maude dished out her specialties in a constant stream of jabber.

By the time Charley arrived at the Boydstuns, one of the regulars at Maude’s table was his youngest brother (half brother, actually, since they had different mothers), Jeff Davis Guthrie. Jeff was a large, windy man with pale red hair and blue eyes; a garage mechanic in the town of Panhandle, but bubbling over with extravagant plans for the future. He combined Jerry P. Guthrie’s passion for get-rich-quick schemes with Charley’s devotion to self-improvement and, as a result, enrolled in some pretty exotic correspondence courses. He learned fingerprinting by mail, and also was a graduate of Dr. Tarbell’s Chicago school of magic. The fingerprint diploma was immediately parlayed into a job on the Pampa police force, but Jeff had no real ambitions in law enforcement. His dream was to get into show business, mixing magic with music. His father had taught him the Guthrie family art of fiddle playing and it was generally acknowledged that Jeff was, hands down, the finest country fiddler in the panhandle. In fact, he’d won several contests to prove it. And after years of practice, he wasn’t half bad at magic either.

It usually didn’t take much prodding to get Jeff up and fiddling after dinner. Often he’d be accompanied on the accordion by Maude’s oldest daughter, Allene, who had dreams of show business herself. She was an attractive girl who enjoyed dressing up and...