PRAIRIE FIRE.(Brandenn Bremmer)

Last May, Patti and Martin Bremmer promised each other that they would get through the second Sunday of the month without mentioning that it was Mother's Day. Brandenn, their son, had committed suicide in March, at the age of fourteen, and Patti was intent on treating the day like any other. To the Bremmers, who live on a farm in western Nebraska, in the village of Venango (population a hundred and sixty-five), and who have earned money over the years by raising organic grain and by breeding dogs, this meant getting up at five-thirty to feed the animals and pitch tumbleweed--the very chores, they could not help but be reminded, that Brandenn used to do.

"We're having a real hard time right now, because we didn't have any routines that didn't involve Brandenn," Martin said. It was a little before noon, and they were sitting down to eat. Their dining room has lavender walls and a large picture window overlooking the front porch. In the distance, they could see a cluster of outbuildings on their property: an old horse barn, a bunkhouse, a washhouse (where Martin's ancestors made soap and did their laundry), a kennel building, and a quonset hut they had long ago converted into a storage shed for grain and tractors. Patti had prepared a freshly killed chicken, baked potatoes, and a salad with redorange Dorothy Lynch dressing. For dessert, there was a store-bought cherry pie. With Brandenn gone, she didn't have the energy for baking.

Their son had killed himself with a single shot to the head from a .22calibre rifle. It was his own varmint gun, which he'd been using on intrusive skunks since he was ten years old. He had been shooting since he was six, an early age at which to become acquainted with a firearm, but almost from the time of his birth the Bremmers had known that he was exceptionally precocious. "He was born an adult, basically," Patti said. "He chose when he would wean himself. I wanted to nurse for a full year, but at eleven months he crawled into the kitchen and motioned for a cup." Though Brandenn didn't talk until fifteen months, Patti said, "he started right off speaking in complete sentences." He potty-trained himself at eighteen months and memorized an entire book of "Mother Goose" nursery rhymes when he was two and a half. At the age of four, he drove a tractor that had a hand-controlled throttle and gearshift, and once, when he was eight, he sat on his father's lap and drove the family car home from town.

Brandenn was known as a child prodigy by almost everybody in this part of Nebraska. When he was a little boy, his I.Q. was scored at 178, and his parents decided to make sure that he was adequately engaged and challenged. They homeschooled him, and when he was six years old they enrolled him in high school through a distance-learning course at the University of Nebraska. He was ten when he finished, in 2001, the youngest graduate in the history of the program.

"We never pushed him," said Patti, whose own experience with higher education, like her husband's, went only as far as some commuter-college credits. "All of his motivation came from within. We never could explain why it was, but one day when he was nine and a half he just decided to finish up, and we didn't want to stand in his way. So he did the last two years' worth of classes in seven months, going at it twelve hours a day, six days a week."