Eggs at Hardesty

I have been asked more than once to set down an account of the last drive Boyd Sill and I made together, that being the drive of eighty-seven head from Yule Linderman’s property south of Borger to a buyer named Fossett in Hardesty, Oklahoma, in the month of November 1893. I did not see the point of writing it down at the time as nothing happened on that drive that would interest a man who had not been there. There was no stampede. Nobody was killed. A steer broke out of a pen on the last night and walked a mile to stand next to Boyd in the dark, but even that does not amount to a story in the usual way people mean when they say story.

What I have come to understand is that the people asking me to write it down are not asking about the drive. They are asking about Boyd. And I cannot tell them about Boyd because I do not have the words for it, which is a peculiar thing for me to say, as I have been accused by many people including Boyd himself of having too many words for everything.

My name is Everett Teague. I was born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1837 and came west at nineteen years of age because I had read a book about it. That is the whole of my reason. People have credited me with ambition and a pioneering spirit and various other qualities that I did not possess. I read a book. It made the country sound large. I went to look at it. I have been looking at it for thirty-seven years and it has not gotten any smaller, though the fences have done what they could.

I met Boyd Sill in the spring of 1862 on a ranch outside of Fort Griffin where we were both employed to do the same work for the same wages under the same sun, and we have been riding together since. Thirty-one years is a long time to ride with a man. I could not tell you what Boyd thinks about any subject you might name — politics, religion, the proper way to shoe a horse, whether there is a God — because Boyd has not told me and I have not asked. What I can tell you is how he cinches a saddle, how he sits when the wind is from the north, how he holds his coffee cup with both hands on cold mornings and drinks from it with his eyes closed. I have learned these things the way a man learns the furniture of a room he has lived in a long time: not by studying it, but by walking past it in the dark and not bumping into it.

The trouble with the cow started on the first morning and it was the kind of trouble that does not belong in a written account but I will include it because it shows you something about the two of us.

We had made camp the night before on a flat stretch of caliche south of the Canadian River breaks, and the herd had settled in the way cattle settle — not happily, not unhappily, just standing there with the patience of animals that have no appointments to keep. There were eighty-seven of them. I know this because I counted them four times and got eighty-seven each time except the second, when I got eighty-eight, and Boyd pointed out that I had counted a cedar stump.

At dawn I rode out to push the leaders toward a dry creek bed that cut across our path. It was not much of a creek bed — three feet deep, ten feet wide, the banks crumbled to a sandy slope a child could walk down. The lead cow did not agree. She was a brindle heifer with a white blaze on her face and the temperament of a woman who has been told she is wrong and knows she is not. She stopped at the edge of the creek bed and looked down into it and decided that she would not go.

I explained the situation. I told her that the creek bed was dry, that the footing was sound, that eighty-six other cattle were waiting behind her, and that we had thirty miles to make before we reached a buyer in Hardesty who may or may not want to purchase her depending on his mood and the current price of beef, which had dropped again and would probably keep dropping until cattle ranching became a memory and we were all growing wheat. She was not moved. I told her about the weather, which was fine. I told her about the grass on the other side, which was no better than the grass on this side but she did not know that. I told her that life was full of crossings and that most of them turned out to be less trouble than they appeared from the edge.

Boyd was fifty yards back. He sat his horse and watched me talk to this cow. He did not say anything. He did not ride up to help. Boyd knew something I have spent fifty-six years failing to learn, which is that a cow will cross a dry creek bed when it decides to cross a dry creek bed and that talking to it is as useful as talking to the weather, or to Boyd.

After eight minutes by my pocket watch the heifer put one foot on the slope, then another, walked down into the creek bed, walked up the other side, and continued on as if the obstacle had never existed. The rest of the herd followed. I looked back at Boyd. He was rolling a cigarette.

“You could have helped,” I said.

“You had it,” he said.

That was the most he said until the second morning, when he told me he was leaving.

He said it while cinching his saddle. He did not look up. The words came out of him the way they always did, dry and even and placed in the air with no more emphasis than if he had said it was likely to rain.

“Nora wants me to come to Wichita. I told her I would.”

Nora was his sister. She had married a hardware man named Plimpton who had died in 1891 of something in his liver, and she had a house with a porch and a garden and she had been asking Boyd to come live in it for two years. Boyd had not answered her. I took his silence for refusal. It was not refusal. It was consideration. Boyd considered a thing the way a river considers a stone — slowly, around all sides, until the stone was smooth or the river found another way.

“When,” I said.

“After this drive.”

I had a great many things to say about Wichita. I had things to say about the quality of the beef there and the width of the streets and the particular species of boredom available to a man sitting on a porch in Kansas watching hardware customers come and go. I said one of them. I do not remember which one. It was a joke. I know it was a joke because Boyd almost smiled, the way he almost smiled, which was a movement of the skin around his eyes and nothing else.

The joke sat between us like a fence post driven into the wrong place. It was in the ground and it was not coming out and it was not where it should have been.

“All right,” I said.

Boyd finished cinching his saddle and mounted and rode out to the herd without another word and I stood there by the fire with a cup of coffee going cold in my hand and I thought about a man named Petrie who had drowned in the Canadian River in the spring of 1862, my first year working cattle. Petrie had gone into the water on a crossing and his horse had gone sideways and Petrie had come out of the saddle and the current had him. I was forty feet upstream. I had a rope on my saddle. I sat there and I calculated — the angle, the current, the distance, the odds that the rope would reach, the odds that it would not. I sat there and I calculated and by the time I was finished Petrie was gone, and the river closed over the place where he had been, and I had not thrown the rope.

I poured my coffee on the fire and packed the camp and rode after Boyd and the herd.

The fence was new. Three strands of barbed wire on cedar posts, running north-south across what had been open range for as long as I had known the country. It cut our path like a scar on a face you remembered as whole.

“That was not there in eighty-nine,” I said.

Boyd looked at the fence. He looked north along it and south along it. It went farther in both directions than it had any reason to go.

We followed it south for a mile and found a gate, and beside the gate a house, and beside the house a barn, and beside the barn a field of wheat stubble that stretched to the horizon and looked like the scalp of something enormous that had been shaved. A man came out of the house. He was wearing overalls and a cloth cap and he carried no gun. He looked at the cattle and his face did the thing a man’s face does when he encounters an animal he has not expected and is not sure he wants.

“Those your cattle?” he said.

“Those are Yule Linderman’s cattle,” I said. “We are delivering them to a man in Hardesty. We need to cross your property, if you will permit it. They are well-behaved cattle and will not disturb your wheat.”

The man looked at the cattle again. There were eighty-seven of them standing in the road and they were not well-behaved. One was eating his fence post. Another was lowing at his barn. The brindled steer with the broken horn — I will come to him later — was standing sideways in the road looking at the man with the kind of fixed interest that cattle direct at things they are considering charging.

“I don’t know about cattle,” the man said.

“That is evident,” I said. I did not say it unkindly. It was a fact, like the weather.

“They carry disease, is what I’ve heard.”

“Some do. These do not. They are Texas cattle and they have been inspected and I have a paper from Linderman that says so, though I cannot put my hand on it at this exact moment because it is in my saddlebag and my saddlebag is on my saddle and my saddle is on my horse and my horse is back there behind eighty-seven cattle that would like to cross your land.”

The man was looking past me now. He was looking at Boyd. Boyd had not said anything. Boyd was sitting his horse at the edge of the herd with his hat low and his hands on the saddle horn and his shoulders filling the sky behind him in the way his shoulders did, which was considerably. Boyd was not doing anything threatening. He was not doing anything at all. He was just there, the way a mountain is there, and the farmer was doing the arithmetic that men do when they encounter something that is larger than their objections.

“How long will it take them to cross?” the farmer said.

“An hour. Maybe less if they cooperate, which they may or may not.”

“All right then.”

He opened the gate. The cattle went through. It took forty minutes. The farmer watched from his porch and did not come closer. His wheat field survived. When the last cow was through he closed the gate and went back inside and that was the last I saw of him, a man in overalls and a cloth cap who had put a fence across country that had been open since God made it, and who was afraid of cows, and who was the future.

It was at the gate that we picked up the boy.

His name was Lyle Dunaway and he was nineteen years old and he was walking to Hardesty from Amarillo, which is a distance of about a hundred and ten miles, though he did not seem to know that when he set out. He was wearing Eastern clothes — a wool suit that had been good at some point and was now not good, and new boots that had raised blisters on both heels, and a hat that had never seen weather until this week, at which point it had seen a great deal of weather and responded poorly. He had a canvas bag over one shoulder containing, as he told us later, two shirts, a Bible, a straight razor, and a letter of introduction to a man in Hardesty whose name he could not pronounce and whose business he could not describe.

“I am looking for work,” he said. He said it the way a man says a thing he has practiced. “I can do most anything.”

“Can you ride a horse,” Boyd said.

“I have ridden a horse. Yes sir.”

“Can you ride that horse,” Boyd said, and pointed at the spare, a hammer-headed bay named Principle who had the disposition of a headache and who had thrown me twice in twelve years of my knowing him.

“I can ride any horse,” Lyle said, and the confidence in his voice was the saddest thing I had heard that week because it was the confidence of a man who did not know what he did not know, and I had been that man once, and I knew how the country corrected it.

Boyd put him on Principle. Principle humped his back and took two crow-hops and then settled, because Boyd was holding the bridle and Principle respected Boyd the way all animals and most people respected Boyd, which was completely and without discussion. Lyle sat the horse like a man sitting on a church pew — upright, formal, his weight in the wrong place. He would learn. Or he would not. The country did not care.

I recognized in Lyle what I had been at nineteen — a man who had absorbed the West through reading and conversation, who knew the vocabulary but not the grammar. He knew that cowboys drove cattle and slept on the ground and faced hardship with stoic determination. He did not know that the hardship was mostly boredom, and that the stoic determination was mostly habit, and that the ground was cold and hard and full of things that bit you. He had come west the way I had come west: because he had read a book. But I had come in 1856, when the country was still open and a man could learn it by living in it. Lyle had come in 1893, when the fences were up and the wheat was planted and a man could walk a hundred and ten miles and find nothing at the end of it but another man who was afraid of cows.

He was a tenderfoot arriving at a frontier that was already closed. I did not tell him this. It was not my place to take a man’s reason from him before the country had the chance to do it properly.

The storm came on the fourth night, which was the second night it should not have been if the drive had gone as planned, which it had not, because the fence and the negotiation and a lame horse on the third day had added time the way water adds to a creek — a little here, a little there, and suddenly you are swimming.

It came from the northwest, the way November storms come in the Panhandle — no warning, or rather all warning and no time. The sky went green at the horizon and the air went still and the cattle knew before we did. They bunched. Their heads came up. The brindled steer with the broken horn turned north and stood facing the storm like a man who has decided to have the argument rather than avoid it.

Then the wind hit and the rain came sideways.

I will not dress it up. A man who has not been in a Panhandle squall cannot imagine it and a man who has does not need me to describe it. The rain was cold and it came horizontal and it found every seam in your clothing and worked its way through. The cattle moved. They did not stampede — these were old Texas cattle, not spooky — but they drifted south with the wind and if you let them drift they would scatter into the breaks and it would take days to gather them. Boyd went to the north side of the herd. I went to the south. We held them.

Boyd worked his horse into the wind. His hat was gone — he did not reach for it, he let it go, and his hair was flat against his skull and the rain ran down his face and he did not wipe it. He rode the edge of the herd, turning back the leaders when they tried to break south, his horse moving under him with the short quick steps of an animal that knows its work. He used his voice, which was the only time I heard Boyd use his voice with volume — a low, steady sound, not a shout, more like the sound a river makes going over stones, constant and without variation, and the cattle responded to it the way cattle respond to things that are louder than their fear.

I worked the south side. The mud was ankle-deep on the horses and the rain was in my eyes and I could taste the grit of caliche in it, a taste like chalk and old bone. My hands were numb on the reins. The saddle leather was slick under me. I could see Boyd across the herd, a shape in the rain, shoulders wider than the night behind him, and I thought of the passage from a book I had read once about a man whose toughness was ingrained and deep, without cruelty, yet quick and hard, and I thought the man who wrote that had known a man like Boyd or had been lucky enough to imagine one.

Lyle was there. He had no business being there but he was. He was on Principle in the dark and the rain and he was doing what he could see Boyd and me doing, which was riding the edge and turning cattle, except he did not know how to turn cattle and Principle did not respect him and the result was a nineteen-year-old boy on a bad horse in a storm accomplishing nothing, but accomplishing it with his whole body, and I will say this for him: he did not quit. He rode that edge for three hours and he did not quit and he did not fall off and when it was over he was shaking so hard his teeth sounded like dice in a cup.

I took a blanket from my roll and put it around his shoulders. It was wet but it was wool and wool holds heat even when it is wet, which is something Lyle did not know and I did.

“You did all right,” I said.

I do not know why I said it. He had not done all right. He had done nothing useful. But he had been there, and in my experience the West does not ask more of a man than that he be there when the storm comes, even if he does not know what to do when he arrives.

It was during the storm that I saw Boyd’s shoulder. He reached for a rope on his saddle to throw a loop over a steer that was breaking west, and as he reached his whole body went wrong — a flinch, not large, the kind of thing you would miss if you had not been watching a man’s body for thirty-one years. His right shoulder dropped and his left came up and the rope throw was short by two feet and he gathered the rope and threw again and made the catch, and he did not mention it, and I did not mention it, because we did not mention things about our bodies any more than we mentioned things about our feelings. But I had seen it. And I knew it had been there for some time — weeks, maybe months — and that Boyd had been carrying it the way he carried everything, privately, without complaint, the way a pack mule carries a load it did not choose.

The brindled steer was the one with the broken horn. The left horn had been snapped off halfway, probably in a fence or a fight, and the stump had healed smooth and dark, and the right horn curved out full and sharp, so the animal looked like a thing drawn by a man who had been interrupted. He weighed about eleven hundred pounds. He had opinions about direction.

On the fifth day he separated from the herd and went east. Boyd went after him. Boyd brought him back. The steer waited an hour and went east again. Boyd brought him back again. This continued for the better part of two days.

I have watched men work cattle for thirty-seven years and I have seen every method and every temperament applied to the problem of making an animal go where it does not want to go. I have seen men curse and whip and rope and drag. I have seen men give up. I have seen one man in Abilene shoot a steer that would not load onto a rail car, which settled the matter but not in a way that made anyone money.

Boyd did none of these things. He followed the steer. When it went east, he went east. He did not hurry. He did not rope it. He did not shout. He put his horse between the steer and the direction it wanted to go, and he waited, and when the steer chose a new direction that was not the right direction, he did it again. He was patient the way the ground is patient — not because he had chosen patience but because he was made of it, the way the ground is made of dirt.

I watched this from the herd, where I was doing the work of two men because Boyd was occupied with an animal that was worth perhaps eighteen dollars. Lyle rode beside me and watched too. He did not ask what Boyd was doing. I think he understood, the way a man understands a thing he has seen in a painting — the composition if not the technique.

By the end of the second day the steer was walking with the herd. Not happily. Not willingly. But walking. Boyd rode behind it and said nothing and the steer went where the herd went and I do not know what passed between them but something had been settled.

I had been narrating Boyd’s contest with the steer in my head for two days, finding the jokes in it, shaping the observations, and somewhere on the second afternoon the jokes stopped. I was watching Boyd ride behind that steer in the late light, the dust coming up gold around them, his shoulders set and his bad arm held close to his body, and I was not finding anything funny. I was watching a man do what he was made to do, and I was watching it for the last time, and I shut up. I rode beside the herd and I shut up and I let the silence be what it was.

We came to Hardesty on the sixth day, which was three days later than we should have come, and the town was not what I remembered. I had been there in 1886 and it had been a cattle town then, with pens and loading chutes and a rail spur and the smell of stockyards that you could detect from two miles if the wind was right. The pens were gone. The loading chutes were gone. The rail spur was there but it was servicing wheat wagons. The smell was of cut grain and dust and the specific emptiness of a place that has changed its mind about what it is.

Fossett’s place was east of town on a section that had been good grass when I last saw it and was now plowed under. The house was the same — a two-story frame building with a porch that sagged in the middle — but the corrals were gone and in their place was a structure I did not immediately recognize. It was made of wood and was open on three sides and inside it was a machine.

“That is an automobile,” Lyle said. He said it the way a man says a thing he has read about in a magazine. He said it the way I would have said it.

It was, in fact, an automobile. Fossett came out of the house while we were looking at it and he told us about it with the enthusiasm of a man who has invested money in something and needs other people to agree that the investment was sound. It had been manufactured by a company in Ontario that made threshing machines and had recently begun making automobiles, of which they had produced no more than eight before going out of business when their factory caught fire. Fossett had purchased this one from a dealer in Kansas City who had purchased it from a man in St. Louis who had purchased it from the manufacturer, and at each stage of this journey the price had gone up and the machine’s ability to function had gone down.

“It will do twenty miles an hour on a flat road,” Fossett said.

“Will it,” I said.

“It has done twelve. On this road. For about forty yards.”

“That is not twenty.”

“The principle is sound. The execution requires refinement.”

The automobile sat in its shed and it was the sorriest thing I had seen since a dead mule in Tascosa in 1879. It had four wheels, which was the correct number for an automobile, and a seat, which was upholstered in a fabric that had begun to rot, and a steering mechanism that looked like something you would use to steer a boat if you did not like the boat. The engine was in the front, under a hood that did not close properly, and when Fossett opened the hood to show us the engine I saw a quantity of metal and oil and rust that reminded me of nothing so much as the inside of a clock that had been dropped down a well.

“Would you like to hear it run?” Fossett said.

“Very much,” I said.

He went to the front of the machine and took hold of a crank and turned it. Nothing happened. He turned it again. The engine made a sound like a horse coughing. He turned it a third time. The engine caught, ran for approximately four seconds, produced a quantity of blue smoke and a smell that I can only describe as the future arriving badly, and stopped. Fossett stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers and looked at the automobile with the expression of a man who loves a thing that does not love him back.

“She was running better yesterday,” he said.

“I believe you,” I said. I did not believe him.

The cattle pens were gone. Fossett had torn them down in September and used the lumber to build the automobile shed. He had invested in a threshing operation with two partners from Guymon and he was converting his ranch to wheat. He would take the cattle — he had agreed to take them, and Fossett was a man who honored his agreements — but he had no pens to hold them and no chutes to load them and the price he was prepared to pay was so low it barely covered the cost of the drive.

He told me the number. I stood in his yard and looked at the automobile that would not run and the wheat field that had been pasture and the shed built from the lumber of cattle pens, and I opened my mouth to say something — a joke, an observation, a calculation of the precise ratio of absurdity to loss — and nothing came out.

I had nothing to say. The words that had been my stock in trade for thirty-seven years were gone. I was standing in the future and the future did not need me to describe it. It was just there, chewing up grass and putting down wheat and buying machines that did not work from companies that no longer existed, and it did not require my commentary.

Boyd dismounted. He walked past me and stood in front of Fossett and he said the number he would accept for eighty-seven head of mixed cattle delivered to Hardesty, Oklahoma, on the sixth of November 1893. The number was higher than Fossett’s number and lower than what the cattle were worth, and Fossett looked at Boyd and Boyd looked at Fossett, and Boyd did not say anything else, because Boyd had said what there was to say and further words would only subtract from it.

Fossett met him halfway. It was done. I watched this and I understood something I had known for thirty-one years without putting words to it, which was that Boyd’s silence was not a limitation. It was a discipline. Boyd did not waste words because Boyd understood — had always understood, from the first day I met him at Fort Griffin when he was twenty-three and I was twenty-five and we were both too young to know anything except how to do the work — that most of the time words could not reach the thing they were aimed at, and the saying was just movement that made the sayer feel better about standing still.

We penned the cattle in a makeshift corral that Fossett and his two hired men built from fence rails and prayer. It would not hold them long. It did not need to. Fossett had a buyer coming from Woodward in two days with wagons, and if the corral held until then, it had done its job. The brindled steer went in last, and he went in because Boyd walked behind him and the steer had learned what I had learned, which was that Boyd’s patience was not a thing you could outlast.

Fossett paid us. Boyd took his share and put it in his vest pocket without counting it. I counted mine. It was not enough and it would have to be enough and the difference between those two things was the distance between 1862 and 1893.

Lyle Dunaway shook our hands. He had a handshake that was firmer than it needed to be, the handshake of a man who has been told that a firm handshake matters, which it does not, but I did not tell him that either.

“I thank you for the work,” Lyle said. “And for the horse. And the blanket.”

“You are welcome to the work,” I said. “The horse belongs to Linderman and will need to go back. The blanket is yours.”

He walked toward Hardesty with his canvas bag over his shoulder and his blistered feet and his letter of introduction to a man whose name he could not pronounce. He did not look back. He was nineteen years old and he was walking into a town that had stopped being what he had come to find, and he did not know that yet, and I did not tell him, because the country would tell him soon enough and the country was better at that kind of telling than I was.

I do not know what happened to Lyle Dunaway. He walked into Hardesty and I did not see him again. He may have found work. He may have gone back east. He may have learned the wheat business and made a fortune and bought an automobile that actually ran. He was the future, or he was nothing, and the story does not tell you which, because the story does not know.

We made camp a mile west of town, on a flat stretch of grass beside a cottonwood creek. Neither of us said we should make camp there. Neither of us said we were not ready to stop. Boyd built a fire and I made coffee and we sat on our saddles and drank it and did not talk, which was not unusual for Boyd and was very unusual for me.

The night was clear after the week of weather. Stars out, the kind of stars you get in November on the plains when the air has been washed clean and the sky goes so deep you can feel it pressing down. Coyotes on the south ridge, calling to each other or to nothing. The horses cropped grass. The fire cracked and settled. I could smell cedar smoke and cold dirt and the ghost of cattle that were a mile away but had been with us for six days and had left their smell on everything we owned.

I should have said something. This was the time to say something. Boyd was leaving in the morning — catching the train in Hardesty, riding to Wichita, sitting on his sister’s porch for the rest of his life. Thirty-one years of riding together and this was the night to say it, and I knew it, and I opened my mouth, and I told him about the farmer’s wheat field and how it had looked like a scalped head and wasn’t that something, and Boyd almost smiled, and the moment passed. That is what I do. The joke is good — my jokes are good, I have spent a lifetime making them good — and the joke fills the space where the real thing should go, and the real thing stays where it was, unsaid.

At some point past midnight I heard something at the edge of the firelight. I looked up. The brindled steer was there.

He had broken out of Fossett’s makeshift pen — which I could have predicted, as the pen was built from fence rails and prayer and the prayer had been insufficient — and he had walked a mile in the dark and he was standing at the edge of our camp, looking at Boyd. Not at me. Not at the fire. At Boyd.

Boyd got up. He walked to the steer. He put his hand on the broken horn — the smooth dark stump where the horn had been — and he stood there. The steer did not move. Boyd did not move. The fire popped. A coyote called from the ridge and another answered from somewhere south.

I did not say anything. I sat on my saddle with my cold coffee and I watched Boyd stand with his hand on that steer’s broken horn in the dark, and I did not describe it, and I did not make a joke about it, and I did not calculate the odds of a steer walking a mile to find a man who had spent two days bending it to his will, and for once I did not think about what it meant.

They stood there for a long time. Then Boyd patted the horn twice — two soft pats, the way you would pat a dog — and walked back to the fire and sat down and pulled his blanket up and went to sleep. The steer stayed where it was. I could see its shape at the edge of the firelight for an hour, maybe two. At some point I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was gone.

Morning. The sky going pale in the east, the stars fading like they were ashamed to have been seen. Boyd was up before me, which was always the case. He had packed his bedroll and his saddlebag and his kit, all of it arranged on the ground beside his saddle with the neatness of a man who has packed a camp a thousand times and has reduced the process to its minimum.

I built up the fire. I made coffee. I made it the way I always made it — strong enough to argue with, Boyd would say, on the rare occasions when Boyd would say anything about coffee. I cooked the last of the bacon and I looked at the bacon and I looked at the fire and I looked at Boyd, who was checking his horse’s hooves with the careful attention of a man who loves his animals more than he loves most people, which in Boyd’s case was not a high standard as Boyd did not love most people, or if he did, he had not mentioned it to me or to them.

“I wonder whether Fossett’s hens lay any better than his cattle buy,” I said. “A man who pays that little for beef cannot have much confidence in his eggs.”

Boyd looked at me across the fire. The light was behind him, coming up over the plains to the east, and his face was in shadow and I could not see his expression, which may have been the point.

“The eggs are probably all right,” he said.

“I would not count on it. A man who buys an automobile from a company that has burned to the ground is a man whose judgment I would not trust in the matter of poultry.”

“Everett,” Boyd said.

“What.”

He did not say anything for a moment. He finished with the horse’s hoof and set it down and straightened up and his shoulder did the thing it did and he did not wince, or if he winced I did not see it in the bad light.

“You did all right,” he said.

I did not know what he meant. He meant the drive, maybe. He meant all of it, maybe. He meant the thirty-one years of riding and working and sleeping on the ground and talking to cattle and making coffee and not saying the thing, maybe. I do not know what he meant. He said it and he did not explain it and I did not ask him to explain it, because asking Boyd to explain a thing he had said was like asking a rock to explain why it was sitting where it was sitting. It was there. That was the explanation.

He saddled his horse. He mounted. He sat there for a moment, looking east toward Hardesty. The sun was clearing the horizon now and the light was the color of old gold and it laid itself across the plains the way light does in November in that country, flat and long and without mercy or kindness, just light, doing what light does.

“I will write to you from Wichita,” he said.

“You will not,” I said. “You have not written a letter in thirty-one years and you are not going to start now.”

“I might.”

“You will not.”

He almost smiled. The skin around his eyes moved. That was all. He turned his horse and rode east toward Hardesty at a walk, not hurrying, because Boyd never hurried, because hurrying implied that where you were going was more important than where you were, and Boyd did not believe that, and neither did I, though I had never been able to stop myself from acting as though I did.

I watched him go. He got smaller. The dust came up behind his horse and hung in the gold light and settled. He did not look back. Boyd did not look back at things. He looked at them while he was with them and then he left and did not look back, and the looking he had done while he was there was the looking, and it was enough, and it had to be enough, because it was all there was.

He reached the road. He turned north toward town. The road was empty in both directions. He was a shape on the road, then a shape against the light, then a thing I might have been imagining, then nothing.

I stayed at that camp for two more days. I told myself it was because the horse needed rest. The horse did not need rest. The horse was twelve years old and sound and could have carried me to Borger and back without complaint. The horse did not need rest and I knew it and I stayed anyway, because there was nobody at Borger waiting for me and nobody anywhere waiting for me and the fire was warm and the creek made a sound at night that was better than conversation.

I sat by the fire and I drank coffee that was too strong because I had made it for two and there was only one of me, and I watched the plains do nothing, which is what the plains do best. The grass moved. The sky was large. A hawk circled over the creek, patient as Boyd, and dove and came up with something small and brown in its talons and carried it west, and I watched it go, and I thought about Petrie, and I thought about Boyd, and I thought about Lyle Dunaway walking into Hardesty with his blistered feet, and I thought about Fossett’s automobile sitting in its shed like a dead horse on its feet, and I thought about the farmer who was afraid of cows, and I thought about the brindled steer standing in the dark with Boyd’s hand on its broken horn, and I did not make a joke about any of it.

On the second morning I packed my camp and saddled my horse and rode south toward Borger. The sun was up. The light was gold and flat and it went on forever and the plains went on forever and the sky went on forever and I was the only thing in any of it that had somewhere to be, and I was in no hurry to get there.

I have set this down as well as I can. It is not a good account. The joke about the eggs was the last thing I said to Boyd that mattered. It did not matter at all.