The Short Go

The Bread Box

Desmond Reese came back into Okmulgee County on the first Tuesday in June with his right arm in his lap like a sleeping cat, because that was the only way the shoulder liked to ride.

He had driven up from Stephenville in one long push, and by the time he crossed the river at Beggs the truck's air conditioner had given up and was blowing the same breath back at him. He rolled the windows down. The air that came in was thick enough to chew. It smelled of cut hay and hot asphalt and the mineral red of the ground itself. He had spent fourteen months in therapy offices in Texas where the floors were beige and the radio played the same nine songs. Now there was a hawk sitting on a fence post, feathers fluffed out against the heat, looking at him like he owed it money.

"I know," Desmond told the hawk. "I'm late."

His sister Shante had called four times since Sunday. She had texted a picture of a county letter, then a photograph of the envelope, then a photograph of the envelope's postmark, as if he might argue about the date. The letter said that the property described as the southwest quarter of a certain section, township and range, owner of record Ellis Avery Reese, was delinquent in ad valorem taxes for three consecutive years, and that unless the delinquent amount plus penalties, interest and costs was paid in full, the parcel would be offered at the county resale in October. The amount, which Shante had circled twice in blue pen before photographing, was twenty-seven thousand three hundred and eight dollars and some cents.

"He hid it in the bread box," Shante had said on the phone. "Dez. The bread box. Under the heels of a loaf of wheat bread he's been saving for the birds."

"Maybe he wanted it to stay fresh."

"I am not laughing. I'm laughing, but I'm not laughing."

He turned off the highway onto the county road, and the truck began its old complaint over the washboard gravel. The road ran along the top of a low rise, and on the left the land fell away toward the Deep Fork, which he could not see but could feel, the way you can feel a person standing behind you. The pasture between the road and the trees was a patchwork, some of it bush-hogged and baled, some of it gone shaggy with Johnson grass and ragweed. That was the first thing that told him how bad it was. His grandfather had never let a pasture go shaggy in his life.

The gate was the same green pipe gate, sagging on its hinges so you had to lift it as you swung it. The cattle guard rang under the tires. Above the gate, on the crossbar welded between the two tall posts, was the brand cut out of quarter-inch steel: an R lying on its back with a bar under it. Lazy R Bar. When he was eight he had thought it meant the R was lazy and had asked his grandfather why they would brand a cow with something lazy, and his grandfather had said, "Because the R did all the work getting here, and now it gets to lie down."

The house sat on a little knob above the creek that fed the river, under two enormous pecan trees that had been planted, according to family lore, by a woman nobody had ever photographed. It was a white frame house with a wide porch and a tin roof faded to the pink of a sunburn, and behind it an old gray board barn leaned eastward as if trying to hear something in the next county.

His grandfather was on the porch. Of course he was.

Ellis Reese was eighty-two years old and had the build of a fence post that had been out in the weather long enough to get interesting. He wore a pressed pearl-snap shirt, faded jeans with a crease ironed into them, and a straw hat whose sweat stain was shaped like the state of Kentucky. He was sitting in the green metal chair that rocked on its springs, and on the floor beside him was a coffee can full of pecans from last fall that he was cracking one at a time with a pair of pliers. The gray gelding, Smoke, was standing loose in the yard below the porch with his nose in the shade of the pecans and one hind foot cocked.

"Well," his grandfather said. "Look what the dog dragged off and couldn't eat."

"Hey, Pop."

"They let you drive with that arm?"

"Nobody asked."

Desmond climbed the porch steps. The boards gave the same soft complaint under his boots that they had given when he was a boy. His grandfather did not get up, but he put the pliers down and held out his hand, and when Desmond took it the grip was still a working man's grip, dry and hard as a leather glove left on a dashboard. Then Pop pulled him down a little, one-handed, and held the back of his neck for a second the way he used to hold a calf to look at its eyes.

"You lost weight," Pop said.

"You lost a pasture."

His grandfather let go of his neck. "That's a hay meadow resting."

"Resting from what?"

"From me." Pop picked up the pliers again and cracked a pecan, and a little puff of bitter brown dust came off the shell. "Your sister send you?"

"My sister sent me eleven pictures of an envelope."

"She's always been thorough. Gets it from her grandmother." Pop worked the meat out of the shell with his thumbnail and held it out, and Desmond took it because you did not refuse food on that porch. It tasted like last October, oily and a little stale and sweet.

There were things they did not say. They did not say that Desmond had not been home in three years, not since the funeral of his grandmother Alberta, when he had stayed exactly two days and then driven to a rodeo in Cheyenne because he had already paid his fees. They did not say that the shoulder had been torn in front of eleven thousand people in Las Vegas, his hand hung in the rope of a bull named Thunder Payment, his body flapping off its side like laundry in a gale, or that he had gone back three months later and torn it worse. They did not say that the cattle had dropped from sixty head to fourteen, or that his grandfather's pickup had a flat on the front left and a mud dauber nest in the mirror.

Instead Pop said, "You hungry? There's beans."

"There's always beans."

"Then you're never going to starve."

---

The kitchen was dim and hot and smelled of bacon grease and the ghost of his grandmother's lemon cleaner, which had soaked so far into the cabinets over fifty years that it would probably outlive the house. The bread box was on the counter where it had always been, a dented white enamel box with red trim and the word BREAD in a curly script across the front. Desmond lifted the lid. Inside were two heels of wheat bread wrapped in a produce bag, a sleeve of saltines, and nothing else.

"Shante took it," Pop said behind him. "Took it right out of my house. Folded it up and put it in her purse like a parking ticket."

"Pop."

"I know how much it is."

"Do you know how you're going to pay it?"

His grandfather lifted the lid off a pot on the stove and stirred the beans with a long wooden spoon whose end had been burned black by decades of resting on the burner.

"I've got some cattle," Pop said.

"You've got fourteen cows and a bull who's older than my truck."

"Duke is in the prime of his life."

"Duke is in the prime of somebody's life. It's not his."

Pop knocked the spoon three times against the pot and laid it down. "Two years ago," he said, "it didn't rain from May until the middle of September. You remember that? No, you were in Texas. Pond went to a mud hole. I was hauling water in the tank on the back of the truck twice a day. Bought hay from Missouri at a hundred and ten a bale. I sold down. Sold them when everybody else was selling and the sale barn in Okmulgee was giving it away. Then last year the hay meadow made about half. Then the truck needed a transmission." He shrugged, a small economical movement. "It's not a story. It's just arithmetic."

"Why didn't you call me?"

"You were busy getting your arm pulled off."

"Shante, then."

"Shante's got two kids and a husband who drives a cement truck and a job fixing school buses. She don't need my mess."

"It's not your mess," Desmond said. "It's our mess. My name's going to be on this place."

His grandfather looked at him for a long time, long enough that Desmond could hear the clock on the wall above the table, the one shaped like a teakettle, ticking away.

"Is it," Pop said. It was not a question.

---

After supper they sat on the porch while the heat broke a little. The sun went down behind the hill across the road in a wash of colors that looked like a bruise healing: purple, yellow-green, a sore orange where it touched the treeline. The cicadas started up in the pecans like an electric razor in a coffee can. Smoke stood near the porch with his head low, and Desmond saw now that the gray was favoring his left front.

"What's wrong with his foot?"

"Bruise, probably."

"How long?"

"Few days." Pop rocked his chair on its springs. "I called the vet. She's coming tomorrow."

"She?"

"Doctor Hollins. Boley girl. Bought into Doc Sutton's practice when he got his knees replaced." Pop rocked. "She's good. Talks too much. Ropes calves with her tongue."

Desmond unbuttoned the cuff of his right sleeve and rolled it, slowly, because even that pulled at the long seam of scar that ran down the front of the shoulder. He made the arm do a small circle. Then a bigger one. It was better than it had been. It was a long way from the arm he'd had.

"I looked at the Deep Fork Invitational," he said.

His grandfather stopped rocking.

"Labor Day weekend," Desmond said. "Odessa Kinnard's still putting it on. They added money this year. Thirty thousand added in the bull riding, and that's before the entry fees go in the pot. If I win it, that's the taxes and then some. If I place, I can get close. Between now and then there's rodeos every weekend from here to Kansas. I can ride. I can make the payments."

"You can ride," Pop repeated.

"I've been cleared."

"By who?"

"By a doctor."

"Which doctor? The one in Texas who told you not to get on again or the one you paid to say different?"

Desmond didn't answer. Across the yard the lightning bugs were coming up out of the grass, blinking low as if the pasture were full of tiny people lighting cigarettes.

"My granddaddy Josiah rode broncs," Pop said finally. "Did I ever tell you that? Not for money. There wasn't any money for a colored man riding broncs in nineteen twenty, not around here. He rode them on Sunday afternoons in the bottom pasture because the white ranchers up by Henryetta would bring their rank horses down and bet each other he couldn't ride them. He rode them. Every one. Bought the first windmill on this place with what he won off those bets." He rocked again, once. "Then a sorrel horse broke his hip and he walked with a cane for thirty years and couldn't work, and his wife and his boys had to do it all."

"So you don't want me to ride."

"I didn't say that." Pop reached over and laid two fingers on Desmond's bad shoulder, very lightly, the way you would test whether a skillet was hot. "I'm saying the windmill's still out there. It still pumps. And I'm saying if you're going to do this, you're going to do it with your eyes open and your head on. Not because you feel sorry for me. I don't need anybody feeling sorry for me. And not because you can't stand being off a bull."

Desmond looked at the windmill. It stood at the corner of the near pasture in the dusk, a tall gray skeleton with the blades turned into the faint south breeze, and as he watched it gave a slow creaking turn and the sucker rod clanked down into the dark of the well.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, eyes open."

His grandfather snorted. "We'll see," he said, and went back to his pecans.

Later, lying in his old bedroom with the window up and the box fan roaring in it and the sheets damp against his back, Desmond took out his phone and opened the family's shared space, the private one Shante had set up two Christmases ago so the cousins in Oakland and Chicago and Houston could stop asking each other who was who. He had not looked at it in months. Somebody had added a great-great-aunt named Viola who had gone to Kansas City in 1926 to teach school, staring out of her photograph as if she knew exactly what the photographer was charging.

At the root of the whole tree, at the very bottom of the screen, was a single name with a small square beside it where a picture would go if anyone had one. Lettie Grayson Reese. Allottee. Born around 1868. Nobody had ever found a photograph of her.

He looked at the empty square for a long time while the fan shoved the hot air around the room and the windmill clanked out in the dark. Then he turned the phone over on the nightstand, rolled carefully onto his good side, and listened to the bullfrogs until he slept.

Hoof Tester

The vet came at seven in the morning, which in June in Okmulgee County was already hot enough that the dew had burned off the grass and the flies had clocked in for the day.

Desmond was in the near pen with a bucket of sweet feed trying to convince Smoke to stand still. The gray had decided overnight that Desmond was a stranger and possibly a predator, and every time Desmond reached for his halter the horse swung his hip around and gave him a look of profound skepticism. Pop sat on an upturned mineral tub outside the fence drinking coffee from a thermos lid and offering no help at all.

"He don't know you," Pop said.

"I've known this horse since he was a colt."

"You've met this horse. That's not the same."

A white pickup with a vet box on the back came up the drive in a long feather of red dust and stopped beside the pen. The vet box was the kind with a dozen little doors on each side and a water tank on top, and it was so covered in dried mud it looked like a piece of terracotta somebody had pulled out of a kiln. The woman who climbed down from the cab was tall, long-legged, in a navy work shirt rolled up past the elbows, scrub pants tucked into tall rubber boots, and a ball cap with her braids pulled through the back of it. She had a coffee cup in one hand and a set of hoof testers in the other, a pair of big curved steel pincers like something you'd use to pull a tooth out of a dinosaur.

"Mr. Reese," she said to Pop.

"Doctor Hollins."

"How's my favorite gelding?"

"Lame."

"Well, that's why I'm here." She looked at Desmond, who was standing in the middle of the pen with an empty halter and a bucket. Her eyes went down to his boots and up again, quickly, the way he'd seen buyers at a sale barn size up a bull. "And you must be the bull rider."

"I must be."

"I watched you get hung up in Vegas."

"Everybody watched me get hung up in Vegas."

"I watched it four times." She set her coffee on the fender of the truck and climbed through the fence instead of using the gate, one long leg and then the other, without spilling the testers. "I was trying to figure out whether that bull stepped on you or just thought about it really hard."

"Thought about it."

"That's what I decided." She walked up to Smoke with her hand held out flat and low, talking to him in a voice completely different from the one she had been using on Desmond, low and lazy and full of nonsense, hey big man, hey old gentleman, who's that ugly fella in your pen, who let him in. The gray dropped his head and let her take the halter as if she were the one who had known him since he was a colt. She buckled it, handed Desmond the lead rope without looking at him, and said, "Hold him. Can you do that with the one arm?"

"I've got two arms."

"You've got one and a half arms and a lot of opinions. Hold him."

He held him.

She ran her hand down Smoke's left front leg from the knee to the fetlock, slowly, feeling the tendons, then picked up the foot and cradled it between her knees with the hoof turned up, the way a farrier does. She brushed the sole clean with the heel of her hand. Then she fit the testers around the hoof wall and squeezed, moving the pincers inch by inch around the foot like the hands of a clock. Smoke stood quietly until she got to the outside toe, and then he flinched so hard Desmond nearly lost the rope.

"There you are," she said softly. "There's the trouble."

"Bruise?" Pop said from the mineral tub.

"Abscess. He's got a pocket of pus about the size of a thumbnail under there, and it's mad it can't get out." She set the foot down and patted the gray's shoulder. "When's the last time the farrier was out, Mr. Reese?"

Pop scratched under his hat. "Spring."

"What spring?"

"A spring."

She looked at Pop for a long moment, and then at Desmond, and Desmond had the strange experience of being included in a look of exasperation that was not aimed at him. It was a nice experience. He wasn't used to it.

"All right," she said. "I'm going to pare it open and drain it and pack it, and you're going to soak it every day for a week in warm water with Epsom salt, and you're going to keep a boot on it. And you," she pointed the testers at Desmond, "are going to call Lester Pryor and get him out here to trim this horse's other three feet before something else happens. Lester's number is on the board at the feed store."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't ma'am me. I'm thirty-one."

"Yes, Doctor."

She almost smiled. He saw it get to the corner of her mouth and get stopped there by force of will.

---

It took most of an hour. She cleaned the foot, found the spot with a hoof knife whose blade was curved like a question mark, and pared down through the sole in thin translucent curls that fell into the dirt like shavings of soap. When she broke into the abscess a thin stream of gray-black fluid came out with a smell that made the flies very happy and Desmond's eyes water. Smoke sighed, a long rubbery exhale through his nose, and shifted his weight onto the foot for the first time that morning.

"Feels better already," she said. "Doesn't it, sweetheart. Doesn't it."

"You talk to all of them like that?"

"Only the ones who hold still." She flushed the hole with a big plastic syringe full of something pink, packed it with a wad of cotton soaked in iodine, and wrapped the whole hoof in layers of padding and duct tape until it looked like a gray and silver pastry. Her hands moved fast and sure, long fingers, short nails, a thin gold band on her right thumb. A white scar ran across her left hand, a puckered line that ran from the knuckle of her index finger almost to her wrist.

"What's that from?" he asked.

She glanced at it. "Mare in Okemah. Didn't want a rectal exam. I didn't blame her." She tore off the last strip of tape with her teeth. "What's yours from?"

"Which one?"

"The one on your chin."

He touched it. A small white seam in his beard. "First bull I ever got on. I was fourteen. Junior rodeo in Bristow. I came off over his head and he came up under me and I bit through my own lip."

"And you got back on another one."

"The next weekend."

"That," she said, standing and stretching her back with both hands pressed against her hips, "is the most bull rider thing I have ever heard, and I have heard a lot of bull rider things. I sew up bull riders on the side, you know. Unofficially. Whenever the ambulance is busy at the Okmulgee arena and somebody's split his eyebrow open. Doc Sutton used to do it and they still come looking for him, and when they find me instead they don't even blink. A cut's a cut."

"You're not a people doctor."

"I'm not a people doctor," she agreed, "but I'm a very good seamstress. Ask Alvin Tubbs about his ear."

"You sewed Lil Alvin's ear?"

"Back on." She held up two fingers a little ways apart. "About this much of it."

Desmond started laughing and couldn't stop. Lil Alvin Tubbs had been the bullfighter at every junior rodeo Desmond had ever ridden in, a short round man who moved like a housecat and had been knocked unconscious more times than anyone could count, and the image of him sitting on the tailgate of a vet truck with his ear in a cooler was too much. The laughing pulled at his shoulder and he had to put his hand on it.

She noticed. She noticed everything, he was beginning to understand. "Who did your surgery?"

"Guy in Fort Worth."

"Labrum?"

"Labrum and the biceps tendon. And the thing in the back that holds the ball in."

"Capsule."

"Capsule."

"Twice?"

"Twice."

She gathered her tools off the fence rail and climbed back out of the pen. She didn't say anything for a minute. Then she said, without looking back at him, "And you're getting on again."

"I'm getting on again."

"Why?"

He looked at Pop, who had gone very still on his mineral tub, the thermos lid halfway to his mouth.

"Money," Desmond said.

"There are easier ways to get money."

"Not twenty-seven thousand dollars by October."

She turned around. She looked at Pop, then at the shaggy hay meadow beyond the pen, then at the leaning gray barn, and he watched her add it up the way she had added up the abscess, quick and certain. She did not say she was sorry. He was grateful for that.

"Deep Fork Invitational," she said.

"You know it?"

"I've won the barrels at it two years running." She opened one of the little doors on the side of the vet box and put the testers away. "I'm going for three."

"Is that right."

"That's right." She pulled a pad out of her shirt pocket, wrote something, tore off the sheet and handed it to Pop. "Bill's on there. Don't put it in the bread box."

Pop's mouth fell open. Desmond had never in his life seen his grandfather speechless.

"Shante told my mama," Toni Hollins said. "Shante and my mama go to the same hair shop in Boley. Everybody in Boley knows about the bread box. Next time you want to hide something from your grandkids, Mr. Reese, put it in the truck. Nobody's going to look in that truck. There's a mud dauber nest in the mirror."

She climbed into the cab and started the engine.

Desmond walked over to the driver's window before she could pull out. He didn't quite know why. The cab smelled of coffee and iodine and some kind of coconut hair oil, and there was a saddle pad drying across the passenger seat with red dirt crusted into the felt and a dozen paper rodeo numbers clipped to the sun visor, all of them with her name on the back in marker.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"What's your horse's name? The barrel horse."

"Why?"

"I like to know who I'm up against."

"You're not up against anybody. You ride bulls. I run barrels. Different event."

"Same arena."

She considered him through the open window. The sun had gotten high enough to come in under the bill of her cap, and in it her eyes were a light, strange brown, almost amber, like creek water over sand.

"Pocket," she said. "Her name's Pocket."

"Because she's small?"

"Because she gets so close to the barrel on the turn you could put her in your pocket." She put the truck in gear. "She's also small."

She drove off. The dust came up behind the white truck and hung over the drive in a long red curtain, and Desmond stood in it and didn't step out of it until it had settled on his shirt.

When he got back to the pen, Pop had finished his coffee and was screwing the lid back onto the thermos with great concentration.

"Talks too much," Pop said.

"You said that."

"Ropes calves with her tongue."

"You said that too."

"Well," Pop said, and stood up off the mineral tub, and went limping off toward the house with his hand at the small of his back, "I'm old. I repeat myself." At the porch steps he stopped and turned around. "Her mama does hair at Pearline's. Her grandmama is Pearline. That family has been in Boley since before there was a Boley. You remember that."

"Why?"

"Because you're standing in the dust like a fool," his grandfather said, and went inside.

Cornbread

Lil Alvin Tubbs kept six practice bulls on forty acres of scrub oak and greenbrier east of Henryetta, along with a set of chutes he had welded himself out of drill pipe, an arena fenced with old guardrail, and a single light pole that leaned like a drunk at a bus stop. He charged twenty dollars a head to get on, and he charged it to everybody, including his own nephews, including the time a man from a television show came out to film him and asked for a discount.

"That ear cost me eight hundred dollars at the emergency room in Tulsa," Alvin said, the first evening Desmond pulled in. "The vet sewed it on for free and a six-pack of peach soda. And it still ended up crooked. So twenty dollars a bull. I've got to recover my losses somewhere."

His left ear did sit a little lower than the right, and there was a pale seam where it joined his head, like a pocket somebody had stitched back onto a shirt.

"It looks distinguished," Desmond said.

"It looks like a cauliflower that lost a fight." Alvin held out his fist and Desmond bumped it with his left, and Alvin noticed, and his eyes went to the right shoulder and back up. He didn't say anything about it. Lil Alvin had been a bullfighter for twenty-two years and had seen every injury a human body could collect, and he had a gift for not saying anything about any of them.

It was seven in the evening and still ninety-four degrees. The sun hung low and white over the oaks and the heat came up off the arena dirt in a shimmer, so the far fence wavered like it was underwater. The arena smelled the way every arena on earth smelled to Desmond: churned dirt, old manure ground fine as flour, diesel, sweat, and the deep, rank, mineral stink of bull, a smell that went into your clothes and stayed there through three washings. Some people hated it. Desmond had once dated a girl in Abilene who made him leave his jeans on the porch. He had never managed to tell her that it smelled to him like the inside of his own life.

There were four other riders already there, sitting on the tailgates of their trucks with their gear bags open, taping wrists and rosining ropes. Three of them were high school kids from Okmulgee and Beggs with their hats too big for them. The fourth was a lean young man in a black vest with a gold stripe, sitting cross-legged on the hood of a very clean red truck with his phone held up, filming himself.

"Javon Mitchell," Alvin said, low. "Twenty-two. From Wewoka. He's leading the regional standings and he lets you know it about every ten minutes."

"He any good?"

"He's real good." Alvin spat. "And he knows it about every ten minutes."

Javon put the phone down and slid off the hood and came over with his hand out. He had a wide easy grin and a gold left canine, and he moved in a loose rolling way that said he had never been seriously hurt in his life.

"Desmond Reese," Javon said. "Man. I watched you ride Pale Rider at Cheyenne when I was in eighth grade. Ninety-one points. I had that on a poster."

"You had a poster of me?"

"Had you and Bill Pickett and a picture of my uncle's bass boat. Those were the three." Javon shook his hand, then pointed at the shoulder without any of Alvin's tact. "That's the arm, huh? From Vegas?"

"That's the arm."

"Man, I watched that like ten times. You were flopping like a bedsheet."

"So I'm told."

"You coming back for the Invitational?"

"Thinking about it."

"Good," Javon said, and grinned the gold-tooth grin. "I'd hate to win it without you there to see it."

---

Alvin let Desmond go last, which was a kindness disguised as a joke. "Old men at the end," he said, "so the young ones can learn what not to do."

The high school kids each got on a muley brindle bull named Stretch Marks who bucked in slow lazy circles to the left, and each of them came off at about four seconds and landed in the dirt and got up whooping. Javon got on a white-faced red bull called Ricky Bobby and rode him to the whistle Alvin blew from the fence, and stepped off the side when the bull ducked, and landed on his feet like a cat coming off a counter, and then turned around and bowed to the high school kids, who cheered. Desmond had to admit it was a good ride. Square, centered, his free arm high and loose and timed to the bull's front end. The kid had the thing that couldn't be taught, which was that he wasn't afraid.

Desmond's bull was named Cornbread. He was a black-baldy crossbred, about fifteen hundred pounds, a little rangy, with one horn that pointed up and one that curled down like it had changed its mind halfway. Alvin said he was honest. "Turns back to the right after the third jump. Every time. Like a kitchen timer, only meaner."

Desmond climbed the chute and stood on the rails above the bull. Cornbread's back was broad and black and steaming faintly in the evening heat, the hair slick with sweat and the skin twitching under it where the flies landed. Desmond could smell him from there, hot and grassy and sharp, and could hear the slow rumbling bellows of his breath. He set his feet on the rails on either side and slid the bull rope down over the bull's back while Alvin's nephew reached under with a hooked wire and pulled the tail of it up the other side. He worked his glove into the handhold. Rosin, sticky as cooled candy. He pulled the rope tight, and Alvin's nephew pulled it tighter, and he wrapped the tail once around his gloved hand and laid it across his palm and closed his fingers on it and beat his fist shut with his other hand.

The shoulder said something to him then. Not pain, exactly. A kind of low mutter, like a dog in another room that hears a car in the drive.

He slid his body forward up onto his rope. His hips came to his hand. He lifted his free arm.

"Eyes open," he said, under his breath, to nobody.

"What?" Alvin said.

"Nothing. Go."

The gate swung.

Cornbread came out of the chute like a pickup truck dropping off a loading dock, the first jump high and straight and the landing jarring every bone in Desmond's spine one at a time from his tailbone to his skull. Second jump, he was ahead of it, his chest out over his hand, his feet locked. On the third jump Cornbread did exactly what Alvin said he would: dropped his left shoulder and spun back to the right, hard, his whole front end coming around under Desmond like a door swinging on its hinges.

And Desmond was late.

It wasn't much. It was a fraction of a fraction. But he felt the shoulder hesitate, felt it hold back the way you hold back from putting weight on a step you aren't sure of, and that fraction let the spin pull him off center toward the outside, into the well. He could feel the old animal part of his brain screaming at him to grab, to hold, to fight the rope, and the old trained part answering, no, no, sit down, move your feet, and for a second the two parts argued while the bull went around and around and the sky and the leaning light pole and the guardrail fence spun past like the inside of a washing machine.

Then the spin broke and he was in the air and the ground came up and hit him on his good side, and he rolled, and Alvin was there between him and the bull flapping his arms and yelling something about Cornbread's mother, and Cornbread trotted off toward the out gate with his tail switching as if nothing had happened at all.

Desmond lay on his back in the dirt. The sky directly above him was a hard washed-out blue, going pink at the edges. A grasshopper landed on his chest and looked at him.

"Five point two," Alvin called from the fence. "Not bad for an old man."

"I was late."

"You were late," Alvin agreed. "You were real late."

Desmond sat up. The shoulder was hot and humming but it held. He rolled it. It rolled. Then he looked past Alvin's crooked ear to the fence, and saw that someone was sitting on the top rail on the far side, next to where a white truck with a mud-caked vet box was parked beside a gooseneck trailer.

Toni Hollins had her boots hooked into the rail below her and her elbows on her knees and a bottle of water dangling between her fingers. She had changed out of her work clothes into jeans and a fitted long-sleeved shirt the color of a ripe plum, and her braids were tied back under a straw hat. She raised the water bottle at him in a little salute.

"Five point two," she called.

"I heard."

"Not bad for an old man."

"I'm thirty-four."

"I'm aware."

---

It turned out Alvin's arena did double duty. On Tuesday evenings, after the bulls, his sister ran a jackpot barrel race, five dollars to enter and winner takes the pot, and a dozen women and girls hauled in from all over Okfuskee and Okmulgee counties to run their horses under the leaning light. Alvin's nephews dragged the arena with a harrow behind a four-wheeler and then set out three blue plastic barrels in their cloverleaf, and Alvin's sister sat on a lawn chair at the timer with a clipboard and a can of bug spray. She took a picture of every rider and horse before each run, and at the end of every summer she printed them and laid them out on her kitchen table, and the girls came by and wrote their own names and their horses' names on the backs so nobody would have to guess in twenty years.

Desmond sat on the tailgate of his truck with a bag of frozen peas from Alvin's freezer pressed to his shoulder and watched them go. A girl of about twelve on a fat paint pony who ran the pattern at a gentle trot and got the loudest cheer of the night. A woman in her sixties on a bay mare who knocked the second barrel and said a word he was surprised to hear from somebody's grandmother. A teenager on a sorrel who was fast but wild and swung so wide on the third barrel her horse nearly went into the fence.

Then Toni.

Pocket was a little red dun mare, barely fourteen hands, with a black stripe down her back and black zebra bars on her legs and a coarse black mane that stuck up in a short brush. She was dancing before she ever got to the gate, sideways, her hindquarters swinging, and Toni sat her the way water sits in a glass, loose and level and not going anywhere. Then the light pole flickered and steadied and Alvin's sister yelled "Go on!" and Pocket went.

Desmond had seen fast horses. He had seen the best barrel horses in the country at the big rodeos in Las Vegas and Houston, the ones that sold for six figures. Pocket was not the fastest horse he had ever seen. But she was the closest. She came into the first barrel so tight that Toni's knee seemed to brush it and the barrel rocked and settled without falling, and the mare's whole body bent around it like a bow, and then she was gone toward the second barrel with her ears pinned flat and her tail straight out behind her. Toni wasn't kicking, wasn't whipping with the over-and-under the way some of them did. She was barely moving. She was riding the way you'd carry a full cup of coffee across a room, all her stillness in the middle of all that speed.

The third barrel. The run home. Pocket came down the center of the arena flat out with the red dirt flying up behind her in clods, and Toni folded down over her neck, and they crossed the line and Alvin's sister hit the timer and yelled "Fifteen-oh-eight!" and the high school kids on the fence started banging on the guardrail with their hats.

Toni loped the mare out in a big easy circle, patting her neck, and walked her back past the trucks. Pocket was blowing, her nostrils wide and red inside, her neck dark with sweat. When they came even with Desmond's tailgate Toni pulled up.

"How's the arm?"

"Cold. These are peas."

"Alvin's peas have been in that freezer since two thousand nineteen." She leaned down and looked at the shoulder, at how he was holding it. "You were late on the turn back."

"Everybody keeps telling me that."

"You weren't late because you're slow. You were late because you were scared it would go out." She said this in the same flat, factual voice she had used to say *abscess*. "A horse does the same thing when it's been lame. Comes back sound and still flinches on the bad foot for a month. Muscle remembers what the hurt felt like before the brain does."

"So what do you do with the horse?"

"Wet saddle blankets." She gathered her reins. "Ride it till it forgets."

"That's your professional opinion?"

"That's my professional opinion as a veterinarian and a seamstress." She turned Pocket toward her trailer, then glanced back over her shoulder. The light pole lit one side of her face and left the other in the warm blue dusk, and her eyes did the amber thing again. "Alvin's got the bulls again Thursday."

"Is that right."

"That's right. Same time." She clicked to the mare. "Bring your own peas."

The Brand Book

Shante came down from Tulsa on Saturday morning with her son Marcus, a flatbed scanner in a laundry basket, and a pan of peach cobbler wrapped in a beach towel so it would stay warm for the forty-five-minute drive.

"You look terrible," she told Desmond on the porch, and hugged him hard, carefully, on his left side only. She was four years older than him and two inches shorter and she had their grandmother's cheekbones and their grandmother's way of looking at you as if she had already found the receipt. She worked as a mechanic for the Tulsa school district, keeping a fleet of two hundred yellow buses running, and she had grease worked into the creases of her knuckles that no amount of scrubbing would get out. "Alvin Tubbs says you got bucked off a bull named after a side dish."

"How does Alvin Tubbs know you?"

"Alvin Tubbs knows everybody. Alvin Tubbs called Mama's cousin Bernice who called me." She held him at arm's length. "Five point two seconds, Dez."

"It was a good five point two."

"Uh huh." She let him go and turned to the screen door. "Pop! I brought cobbler and I'm not giving you any till you show me the brand book."

"Who said I'd show you anything?" came the voice from inside.

"Shante Alberta Reese Wiley said. Come on."

Marcus came up the steps behind her lugging the laundry basket. He was fifteen, long and narrow as a fence rail, in a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a straw hat that was new enough that the brim still had its factory curl. He had wanted to rope since he was six, and he looked at Desmond's shoulder with polite, deep horror.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"Only when I move it."

"Then why do you want to get on a bull?"

"That," said Shante, "is the question for the ages, baby."

---

The brand book lived in the bottom drawer of Pop's rolltop desk, wrapped in a flour sack. It was a ledger bound in green cloth that had gone brown at the corners and soft as felt from handling, with a spine of cracked red leather and the words RECORD OF MARKS AND BRANDS stamped on it in faded gold. Pop carried it to the kitchen table himself and unwrapped it with the care of somebody unwrapping a baby bird, and the smell that came up off it was dry and sweetish, old paper and cedar and something else, something like pipe smoke.

"My granddaddy Josiah started this," he said. "Nineteen-oh-nine. After his mother got her allotment."

He opened it. The first page was ruled into columns in faded purple ink, and in a careful slanting hand were written names and, beside each name, a little drawing. A circle with a line through it. A capital T with a hook. Two short bars side by side. A heart lying on its side.

"These are brands," Marcus said.

"These are all the brands of the colored ranchers around here that Josiah knew," Pop said. "He wrote them down so if anybody's cattle got stolen, or strayed, and turned up at a sale barn somewhere, there'd be a record of whose they were. Because the county record didn't always stay put, if you follow me. Papers got lost. A man's brand got registered to somebody else." He turned a page. "So the families around here kept their own."

Shante already had the scanner out of the basket and plugged into the outlet beside the toaster. She did not ask. She just held out her hands, and after a long moment, Pop laid the book in them, and she set it face down on the glass with the delicacy of somebody defusing a bomb.

"These are going in the family space," she said, "with the names written out, so the cousins in Oakland can read them. Uncle Wendell's grandbaby in Chicago is doing a paper on the Creek Freedmen. She keeps asking me who was who."

"Wendell's grandbaby can drive down here and ask me."

"Wendell's grandbaby is nine, Pop."

"Then she can ask me in ten years."

"You'll be ninety-two."

"I'll still be here." He said it with such flat conviction that nobody argued.

The scanner hummed and a band of white light slid under the glass. Desmond watched the page come up on Shante's laptop screen, the purple ink sharpened, every waver in Josiah's pen visible. There, near the bottom of the first page, was an R lying on its back with a bar under it. And beside it, in the same careful hand: *Mrs. Lettie Reese, her mark. Allotment SW 1/4.*

"Her mark," Desmond said. "Not his."

"Her mark," Pop agreed. "The land was hers. Allotted to her as a Creek Freedwoman. She'd been born a slave in the Creek Nation and she got a hundred and sixty acres when they broke the land up. Josiah was her boy. He ran her cattle and he wrote it down as hers until she passed, nineteen thirty-one. Then it come down to him."

"Who was she?" Marcus asked. "Like, what was she like?"

Pop leaned back in his chair. The kitchen was getting hot; somebody had turned off the window unit to plug in the scanner, and the air had gone thick and drowsy. Out the window over the sink, a mockingbird was running through every song it had stolen from every other bird in the bottoms.

"I never met her," Pop said. "She passed thirteen years before I was born. But my granddaddy said she was a little bitty woman who wore a man's hat and smoked a corncob pipe, and that she could not read but she could count to any number you wanted, and that she kept the whole place in her head. Every fence, every spring. Where the good pecans were. She'd stand on that porch," he pointed through the wall, "and tell you which cow was going to calve that night by how it was walking. He said she sang when she worked cattle. Old songs. Low, like this." He hummed something, a few notes that went down and then turned back up at the end, slow and rough, like a gate swinging. Then he stopped, embarrassed. "I don't know the words. Nobody does now."

Shante had very quietly taken out her phone and set it face up on the table. She looked at Pop.

"Can I," she said.

"Can you what?"

"Record you. Telling about her. Just your voice. It goes in the family space with your name on it, and nobody hears it but family."

Pop looked at the phone like it was a snake he was trying to identify. "What for?"

"For Wendell's grandbaby. For Marcus. For whoever."

"I sound like a bullfrog."

"You sound like Pop."

He considered this. The mockingbird outside switched from a cardinal to a car alarm. "All right," he said finally. "But I get to hear it first. And if I sound like a fool you take it out."

"Deal."

She pressed the red circle. And Pop, who had never in Desmond's memory told a story on purpose, who told stories only sideways and by accident while he was doing something else, sat back in the heat of that kitchen and told about Lettie Grayson Reese for twenty minutes without stopping. About the log cabin she had first lived in down by the creek, where the chimney stones were still standing in the poison ivy. About the horse she had traded a cookstove for. About how she had walked to Okmulgee to sign the allotment papers and back again in one day, twenty-two miles round trip, because she didn't trust anybody else to put her mark on them. About how she had planted the two big pecans in the front yard as nuts, the year her boy was born, so he'd have shade when he was old.

"And he did," Pop said. "He sat under them every summer till he was eighty-four. And so do I." He looked at Shante. "That's it. Shut it off."

She stopped the recording.

Marcus was staring at his great-grandfather as if he'd just seen him pull a rabbit out of his hat. Shante's eyes were wet and she was pretending they weren't. Desmond found that he had been holding his bad arm with his good hand so tightly that his fingers had left marks.

"Well," Pop said. "Where's that cobbler?"

---

After the cobbler, which was too sweet and perfect and gone in ten minutes, Pop brought out the photographs. They were in a candy box with a lid of faded red cardboard, and there were not as many as Desmond would have thought. Thirty or forty. Some were tintypes, small and dark as a pond. Most were from the forties and fifties and sixties, square black-and-white snapshots with deckled edges.

Shante laid each one on the scanner, and as it came up on the screen she typed whatever Pop said under it. *Josiah Reese with the windmill crew, 1921.* *Alberta and Ellis on their wedding day, front steps of her mother's house in Boley.* *Unknown man with mule. Pop says maybe Cousin Ike. Ask Aunt Fannie.*

Then a photograph came up that made Desmond stop breathing for a second.

It was a rodeo arena. Not a big one: a fence of rough boards, a crowd standing along it in hats and good dresses, a set of wooden chutes. The photograph had been taken from low down, from the dirt, looking up. In the middle of it a dark bull was twisting in the air with all four feet off the ground and its head tucked down between its knees, and on its back, his body bent like a bow and his free hand thrown up high against a white sky, was a young man in a checked shirt.

"Is that you?" Desmond said.

Pop leaned over and looked. Something came into his face that Desmond had never seen there before, something private.

"Boley," he said. "Nineteen sixty-two. That bull was called Bad Medicine. Belonged to a man from Taft."

"You rode bulls?"

"For about two years." Pop sat back. "Till I married your grandmama."

"Did you make the whistle? On that one?"

"No," said Pop. "I made about seven seconds. Then he threw me into the fence and broke my collarbone." He picked up his cup of coffee. "Your grandmama was standing right there by the chute. She was wearing a yellow dress. She come running out into the arena in that yellow dress with the bull still in it and the pickup man yelling at her, and she knelt down in the dirt and the first thing she said to me was, Ellis Reese, if you ever do this again I am going to marry Calvin Hatcher instead."

Marcus laughed so hard he snorted cobbler through his nose. Shante had her hand on the table, flat, as if she were steadying it.

"So you quit," Desmond said.

"So I quit." Pop sipped his coffee. "Calvin Hatcher had a car."

Shante typed under the photograph: *Ellis Reese on Bad Medicine, Boley rodeo, 1962. Seven seconds.* She looked at Pop. "Who took it?"

He thought about it. "Amos Tolliver," he said. "The saddlemaker. He had a camera. Everybody said he took better pictures than anybody in Okfuskee County, and he'd lay right down in the arena dirt to get them." He nodded toward the hall, toward the dark closet where the old saddles hung. "Same man that made that saddle in there. Made it for my daddy in nineteen forty-nine."

Desmond got up and walked to the closet and opened the door. The saddle was on its rack in the back, behind a box of Christmas lights and his grandmother's old vacuum cleaner. He lifted it out. It was heavier than any saddle he had used in years, the leather a deep dark red-brown like a cooked pecan shell, the horn wrapped in rubber, the fenders and skirts tooled all over with oak leaves and acorns so fine and deep that his thumb could follow the veins in each leaf. And worked into the left fender, among the leaves, almost hidden, was a small R lying on its back with a bar under it.

He carried it into the kitchen and laid it next to the brand book.

"That goes in the family space too," Shante said, already reaching for her phone camera. "Who made it, who rode it, when."

Pop studied the saddle until the coffee in his cup went cold. Then he said, "Photograph it from the near side. That's the good side," and got up and went out to check on Smoke's foot, and the screen door clapped shut behind him in the heat.

Pearline's

Boley sat on a long slope of prairie thirty miles northwest of the ranch, where Highway 62 bent and the land opened out into wide swells of pasture the color of a lion's back. Desmond had been coming to the Boley rodeo since before he could walk. His grandmother used to carry him on her hip through the crowd along the fence, feeding him bits of funnel cake, and he still could not smell powdered sugar and frying oil together without feeling the ghost of her arm around his ribs.

The town was smaller than it had been when she was a girl. Anybody would tell you that, and most people did, without being asked. The old brick storefronts along Pecan Street were half of them empty, their tall windows dusty and blank, and the shell of the old bank building stood roofless at the corner with a hackberry tree growing up through the middle of it. But on rodeo weekend the town filled up again the way a dry creek fills after a rain. Trucks and horse trailers were parked along every road and in every yard. Somebody had strung lights across Main Street. People had driven in from Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Dallas and Kansas City and Denver, people whose grandparents had been born here and left, and they walked up and down the street hugging people they hadn't seen in a year and saying, Look at you, look at you, as if looking were the whole point.

Pop had refused to come. "I've been to sixty Boley rodeos," he said. "I know how they come out." But he had given Desmond a paper sack of shelled pecans to deliver to Pearline Hollins, and two hundred dollars cash in an envelope for his entry fees, and a look that said he'd better not lose either.

Pearline's Beauty Shop was in a low white building on Pecan Street with a striped awning and a window full of plastic plants and a hand-lettered sign taped to the glass that said OPEN WHEN I'M HERE. Desmond pushed the door and a bell jangled and the smell hit him like a warm wet towel: hot combs, pressing oil, a sweet heavy perfume of coconut and shea, burned hair, coffee, and something frying in a back room. A box fan in the corner pushed it all around without improving it.

Three women were in the chairs. Two more were waiting on a vinyl couch under the window. All five of them turned and looked at him, and he had the distinct sense of being a steer that had wandered into a sale ring.

"Well, look at what we have," said a woman of about sixty with a comb in one hand and a jar of something in the other. She was small and sturdy with a short gray natural and reading glasses hung on a string of wooden beads, and she had Toni's eyes exactly. "You must be Ellis's grandbaby."

"Yes, ma'am. Desmond."

"I know who you are, baby. I've known who you are since you were in diapers. I'm Dolores." She pointed the comb at an elderly woman sitting in a padded chair by the register, a woman so straight-backed and still she might have been carved, wearing a lavender housedress and a lot of rings. "That's Mama."

"Miss Pearline," Desmond said, and held out the paper sack. "Pop sent these."

Pearline Hollins took the sack and opened it and looked inside. She was eighty-four years old and her face was the color of strong coffee with cream and as smooth as if she had been ironing it every day of her life. She took out a pecan half, examined it, put it in her mouth, and chewed for a long time.

"Ellis Reese," she said finally, "still grows the best pecans in the Creek Nation and has the worst manners. Tell him I said that."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Tell him exactly that."

"I will."

"You won't." She closed the sack. "But that's all right. Come here and let me see your face."

He bent down. She took his chin in her dry hand, the rings cool against his jaw, and turned his head one way and the other like she was checking a melon.

"You have your grandmother's forehead," she said. "Alberta had a good forehead. She was in my wedding. Did you know that? Nineteen sixty-one, she was my maid of honor, and she wore a blue dress and caught the bouquet and a few years later she married your grandfather instead of Calvin Hatcher, and Calvin Hatcher never forgave either one of them."

"I heard about Calvin Hatcher."

"Everybody heard about Calvin Hatcher. He made sure of it." She let go of his chin. "Antoinette is out back."

"Antoinette?"

"My granddaughter. The one you came in here looking for with a sack of pecans for an excuse."

The two women on the couch laughed out loud. Dolores laughed into her jar. Desmond felt his face go hot and was grateful, for once, that he was dark enough that nobody would see it.

---

The back room was a little kitchen with a deep fryer going on the counter and a back door propped open to a yard of bare dirt and chickens. Toni was standing at the fryer in cutoff shorts and a tank top with a dish towel over her shoulder, dropping cornmeal-coated pieces of catfish into the oil one at a time, where they spat and sizzled and turned gold. Her braids were wrapped up in a bright orange scarf. She did not look surprised to see him.

"Grandmama told you to come back here," she said.

"She told me a lot of things."

"She tells everybody a lot of things." She fished out a piece of catfish with a spider strainer, shook it, and laid it on a sheet pan lined with brown paper grocery bags already spotted through with grease. "Here. Eat this before you get on that bull so I'll have something to sew around."

He took it. It was so hot he had to toss it from hand to hand, and then he bit into it and the crust shattered and the fish underneath was white and sweet and tasted faintly of the river. There was hot sauce in it, and black pepper, and something sharp he couldn't name.

"Mustard," she said, watching his face. "You soak it in yellow mustard before you roll it. Grandmama's way. My mama does it with buttermilk and they've been fighting about it since nineteen eighty-five."

"Who's winning?"

"Grandmama's ahead on points." She dropped another piece in the oil. "Mama's ahead on longevity."

On the wall above the little kitchen table there was a big framed board covered edge to edge with photographs, dozens of them, all sizes, some in color and some black and white, held in with little brass corners. Women mostly. Women in the chairs of this shop, getting their hair pressed, their hair set, their hair cut; women laughing with their heads back; a girl of about six asleep under a dryer hood. Under every photograph, in tiny careful writing on a strip of white tape, was a name and a year.

"Grandmama's wall," Toni said, following his eyes. "Everybody whose hair she ever did that she's got a picture of. Sixty-two years. When somebody's family comes back for the rodeo they come in here and find their grandmama on the wall. They stand there and cry. Then they get their hair done." She pointed with the strainer. "That's your grandmother. Nineteen sixty-six."

He leaned in close. Alberta Reese, young, in a sleeveless dress, sitting in one of the chairs with her hair half pinned and her hands up, laughing at somebody outside the picture. *Alberta Reese, Lazy R Bar, 1966.*

"Lazy R Bar," he said. "She wrote the brand."

"Grandmama wrote it. She writes where everybody's from." Toni shook another piece of catfish out of the oil. "She says a name by itself doesn't tell you anything. Half of Boley is named Johnson."

He was quiet for a moment. "Shante's going to want to scan this whole wall."

"Shante already asked," Toni said. "Grandmama told her she could come on Tuesdays and do ten at a time and nobody gets put up anywhere without the woman in the picture, or her family, saying so first." She turned the heat down under the fryer. "Grandmama has rules."

"I noticed."

"You haven't noticed anything yet." She took the towel off her shoulder and wiped her hands. Then she looked at him straight, the way she had looked at Smoke's foot. "Why'd you really come back here?"

"To deliver pecans."

"Desmond."

He liked the way she said his name. He liked it more than he wanted to. "To see you," he said.

"I don't date bull riders."

"I didn't ask you on a date."

"You were going to."

"I was thinking about it."

"Well, stop thinking about it." She untied the orange scarf and her braids came down around her shoulders, and she shook them out. "I spent the first two years of my practice with Doc Sutton sewing up boys who thought they were immortal. I've seen what's left of them at forty. I've put my hand on a bull rider's neck and felt for a pulse in the parking lot of the Okmulgee arena while we waited on the ambulance. I don't want to be the woman in the yellow dress running out into the dirt."

He stared at her. "Who told you about the yellow dress?"

"Your grandmother told my grandmother. In nineteen sixty-two. You think a thing like that stays private in Boley?" She picked up the sheet pan. "Come on. Help me carry this out front. Mama's starving and she gets mean."

---

He drew a bull that afternoon called Gravy Train, a brindle with a chunk out of one ear and a habit of ducking left out of the chute. The arena was the same as he remembered: bleachers of weathered planks, a dirt floor that went to powder in the heat and to soup in the rain, cottonwoods along the back fence turning their leaves over in the wind so the whole tree flashed silver and green. The announcer was a man named Booker Dade who had been announcing the Boley rodeo for thirty-one years and who said Desmond's name into the crackling speakers like he was introducing a grandson at a graduation. "Ladies and gentlemen, this young man's granddaddy rode here in nineteen sixty-two, and his granddaddy's granddaddy rode broncs in the bottoms before there was a chute in this county to ride out of. Desmond Reese, home from Texas, let's make some noise."

They made some noise.

In the chute, wrapping his hand, he looked up and saw her. She was standing along the fence near the out gate with her mother and grandmother. Miss Pearline was sitting in a folding lawn chair somebody had carried down for her. Toni wasn't cheering. She had her arms crossed and her hat pulled low and she was watching his hand in the rope.

He nodded his head.

Gravy Train ducked left, as promised, and Desmond was there. He was not late. He felt it the moment the bull's front end dropped away under him, felt his hips go with it, felt his free arm come up and over in time, felt the bull drop and kick and spin and his body answer every move like a voice answering a song it knew all the way through. The shoulder muttered and he ignored it. Eight seconds was a long time and a short time and then the whistle blew and he reached down and pulled his tail and jumped, and landed on his feet, and the bleachers came up in a roar and Booker Dade was yelling something about Lazy R Bar.

Eighty-one points. Enough to win the round. Fourteen hundred dollars.

When he walked out of the arena, stiff and grinning and covered in dirt, she was still at the fence. Her mother was clapping. Her grandmother was looking at him like a melon she had decided to buy after all. Toni's arms were still crossed.

"You weren't late," she said.

"No."

"Muscle's forgetting."

"Wet saddle blankets."

She didn't smile. But she uncrossed her arms, and she reached over the fence and brushed a clot of red dirt off the front of his vest with her fingers, two quick strokes, the way you'd brush crumbs off a tablecloth, and then she turned and walked off toward the trailers without saying another word, and he stood there with his heart going as hard as it had in the chute.

Water Gap

By the second week of July Desmond had ridden in Boley, Claremore, Coffeyville and a little Tuesday-night jackpot in Morris that paid out in cash from a cigar box, and he had won, in total, two thousand nine hundred and forty dollars. He kept the figure on a strip of masking tape on the dashboard of his truck and crossed it out and wrote a new one every time it changed. Under it, in smaller numbers, was the figure from the county letter. The gap between them was so wide that some mornings he didn't look at it.

The heat had settled over the county like a lid on a pot. It was a hundred and two at four in the afternoon on the day the storm came, and the air was so still and wet that the sweat would not leave his skin; it just sat on him, a second shirt. The cattle had gone down into the creek bottom and were standing in the shade of the cottonwoods with their heads low and their tails going. Even the cicadas sounded tired.

Toni's truck came up the drive at a quarter to five. She had been out to check Smoke's foot every week, which Pop said was unnecessary and which nobody had tried to stop. This time she also had a vial of eye ointment for a red cow named Biscuit who had come up with a cloudy eye, and she worked in the squeeze chute in the old barn with her shirt stuck dark to her back while Desmond held the cow's head and Pop supervised from a bucket.

"Pinkeye," she said. "Flies carry it. You need fly tags on all of them."

"Fly tags cost money," Pop said.

"So does a blind cow."

"Biscuit's not going blind."

"Not if you put the tags in." She squeezed a line of ointment into the corner of the cow's eye and held the lids shut with her thumb for a moment. Biscuit groaned, a deep put-upon sound, and Toni said, "I know, ma'am, I know, life is hard," and let her go.

It was when they came out of the barn that they saw the sky.

It had built up in the west while they were inside, a wall of cloud so tall it seemed to lean over them, the top of it still lit white by the sun and the bottom gone the color of an eggplant, almost black, with a strange greenish tinge along its lower edge like the inside of a bruise. As they watched, a vein of lightning went down through it to the ground somewhere past Okmulgee Lake, and long seconds later the thunder came, not a crack but a slow enormous rolling, like somebody moving furniture across the floor of the sky.

The wind arrived all at once. It came up the slope from the bottoms flattening the grass, and it was cold, shockingly cold after the heat, and it smelled of rain and dust and ozone and, faintly, of hay being torn off a bale somewhere upwind. The pecans in the front yard began to roar. A bucket went tumbling across the barnyard. Toni's ball cap lifted right off her head and she snatched it out of the air without looking.

"Get in the house," Pop said. "Both of you."

"I need to get the truck in the barn," Toni said.

"Then get it in the barn and get in the house."

They had the truck in the barn and the barn doors halfway shut when the rain hit, not starting the way rain usually starts but simply arriving, a gray wall that came up the drive and hit the tin roof with a sound like a thousand hands slapping a table. The barnyard went to red soup in about a minute. The rain came sideways through the gap in the doors and they stood just inside, soaked anyway, watching the yard turn into a river.

Then, under the noise of the rain, Desmond heard the cattle.

Not the ordinary lowing of cattle in a storm. A higher, wilder bawling, and it was coming from the wrong place. From the road side.

"The water gap," he said.

---

Where the creek ran under the south fence, there was a water gap, a swinging panel of cable and pipe hung from a crossbar so that high water could pass under it and the cattle couldn't. It was the weakest point in any fence in that country, and in a hard storm the creek came up fast and full of brush and logs, and if enough debris piled up against the gap it would tear the whole panel loose. The cattle would walk right out through the hole and up onto the county road and then wherever they wanted to go, which in Desmond's experience was usually the middle of a highway at night.

He grabbed a coil of wire and a pair of fence pliers off the wall. Toni grabbed a halter and a flashlight.

"You don't have to come," he said.

"Biscuit's got ointment in her eye. I'm not losing a patient to a cattle truck."

They went out into it.

The rain was so hard it hurt, stinging his face and the backs of his hands like gravel thrown by a tire. The light had gone strange, dim and green and flickering with lightning every few seconds so the whole world strobed. They half ran, half slid down the slope toward the creek, the red clay sucking at their boots, and the grass was laid flat by the wind and water was already running across the pasture in sheets. He lost his footing once and went down on his bad side and the shoulder lit up white and he lay there in the mud for a second swearing until Toni grabbed the back of his vest and hauled him up.

"Was that the arm?"

"No," he lied.

"Liar."

At the bottom of the pasture they came out into the trees and he saw that he was right. The creek was a brown roaring rush, bank-full and still rising, and the water gap had a mat of brush and branches and a whole small cedar tree jammed against it, and the downstream end of the cable had torn loose from its post. The panel was swinging in the current. Through the gap, on the far side, standing in the road ditch in the rain looking confused and pleased with themselves, were six of Pop's fourteen cows and Duke, the old bull.

"Okay," Toni said, wiping water out of her eyes. "You fix the gap. I'll bring them back."

"How?"

"Same way I bring anybody back," she said. "I'll be nicer than them."

She waded across where the creek widened over the gravel bar, thigh-deep and pushing hard, holding the flashlight up out of the water, and he watched her climb out the other side and go up into the ditch talking. He couldn't hear what she was saying. He could see her arms moving and the beam of the flashlight swinging and the cattle turning their heads toward her one by one.

He went to work on the gap. The cable was slick and cold and the end of it whipped in the current, and he had to stand in water to his waist to reach the post, the creek shoving at the backs of his knees like a big dog. He couldn't use his right arm above his shoulder. He used his left, and his teeth, and the fence pliers, and a lot of language. Something went past him in the dark water and bumped his leg, a log or a dead branch or something worse. The lightning showed him the chimney stones of Lettie Reese's old cabin up on the rise across the creek, a dark crooked stack in the poison ivy, there and gone and there again.

He got a wrap around the post. Then another. He twisted the wire with the pliers until it bit.

When he turned around, Toni was coming back across the gravel bar with Duke on a halter.

The old bull was walking beside her in the knee-deep water as placidly as a dog on a leash. The six cows were strung out behind him in a line, following. Toni had the flashlight in her teeth and one hand on the bull's neck and she was soaked to the skin, her shirt and jeans plastered dark against her body, her braids heavy with water, rain pouring off the brim of her ruined cap. Lightning lit the whole scene and Desmond, standing in the creek to his waist with a pair of fence pliers in his hand, laughed out loud.

"What," she said around the flashlight.

"Nothing."

She took the flashlight out of her mouth. "What."

"You're walking a bull like it's a poodle."

"Duke is a gentleman." She led him up the bank and through the gap Desmond was holding open, and the cows followed, splashing, bawling, offended. "He just needed somebody to explain the situation."

Desmond let the panel swing closed behind the last cow and they stood together on the bank under the cottonwoods with the creek roaring beside them and the rain coming down through the leaves in big cold drops. She was breathing hard. So was he. She was close enough that he could see the water running down her neck into the collar of her shirt, and close enough that she could see him looking.

"Your arm," she said.

"It's fine."

"Let me see."

She put her hand on his shoulder. Her palm was cold from the rain and then, through the wet cloth, it wasn't. She pressed gently with her fingers along the front of the joint, along the scar she couldn't see but seemed to know exactly where to find, watching his face the whole time for a flinch the way she'd watched Smoke's foot under the testers. He didn't flinch. He didn't do anything. He stood there in the rain with her hand on him and thought that he had been on two hundred and some bulls in his life and he had never once been as scared as he was right now.

"Desmond," she said.

"Yeah."

"I don't date bull riders."

"I know."

"I'm just telling you." She didn't take her hand away. "So you know."

"I know," he said, and she leaned in, or he did, and her mouth was an inch from his and he could feel her breath on his lip, warm in all that cold, and smell the rain on her skin and the coconut oil in her hair and, underneath, very faintly, cow.

A flashlight beam swept across both of them from up the slope.

"Y'all get those cattle in?" Pop yelled. He was standing at the top of the bank in a yellow slicker that came down to his ankles, holding a lantern flashlight the size of a car battery, looking like a lighthouse that had climbed out of the sea to complain. "I can't hear a thing down there! Did you get Duke?"

Toni stepped back. She took her hand off Desmond's shoulder and pushed her wet braids back with both hands and looked up at the slope and called out, perfectly level, "We got Duke, Mr. Reese."

"Well, get on up here before you both drown. I made coffee."

She looked at Desmond. The lightning came again, closer now, and in the white flash of it her face was doing something complicated, laughing and furious and a little bit sad all at once, and then the dark came back down.

"Your grandfather," she said, "has a gift."

"He's had it all my life."

They climbed the slope in the rain. Behind them the creek kept rising, and the patched water gap held, and the cows stood in the bottom under the cottonwoods chewing their cud in the downpour as if nothing in the world had happened.

---

Later, in the kitchen, Pop poured coffee so strong it was nearly thick, boiled in a speckled enamel pot on the stove the way his father had made it on roundups, with the grounds right in the water and a splash of cold water at the end to settle them. Toni sat at the table wrapped in one of Alberta's old quilts, a log cabin pattern in faded reds and browns, her hands around the mug. Desmond sat across from her in dry clothes with a bag of frozen corn on his shoulder. The rain hammered the roof. The power had gone out, and Pop had lit a kerosene lamp that smelled of hot tin and threw long shadows up the cabinets.

"Mama's quilt," Pop said, nodding at it. "Alberta's mama made that. Out of my granddaddy's work shirts and her own dresses. There's a piece of Josiah's wedding shirt in it somewhere."

Toni looked down at the quilt in her lap and ran her thumb over one of the strips. "This one?"

Pop squinted. "Might be."

"Somebody ought to write down which piece is which," she said. "Before nobody knows."

"Shante's coming Tuesday," Desmond said. "She's already got a list going. Saddle, brand book, the quilt. Who made each one. Who wore it."

Pop grunted into his coffee. Toni didn't say anything. But she kept her thumb on that one strip of faded brown cloth the rest of the night, as if she were holding a place in a book.

Wagon Coffee

The last weekend of July, the rodeo at Okemah ran alongside a chuckwagon cook-off, and the whole east end of the fairgrounds smelled of post oak smoke, beef fat and coffee boiled the old way until it could stand up and walk.

Desmond and Lil Alvin drove over Friday in Alvin's truck, which had a split windshield, rodeo numbers taped all over the dash, and a cooler between the seats full of ice, water bottles and a sack of boiled peanuts Alvin's sister had made, wet and salty and still warm. The windows were down because the truck's air conditioner had been broken since sometime before Marcus was born. It was ninety-nine degrees. They passed the long blue glint of Okemah Lake and the wind came in off it smelling of mud and fish.

"She still not talking to you?" Alvin said.

"She's talking to me."

"She's talking to you like a dentist."

That was accurate. In the two weeks since the storm, Toni had come out to the ranch twice to check Biscuit's eye. She had been friendly. She had been professional. She had explained the life cycle of the face fly in considerable detail. She had not once let herself be alone with him for longer than it took to hand him a tube of ointment, and when he had walked her to her truck the last time she had gotten in, rolled the window up and then rolled it down again two inches to say, "Tags. Fly tags, Desmond," before driving away.

"She's being smart," Alvin said. "You're leaving."

"I didn't say I was leaving."

"You've been saying it since you got here. One season. One season. You say it like a man reading the expiration date off a milk jug." Alvin cracked a peanut with his teeth and spat the shell out the window. "Woman like that hears a man say one season, she hears him say he's got a calendar and she's on it."

Desmond didn't answer that. He looked at the number on his dashboard tape instead. Three thousand six hundred and twenty. Ninety-nine degrees. Forty-one days until the Invitational.

---

The cook-off wagons were lined up under the trees behind the arena, a dozen of them, real wagons, some over a hundred years old, with canvas tops stretched over hoops of bent wood and chuck boxes built into the back like big wooden cabinets with a hinged lid that dropped down to make a table. Fires of post oak burned down to coals in shallow pits, and over the coals were black cast-iron Dutch ovens with more coals heaped on the lids, and iron tripods holding coffee pots blackened by a century of smoke. Men and women in aprons and old hats moved between the fires with long iron hooks, lifting lids, checking, frowning, putting lids back. There was beef cooking somewhere in a deep pot with onions and chiles, and peach cobbler, and sourdough biscuits rising in the ovens so that every time somebody lifted a lid a breath of hot sour yeast came out with the smoke.

The wagon at the end of the line was painted a faded green with yellow wheels, and on the side of the chuck box somebody had stenciled, a long time ago, the words TWIN MOUNDS CATTLE CO. A very old man was sitting beside it in a folding chair, with a cane across his knees and a blue enamel cup in his hand and a straw hat pulled so low that only his chin was showing. A younger woman, maybe sixty, was working the fire and the ovens.

"That's Cleophus Barnett," Alvin said. "Ninety years old. He cooked on roundups when there were still roundups. You want to hear about your granddaddy, you ask him."

"Why would I want to hear about my granddaddy?"

Alvin looked at him with something like pity. "Go get some coffee, Dez."

He went. The woman at the fire handed him a cup without asking, an enamel cup chipped to black iron at the rim. The coffee was so hot he couldn't hold it by anything but the handle, and it tasted of smoke and iron and something dark and bitter and wonderful, and there was a fine silt of grounds at the bottom of it that you learned to stop drinking before you reached.

"Mr. Barnett," he said.

The hat came up. Under it was a face so lined and weathered it looked like a dry creek bed seen from the air, with two very bright black eyes set deep in it. The eyes looked at him for a while.

"You're Ellis Reese's grandson," the old man said.

"Yes, sir."

"The bull rider. The one that got hung up."

"Yes, sir."

"You look like him." Mr. Barnett took a slow sip of his coffee. "He was better looking."

Desmond laughed and sat down on an overturned five-gallon bucket beside the chair. The smoke drifted over them both. Somewhere behind the wagon the woman at the fire lifted a lid and swore softly at a biscuit.

"Did you know him?" Desmond asked. "When he rode?"

"I knew him before he rode and after he quit and every day in between," said Mr. Barnett. "We rode the Boley rodeo together. I rode broncs. He rode bulls. He was the best bull rider in the Creek Nation for two years, and then he quit."

"For my grandmother."

The old man looked at him. "Is that what he told you?"

"That's what he told me."

Mr. Barnett set the cup down on his knee. He took a long time to say the next thing, and while he took it the smoke drifted and a meadowlark sang out in the hayfield past the fairgrounds, a liquid falling run of notes, and a horse whinnied over by the trailers.

"His daddy got kicked by a mule," Mr. Barnett said. "Spring of nineteen sixty-three. Broke his leg in two places and it set wrong. Couldn't work for a year. That place of yours had a note on it at the bank in Okmulgee, and that bank was not looking to do any favors for a colored family with a hundred and sixty acres of good bottom ground. Half the Black families around here lost their allotment land one way or another by then. Taxes. Notes. Somebody's cousin signing something he couldn't read. Ellis knew it. So he quit riding and went to work. Worked that place by himself and hauled hay for the white ranchers up by Beggs for cash and drove a gravel truck nights for the county. Two years. Paid that note off to the penny." He picked the coffee back up. "Alberta waited on him the whole time. She was a smart girl. She knew what she was getting."

Desmond sat on the bucket holding his cup of coffee, which had gone from too hot to drink to just right while he wasn't paying attention.

"He never told me that," he said.

"Course he didn't. Ellis Reese never told anybody anything that might make them think he needed help." The old man's bright eyes studied him from under the hat. "Is that why you're back? The place?"

"Taxes."

"How much?"

He told him.

Mr. Barnett whistled, a thin dry sound. "And you think you're going to ride it off."

"I'm going to try."

"That's what he said." Mr. Barnett reached over with his cane and tapped the toe of Desmond's boot with it, twice, the way you'd tap a horse's hoof to get it to pick up. "Listen to me. He did the right thing. But he did it alone, and he was proud of doing it alone, and it about killed him, and it made him a hard man for a long time. Alberta softened him up some. Not all the way." He leaned back. "Don't do it alone."

"Who's going to help me ride a bull?"

"Nobody. That ain't what I said."

---

Before he left the wagon, Desmond asked if he could record the old man talking. Just his voice. For the family, with his name on it, and only if he said so.

Mr. Barnett looked at the phone in Desmond's hand with deep suspicion. Then at the woman at the fire, who turned out to be his daughter, Mavis.

"Daddy," Mavis said, "you've been telling me those roundup stories for sixty years and I can't remember half of them. Let the boy."

So the old man talked again for ten minutes, about cooking on the last big roundups in the Osage in the late forties, about sourdough starter carried in a crock wrapped in a wet towel under the wagon seat, about a cook he'd learned from, a man named Pinto Coleman who had cooked for Black and white and Creek and Osage cowboys alike and wouldn't let any of them near the fire, and who made a coffee so strong that a cowboy from Arkansas once claimed it had put a crease in his hat. At the end Mr. Barnett said his own name and the year, clear as a schoolteacher, and Desmond stopped the recording and saved it in the family space under *Cleophus Barnett, Twin Mounds wagon, Okemah, in his own words.* He sent a copy to Mavis.

---

He drew badly that night. A bull named Tax Season, of all the names in the world, who bucked in straight line jumps down the arena and then, at about five seconds, stopped dead and dropped his head and sent Desmond off over the front end, right over the horns, so that he landed on his back in the dirt staring up at the stadium lights in a cloud of moths.

No score. No money.

Javon Mitchell rode a big gray named Smokehouse for eighty-seven and won the rodeo.

Toni was there. Of course she was. She ran Pocket in fifteen-three and won the barrels by two tenths. He saw her loping the mare out past the stripping chute afterward, and she saw him sitting on the fence with dirt in his hair, and she pulled up. For a moment he thought she might say something kind.

"That was a terrible ride," she said.

"Thank you."

"I mean that bull was terrible. He stopped like he forgot something in the car." She studied him. "You land okay?"

"I landed."

"Okay." She gathered her reins, then didn't go. The arena lights hummed overhead and the moths whirled in them like snow. Out behind the arena, the wagon fires had burned down to red eyes in the dark, and the smell of wood smoke and coffee drifted over the fence with the dust. "I heard you were talking to Mr. Barnett."

"How did you hear that?"

"Mavis told my mama." She shook her head at his face. "Desmond. It's Okemah. It's thirty miles from Boley. You have got to stop being surprised."

"He told me some things about my grandfather."

"Good things?"

"True things."

She kept her eyes on him. Pocket shifted under her, blowing, wanting to go back to the trailer and her hay.

"My dad left when I was nine," she said abruptly. "He was a farrier. Shod horses all over this county. One day he got a job offer with a racetrack in California and he said, I'll go out there and get set up and send for you. I'll go one season. One season." She said it in a flat voice, like she was reading it off a paper. "He did send for us. Every year. Next season, next season. Mama never went. Twenty-two years. He's still in California. He calls on my birthday." She shrugged one shoulder. "I don't do one season, Desmond. That's all."

She rode off before he could answer. He sat on the fence a long time after she was gone, watching the moths, with the taste of old Pinto Coleman's coffee still bitter at the back of his throat, and thought about a young man driving a gravel truck through the dark on county roads for two years without telling anybody why.

Oak Leaves

The man from Fort Worth came on the first Thursday in August, in a silver pickup so clean it looked like it had been delivered that morning in a box.

Desmond was not supposed to be home. He was supposed to be at Alvin's, getting on two practice bulls and then driving to a rodeo in Coweta, but Alvin had called at noon to say that Cornbread had gotten through a fence and was visiting a neighbor's heifers and the practice was off. So Desmond had come back early and was in the old barn, up a ladder, nailing a loose sheet of tin back onto the roof with his left hand and a lot of patience, when the silver truck pulled up beside the house and a tall white man in a pale gray suit and an expensive hat climbed out and went up the porch steps like he'd been there before.

From the top of the ladder Desmond could see through the kitchen window. He saw his grandfather open the door. He saw them shake hands. He saw Pop go into the hall, and come back carrying the saddle.

He came down the ladder so fast he skipped the last three rungs.

By the time he got to the kitchen the saddle was sitting on the table on a folded bath towel, and the man in the gray suit was bent over it with a pair of reading glasses on his nose and a small flashlight in his hand, shining the light at a low angle across the tooling so the oak leaves stood up out of the leather in sharp relief. He was murmuring to himself. Pop was standing by the stove with his arms folded.

"Pop," Desmond said.

His grandfather didn't turn. "This is my grandson. Desmond, this is Mr. Pugh. From Fort Worth."

"Garland Pugh." The man straightened up and offered his hand. He had a pleasant, intelligent, sunburned face and a soft voice, and his handshake was firm and brief. "I collect early Southwestern saddles. Mostly Texas and Oklahoma makers before nineteen-sixty. I've been trying to find a Tolliver for eleven years."

"It's not for sale."

"Desmond," said Pop.

"It's not for sale."

Mr. Pugh glanced at the old man and the young one and seemed to understand quite a lot very quickly. He slid the glasses off and tucked them in his breast pocket.

"I'll step outside," he said, "and admire your pecan trees. Take whatever time you need." And he went out onto the porch and closed the screen door very gently behind him.

---

"Eighteen thousand dollars," Pop said.

They were standing on opposite sides of the kitchen table with the saddle between them. The window unit was roaring. Outside, through the screen, Desmond could see Mr. Pugh standing in the yard with his hands in his pockets, looking up into the pecans with apparent fascination.

"You were going to sell it without telling me."

"I was going to sell it and then tell you. It's my saddle."

"It's Great-granddaddy's saddle."

"And then it was mine. And it's still mine." Pop's jaw was set in a way Desmond remembered from being eleven years old and caught with a cigarette behind this same barn. "Eighteen thousand plus what you've got. That's close. Shante can find the rest. And you don't have to get on another bull."

"I want to get on another bull."

"I know you do," his grandfather said. "That's what scares me."

Desmond leaned his weight on the table. The shoulder grumbled. He ignored it. He looked down at the saddle, at the oak leaves crawling over the fenders and skirts and the swells, leaf on leaf, some of them with tiny holes where a beetle had chewed them, because Amos Tolliver had apparently believed that a perfect leaf was a lie. In the curve of the cantle there was a tooled acorn half split open with a little curled sprout coming out of it. He had never noticed that before.

"Cleophus Barnett told me about the gravel truck," he said.

Pop went still.

"Nineteen sixty-three," Desmond said. "The mule. The note at the bank. Two years of hauling hay for the ranchers up by Beggs and driving nights for the county. You never told anybody."

"Cleophus Barnett," said Pop, very quietly, "has a big mouth for a man who's been dead from the neck up since nineteen seventy."

"He's sharper than both of us."

"He's ninety."

"He said you did it alone and you were proud of doing it alone and it made you hard." Desmond's voice was rising. He let it. "And now you're doing it again. You hide the letter in the bread box. You sell the saddle behind my back. So that I don't have to. So that Shante doesn't have to. So that nobody has to see you need anything."

"I don't need anything."

"You need twenty-four thousand dollars by October!"

The window unit roared. Out in the yard Mr. Pugh had wandered over to look at Smoke, who had come to the fence to inspect him, and the two of them were regarding each other with mutual politeness.

Pop pulled out a chair and sat down in it, heavily. He put one hand flat on the saddle seat, the way you'd settle a horse that was thinking about leaving. His fingers were long and knotted, the knuckles big as walnuts.

"You know what Amos Tolliver charged my daddy for this saddle?" he said.

Desmond shook his head.

"Nothing. Nineteen forty-nine. Daddy had broke a colt for him, a big black that nobody else could get on, and Amos said I'll make you a saddle for it. Took him a whole winter. He worked in a shop on Pecan Street in Boley behind the drugstore. Made saddles for everybody. Black cowboys, white ranchers, Creek ranchers, the rodeo men from Texas. Rich men from Tulsa who'd never been on a horse paid him to make them saddles to hang on the wall. He had a waiting list two years long." Pop rubbed his thumb along the edge of a leaf. "You know why he put the brand on the fender? Down in the leaves where you can hardly see it?"

"Why?"

"Because he said a man's saddle ought to know whose it was, even if nobody else did." Pop let that sit. "As a boy I used to lie under the saddle rack in the barn and look up at those leaves and count them. There's three hundred and six. I counted them about fifty times. Got a different number every time till I was twelve."

Desmond pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.

"So why sell it," he said.

"Because I'm eighty-two," Pop said. "And it's a saddle. And you're my grandson." He looked up, and his eyes were angry and wet at the same time. "I stood at that fence in Vegas, you know that? I didn't tell you. Shante paid for me to fly out. I was going to surprise you. I was standing by the out gate when that bull hung you up. I saw your arm. I saw your face, Desmond. I saw you hanging off that animal for four spins and I couldn't do one thing. And then I had to get back on an airplane and fly home and not tell you I was there because you'd have been ashamed I saw it."

Desmond stared at him.

"You were there?"

"I was there." Pop dragged a wrist across his eyes, roughly. "So I'll sell a saddle. I'll sell every saddle in the barn. I'm not watching that again."

The kitchen went very quiet except for the window unit and the teakettle clock above the table, ticking.

"You should have told me," Desmond said finally. His voice came out strange.

"You should have told me you were hurt the first time instead of getting back on in three months like a fool."

"I didn't want you to worry."

"Well." His grandfather snorted, half a laugh. "There it is. Look at us. A couple of geniuses."

---

They went out to the porch together. Mr. Pugh was sitting on the steps with Smoke's nose in his hat, and he got up when the screen door opened and dusted off his trousers.

"Mr. Pugh," Pop said. "I'm sorry for your trouble. I'm going to hold on to it a while longer."

The collector nodded slowly. He did not look surprised. "I thought you might," he said. He found a card in his jacket and gave it to Pop, and then, after a moment's hesitation, gave another one to Desmond. "Mr. Reese, I'll be honest with you. I've seen maybe four Tolliver saddles in my life, and that's the finest. If you ever do decide to let it go, call me. But I'd say, from where I'm standing, don't." He put his hat back on. It was slightly damp from Smoke's breath. "What you might think about doing, if you haven't, is writing down everything you know about it. Who made it, who rode it, every story. Pictures. Because most of the saddles I buy, nobody remembers a thing about them by the time they get to me. The leather's still there and the people are gone."

"My sister's already doing that," Desmond said.

"Then your sister's smarter than most of my clients." Mr. Pugh went down the steps and across the yard to his silver truck. He stopped with the door open. "Good luck at the Invitational, son. I'll be watching. I always go."

He drove away. The dust rose behind him and hung in the hot still air over the drive.

That evening, after the heat broke, Desmond carried the saddle back to the barn himself instead of the hall closet. He set it on the old rack under the loft where it had lived when he was small, and he lay down on his back in the loose hay on the floor beneath it, the way Pop said he used to, and looked up. The last light came through the gaps in the board walls in thin red stripes. The barn smelled of dust and old leather and mouse and sweet clover from the new bales. From underneath, the oak leaves on the skirts looked like a canopy, like lying under a real tree in October. He started counting. He got to a hundred and forty before he lost his place at the rear jockey and had to start over, and the second time he got to a hundred and ninety and laughed out loud at himself in the empty barn, and the barn swallows in the rafters scolded him for it.

Pop sat down in his green spring chair and looked out at the hay meadow, which Desmond had finally gotten cut the week before, borrowing Alvin's cousin's baler. The round bales sat on the stubble in long rows, golden in the late sun, each one throwing a long shadow toward the east.

"Shante's coming Saturday," Desmond said. "She wants to talk about the money."

"I know what she wants to talk about."

"Aunt Fannie's people in Oakland want to send some. And Uncle Wendell. And the cousins in Houston. She put it in the family space, Pop. Just the number. Everybody saw it."

"She what?"

"Everybody's seen it. Forty-one people. They've been asking how to help."

His grandfather looked at him with an expression of slowly dawning outrage.

"That girl," Pop said, "is just exactly like her grandmother."

"I know."

"Never could keep a thing to herself."

"I know."

Pop rocked his chair on its springs. Once. Twice. The cicadas were going in the pecans and the windmill creaked out at the corner of the pasture, and a red-tailed hawk was turning slow circles over the bales, watching for mice in the stubble.

"Forty-one people," Pop said finally.

"Forty-one."

"Huh," said his grandfather, and didn't say anything else for a long time, but he didn't get up and leave either, and when Desmond went inside to start supper he heard him still out there, rocking, and once, very low, humming the same few notes he had hummed in the kitchen about Lettie Reese, the ones that went down and then turned back up at the end like a gate swinging open.

Night Call

She called him at eleven-forty on a Tuesday night, and the first thing she said was, "How strong is your left arm?"

"Strong."

"Good. Put on clothes you don't love and meet me at the Haskins place on the Morris road. There's a heifer who's been trying to calve since six and the calf's turned wrong, and Bud Haskins is seventy-eight and his hired man's in Arkansas." There was a pause, and a clank of metal, and the sound of a truck door. "I need somebody to hold a leg up for about an hour. I'd ask Alvin but Alvin faints."

"Alvin faints?"

"Alvin has been gored eleven times and he faints at the sight of a uterus. Are you coming or not?"

He was already pulling on his boots.

---

The Haskins place was a low brick house and a big pole barn under a single sodium light that turned everything the color of weak orange soda. The night was hot and close and smelled of rain that hadn't come yet, and the light was full of bugs, a whirling cloud of them, beetles and moths and long-legged flies that pinged against the metal reflector and dropped stunned into the dirt. Out past the barn, in the dark, the cattle in the pasture were lowing, uneasy.

The heifer was a black baldy, young and frightened, standing in a pen with her head low and her sides heaving and a pair of small yellow hooves showing under her tail, the soles turned up. Toni was already in coveralls with the sleeves cut off and a pair of shoulder-length plastic sleeves on both arms. Her braids were tied up on top of her head in a knot. A tall old man in overalls stood at the gate holding a flashlight with both hands like it might get away.

"Feet are upside down," Desmond said.

"Feet are upside down," she agreed. "Calf's backward and twisted, and she's too small to get it out the regular way. I tried for half an hour. We're going in the side."

"A C-section? Out here?"

"Where did you think we were going to do it, Desmond, a hospital with a gift shop?" She was laying out instruments on a clean towel spread over a hay bale: scalpels, clamps, a curved needle, spools of suture, a jug of iodine scrub that smelled sharp as a struck match. "Mr. Haskins, can you keep that light right where I tell you?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Desmond, I need you to hold her tail, and then when I tell you, I need you to take the calf's back legs and pull straight up and out. Not fast. Steady. Like pulling a boot out of mud."

"I've never done this."

"I'm aware." She looked at him. In the orange light her face was calm and tired and completely focused. "You ever ridden a bull with a busted shoulder in front of a few thousand people?"

"Yes."

"Then you can do this."

She clipped the hair off a broad patch of the heifer's left side, scrubbed it, numbed it with a long needle in a line down the flank. The heifer bawled and shifted and then stood still, trembling. Toni made the cut. Desmond had seen a great deal of blood in his life, much of it his own, but he had never seen anybody cut into a living animal with that kind of calm. Skin, then a layer of yellow fat, then pink muscle that she parted with her fingers, talking the whole time, low, not to him and not to Mr. Haskins but to the heifer, the same nonsense voice she'd used on Smoke: hey mama, hey girl, almost there, you're doing so good, you're doing better than me.

She reached in up to her shoulder. Her face went inward, listening with her hand.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. There you are. Desmond. Get ready."

The calf's hind legs came out through the incision, wet and slick and steaming slightly in the hot night, the little hooves soft as cheese. Toni put them into his hands. They were warm and slippery and kicking very faintly.

"Up," she said, "and toward me. Now."

He pulled. The calf slid out all at once in a gush of fluid that soaked him to the knees, a long dark wet weight that he caught against his chest without thinking, and he staggered and went down on his good knee in the straw with forty pounds of calf in his arms and his shoulder screaming. The calf wasn't moving.

Toni was on it before he could say anything. She cleared its nose and mouth with two fingers, slung a wad of mucus into the straw, picked up a piece of straw and pushed it up one nostril. Nothing. She grabbed the calf's back legs, lifted its whole hind end off the ground and swung it, once, sharply. Nothing. She knelt and rubbed its ribs hard with a feed sack, hard enough to hurt, talking all the while, come on, come on, come on.

The calf sneezed.

It was the smallest sound. It shook its head, a feeble, offended little shake, and its ears flopped, and its sides moved, and then it opened its mouth and let out a hoarse indignant bleat that was the most beautiful sound Desmond had ever heard in his life.

"Bull calf," Toni said. She sat back on her heels in the straw. "Mr. Haskins, you've got a bull calf."

Mr. Haskins, at the gate, said something that might have been a word and might just have been a sound.

---

It was almost three by the time she finished closing the heifer's side. She sewed it in layers, muscle and then muscle and then skin, with a big curved needle and thick suture, in long neat even stitches, and while she worked Desmond sat in the straw and held the calf's head up so the heifer could reach it and lick it, which she did, with a big rough tongue, mooing softly, deep in her chest. The calf smelled like hot pennies and wet hay. Its coat was drying in little curls.

"You're good at that," Desmond said. "The stitching."

"I told you I was a seamstress."

"Who taught you?"

"Grandmama." She tied off a knot, snipped it. "She sewed everything. Wedding dresses, hems, quilts. Taught me on a piece of bacon rind when I was eight. Said if I could sew a straight line in bacon I could sew anything." She smiled, finally, for the first time that night, a small tired smile into the heifer's side. "Turns out she was right."

"You ever tell her that?"

"Every time I sew something." She sat back and stretched her spine, both fists pressed into her lower back, and he heard it crack. "She says I'm fishing for compliments."

They washed up at the hydrant behind the barn, taking turns, the water lukewarm from the pipe and smelling of iron. He had to take off his shirt, it was ruined, and he stood in the orange light in his undershirt with water running down his arms and the bugs whirling overhead, and she studied the shoulder, saying nothing. Then she reached over and turned the hydrant off.

"You pulled that calf with it," she said.

"I didn't have a choice."

"How does it feel?"

He thought about lying. "Bad," he said.

"How bad?"

"Like a horse kicked it."

She nodded. She didn't tell him not to ride. He had expected her to, and when she didn't, it was worse, somehow; it was as if she had decided that was his business and she had no part in it.

"Come on," she said. "I'll buy you breakfast."

---

The only thing open at that hour was a truck stop café out on the highway, a long low building of white block with a red neon sign that buzzed and a parking lot full of eighteen-wheelers idling in the dark with their running lights on, like a herd of glowing animals asleep on their feet. Inside it was too bright and too cold and smelled of bacon, burned coffee and pine cleaner. A waitress with a lot of eyeliner put them in a booth by the window without comment, although they were both still wet to the knees and smelled strongly of cow.

Toni ordered biscuits and gravy, two eggs over medium, hash browns, bacon, a side of grits, and a chocolate milk. Desmond stared at her.

"I just did surgery," she said. "In a barn. At midnight. Don't look at me like that."

He ordered the same thing.

They ate. It was the easy quiet of people who have been through something together and are now very hungry. Outside the window, the sky over the eastern tree line began very slowly to go from black to a deep blue, the color of a mussel shell, with one long band of pale green along the bottom. A trucker came in and sat at the counter and ordered pie.

"I'm buying Doc Sutton out," she said suddenly. "The rest of the practice. He's retiring for real at the end of the year. Moving to Arizona where his knees won't hurt."

"That's good. Isn't it?"

"It's sixty thousand dollars I don't have." She pushed a piece of biscuit through the gravy. "I've got the bank sort of interested. If I win the Invitational again, that's another eight thousand toward it. If I don't, I'll figure something else out. I always do." She looked up. "Mama thinks I'm crazy. A Black woman large-animal vet in Okmulgee County, owning her own practice. Grandmama says her own grandmama came out here from Alabama in nineteen-oh-four in a wagon with nine children and a milk cow and opened a dry goods store in Boley in a tent, so I'm not allowed to say anything is crazy."

"Nine children."

"Nine children and a cow named Duchess. It's on Grandmama's wall. There's a picture of the tent." She put down her fork. "My family's moved around a lot, you know. Alabama to Boley. Boley to Tulsa, some of them, after the war. Tulsa to Los Angeles. My dad to California. My cousins in Denver. Shante put together one of those timelines for your family, with everybody's moves on it. I saw it. I want to do one for mine. Just so somebody can see the whole line in one place. All the roads." She shrugged, embarrassed. "Anyway. I'm the one who came back. Somebody had to."

"Me too," he said.

"Are you?" Her eyes stayed on his. "Back?"

Outside, the green at the edge of the sky had turned to gold and the gold to a hot clear orange, and the first light came across the parking lot and hit the chrome of the idling trucks and the window of the café, so that her face was suddenly lit up along one side, the curve of her cheekbone and her tired eyes and a smudge of something dried on her jaw that he decided not to mention.

"I don't know yet," he said honestly. "I want to be."

She held his eyes a long time. Then she reached across the table and took his left hand, the good one, turned it palm up and studied it, at the thick yellow calluses at the base of his fingers from the bull rope, the old rope burn across the heel of his hand, the scrape from tonight's straw.

"Bull rider hands," she said.

"Calf puller hands."

"Those too." She didn't let go. "Desmond. I still don't date bull riders."

"Then don't date me," he said. "Have breakfast with me."

She laughed. It surprised her, he could see that. She laughed with her head back against the booth, a real laugh, loud enough that the trucker at the counter turned around. And when she was done she was still holding his hand, and she kept holding it while the waitress refilled their coffee, and while the sun came up over the trucks, and while they argued about whether Alvin Tubbs was really afraid of a uterus or just said so to get out of work, and for the whole time it took him to finish his grits, which he did very, very slowly.

Okra

The Henryetta rodeo was the third weekend in August, and the bull Desmond drew was a big mouse-colored crossbred with a white blaze called Mister Saxophone, who had been ridden only four times all year.

"He's going to spin left and then reverse," Alvin said behind the chutes, wrapping his own knees in tape for the bullfighting. "Then he'll spin right till you're dizzy. Then he'll do something nobody's ever seen. He's a jazz musician. He improvises."

"Great."

"If you ride him it's eighty-five, easy."

"If I ride him."

"If you ride him," Alvin agreed, and slapped him on the good shoulder, and went off to stand in the arena in his red-and-yellow shirt with his face painted, waiting.

The Henryetta arena was set down in a hollow below the town, with the old brick buildings and the water tower up on the hill above it, and in the late afternoon the sun came down through the haze of dust and humidity so that the whole bowl glowed a soft dull copper. It was ninety-six degrees. The bleachers were full. Somebody was frying funnel cakes and somebody else was smoking brisket in a trailer-mounted pit behind the concession stand, and the two smells fought it out over the arena, sweet and smoky, with the warm stink of livestock underneath everything like a bass note.

Toni had run in the slack that morning, a fifteen-two, leading. She was on the fence near the chutes now with Pocket tied to her trailer behind her, and when he climbed down onto Mister Saxophone he looked up and found her the way he always found her now, without looking, the way you find a light switch in your own house in the dark.

He nodded his head.

The bull did exactly what Alvin had said, which was something Desmond would think about later. He spun left, three tight rounds, so fast the world became a smear of copper and faces. Then he reversed, a sudden whipping change of direction that would have thrown Desmond into the well a month ago, and Desmond went with him, his hips loose, his free arm working. Then he spun right. Then, at about six seconds, he did the thing nobody had ever seen: jumped straight up in the air with all four feet off the ground and came down on his front feet only, kicking his hind end so high that for a second Desmond was looking straight down past the bull's head at the dirt.

He stayed. He didn't know how. The whistle blew.

It was getting off that did it. He reached down for his tail with his left hand and pulled it and opened his riding hand and swung his right leg over, the way he had done ten thousand times, and the bull ducked unexpectedly under him and his right arm was still up in the air, and the jolt of the landing went up through that arm into the shoulder and he felt the ball of the joint slide forward out of its socket. It was a sickening, slippery, grinding sensation, like a drawer coming off its runners. Then, as he hit the dirt and rolled, it slid back in with a clunk he felt in his teeth.

He lay on his side. The pain came a second later, so big it had a color, white-green, and a sound, a high whine.

Alvin was standing over him, between him and the bull, his painted face upside down. "Dez. Dez. You okay?"

"Eighty-five?"

"Eighty-four and a half, you idiot. Can you get up?"

He got up. He walked out of the arena on his own feet with his right arm held tight against his body and his face perfectly calm, and he waved his hat with his left hand to the bleachers, who were on their feet, and he walked behind the chutes and around the end of a stock trailer where nobody could see him and sat down on the ground and was sick into the grass.

Toni found him there. She didn't say anything at first. She knelt in front of him and put her hands on his shoulder, light and quick, front and back, feeling. Her fingers were cool. He could smell her, horse and sunscreen and coconut, and under the pain it smelled like the only good news of the day.

"It went out," she said.

"It went back in."

"I know. I can feel it." She sat back on her heels. Her face was very still. "You need ice and a sling and a real doctor in the morning. In that order. Where's your truck?"

"Alvin drove."

"Then I'm driving you."

On the way out of the fairgrounds she stopped at the secretary's trailer without asking him and went in, and came back out with an envelope and dropped it in his lap. Second place. Two thousand two hundred dollars. Javon had ridden a spotted bull for eighty-six in the last section and won it, and had come by the stock trailer afterward to say so, but he'd also said, quieter, without the gold-tooth grin, that the jump at six seconds was the best thing he'd seen a man ride all year. Desmond pictured the strip of masking tape on his own dashboard and did the arithmetic out loud. Eight thousand and change from riding. Shante's family pot at nine thousand four hundred. Ten thousand short, give or take, with one rodeo left that mattered.

"Stop counting," Toni said, her eyes on the road.

"I can't."

"Then count quieter."

---

She lived in a small yellow frame house on a quiet street on the north side of Okmulgee, three blocks from the clinic, with a deep screened porch and a garden in the side yard where okra plants stood taller than she did, their big pale yellow flowers with red centers closed up for the evening. A brown dog of no particular breed came running to the gate and threw himself against her legs, groaning with joy.

"That's Waylon," she said. "He's an idiot. Someone dumped him at the clinic. Don't let him on your arm."

The house inside was cool and dim and smelled of cedar and some kind of spice, cumin maybe, and of clean laundry. There were saddle pads drying over the back of a kitchen chair, and veterinary journals stacked on the floor beside the couch, and a big framed photograph above the mantel of a wagon and a canvas tent on a bare prairie, with a crowd of children in front of it and a woman in a long dark dress holding the halter of a cow. *Hollins Dry Goods, Boley, 1904.*

"Duchess," Desmond said, pointing at the cow.

"Duchess," Toni agreed, and pushed him down onto the couch.

She brought ice in a dish towel and packed it around the shoulder and made him a sling out of another dish towel and two safety pins, and then she sat beside him on the couch and gave him two pills and a glass of water, and when he raised his eyebrows at the pills she said, "They're for humans. I keep them for my own back. Don't get excited."

He took them. Waylon lay down on his feet. Through the screen door the evening was turning deep blue, and the cicadas were winding down and the crickets were starting up, and somewhere down the street somebody was playing an old soul record on a porch, a man's voice, rough and sweet, coming faint through the dusk. He couldn't make out the words.

"Your grandfather's going to kill me," she said.

"Why you?"

"Because I'm supposed to be the smart one." She sat with her elbows on her knees, staring at the floor. "I watched that bull do that thing. The jump. And I thought, he's going to come off. And I was scared. And then you didn't come off and I wanted to climb the fence and hug that ugly bull. And then you landed." She laughed, a short, unhappy sound. "I don't know what I am, Desmond. I'm a mess."

"You're not a mess."

"I'm the woman in the yellow dress."

He reached over with his left hand and took hold of the end of one of her braids, very gently, and rolled it between his finger and thumb. It was soft and heavy and smelled of her.

"Toni."

She turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes were wet. In the blue light from the screen door they were dark, not amber, and close.

"I'm going to ride at the Invitational," he said. "I won't pretend otherwise."

"I know."

"And after that I don't know. But I'm not going anywhere tonight."

She looked at him a long time. Then she leaned in and kissed him, carefully, like she was checking a wound, and then not carefully at all.

Waylon got up and left the room in disgust.

---

What happened afterward was slow, because of his shoulder, and funny, because of the dish towel sling, which came unpinned at an important moment and set her laughing until she had to rest her forehead against his chest, and tender in a way he had not expected and did not have words for and did not need any. The window unit in her bedroom rattled and dripped. The okra flowers, he learned later, opened at dawn. He did not see them open. He was asleep with her hair across his face and her hand flat on his good shoulder, holding it, as if he might roll away in the night and go somewhere.

---

In the morning she made coffee in a stovetop pot that hissed and spat and smelled like a fire in a cedar forest, and cut okra from the garden while it was still wet with dew, and fried it in a cast-iron pan in cornmeal and bacon fat until the pieces were gold and crisp and popped between his teeth. They ate it on the porch with eggs and toast, Waylon watching every bite with tragic eyes.

His shoulder was swollen and stiff and the color of a ripe plum along the front. She looked at it in the daylight and her mouth went tight.

"Doctor today," she said. "Promise me."

"I promise."

"A people doctor."

"A people doctor."

She was quiet for a moment, holding her coffee cup in both hands. Then she put it down and picked up her phone off the porch rail and did something on it and handed it to him.

It was an invitation. A private page, the kind only invited family could open, with a picture of Miss Pearline at the top, young, in a white dress on the steps of the shop, and below it: *Pearline Hollins turns 85. Saturday, September 5. The shop, Pecan Street, Boley. Family only. Bring a dish and a story.* Under it was a list of who had been invited, and who had said yes. Dolores. A dozen cousins. An uncle in Denver. The last name on the list, added that morning, was his.

"The night before the Invitational," he said.

"Grandmama's choice. Not mine." She took the phone back. "She says you need a good meal before you get on that bull, and she says your grandfather has to come too, and she says if he doesn't she'll drive out there herself and tell him what she thinks of his manners in person."

"She already told him."

"She'll tell him again. She enjoys it." Toni picked up her coffee. She did not look at him. "Anyway. You're on the list. That's all."

He looked at her profile against the morning light coming through the screen, the curve of her cheek and her chin and the line of her throat, and the okra flowers open now behind her in the side yard, pale yellow, like small paper lamps.

"Family only," he said.

"Don't make a thing of it, Desmond."

"I'm not making a thing."

"You're making a face."

"This is just my face."

She threw a piece of toast at him. Waylon caught it in midair, and that was the end of breakfast.

The Treasurer's Window

The people doctor was in Tulsa, on the fourth floor of a glass building beside the river, and she was a small brisk woman with silver hair who looked at the scans on her screen for a long time with her lips pressed together and then turned around on her rolling stool and said, "So. You're going to ride anyway."

"How did you know?"

"Mr. Reese, I've been doing this for twenty-six years and I'm the team doctor for two rodeos. I can tell a bull rider from across a parking lot. You walk like you're expecting the floor to move." She pointed at the scan with her pen. "The repair held. That's the good news. The capsule's loose. That's why it slid. It's going to keep sliding. Every time it slides it does a little more damage to the cartilage, and someday that cartilage will be gone, and then you will have an eighty-year-old shoulder at forty-five."

"How many more times?"

"Can it slide? Nobody knows. Ten. One." She shrugged. "I can give you a brace. It'll help. It'll limit how high that arm goes, which in your line of work is a problem, I realize."

"I ride left-handed for the free arm."

"Then that's something." She rolled her stool back to the desk and started writing. "I'm not going to tell you not to ride. You've already decided. I'm going to tell you to be honest with yourself about why."

He thought about that all the way back down Highway 75 with the brace on, a stiff black contraption of neoprene and plastic and straps that held his right arm against his ribs and made him look, Shante said from the driver's seat, like a man who'd been halfway into a straitjacket and changed his mind.

"Well?" she said. "Why?"

"The ranch."

"That's one."

He looked out the window. The country south of Tulsa rolled by, hay meadows and oil pumps nodding in the pastures like big patient birds, red cattle under blackjack oaks. A thunderhead was building in the far west, white on top, and the air through the vent smelled of baking grass.

"Because I'm good at it," he said finally. "Because it's the only thing I ever did that I was the best at. Because I don't know who I am if I'm not doing it."

Shante nodded slowly. "That's three."

"Is that bad?"

"No, baby brother. It's honest." She reached over and squeezed his knee. "I just wanted to hear you say it out loud before you get on that bull and I have to watch."

---

The Okmulgee County treasurer's office was in the courthouse, a big pale stone building a few blocks from the old Creek Council House on the town square. The Council House was built of rough brown sandstone in the 1870s, with a white cupola on top, and it sat in the middle of a green lawn shaded by elms, where the Creek Nation's government had once met. Desmond had been inside once on a school trip and remembered almost nothing except the cool of the stone walls on a hot day and an old woman telling the class that the building had stood when Oklahoma was not yet a state, and that the people who built it had walked here from Alabama and Georgia on the forced removal. He remembered thinking about how far that was. He was ten. He thought about it again now, standing on the courthouse steps in the heat with his arm strapped to his side. He thought of Lettie Reese walking twenty-two miles in a day to put her mark on a paper.

Pop had put on his good shirt and a bolo tie with a polished piece of petrified wood for the slide. He had put on his good hat. He walked up the courthouse steps without touching the rail, slowly, with Shante on one side of him and Desmond on the other, and neither of them touched him either, because they knew better.

Inside it was cold and echoing and smelled of floor wax and copier toner. The treasurer's office was down a long hallway at the back, behind a counter with a glass window, and the woman behind the window was about fifty, with her readers pushed up into her hair and a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST AUNT.

"Ellis Reese," she said, when Pop gave his name. She looked up from the screen. "Mr. Reese. I've been hoping you'd come in."

Pop's jaw tightened. "I'm here."

"I know you are." The woman, whose nameplate said YVONNE TATE, took off her reading glasses. "My daddy bought hay from you for twenty years, Mr. Reese. Bertrand Tate. Out on the Beggs road."

Pop looked at her more closely. Something in his face eased by a fraction. "You're Bert's girl. The one who rode the paint pony."

"Into a stock tank at the county fair. Yes, sir." She put the glasses back on and turned to her screen. "Okay. Let's see where we are."

Shante put the cashier's check on the counter. Nine thousand four hundred and fifty dollars. Forty-one names had gone into it: Aunt Fannie and her children in Oakland; Uncle Wendell and his grandbaby in Chicago, who had sent eleven dollars of her own in an envelope with a drawing of a horse on it; cousins in Houston and Kansas City and Denver and Atlanta; a second cousin in Germany nobody had heard from in years who was in the Air Force and had sent three hundred dollars and a photograph of himself standing next to a fighter jet. Shante had kept a list of every name and every amount in the family space, and beside each one she had put where that branch of the family had lived, and when they had moved there, and from where. Lettie in the Creek Nation. Josiah's sister to Kansas City in 1926. Two of his sons to Oakland in the war to build ships. A grandson to Chicago for the steel mills. Everyone scattered across the map like seed blown off a cottonwood, and all of them, it turned out, had kept a thread back to that hundred and sixty acres on the Deep Fork.

Pop had read the list three times at the kitchen table the night before. He had not said anything. But at the end he had asked Shante to record him, and he had said into her phone, in a voice so gruff it barely came out, *This is Ellis Reese on the Lazy R Bar. I'm much obliged to every one of you. I'll pay it back.* And then, after a long pause, *Wendell, your grandbaby's horse needs a longer neck. Tell her I said so.*

Yvonne Tate processed the check. The printer under the counter chattered and spat out a receipt.

"All right," she said. "That brings the delinquent amount down to ten thousand one hundred and sixty-two dollars and forty cents, which includes this year's interest. To take the property off the resale list it has to be paid in full by close of business on October first." She looked at Pop over the glasses. "Mr. Reese, I can't change that date. I want you to know I would if I could."

"I know it."

"And I want you to know that there's a man from Tulsa who calls this office every two weeks asking about that parcel. He buys at resale. He's bought a lot of bottomland in this county. He's very polite."

Pop said nothing. His hands were flat on the counter.

"I tell him I can't discuss it," Yvonne said. "Which is true." She slid the receipt under the glass. "Good luck at the Invitational, Desmond. My nephew's got your picture in his room. The one from Cheyenne."

"Everybody's got that picture," Desmond said.

"Not everybody," said Yvonne Tate. "Just the ones around here."

Outside, Pop didn't go straight to the truck. He stood at the bottom of the courthouse steps with his hat in his hand and looked across the street toward the square, toward the brown stone of the Council House under its elms, and then he walked over there, slowly, and Desmond and Shante followed him without asking why. The lawn was freshly mowed and the clippings stuck to their boots. Cicadas roared in the elms. A man on a riding mower at the far corner lifted a hand to them and kept going.

Pop stopped in the shade at the edge of the lawn and stood looking up at the white cupola against the hot white sky.

"My granddaddy said she stood right about here," he said. "Lettie. Waiting in line to sign. There was a crowd of them, Freedmen and Creeks both, all day in the sun, and some of them had come farther than her. He said she wore her good hat. He said she wouldn't sit down in the shade because she was afraid she'd lose her place."

Shante took out her phone and photographed the spot, the trampled grass, the shade line of the elm, Pop's boots, and later that night she added it to the map she had been building for the family of every place that mattered to them, beside the creek and the chimney stones and the shop on Pecan Street, with one line under it in Pop's words. *Where she stood and wouldn't sit down.*

---

They stopped for lunch at a barbecue place on the edge of town, a low cinderblock building with a smoker the size of a submarine out back and picnic tables inside covered in red-and-white checked oilcloth. The smell of hickory smoke had soaked so deep into the walls and the tables and the ceiling tiles that it was like eating inside a smokehouse. They ordered ribs and hot links and sliced brisket on butcher paper with white bread and pickles and onions and a side of beans that tasted, Pop said, almost as good as his.

Marcus met them there. He had driven down from Tulsa with a friend's father to rope at a youth jackpot at the county fairgrounds that afternoon, and he came in still wearing his roping glove, with arena dirt on his jeans and a look on his face like he'd swallowed a light bulb.

"I caught," he said. "Both runs. Second place in the breakaway."

Shante shrieked and hugged him so hard his hat fell off. Pop stood up from the picnic table, which he did not often do for anybody, and shook his great-grandson's hand gravely, like a man closing a deal.

"What horse?" Pop said.

"Mr. Dade's old sorrel. Biscuit. Not the cow Biscuit. A different Biscuit."

"Everybody in this county names things Biscuit," Shante said.

"It's a good name," said Pop. "You can't go wrong with Biscuit." He sat back down. "Did you look at the calf or at the loop?"

"The calf."

"Good. Keep doing that. Never look at your own rope." He picked up a rib and examined it. "That's the whole secret. Took me forty years to learn it."

Desmond laughed. Marcus looked at him, confused.

"What?"

"Nothing," Desmond said. "It's good advice."

Later, in the parking lot, with the sun beating down on the blacktop so hard you could smell the tar, and Shante and Marcus loading into her car, and the thunderhead in the west grown huge and dark and grumbling, Pop stood beside Desmond's truck and looked at the brace on his arm.

"What did the doctor say?"

"That I'm going to ride anyway."

"Smart woman."

"She said to be honest about why."

"And are you?"

Desmond thought about it. The wind was beginning to come in ahead of the storm, warm and fitful, lifting the dust in the parking lot in little whirls. A grackle on the power line overhead was making a noise like a rusty hinge.

"I want to win it," he said. "For the place. And for me. Both. I don't know which one's bigger."

His grandfather nodded slowly. He took his hat off and wiped the sweatband with his handkerchief and put it back on.

"That's the first honest thing anybody named Reese has said about bull riding in sixty years," he said. "Get in the truck. That storm's going to hit before we get home."

Long Division

Odessa Kinnard raised bucking bulls on twelve hundred acres along the Deep Fork west of town, in a stretch of bottomland so flat and rich that in wet years the river came up over it and left behind a skin of red silt you could have planted a garden in. She was sixty-seven years old, five feet tall in her boots, and had been called the meanest woman in Oklahoma by at least three stock contractors and one former husband, all of whom she outlived in business if not in body.

"Your grandfather," she said, when Desmond climbed out of his truck in her yard on the Monday before the Invitational, "owes me a pie."

"Ma'am?"

"Nineteen seventy-eight. He bet me a pie that my daddy's bull Sweet Potato would get ridden at the Boley rodeo. Sweet Potato did not get ridden. Ellis Reese has owed me a pie for forty-eight years." She shook his left hand with a grip like a fence stretcher. "You tell him I said so."

"Everybody keeps giving me messages for him."

"That's because he won't answer his telephone." She turned and walked off toward the pens, and he followed. "Come on. I want to show you something."

The Kinnard place was all business. The house was a plain brick ranch house with a carport. Everything else was pens. Long alleys of heavy pipe fence painted a dull green, running in a grid across the bottoms, with water troughs and feed bunks and big round bales of prairie hay set in rings. The bulls stood in groups of three and four in the shade of tin sheds, chewing, eighty of them at least: brindles and blacks and reds, spotted ones, a few big gray Brahman crosses with drooping ears. The smell was enormous, a wall of dung and hay and hide and hot breath that hit him the way the heat did, physically. Flies rose in clouds wherever they walked. A pair of scissortail flycatchers swooped low over the pens with their long forked tails streaming out behind them like ribbons, hunting.

"My daddy started the Invitational in nineteen seventy-one," Odessa said as they walked. "You know why?"

"No, ma'am."

"Because there were rodeos in this state that wouldn't let a Black cowboy enter. Or they let you enter and then they drew you the worst stock and the judges marked you down. Daddy was a stock contractor and a rodeo man his whole life and he got tired of watching it. So he said, I'll put on my own, and I'll invite the best Black cowboys in the country, and anybody else who wants to come and ride against them can come too, and we'll see who wins." She stopped at the end of an alley, beside a tin shed that served as her office, and pushed the door open with her boot. Inside it was hot as an oven and smelled of mineral blocks and old paper. The walls were covered from the floor to the rafters with photographs in cheap frames, every one of them a cowboy on a bull, and every one labeled on a strip of white card tacked under it: the rider's name, his hometown, the bull, the year, the score. Some of the cards were in a big looping hand gone brown with age. The newer ones were in Odessa's small square print.

"Daddy's wall," she said. "Every champion since seventy-one. When a man's grandson comes through, he can find him. I had a boy from Houston last year stand right there and cry because he'd never seen his granddaddy's face young." She tapped an empty space near the door with one knuckle. "Fifty-sixth one goes there. Nobody's got it yet."

She pulled the door shut again and walked on.

She leaned on the fence. On the other side, alone in a pen by himself, a bull was standing in the shade of a tin roof looking at them.

He was not as big as some of the others. Seventeen hundred pounds, maybe. But he was built like a piece of machinery, short-coupled and deep-chested, all of his weight forward in the shoulders. He was a dark red brindle, the stripes in his hide so dark they were almost black, so that in the shade he looked like the inside of a woodstove with the coals burning through. His horns were short and thick and tipped back. He was not chewing. He was simply looking at them, steadily, with an expression of total calm.

"Long Division," Odessa said.

"I've heard about him."

"Everybody's heard about him. He's been out a hundred and four times. Ridden twice. Once in Fort Worth two years ago and once in Guthrie last summer by a boy who broke his jaw getting off." She spat neatly into the dirt. "He's the best bull I've ever raised. He's the best bull my daddy ever dreamed of. He's going in the short go at the Invitational. If you make the short go, you might draw him. You might not."

"Why are you showing me?"

Odessa Kinnard looked at him sidelong from under her hat.

"Because my daddy watched your grandfather ride Bad Medicine in nineteen sixty-two," she said. "He brought it up at every supper table I can remember. He said it was the best seven seconds he ever saw. He said if Ellis Reese hadn't had to quit and go haul hay, he'd have been the first Black world champion bull rider." She turned back to the bull. "I wanted you to see the animal. That's all. Before you're sitting on him in front of six thousand people with your arm in a brace. So you know what it is you're doing."

Long Division blew out through his nose, a long slow rush of air that raised a little puff of dust from the ground in front of him. Then he turned and walked away into the back of the pen, unhurried, and lay down in the shade like a cat.

---

On Wednesday he drove out to Alvin's to get on one more practice bull, because a man ought to get on something the week of a big rodeo, and because Cornbread was honest.

It was a hundred and one degrees at six in the evening. The leaning light pole threw a shadow across the arena like the hand of a clock. Grasshoppers went up out of the dry grass in front of his boots in little clattering bursts. Alvin was on the tailgate eating sunflower seeds and spitting the hulls into a coffee can.

"One bull," Alvin said. "Then you go home and sit in front of a fan."

"One bull."

Cornbread came out the way he always did, high and straight, and on the third jump he dropped his left shoulder and came back to the right like a kitchen timer, and Desmond was there for it. He was ahead of it. He was thinking that he was ahead of it. Then the bull did a small, stupid, ordinary thing he had never done before. He stumbled. One front foot went into a soft place in the dirt where the water trough had leaked, and his whole front end dipped, not much, maybe a foot, and Desmond's free arm went back to catch his balance, the way a free arm is supposed to.

The brace stopped it at the shoulder. The arm kept going anyway.

He felt the ball of the joint leave. It did not slide this time, the way it had in Henryetta. It went out all at once, forward and down, with a pop he heard inside his own head, and it stayed out. He came off over the bull's hip and landed on his left side, and when he tried to roll his right arm did not come with him. It lay in the dirt beside him at an angle that belonged to somebody else.

Alvin was there. Cornbread trotted off to the out gate and waited at it like a man with an appointment.

"Don't move it," Alvin said.

"I can't move it."

"Then that's easy."

They drove to the emergency room in Okmulgee in Alvin's truck with every window down, the air conditioning dead since spring, and every seam in the county road went through Desmond's shoulder like a nail. He held his right forearm in his left hand and watched the oil pumps go by, nodding their heads in the heat, and Alvin, for once in his life, said nothing.

At the hospital a young doctor with a ponytail looked at the shoulder and said, "Oh, wow," which was not what Desmond wanted to hear, and then gave him something in a needle and wrapped a bedsheet around his chest and handed the two ends of it to Alvin.

"Hold that," she said. "Lean back. Don't let go."

"I faint," Alvin told her.

"At what?"

Alvin considered the question honestly. "Mostly uteruses," he said.

"Then you'll be fine. Lean back."

She took Desmond's wrist and pulled, slow and steady and harder than he would have believed a person her size could pull, and Alvin leaned back against the sheet with his eyes shut tight, and after a long burning time there was a deep clunk and the shoulder was in again, and he could hear the ice machine in the hallway dropping cubes into its bin.

"Second time this month?" the doctor said, reading the chart.

"Third time this summer."

She put the chart down and looked at him for a while.

"I'm not your doctor," she said finally. "But if I were, I'd tell you that the next one might not go back in for me."

---

Alvin brought him home at dusk with his right arm strapped across his chest in a sling over the brace. Toni's truck was in the yard. She was sitting on the porch steps with Pop, holding one of Pop's coffee cups in both hands, and when Desmond climbed down out of Alvin's truck she stood up, and he saw that she already knew.

"Alvin called me from the waiting room," she said. "Before he called your grandfather."

Alvin did not get out of the truck. He lifted two fingers off the wheel and backed out of the drive fast, the way a man leaves a house where an argument is about to start.

Pop got up, without a word, and went inside. The screen door clapped behind him.

Desmond sat down on the step. Toni sat beside him. Waylon, who had ridden over in her truck, came out from under the porch and leaned his whole warm weight against Desmond's knees.

"Bank said no," Toni said. "This morning. I was going to tell you that first. Now it's second."

"Toni. I'm sorry."

"They said not enough collateral. If I had land, or a co-signer." She turned the cup. "Doc Sutton's going to sell to a group out of Dallas. They'll keep me on as an associate. Salary. No say."

"Listen. If I win Monday, there's money left after the taxes. And Pop's got a hundred and sixty acres that would be clear—"

"No."

"I'm just saying—"

"No. You are not getting on a bull for my practice. You are not putting your grandfather's land up for my practice. And you are not getting on a bull Monday with a shoulder that just came out on a practice bull because he tripped." She set the cup down on the step hard enough to slop coffee on the boards. "I'm not your rescue, Desmond. I'm not the next thing on your list after the county."

"I know you're not."

"Then don't." She stood. The sky behind the hill across the road was a deep hot orange fading up into violet, and the cicadas were winding up in the pecans. She called the dog and went down the steps, and at the truck she stopped with the door open, gripping the frame, not getting in.

"You want to know the stupid part?" she said. "If some bull rider I didn't care about had offered to co-sign, I'd have said thank you and taken it." She turned her head. "It's only because it's you that I can't."

She drove away.

---

Pop came back out with two cups of coffee and gave one to Desmond, and sat down in his green spring chair, and the springs creaked.

"You heard," Desmond said.

"I'm old. I'm not deaf." Pop sipped. "You offered that girl my land."

"Yeah. I guess I did."

"Without asking me."

"Yeah."

His grandfather nodded slowly and rocked once on the springs.

"Now you know how it feels," he said. "Somebody trying to save you that you didn't ask to be saved by. Mad as a wet hen, ain't it."

Desmond laughed, a little helplessly, and the laugh went into the shoulder and he stopped.

Pop looked at the sling. He studied it, the strap across the chest and the arm folded up inside it like a wing that would not open, and Desmond waited for him to say it, the thing about Vegas, the thing about not watching it again. He didn't. He drank his coffee. Out along the creek the lightning bugs were coming up, fewer now at the end of August.

"Odessa tell you I owe her a pie?" Pop said.

"She did."

"Sweet Potato was ridden," Pop said. "Six and a half seconds. Then that boy's hand came out of the rope and she says it don't count." He shook his head. "Forty-eight years. That woman."

"You going to pay it?"

"I'm going to have to, now," Pop said darkly. "She told you. Now there's a witness."

Later, when Desmond was lying awake in the back bedroom with the window unit roaring and the arm strapped to his ribs, he heard his grandfather get up in the night and go out to the barn. He heard the barn door roll on its track. The light came on out there, a thin yellow line under the door, and stayed on a long time, and when it finally went out Desmond had still not decided whether the old man had gone to look at the saddle or to look at the bottom pasture in the dark.

Bring a Dish and a Story

Pop baked the pie himself.

He did it on Saturday morning, the day of Miss Pearline's party, with all the windows open and the box fan going and his good shirt hanging on the back of the kitchen door in a dry cleaner's bag so it wouldn't get flour on it. It was a sweet potato pie, because Alberta's sweet potato pie had been the most famous thing in three counties and he had watched her make it for fifty-eight years. He had never once made it himself. Desmond sat at the kitchen table with his arm strapped up in the sling and watched him do it and was not allowed to help.

"You'll put your elbow in it," Pop said.

"I'm not going to put my elbow in it."

"You'll put your elbow in it and then you'll say it was the sling."

Pop boiled the sweet potatoes in their skins until they were soft and slipped the skins off with his fingers, wincing at the heat, and mashed them in a big yellow bowl with butter, sugar, evaporated milk, eggs, a long pour of vanilla, nutmeg grated fresh from a whole nut on a little tin grater that had been Alberta's mother's. The kitchen filled up with a smell so thick and warm and sweet it was almost a sound. He tasted it from the spoon, frowned, added more nutmeg, tasted again, and nodded.

"That's hers," he said quietly.

The crust was harder. He rolled it out on the floured counter with an old wooden pin and it tore twice and he said things to it that Desmond had not heard him say since a heifer broke through a fence in 2009. The third time it held. He laid it in the dish and crimped the edge all the way around with his thumb and forefinger, slow and even, and when he was done he looked at it for a long while.

"She used to do it faster," he said.

"You did it fine."

"I did it slow." He poured in the filling. "Slow's fine."

He made two pies. One for Miss Pearline. One, he said, wrapped in foil and put in a separate box, the lid taped and lettered O. KINNARD in black marker, for an old debt.

---

Boley on a Saturday night in September smelled of fish frying and hickory smoke and cut grass, and, as the sun went down, of the rain that had fallen that afternoon steaming up off the hot asphalt of Pecan Street. They had closed off the block in front of Pearline's Beauty Shop with a pair of sawhorses and somebody's horse trailer parked sideways, and set up folding tables down the middle of the street, end to end, covered with white paper. There were strings of bulbs from the shop's awning to the dead bank building across the way. A man was frying catfish in a propane cooker on the sidewalk, in a pot of oil wide enough to float a saddle. Another man had a smoker on a trailer. Children were running up and down the street in a pack, shrieking, being chased by a pack of dogs, being chased by a teenager on a bicycle.

Every family had brought a dish. The tables were covered with them: fried chicken, ribs, greens cooked down with smoked turkey, macaroni and cheese in great golden pans, potato salad, deviled eggs, fried okra, cornbread, three kinds of beans, a whole ham glazed with brown sugar, peach cobbler and blackberry cobbler and banana pudding with vanilla wafers going soft in it, a coconut cake four layers high. At the center, on a lawn chair raised up on a wooden pallet as if she were a queen on a dais, in a dress of deep purple with a corsage of white flowers, sat Miss Pearline Hollins, eighty-five years old, receiving visitors.

Pop set his pie in front of her and stood back.

She looked at it. She looked at him. She leaned forward and smelled it.

"Ellis Reese," she said, "did you make this?"

"I did."

"You never made a pie in your life."

"I made two today."

Miss Pearline took the fork somebody handed her and took a bite directly out of the middle of the pie, in front of everybody, and chewed for a long time with her eyes closed.

"That's Alberta's," she said finally.

"It is."

"You didn't get it all the way."

"I know it."

"Close, though." She opened her eyes. "Sit down by me, you old fool. I haven't seen you in four years. You look terrible."

He sat down by her. Desmond, standing behind them, saw her put her small ringed hand over his big knotted one on the arm of the lawn chair, and keep it there, and saw his grandfather let her.

---

Toni found him an hour later down by the sawhorses, where he was standing with a paper plate of catfish and watching Marcus try to teach three little girls to swing a rope.

She was wearing a yellow dress.

He stared at it. He couldn't help it. It was a plain cotton sundress the color of a ripe squash, and it came down to her knees, and she had put her braids up and she had gold hoops in her ears and she was holding two paper cups of red punch and looking at him with an expression of grim, defiant amusement.

"Don't," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"Grandmama made it. For me, for tonight. She's been sewing it for a month. She didn't tell me until this afternoon." Toni handed him a cup of punch. "She said I should stop being scared of a color."

"It's a nice color."

"It's a terrible color. It's the color of a school bus." She drank her punch. "I look like a caution sign."

"You look," he said, and found that he did not have a way to finish the sentence that he could say out loud on a public street in Boley in front of forty of her relatives, so he didn't.

She sipped and kept her eyes on him. The lights strung over the street had come on, and in their warm yellow glow her skin was dark gold and her eyes had gone amber again.

"I'm sorry," he said. "About the land. About the bank. I shouldn't have said it."

"No. You shouldn't have." She turned the cup in her fingers. "I shouldn't have yelled at you on your grandfather's porch."

"Pop enjoyed it."

"I know. I saw him in the window." She almost smiled. "I've been thinking. All week. I don't need Doc Sutton's building. I don't need his X-ray machine and his front desk and his three exam rooms. Half of what I do is out of my truck anyway. I've got the truck. I've got the vet box. I've got the clients, most of them, and most of them don't like the idea of some group out of Dallas any more than I do." She took a breath. "So I'm going to go on my own. Mobile. Just me and the truck and Waylon. Hollins Large Animal. Grandmama's going to let me use the back room of the shop for an office."

"Toni. That's—"

"Crazy, Mama says."

"I was going to say it's great."

"It's crazy and great. Grandmama says her grandmama sold dry goods out of a tent." She put her cup down on the sawhorse. "Anyway, I figured it out myself. That's what I wanted to tell you. Nobody had to save me."

"I know."

"And I'm sorry I said you were trying to. I think you were trying to—" she searched for it, "—share. And I don't know how to do that yet. I've never done it."

"Me neither."

"I know," she said. "That's the problem with us. We're both just like your grandfather."

---

Later, when it was full dark and the children had been gathered up off the street and the old people were sitting in lawn chairs along the sidewalk with plates of cake on their knees, Shante stood up on the shop's front step and clapped her hands and said that Miss Pearline wanted everybody who'd brought a story to tell it. That had been on the invitation. Bring a dish and a story. Shante had her phone out, and Miss Pearline had said yes to the recording, and so had everybody who stood up, one at a time, under the lights.

Dolores told about the time a mule had walked into the shop in 1987 and stood in front of the mirror for ten minutes looking at itself. A cousin from Denver told about the dry goods store in the tent and the cow named Duchess who had once eaten an entire bolt of calico. Booker Dade, the rodeo announcer, told about the first Boley rodeo he ever called, in 1995, when the loudspeaker shorted out and he had to stand on the roof of the announcer's stand and holler every name for three hours. A girl of about sixteen, shy, holding her mother's hand, told about her great-grandmother teaching her to press hair on this very street when she was six, and how the hot comb had scared her, and how she had learned anyway.

Then Odessa Kinnard stood up from her lawn chair. Desmond had not known she was there. She was wearing a pressed white shirt and a bolo tie and a hat with a silver band.

"Ellis Reese," she said, "owes me a pie."

The street laughed.

"I'm here," Odessa said, "to collect."

Pop got up out of his chair beside Miss Pearline, slowly, and walked down the length of the paper-covered tables to where Odessa stood. He was carrying the second pie in its box with the masking tape on the lid. He held it out to her. She took it, and opened it, and looked inside, and closed it.

"Sweet Potato was ridden," Pop said. "Six and a half seconds."

"He was not ridden. That boy's hand came out."

"His hand came out at six and a half."

"And there are eight seconds in a bull ride, Ellis, and there were in nineteen seventy-eight, and there will be on Monday." She tucked the pie box under her arm. Then she said, louder, so the whole street could hear, "And speaking of tomorrow. My daddy started the Deep Fork Invitational fifty-five years ago, and every year we open it with a grand entry, with the families who've been part of it carrying their brands in on flags. This year I'd like to ask Mr. Ellis Reese to ride in front. On his own horse. With his own brand." She looked at him. "If he's still able to sit a horse."

"I can sit a horse," Pop said, offended.

"Then I'll see you tomorrow at six."

She went back to her lawn chair. The street was cheering. Miss Pearline was banging her fork on the edge of her plate. Pop stood in the middle of Pecan Street under the strings of lights with his hands empty and an expression on his face that Desmond had last seen in the photograph from 1962, the young man on the bull with his free hand thrown up against the white sky.

He walked back toward the shop slowly. When he got to where Desmond and Toni were standing, he stopped.

"I'm going to need that saddle oiled," he said.

"I'll oil it tomorrow."

"Not the mink oil. The neatsfoot. Your great-granddaddy only used neatsfoot."

"Neatsfoot."

"And Smoke needs a bath." Pop looked at Toni. "Is his foot good enough for that?"

"His foot's good enough to run barrels," Toni said. "You keep putting the boot on him and he'll be fine."

"I'm not running barrels." Pop squinted at her. "That's a yellow dress."

"Yes sir. It is."

"Huh," said his grandfather, and studied her, and then Desmond, and then he said, "Alberta's was a little more orange," and went on into the shop to sit beside Miss Pearline, and didn't say another word about it all night.

Grand Entry

The Deep Fork Invitational was held every year in Odessa Kinnard's own arena, a big open-air bowl her father had bulldozed out of a hillside above the river bottoms in 1971, with bleachers of galvanized steel on three sides and a row of old cottonwoods along the fourth where people backed their trucks in and watched from their tailgates. The lights hung on old telephone poles. When they came on at dusk you could see them from the highway four miles away, a ring of white fire on the dark ridge, and the bugs came from all over the county to dance in them.

By four o'clock on Sunday the parking pasture was full. Trucks and trailers were jammed in rows across the stubble, plates from Texas, Kansas, Louisiana and as far as Georgia. Generators hummed. The smoke of a hundred cookers joined into one blue haze over the hill that smelled of brisket and charcoal lighter fluid. Somewhere a man was playing a harmonica, badly, over and over, the same eight bars.

The heat was the heavy, wet, late-summer kind. Ninety-eight degrees, and the sky in the west was already building.

Desmond spent most of the afternoon behind the chutes, in the long shadow of the bull pens, taping and stretching and trying not to think. The brace went on under his shirt, cinched one hole tighter than the Tulsa doctor had meant it to go, because the sling had only come off Saturday night and the joint still felt like a gate hung on one hinge. He rosined his rope twice and sat on an overturned bucket with his eyes shut, hearing the clank of horns against pipe and the deep wet rumble of seventy animals breathing.

"You're doing the thing," Alvin said, sitting down beside him on another bucket. He had his face half painted, white with red around the eyes. He looked like a very serious clown, which was what he was.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you think about it. You never used to think about it."

"I used to be twenty-six."

"You used to be stupid." Alvin adjusted the strap of his own knee brace. "Smart's worse. Smart gets you hurt. Get stupid again for about an hour."

"How?"

"Think about Toni's dog," Alvin said, and Desmond laughed in spite of himself.

---

At six o'clock the announcer's voice came booming over the speakers, Booker Dade's voice, borrowed from Boley for the weekend, warm and enormous and crackling with feedback, and the crowd in the bleachers stood up, and the grand entry came in through the far gate.

They came in at a lope, two by two, around the arena in a big circle. The first riders carried the flags of the country and the state. Then the families. Odessa had not exaggerated. There were thirty of them, maybe more, riders from every old ranching family that had been part of the Invitational over fifty-five years, each one carrying a flag on a tall pole with the family's brand sewn on it in heavy felt. A T with a hook. A heart on its side. Desmond, standing on the chute rails, recognized every one. He had seen them in purple ink in a green cloth ledger at his grandfather's kitchen table.

And at the very front, ahead of all of them, on a gray gelding who had been washed until he shone like a new nickel, with his feet oiled black and his mane pulled and his tail combed out like smoke, rode Ellis Reese.

He was sitting the Tolliver saddle. Desmond had spent most of Saturday oiling it with neatsfoot and a soft rag, rubbing it into every oak leaf until the old leather was dark and supple and glowing red as a coal, and now under the arena lights it looked like something alive. Pop wore his good shirt and the bolo tie and his good felt hat, which he had not worn in years. He carried a flag on a pole set in a cup on his stirrup. On it, in black felt on white, was an R lying on its back with a bar under it.

At the first turn Pop gathered him, and the old gray picked up a slow rocking lope as easy as a chair. Pop's back was straight, his rein hand low and quiet. The flag snapped above him in the wind that was coming up ahead of the storm.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said Booker Dade, and for once his big voice went down quiet and almost rough, "leading the grand entry tonight, in a saddle made by Amos Tolliver of Boley in nineteen forty-nine, on the land his family has held since his great-grandmother Lettie Reese put her mark on it in nineteen-oh-three, the man folks in Boley still say was the best bull rider in the Creek Nation in nineteen sixty-two. Mister Ellis Reese, of the Lazy R Bar."

The bleachers came up. Desmond stood on the chute rails and couldn't see very well for a minute.

He found Toni at the far fence by the alley, already mounted on Pocket in a black shirt with her number pinned on the back. She was watching Pop go by. Her hand was over her heart.

Beside her, standing on the bottom rail of the fence in his hat, was Garland Pugh of Fort Worth, who was not cheering, but who had taken off his own hat and was holding it against his chest and watching that saddle go by with an expression Desmond would remember for a long time.

---

The storm hit forty minutes later, just after the bareback riding.

It came up over the ridge from the west the way they all did that summer, a wall of black and purple cloud with that eerie green along its belly, and the wind came first, whipping the flags and lifting the dust off the arena floor in long red veils that stung the eyes and got into everybody's teeth. Somebody's canopy went cartwheeling across the parking pasture. Then the lightning came, close, a crack like a rifle and a flash that lit every face in the bleachers blue-white, and Odessa Kinnard came out of the announcer's stand with a radio in her hand and called a delay.

Everybody ran for cover. Desmond ended up under the awning of Toni's horse trailer with Toni and Pocket and Waylon and a roper from Louisiana nobody knew, with the rain coming down so hard on the tin that they had to shout. The air went cold and smelled of wet horse and hot metal and, very faintly, funnel cake.

"Barrels in mud," Toni said, scowling out at the arena, which was rapidly becoming a lake. "Great. Wonderful. Pocket hates mud. She thinks it's lava."

"Can you run her?"

"I can run her. I just have to be smart about the turns." She was stroking the mare's neck absently. Pocket was standing with her head low and one ear turned back toward Toni, unbothered by the thunder, a small, practical horse. "You've ridden in mud."

"Plenty."

"Is it better or worse?"

"Softer landing," he said. "Harder to get your feet under you."

"Huh." She thought about it. "So, same as everything."

The roper from Louisiana laughed. Waylon, who was terrified of thunder, had pressed himself between Desmond's boots and was shaking. Desmond reached down with his good hand and held the dog's ear, the soft folded flap of it, and rubbed it between his fingers until the shaking eased.

---

The rain lasted twenty-five minutes and then moved on east toward Henryetta, grumbling, and the sun came out low and red underneath it, so that for a few minutes the whole arena and the wet bleachers and the trucks and the dripping cottonwoods were lit up from below in a hot coppery light, and every puddle on the arena floor was full of fire, and a double rainbow stood over the river bottoms with its feet in the trees. Odessa's crew dragged the arena with the harrow, and the red mud turned over in long shining furrows that steamed.

Toni ran Pocket in the second section of barrels, in the mud, in that light. She rode the mare careful and deep into each turn, letting Pocket find her feet, and coming out of each barrel she let her go, and Pocket threw red mud behind her in wet clods that splattered the fence. Fifteen-six. Not her best, but better than anybody else that night, and she loped out with mud in her braids, laughing.

Desmond's bull in the long round was a big red-and-white spotted crossbred named Sorghum who did not mind the mud at all. He came out of the chute spinning left in a flat, fast, steady circle, and Desmond rode him with his eyes on the bull's head and his free arm working, and the brace held, and on the third landing he felt the joint shift in its socket and settle back with a wet little click that he decided not to have felt, and in the eighth second the bull slipped in the mud and went down to his knees and came up again and Desmond rode that too, and the whistle went, and he got off clean on the good side and ran.

Eighty-four. Enough to put him in the short go, in fifth place. Javon Mitchell rode a black named Night Deposit for eighty-eight and led.

---

The draw for the short go was posted at eleven that night on a whiteboard nailed to the side of the secretary's trailer, in Odessa's square print. Desmond walked up to it in the dark with Alvin and Pop.

Javon Mitchell had drawn a big gray called Smokehouse.

Desmond Reese had drawn Long Division.

Alvin swore softly. Pop said nothing at all. He stood in front of the whiteboard in his good hat with the flashlight beam on the name, and then he turned and looked at his grandson, and Desmond looked back, and the generators hummed.

"Well," said Pop at last. "Eyes open."

"Eyes open," said Desmond.

When he got back to his truck Toni was sitting on the tailgate in the dark with her boots hanging down and Waylon asleep across her lap. The mud had dried in her braids and gone pale, so that her hair looked dusted with red flour. She had a paper cup of coffee from the Twin Mounds wagon going cold beside her. She did not get up.

"I heard," she said.

He let the tailgate take his weight beside her. The truck rocked on its springs. A long way off somebody was still playing the same eight bars on the harmonica.

"Can I ask you something," she said, "and you tell me the true thing? Not the porch thing. Not the thing you told the Tulsa doctor."

She was looking straight ahead at the dark shapes of the trailers. "Why do you get on?"

"The land."

"Don't." She said it gently. "You got back on three months after Vegas. With a capsule that slides. There wasn't any letter in the bread box then. There wasn't any land in it at all."

He opened his mouth and shut it again. The frogs were going in the river bottoms, a thick, steady, rising sound like a crowd in another room.

"I told Pop it was for the place and for me," he said finally. "Both."

"I know what you told him. What's the me part?"

He looked at his left hand on his knee, at the yellow calluses from the rope. It took him a long time. She let it, the way she waited on an animal without crowding it.

"On a bull," he said, "nobody can help you. Nobody's allowed to. Not your daddy, not your sister, not the bullfighter until it's over. It's the one place in the world where needing nobody is the rule. Not a fault. The rule." He swallowed. "And I left. Three years. I drove to Cheyenne two days after we put Grandmama in the ground because I'd already paid my fees. If I ride that bull Monday and the money pays the county, then nobody gets to say I left. Not Shante. Not Pop. Me. I don't get to say it either."

Toni was quiet. Waylon groaned in his sleep and stretched out one leg and went still again.

"Those are two real reasons," she said at last. "I believe both of them."

"But."

"But neither one of them is about that bull. The first one is your grandfather hauling gravel by himself in nineteen sixty-three so nobody would see him need a thing. Cleophus told you that story so you'd hear it. And the second one, Desmond, a bull can't pay that. The county can't take that money." She picked up the cold coffee and put it down again without drinking it. "That shoulder came out Wednesday because a practice bull tripped in a wet spot. Long Division doesn't trip."

"You're telling me not to ride."

"No. I'm not." She turned and looked at him, and in the dark he could just see her eyes. "I'm not ever going to tell you that. I'll be at the fence Monday either way, with my needle. And if you don't get on him, don't you dare tell anybody it was for me. I'm not carrying that one. I just wanted you to hear yourself say it out loud one time."

She slid off the tailgate, and Waylon slid off after her and shook himself, and they walked off between the trailers into the dark and the generator noise.

He lay down in the truck bed on the old horse blanket with the brace still on, because taking it off meant moving the arm. Above him the sky had washed itself clean after the storm, and the stars came down all the way to the ridge. He could hear seventy bulls breathing in the pens below him, and among them, somewhere, one dark brindle lying down in the straw like a cat.

Thirty thousand added. He did the arithmetic the way he had done it all summer, on the inside of his eyelids. Then he did it again with the shoulder in it.

He did not sleep.

Turned Out

The Twin Mounds wagon was parked under the cottonwoods at the end of the bull pens on Monday morning, with its canvas top rolled up on the sides and a post oak fire burning down in a shallow pit beside it, and Cleophus Barnett was sitting next to it in his folding chair with his cane across his knees, as if he had been there all night. He might have been. Mavis was at the fire with the big blackened pot. The coffee smell came across the wet grass in the early light and found Desmond in the bed of his truck, where he had been lying awake since three, counting the stars down to the ridge.

"Bull riders drink free," Mavis said, handing him a chipped enamel cup. "Daddy's rule. Fifty-five years."

"Old man Kinnard asked me to bring the wagon the first year," said Mr. Barnett from under his hat. "Said the boys ought to have something hot in them that didn't come out of a can. I've missed four. One for my knee and one for my wife's funeral and two I don't remember." He lifted the brim with one finger. "You drew that brindle."

"Yes, sir."

"Good," said Mr. Barnett, and let the brim drop.

Desmond sat on an overturned bucket with the coffee. The morning was cool for once after the storm, the sky a pale rinsed blue with a few torn clouds drifting east. The arena below was a dark wet red, harrowed overnight into long ridges like a plowed field. Mist lay along the river bottoms. Meadowlarks were singing out between the trailers, and down in the pens the bales were being broken open, and he could hear seventy animals eating.

"I'm not going to get on him," Desmond said.

Mavis stopped with the pot in her hand. Mr. Barnett did not move at all. After a while the hat brim came up again, slowly, the whole width of one finger.

"Then you'd better give my coffee back," the old man said.

"Daddy."

"I'm asking him a question."

Desmond held out the cup. Mr. Barnett looked at it and did not take it.

"Bull riders drink free," he said. "You're a bull rider till seven o'clock. After that we'll see what you are." He let the brim fall. "Drink your coffee, son. It's the only thing on this hill that's free."

Desmond drank it to the grounds. It was black and bitter and full of smoke, and his hand was not quite steady on the cup.

---

Pop was asleep at noon in a lawn chair beside Smoke's trailer, hat tipped forward, hands folded on his belt buckle. The gray dozed on three legs in the shade with his lower lip hanging. Desmond stood looking at the two of them for a while, at the long knotted fingers and the white stubble on his grandfather's chin and the pearl snaps rising and falling. Then he squatted down beside the chair and put his good hand on the old man's knee.

Pop woke the way he always had, all at once, like a dog.

"I'm turning out," Desmond said. "I'm going to tell Odessa."

His grandfather pushed the hat back with one finger and looked at him. He did not ask if he was sure. He did not say anything about Vegas.

"Is it the shoulder?"

"It's the shoulder. It came out Wednesday because Cornbread tripped. It moved again last night on Sorghum. And it's the rest of it." Desmond looked down at the river bottoms below the arena, at the long line of cottonwoods where the Deep Fork bent away out of sight toward their own land. "Toni asked me why I get on. I told her. It wasn't a good enough reason to get on that one."

"That's thirty thousand dollars in that pen."

"I know what's in that pen."

Pop nodded. He looked down at the bottoms too. A pickup was crawling along the river road with a cloud of red dust behind it, and from up here it looked like a toy. The old man's thumb moved on his belt buckle, back and forth over the worn place.

"I quit once," he said finally. "A mule decided it for me. Nobody asked me." He pulled the hat back down over his eyes. "Go tell Odessa before she hears it from Alvin."

---

Odessa Kinnard was in the secretary's trailer with her boots up on a box of entry forms, eating a sausage biscuit. She listened to him without taking her feet down.

"You know what a turnout costs you," she said.

"My fees. And a fine."

"And you don't draw any of mine till next Labor Day." She folded her napkin into a small square. "He bucks anyway. Six thousand people paid to see that animal, and they're going to see him."

"Yes, ma'am."

She got up and went outside to the whiteboard with a marker and, beside his name and Long Division's, in her small square print, wrote TURNED OUT. Then she stood back and looked at it.

"My daddy would have called you yellow," she said. "Then he'd have gone home and told it at supper for thirty years like it was the bravest thing he ever saw." She capped the marker. "Don't bring me a pie. I've had enough Reese pie for one decade."

---

The short go started at seven, under the lights. The arena bowl had filled with a warm haze of dust and smoke that the lights shone through in long white columns, and moths whirled in the beams by the thousands. The smell was popcorn, brisket smoke, hot sugar, red mud drying, and under it the deep musk of the bulls in the pens.

Toni ran last in the barrels. Pocket went to the first barrel like a dropped stone and came home down the center with the dirt flying, and the clock said fourteen-nine-eight, and Booker Dade shouted that it was the fastest time in the history of the Invitational and the third year running for Doctor Antoinette Hollins of Boley. She loped out past the chutes and looked up at the rails for him, and he wasn't there, and her eyes found him a second later at the fence by the out gate, on the ground, in his good shirt with no vest on. She did not point. She lifted her chin at him, once, and was gone into the alley.

Then Booker Dade's voice dropped.

"Folks, the next bull out is Long Division, from the Kinnard ranch. His rider tonight, Desmond Reese of the Lazy R Bar, has turned out." The crowd made a long low sound, half groan, and from the tailgates under the cottonwoods somebody booed and somebody else told him to hush. "Long Division will buck out. You all watch him."

The gate swung open on an empty bull.

He stood there the way he always did, as if he had not noticed. Then he went straight up, higher than the top of the chute gate, and at the top of it he twisted his hind end and kicked at the air where a man would have been, and came down so hard Desmond felt it in the fence rail under his hands. He spun left, flat and fast, and reversed, and spun right, throwing mud over the bleachers' bottom row, all of it for nobody. At about six seconds he threw his head back hard, the way he would have to reach a rider's face. Then he stopped, as if he had remembered he was alone, and trotted to the out gate with his tail switching, and went through it a few feet from where Desmond stood. He did not look over. He smelled like hot grass and iron.

Toni came and stood next to him at the rail with mud dried in her braids and the small black bag in her hand. She didn't open it. She didn't say anything. She leaned her shoulder against his good one and kept it there.

Javon Mitchell rode Smokehouse for eighty-six in the last ride of the night. It was clean and strong, and when the arithmetic was done Booker Dade said Javon's name and the town of Wewoka, and the bleachers stood for him. Javon went around the arena with his hat in the air and the gold tooth flashing. He did not come to the out gate. There was no reason he should have.

Later, by the chutes, Odessa's skinny teenage photographer stood Javon against the green pipe fence for the picture, and Odessa wrote his card on the hood of a truck. *Javon Mitchell, Wewoka. Smokehouse. 86.* She blew on the ink. The fifty-sixth space by the door had a name now, and it was a good name, and it was not theirs.

Desmond walked back toward the trailers in the dark. Pop was standing by Smoke's trailer with the gray's lead rope in his hand. He did not turn around. But as Desmond came up the row behind him he lifted his free hand, high and loose above his head, the way a rider does in the last second before the whistle, and held it there while Desmond walked the whole length of the row, and only put it down when his grandson was standing beside him.

---

Shante found the way to keep the house. She found it in a fat binder at the county assessor's office, two doors down from Yvonne Tate's window, on the Thursday after Labor Day. A quarter section could be split on the rolls into two tracts if it was surveyed and filed, and the delinquent taxes split with it, by value. The forty acres on the hill carried the house and the barn and the pecans and the hay meadow. The hundred and twenty acres of Deep Fork bottom, the richest ground on the place, carried most of the debt.

They paid the forty on September thirtieth with Desmond's long-round check, his last two jackpots in Morris and Coweta, and four hundred dollars that Pop took out of a coffee can in the barn and would not explain. Yvonne Tate counted it twice. She slid the receipt under the glass and kept her hand on it a second longer than she needed to.

"The bottom goes on the list," she said. "I'm sorry, Mr. Reese."

"You said you'd change the date if you could," Pop said. "I believed you."

The resale was the third Monday in October, on the courthouse steps, in a cold wind with leaves blowing across the square from the elms by the Council House. Pop did not go. Desmond stood at the back. The polite man from Tulsa wore a tan jacket and bid the minimum and nobody bid against him, and the whole thing took four minutes.

The cows came up off the bottom that weekend. Desmond and Shante and Marcus pushed them up the slope horseback in a fine cold drizzle, through the gate below the hay meadow, past the water gap they had patched in July with a cedar tree jammed in it, which now belonged to somebody else. The bottom pasture where Josiah had ridden other men's broncs on Sunday afternoons stood empty behind them in the rain, the cottonwoods gone yellow, the grass already looking like it belonged to nobody.

That night Pop took the brand book out of its flour sack and opened it at the kitchen table to the first page, to the R lying on its back and *Mrs. Lettie Reese, her mark. Allotment SW 1/4.* He wrote under it in his careful slanting hand, slowly, with the good pen: *Bottom 120 lost at county resale, October. Home 40 kept. Mark kept. Saddle kept. E. Reese.* He blotted it. He did not close the book until the ink was dry.

In November the new owner's crew came to fence the line. Desmond and Pop sat on the porch with their coffee in the gray morning and listened to the post driver working its way along the slope below the hay meadow, a heavy flat thud every half minute, steady as a pulse. The cows stood along the cross fence below the hay meadow and looked through it at their old grass.

"They'll learn it in a week," Pop said.

"And you?"

His grandfather drank his coffee and watched the posts go in, one after another, down toward the trees.

"Longer," he said.

At eight o'clock Toni's truck came up the drive with Waylon's head out the passenger window, ears flying, and she leaned on the horn, because a cow in Beggs was having trouble and she needed somebody with one good arm to hold a leg up.