Of what, I'd never worked out. So many years and I still didn't have the word for it.
Some mornings, I thought it reminded me who I was. Other mornings, I thought it was proof there'd been a before—a version of me on the far side of one night, a kid who hadn't yet learned the thing about himself he could never unlearn. I came out and waited to feel something, and what came instead was steadier. Set right. Like a sight picture pulling into focus.
That was the part I'd never say out loud.
It beat the ranch, anyway. The ranch was still working—horses in the coral, fences getting mended, the caretakers we paid doing their jobs and doing it better than I could’ve. A couple times a year, one of us drifted back to sign something or look at the horses and was gone before the dust settled.
Dane Ranch. Our father's name still on the gate, his reputation still hanging over three counties like he might walk out of the barn any minute and tell us we were doing it wrong. None of us could stand to be there long. We'd run the way buckshot runs—wide, and all at once, from the same hard pull of a trigger.
And one of the reasons we'd run was lying six feet under my boots. At least, for me.
I let myself stand in it. The sun went on with its Texas business, throwing the whole sky into slow fire—pink and orange and a high, cold blue coming up behind—and out in the brush a dove started in with that low mourning sound they make.
I didn't move.
I'd learned a long time ago how to be still, how to hold past the point where most men start to ache and fidget and give themselves away. Stillness was a skill. My father taught me that before he taught me anything that mattered, back when I believed the lesson was about hunting.
The crunch came from behind me. Boot on caliche. Deliberate—not a man sneaking. A man letting me hear him come.
I'd clocked him by sound before I turned. Slow gait, even, a hitch in it from a hip thrown by more horses than any hip should be. When I looked, the sun sat at his back and burned him down to a long black cutout, and even like that, I knew him.
Thomas Sherwood. Sheriff of Valentine since before I could spell the word.
He had to be pushing seventy-five, maybe past it, and you'd never have known it from how he stood. Straight as a fence post. Shoulders square under a canvas coat gone soft with age, white mustache hanging heavy over his mouth, hat brim pulled low and level. He had the look some old cowboys get if they live long enough and don't let the work bend them—not frail, just weathered down to the parts that mattered, like a length of cedar the wind had been working on for fifty years. Regal, if the word could live on a man in dusty boots. He carried himself like he'd never owed anybody an explanation and never would.
"Heard you were back," he said.
I nodded. Nothing to add, so I didn't.
He came up alongside me, not too close, and looked down at the three stones like they were a view we were both taking in. He said nothing about them. He never had.
"Saw your mother last week," he said after a while. "Drove over to Marfa. Took her some of those lemon things she likes from the bakery." A pause. "She's doing well, Brock. Real well. Color in her face. They've got her in a room that gets a lot of light."
I kept my eyes on the granite. "Has she gotten her memory back yet?"
It came out flat and hard. I heard the cruelty in it a half second late—the way you hear the report after you've already felt the recoil. I didn't take it back. I'd stopped being a man who took things back.
Sherwood didn't flinch. He let the question sit out in the cold and go quiet on its own, like he'd expected it—like he'd driven all the way out here already knowing it was the only answer I had in me to give.
"No," he said. Gentle. No give in it, and no edge either. "No, son. She's the same. She won't know your name when you gosee her. But she's settled. At peace with where she is." He looked over. "That's more than most of us get."
Something moved in my chest. I shut the door on it.
I almost apologized. Felt the shape of it come up—I'm sorry, Sheriff, that wasn't meant for you. The words got as far as the back of my teeth. But there wasn't enough left in me to push them the rest of the way, hadn't been in a long time, and I let them die where they sat.
Fuck this place.That was what came instead, clean and familiar.Fuck this town and this dirt and this old man who'd never done me anything but kindness. Why did I keep coming back? What was I hunting out here that didn't live anywhere else on earth, that I could only find down here, at the wrong end of a Texas graveyard?
I knew the answer. I just didn't care to hold it up in the light.
"How long you in town for?" Sherwood asked.
An idle question now. The kind a man asks because the quiet's run long enough.
There'd been a morning a long time back when the same words out of the same mouth had been something else—not a question at all, but a door held open. A hand on a kid’s shoulder. A suggestion put so soft and so kind it took me years to understand it had saved my life and ended it in the same breath.Maybe you ought to think about getting on out of here, son. Army'd take a boy like you. Make something of all that.
He'd been right. They made something of me.
He just never knew what.
