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  I can barely see his head in the battered straw hat from my poor vantage point down in the muck, and I'm sure he might be having a hard time seeing me through the speckled layers of mud that cover my bathing suit, my skin, my high-topped tennis shoes. I stop my rhythm of scoop, lift, toss long enough to ask him why he's come in from the direction of the field and not the main house. I know if I stop for long, my muscles will freeze and the next inhabitants of the ranch will find my bones preserved in the rich mud when they decide to clear the green waters for themselves, so I keep working while he yells down an answer.

  "Von Dohlen's had one of their Angus go down, thought I'd take a look at yours." He climbs over the fence, careful not to pull on the top rocks, but to

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  press his hands flat on them and push himself up and over. "Don't know why they called me, not a vet. Cow wasn't shot."

  "Piss poor excuse," I tell him between shovels. "Vet's out of town. Cow died of old age, snake bite, something like that. You were over for lunch anyway being as you and Jay Von Dohlen go back to grade school. Right?"

  "Close enough." He laughs. "Did walk though. Your hay's looking good, getting enough rain."

  "Glad you think so."

  "Can I help?"

  "Should be done with this soon and then I can start spraying what's left right out the drains."

  "You sure?"

  "Sure." I toss the shovel up on the grass and pull down the faded green garden hose, minus the pressure nozzle.

  "Can I at least offer to take you for some dinner when you're through?" he asks, sitting on the slate ledge, jeans and boots dangling down against the clean, white poolside. "Nothing fancy. Cheeseburger at the world's worst Dairy Queen?"

  "I'm afraid I won't even be fit company for that once I'm done with this."

  "Are you fit company now?"

  "Try me."

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  He asks short, safe, neutral questions about the pool, the fences, the Appletons. I give him the long answers. I don't start with the Comanches. I do not really know them, only what they did to people here. I start with the bunkhouse, the first real building here, with its rows of two-foot-high by four-inch-wide slits not designed for light but for the easy aim of a gun and the protection from most ammunition. There are bullet marks on the outside walls. Inside, there is blood on the floorboards, some of it belonging to Lizzie Turner's oldest, Miles, who took two bullets in the head. Over the door, a historical marker proves this is true. I end with Grandma Alba dying in her sleep in 1961 and Wil's mother, June, planting the canna lilies and covering the hardwood floors with green shag carpet.

  I tell him the stories that are as familiar to me as if they are my own. They are the only history I know, the only history I can repeat with the authority of an adult telling a bedtime story a child's heard a hundred times and knows by heart but still asks for. The sky turns a faded yellow-green as I talk, and the spring water in the little channel that runs through the bottom of the pool turns clear.

  "Why end it there?" Cotton asks when I finish talking and sit down finally in the middle of the small stream of water.

  "Because. I can begin and end it anywhere I want." I don't plug the drains,

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  but will let the sides bake in the sun tomorrow to kill off any algae I missed. As I rinse and scrub the mud from my face, arms, legs, Cotton rises to leave.

  "What about your story, Kitt Giddry?"

  "I don't have a story." I can tell by the way he squints down at me that he doesn't believe a word. I add in explanation, "At least not like theirs. I'm just a caretaker."

  "What'd you do with the green carpet?"

  I don't see what he's getting at, but answer him anyway. "I burned it. In the burn pit behind the barn."

  "See."

  "See what? I was just returning the house to what it used to be."

  Cotton just shrugs and climbs easily back over the fence. "Can I ask you one thing?" he calls.

  "Not if it's going to make me mad." I stand up so I can get a good look at him.

  "Hope not. Were you planning to go to the Fourth of July fireworks next weekend?"

  After the fireworks, they close down the square and have a street dance, the kind of dance where little girls waltz on their tiptoes standing on their father's shoes and old women sit in folding chairs on the courthouse lawn talking about the young folks.

  "Isn't there a dance afterwards?" I tease him.

  "Well . . . yes . . . but we don't have to stay if you don't feel like it."

  "Are you asking me on a date?"

  He laughs and gives me a half smile from under his hat. "Sounds like it, doesn't it."

  "A real date where the man drives up and rings the doorbell, that kind of date?"

  "Depends."

  "On what?"

  "You have a doorbell?"

  "No."

  "Then I don't guess it's a real date."

  "Okay. But, but just because it's not doesn't mean you can show up from out of nowhere and make me walk. Right?"

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  The pool begins slowly filling on Monday, and I sit on the lawn under a new moon sky Tuesday night and watch the final foot creep in. I don't mind that I'm not in bed by eleven. The cooking for the ladies, the cleaning for the ladies, the arranging flowers and picnic baskets for the ladies, has knocked me off the

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  schedule I've kept five days a week, forty weeks a year, March 'til November, two years running, and it's liberating in a way. I watch the water until way past midnight when I finally begin hearing the faint trickle fall over the dam.

  The visit goes well the next day, and as I run through each story in my repertoire Mrs. Mauch exclaims, "Oh, how wonderful. I don't think we heard that one last time, did we?"

  I think she actually does enjoy them, is not just being polite, and so do the others. After the second question about how long one could actually live after being shot in the neck with a bullet or in the chest with an arrow, I give up my attempts to tone down any violence and blood.

  Sitting on an assortment of patchwork quilts by the pool, we have a proper ladies' picnic of potato salad, marinated and chilled green beans, grilled quail, and homemade biscuits. The ladies drift over in twos and threes to admire the pool, remarking on how perfectly they can see their own faces, almost better than in their mirrors at home. I don't join them. I know what my face will look like, and I know I will be able to see more than my own reflection there now that the algae and the silt's been cleaned away and everything's visible from the surface.

  They ask to stop by the cemetery on their way out and Mrs. Mauch gives me a ride in the front seat of her blue Lincoln. I hold open the main gate for them and let six large cars pass through before I shut it and join the ladies who are already picking their way through the graves. I point out where the historical marker is back in a half-circle of live oaks and tell them the families are in no particular spot but mixed in with one another. They seem to know their way around, need no directions. Some walk gingerly around the graves respectful of boundaries, others walk right up to the headstones and bend down to read the inscriptions. I don't come here often and can't help noticing some of the inscriptions myself. Ezra Benjamin Turney, a cattleman, a good man. Faith Marie Appleton, a love constant and true. Trevor Mason Whidbee, the world took his mother and then it took him. And, by the ranch fence, surrounded by patchy grass and a single clump of Indian firewheels, and set at the head of a slightly darker colored mound where the hard earth has yet to settle and bleach out, the plain, gray slab. Wilburn Allen Giddry, a mender of people.

  They are all here, Turneys and Whidbees, Appletons and Giddrys. The women tromp through them as they did five years before and nothing has changed. Five years from now the lines around my eyes will be deeper, the skin on my hands thicker, but the stories will be the same. Perhaps I will have children, a son or a daughter I will teach to prune roses back to make the
m grow fuller, to separate clumps of irises so their bulbs will divide, a son or a daughter I will teach to recognize the smooth flight of dove, to replace the rocks in the winding fences with the same precision they were built. When I am gone, a vari-

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  ation of these women will walk here and someone will tell them the story of Wil Giddry with the same note of romance and loss that my voice holds when I talk of Joe Donnely or Susannah Whidbee, when I repeat the names of this place over and over so that they wind around and reflect off each other. And me? What will the speaker say of me? They'll say, she told me these words, these words I tell you. She kept things going.

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  Crawford and Luster's Story

  by Richard Giles

  Down the dusty road, and down the river, down below the Bull Cafe. The sun is up and Luster rises. A long hair divides the dog's water dish into the yinyang. Luster leans to her toothbrush. The roots of her hair throb in her scalp, her heavy hair. She is naked, and sweating already. Uncle Bud and Aunt Judy. Why did she think of them now? They had matching tattoos of lips on the cheeks of their butts. Kiss, kiss.

  Now Crawford comes in behind her; he's been watching her from the bed, trying to make sense of her skinny ass. This is a long way out in the country, a long goddamn way out. From the window you can see farther than you can imagine, away off into nothing and then some. Out there are the cows with their long, gaunt faces.

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  Already the horizon is dusty. Away off and hidden in the huge country, an automobile moves along the roadsa Buick wide as a barn, gravel pecking its dusty chrome. Joe, the driver, believes in the power of the land to redeem him. He leans forward into the oncoming country as if to wish it true.

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  Luster makes a pass through the kitchen for a glass of water. It's the middle of the morning, and Crawford shouldn't be here, he ought to be out shuffling dirt or throwing hay, doing farmer things. Crawford's got no sense anymore. But here she goesshe stops herself; no need yelling down that well. This is a rickety place, soon to be gone out of their hands. They have surrounded themselves with this land, she and Crawford. Now it lies like a bed gone hard, a thing to be endured.

  The air coming through the kitchen window takes a little of the heat off with it. She drinks her water, feeling a push at her gutsome feeling trying to talk to her The message seems to ride along on the heat, and pretty soon she can't tell the message from the heat.

  Crawford goes out the front, slowly. The day stands before him. More than a whole world, a universe. From this moment it spreads in both directions for-

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  ever, like the ocean. Bigger. Too big. He brings it down, brings his footsteps down the sandy beach he has imagined. Ahead of him a couple romps and laughs. She, in a green swimsuit cut in plunging angles as if to lift parts of her higher; he with a beard. Crawford passes on, to the barn and beyond. He must catch the horses, shuffle dirt, toss hay Farmer things.

  Heat rises. Already he feels the day has beaten him. Ahead, the immense brown hills roll one into the other, dividing the wind in winter, rising now into the heat. From time to time sparrows flush from among the clods and beat off into the white morning.

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  Luster watches Crawford from the kitchen window, staggering angrily among the cows, pitching toward the big brindle. He stops and slants against the tractor tire, propped like a hoe handle for a long time. Luster is provoked. Why doesn't something kill the idiot? She breathes hard and then looks back out to the catch-pen on the slope below the barn. She has no explanation for her feelings.

  The cow comes over the hill fast. Crawford whacks her once with the stick, and then she hooks at him and snorts but misses. She shakes her old head and falls backward. But she's right back up and coming at him again, which surprises him. He raises the bat to whack her again. Again and again, until she falls, bloody snout first, into the dirt, groveling there with her ass still raised up, her long tail thrashing, like she might kick up and lunge at him and kill him this time. So he keeps the bat cocked over his head. Then her legs tangle in her big bag of an udder and she falls, her eyes roll to white, and she sighs like a shot horse.

  Tonk Myrkle shows up; he has walked up the road, and behind him is his daughter. Early mornings Myrkle's daughter sings a clear song that comes down across the hills like air; then when she comes to work she's all quiet. Today is Friday. Crawford and Tonk will drag the cow away into the boneyard gully. Turkey vultures roost in the trees along the rim of the ravine and occasionally one of them spreads its wings to air. When a breeze moves, the salty stink of the dead cattle comes up to the house.

  Luster goes away from the window and begins her work, but when Myrkle's daughter comes in, Luster goes to the bedroom and stretches out on top of the plowed sheets. The swish of the broom comes and goesdown the hall, out to the porch; the door latch clicks back into its pocket; blackbirds call their rusty songs across the pasture; the fan buzzes Luster to sleep.

  When has she slept like this in the daylight, and dreaming, dreamed herself into that long, falling night of silver-streaked music: she and Crawford fucking on the front porch, time and again and throwing the rubbers off into the flower bed; and the earth slipping from beneath them, down into the dark pond where

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  turtles have eaten all of the fish from the dangling hooks of the trotline, except for the fishes' lips left drifting there like the rolled rims of the rubbers, kisses left behind in some years-ago abandoned barroom?

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  Crawford comes in to lunch in a ripped shirt. "Who's home?" he yells like an idiot from the moon. He waits for Luster to dish up their food from the stove. She's a good cook by habit, almost accidentally. She moves around the stove with the two plates held in one hand and a big spoon in the other. When she sets the plates on the table, Crawford starts in, but she goes back to the stove and dishes up plates for Tonk Myrkle and his daughter, and then she calls the girl to come and take their food out to the porch where Tonk is waiting.

  Luster calls the dog to the back, to the screened porch, and pours crumbled food in his dish. Now the feeding is done. She has done this one thing.

  Crawford looks up when Luster sits to her plate. "It's good," he says, and then he's back at it.

  Luster watches him a minute and then she starts to eat, too. He's the best friend she has.

  "Mercy," he says when he finishes. It's like a request.

  "So, tell me about your life," Crawford says.

  "I don't really have much to say."

  He watches her, it must be forever. He says, "No need gnawing ourselves to the bone." Then his smile comes back. They have begun to look like each other, he and Luster. What joy they have comes to their faces and lingers there, a little uneasily, like curiosity. All their lives together they have bludgeoned each other with this happiness.

  He gets up to go, but Luster takes him from the kitchen to the bed and they lie still in the wind from the fan. The dog comes in and wants to be petted, his snout propped on the edge of the bed, his face gaunt like the cows' faces. Tonk Myrkle and his daughter wait somewhere outside. The whole countryside lies as if waiting, and scalding blankets of heat rise everywhere off the land.

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  Tonight, for the first time, Luster goes out across the pasture to look in the neighbor's window. She is drunk but she isn't crazy. Her feet make a trail of black prints on the silver-dewy grass and her legs rise into the light of the high moon and then fall again into the darkness of her own shadow. She walks naked; this is her indulgence.