The Ridge

You lie awake a long time after the texts stop.

You read the thread again in the dark. His three words. Whatever you sent back. The last thing he wrote before he went quiet, and the way your thumb hovered over the screen afterward like there was something left to say and you'd never learned the language for it.

At five-fifteen you give up on sleep.

The light is still blue when you saddle Ransom. It takes forever one-handed. The gelding stands like a statue the whole time, ears swiveling back to you, like he remembers you used to be faster and he's being polite about it.

"I know," you tell him. "I know, buddy. I'm slow now."

He bumps your chest with his nose. Hard enough to rock you. Not hard enough to hurt.

You walk him out to the mounting block and get on the way Loy told you not to, swinging up with your left hand on the horn and your teeth clenched, and then you're up and the world is the right height again, and for one second your eyes go hot.

You haven't been on a horse since February. Since a black bronc named Black Lacquer turned back hard to the left in a Cheyenne arena and put you into the fence.

Ransom just walks. Slow and steady, up the two-track toward the ridge, like he knows.

You remember the way. Of course you do.

Up past the windmill, along the fence line, through the gate that always sticks, then the long climb through sage and bunchgrass to the top. The sky behind you goes from blue to gray to the faintest pink. Meadowlarks start up in the grass, one and then a dozen.

The cottonwood is still there. Huge and alone at the crest, its new leaves just starting.

Under it there's something that wasn't there ten years ago. A granite stone, plain, gray, with a horseshoe carved at the top.

HJALMAR ANDERS RENNARD. He fed the cattle first.

You stop Ransom. Your chest goes tight. You'd heard, of course. Three years ago, a text from a number you didn't save, from a girl you used to know in town. Hjalmar Rennard passed. Thought you'd want to know. You were in Texas. You sent flowers. You didn't call.

You've sent a lot of flowers in your life.

A horse whickers behind you, and Bartholomew rides up out of the gray light on the big gray gelding, the one that pinned its ears at you in the barn. He's got two travel mugs in a saddlebag. He hands you one without a word.

Coffee. Black, one sugar. The way you took it at twenty-two.

"You remembered."

"You never stopped complaining about it."

He rides up beside you, close enough that your knees almost touch. Together you look down.

The whole ranch is spread below the ridge like somebody unrolled a map. The creek winding silver through willows. The house, the barn, Imogene's garden plot. The south pasture going green. The hay meadows. And beyond, out to the line of blue mountains, the summer range.

"Ten years ago you had six hundred pair," you say quietly.

"Three-forty now."

"What happened?"

He drinks his coffee. Watches a hawk turn slow circles over the meadow. "Dad got sick. I sold some. Then calf prices dropped. Sold some more." He shrugs, one shoulder. "Ranching."

It's not the whole truth. You can hear the missing piece the way you can hear a horse favor a foot.

"I'm sorry about your dad," you say. "I should've called."

"You sent lilies." He almost smiles. "Ma kept the card."

"Lilies," you groan. "God. He'd have hated lilies."

"He did. Said they smelled like a funeral home." Bartholomew looks over at the stone under the cottonwood. "Which, to be fair."

You laugh. It surprises you both. Something in the air between you loosens, just a notch.

You sit there on the ridge while the sun comes up over the far hills and turns the whole valley gold. It's the most beautiful thing you've seen in ten years, and you've seen the Calgary skyline from a Ferris wheel and the Pacific from a motel balcony in Oregon.

This is where he asked you. Right here, under this tree, in October, with the cottonwood leaves gone yellow and his voice shaking. Stay. I'm not asking forever. Just stay and see.

You said you couldn't. You said there'd be time later.

He's not looking at you. But his knee is touching yours now. Just barely. Through two layers of denim.

Neither of you moves it.

"Ransom," you say finally. "You never told me."

He's quiet for so long you think he won't. Then, to the horizon: "Saw him at a sale in Billings six years back. Guy was going to send him to the killer pen. Bad hock."

Your heart drops. "Bart."

"Cost me four hundred dollars and a bad hock." He finishes his coffee. "Worth it. He's a good horse."

That's all you're getting, and you know it. He turns the gray and starts down the ridge.

"Six o'clock was an hour ago," he calls back. "You're late, cowboy."

You sit there a minute longer with your hand on Ransom's neck and the sun on your face, and you don't know whether you want to laugh or cry, so you do neither.

The mail comes at eleven.

Imogene brings it out to the barn where you're doing a terrible one-handed job of cleaning tack. She drops a fat envelope on the bench beside you.

"Forwarded from your PO box in Cheyenne," she says. "Looks official. Don't let it ruin your morning, Ethan."

You know what it is before you open it. The hospital. Prairie Mercy, the big one off the interstate where they put you back together in February. You've been dreading this letter for two months. You've done the math on the ceiling of the bunkhouse at three in the morning. Surgery, the plate, four nights, the imaging, the ambulance from the arena. You have no insurance. The circuit's injury fund covered barely anything. You figured it'd be eighty, ninety thousand. You figured you'd be paying it until you were fifty.

You slit it open with your teeth.

STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT. Patient: Ethan Kestler. Total charges: $86,400.00.

You close your eyes. Open them. Keep reading.

Payments received: $86,400.00. Balance due: $0.00.

You read it three times. You turn it over. There's a line at the bottom, in small print.

Paid in full on your behalf by: Wind River Cowboy Relief Fund. Thank you.

You stare at it. You never applied to any fund. You never filled out a single form. You were too proud and too drugged and too ashamed to ask anybody for anything, and you left Cheyenne with a sling and a bus ticket and a dread you've been carrying for nine weeks.

And it's just... gone?

A shadow falls over the bench. Ysidro, toothpick in his mouth, reading over your shoulder without any shame at all. He takes the statement right out of your hand and holds it at arm's length, squinting.

"Wind River Cowboy Relief Fund," he reads slowly. Then he frowns. "Huh."

"You know them? I need to call them. I need to thank somebody."

Ysidro hands it back. He takes the toothpick out of his mouth, and he looks at you with an expression you've never seen on his face before. Almost sad.

"Ain't no such fund, champ," he says. "I been in rodeo forty years. I'd know."