The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Read Free

chin toward the hill above us where two bays—a mare and a half yearling—grazed. “For a 4-H project.”
    “This is the first time I ever saw a spring in the Little Beaver. Can you believe that?”
    He nodded. “There’re plenty of them, but when you’re a kid, you don’t know anything other than what’s out your back door.”
    “Used to be plenty of them,” I said. “I’ve read that more than seven hundred miles of Kansas creeks and rivers no longer flow.”
    “Is that a fact?”
    “It’s a shame what we’re doing to the water.”
    He looked perplexed. Oh boy, I thought. Was I about to have a political argument with one of those fanatics who thinks that owning land gives him the right to abuse whatever was on or under it? Then Ireminded myself that here in Kansas it was I who would be considered the fanatic. I probably sounded like one now.
    Ward said, “Hey, didn’t you write that book? I recognize you from the picture on the back of it.”
    This was surprising, to say the least. Besides my mother, the only locals I knew who’d read my essay collection had been one fourth-grade and one high school English teacher.
    “I liked that book so much,” Ward said, pausing to reminisce. “It had this melancholy quality about it that reminded me of
The Last Picture Show.
Larry McMurtry. I’m sure you know his work.”
    “Not as well as I should.” In fact, I hadn’t gotten around to McMurtry.
    “I even considered writing to you. I figured your publisher would forward the letter.”
    “You wanted to write to me?” I asked. “Why didn’t you?”
    “Oh sure, now. You would have thought I was some kind of nut case.”
    “No, I would have been flattered.” I looked up into the shadow his hat cast. For the first time, I noticed his eyes—an arresting Caribbean sea green.
    I lowered my gaze. Dark circles stained the underarms of his T-shirt, a light-gray color that a man would grab on a routine morning when he didn’t expect anything new to happen. And nothing new was going to happen. After all, this guy wore a silver belt buckle. Burnished by years of wear, it featured your standard calf roper. Jake’s dad had cured me of my cowboy fascination.
    I could imagine how I looked. After dousing my head at the windmill, I’d just jammed my cap back on. It had the word “Vedauwoo” embroidered on it below a silhouette of that granite mountain range—one of my favorite haunts near Laramie, Wyoming, the town where I lived.
    Ward’s cap also bore a Wyoming emblem. King Ropes, a famous saddler.
    “Do you read much?” I asked.
    “Winters get long when you live in the country, and I always liked a good book.” Taking a blue kerchief from his hip pocket, he removedhis hat, revealing a high forehead. No ring, I couldn’t help but notice as he wiped his brow. But ranch and farm types didn’t always wear rings. Dad hadn’t.
    “Could use a little of that winter weather now,” Ward said. “My favorite author is Cormac McCarthy.”
    Were we really standing in a Kansas pasture? Louis L’Amour I might have expected, or Zane Gray. “I like the way he drops into Spanish,” I said. “‘
Soy yo que traigo las yeguas de las montañas
.’”
    “You memorized that,” Ward said. “What does it mean?”
    “’Tis I who brings the mares from the mountains,” I declaimed. “When I taught at the University of Wyoming several years ago, I always assigned
All the Pretty Horses
. Even though I think McCarthy was intentionally overromantic in that book. He was playing with the cowboy myth.”
    “I don’t know about that,” Ward said. His tone made me wonder if he’d ever heard the two words “myth” and “cowboy” together before. “I’ll admit McCarthy did get some of the details wrong,” he continued. “Did you notice that whenever those two boys went into a saloon, they would take their cigarettes out of their shirt pockets and put ’em on the bar top? Now a cowboy just wouldn’t do