The Broken Hills

He was good with his hands right up to the end; that never failed him. He fenced, he hayed, he fixed the Thornleys' combine with a hammer and two wire splices, and if the men he worked with noticed that the old hand never came to town on the day the exchange prices went up on the board, they were too decent to say.

Willie Dunn lived in the next cottage down the creek — a soft, slow young man whom Roy ran the way Roy ran everything, on and on, the way he had once run a whole county. When Willie came in late from the far pasture, Roy told him what he'd told foremen for thirty years: that a man who couldn't keep a clock had no business asking a clock for wages. The Thornleys let it go. Roy didn't. He was easier on the cattle than on Willie, and Willie stood out by the creek in the rain a while before he went in.

He had one tie left in Vernal Crossing, and he never used it, and that was the hardest part to watch. He asked after Marisol the way you ask after weather in a county you've moved out of. He heard she was to be married in September — to Theo, of course to Theo, the whole town had bet on it years ago — and he sat with that news the way he had once sat with a short crop, working the arithmetic and finding no way through it.

He decided on a gift. Nothing with his name in it, nothing a clerk would remember. In the farm store in Cinder Flats, of all towns, he found a caged finch — a green singer, quick-eyed, hammering at the seed cup — and he bought it with cage and seed for the wedding, meaning to leave it at the church door with no card, because a bird sings for whoever opens the cage door and never asks who paid for the cage.

The wedding was the Saturday after harvest. Roy meant to go and stand at the back and then walk out and let the bird be the whole of him that stayed. He left the Thornley place at four in the morning, walked the eight miles to the road, and waited for the church van he'd been promised.

The van did not come. The wind swung around out of the north while he waited, and he counted the church bells in Cinder Flats, six of them, and then a seventh that was the fairgrounds clock, and he shifted his coat to the windward side of the cage without thinking about it. It was past noon when Willie finally came, gray-faced, taking the corner too fast.

"I overslept, Mr. Calloway," Willie said.

"You'll oversleep at my funeral too," Roy said, which was as near to forgiveness as he had ever come, and got in. Willie drove the wrong way first, toward the Broken Hills, the high empty shortgrass south of the fairgrounds, and Roy, too far gone to correct him, said, "It doesn't matter now where," and Willie kept driving up into the hills because his instructions had always come from the one man who could no longer give any.

They found the truck at sundown. Roy was still in it, his coat folded over the finch's cage to keep the wind off the bird, his hat squared on his knee, looking, the deputy wrote later, like a man who had simply finished. The county doctor wrote exposure — a man too long in the wind — and nobody disputed it, least of all the wind. Tucked into the cage wire, where anyone who came for the bird could not miss it, was one sheet, written the week before in pencil, the letters leaning like fence posts:

"That Marisol never be told I came. That nobody wear black for me. That no man remember me. I have worked it out that I am not worth remembering, and I ask only that the account be closed clean. — R.C."