When Bill Dalton was reached at his Bartlesville farm on October 5th, he had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up and was chopping with a hoe in his garden. A newspaper reporter stood at the gateposts with his skimmer under his arm. “Am I the first to inform you?” he asked. My brother paused and leaned on his hoe. “Oh God.” I think it was Bill.

In middle September, Bob and Eugenia closed up the Hennessey house and sold the animals and Eugenia left to stay a week at the stockman’s ranch of Dan Quick, her father. She said, “I’m going to South America. I’ve come here to say goodbye.”

He stood at the stove stirring a cauldron of chili. After a while he said, “I thought you said good-bye many moons ago, Florence.”

“I did. It needed repeating.”

Powers, Broadwell, and I bid the Skiatook ranch good riddance when Amos Burton rode out from Dover and said Bob required us. It wasn’t that I thought yea or nay about banks; Bob assumed I’d be there, so I went. The four of us stayed a week in the dugout, playing Monte next to a bonfire at night or relaxing in the sun smoking cigarettes with the broad leaves of Paradise trees on our heads. And when Bob came in from the west at last, my brother Grat was with him, two crockery jugs of cornmash in his lap.

Bob uncinched his saddle and unfolded the horse blanket on grass where the sun was while the men sat in the shade of the dugout overhang, rolling tobacco in papers and passing the jug. Bob slapped his hat off on his pants and found a currycomb in his saddlebags and squinted at me over the rump of his horse. “You make your proposal to Julia yet?”

“Nope.”

“That’s something we’ll have to do then.”

I said, “She won’t marry me. I mean, it’s not like she’s some mail-order bride. She’s like Miss Moore; she can have her pick. I’m gonna ask but she won’t elope, not Julia. I think I’d be kind of disappointed in any girl who’d want to settle for me, anyway. That’s true, I would. How smart could she be? Julia’s going to say NO in capital letters. And I don’t blame her, not one bit.”

My brother seemed to think all that was funny. He said, “I believe your sales talk could use a little work, boy.” Dust floated from the horsehide whenever he raked the comb. The mare’s coat was polished with sweat where the blanket had been.

I said, “I reckon you and Eugenia had yourselves a good time on her farm.”

“You bet,” said Bob. “It was romantic as hell.”

I stood there with thumbs hooked in my chaps and a cigarette between my fingers. I said, “Women can fix it, can’t they.”