She was born in Kentucky and lived for some years in Texas where her father was a stockman. She had one sister, Lucy, and four brothers, two of them sheriffs. The Johnsons had moved only months before to a farm in Bartlesville twenty miles south of the Kansas line, and I commenced courting her there almost every night, making a nuisance of myself, until I broke down her resistance and she began thinking of Emmett Dalton with some fondness.

I shorthand that romance because it seems to me now so usual. I’d show up on her porch with a red bandana around my neck and my boots shined with tallow, a clutch of peonies in my hand, and I’d have supper with the Johnson family and try not to shovel my food. She’d do chores and I’d tag along. She’d wash the dishes and I’d dry; she’d ride the bell cow in from the pasture and giggle as I stumbled backwards over calf puckey, spouting about myself, and she’d sew my initials on white handkerchiefs while I pumped a frenzy in the butter churn.

My brother Bob was involved at that time with a girl of the same last name, Minnie Johnson. She was no relation to Julia but she was to Bob and me: a cousin, the daughter of my mother Adeline’s dead sister. She was a pretty girl just turned sixteen, with green eyes and sausage-curled brown hair and skin as fair as white bread. She’d once let Bob unbutton her in the barn and he said she was as fine in the shingle light as the naked French actresses on postcards. And when she was thirteen she had allowed Bob to sneak into her bedroom on Christmas night and have his way with her.

She stayed off with my sisters Eva, Leona, and Nannie Mae most of the years that she and I shared the Dalton farmhouse, and after I left I hardly saw her at all except when she was hugging Bob’s sleeve in a stroll down the Coffeyville streets, or at the contest booths under the shade trees at the Fourth of July picnic.

My brother wore a straw boater and a wrinkled white suit with his deputy marshal’s badge pinned to his pocket. He’d deign to pitch a baseball at wooden milk bottles or toss pennies into teacups, but most of the afternoon he spent tipping his hat to ladies and carrying on like a boulevardier with his adoring cousin latched to him.

Whereas Julia and I took twenty nickel rides on a mule-pulled merry-go-round that had a fiddler turning with it for music. We drank lemonade from washtubs and reclined with Bob and Minnie on a patchwork quilt at night to gawk at the fireworks that whined and popped over the Caney River.

Bob sat back on his elbows and whispered to Minnie, “What’s that one look like?”