A stout man with a handlebar mustache, Henry Isham, crossed the Santa Fe tracks at Tenth Street. He could see his clerks Louis A. Dietz and Arthur Reynolds standing with lunch boxes on the loading dock of the hardware store owned by himself and his brother and son-in-law. Dietz had a rusty monkey wrench he’d discovered by the tracks. He rubbed it on his pants and dropped it into his shirt pocket when Isham walked up the stairs to the dock. Isham shook out his keys. “Sun feels good, doesn’t it.”

At the country road two miles from town, we turned east on what is now Highway 166. The horses were skittish and surly and showed their long teeth over the mouth bits like they’d been gagged. Their tails swung at flies; their shoes skidded on pebbles. I could make out the scaling red paint on a barn a quarter mile to the right. In the shaded backyard of the house a woman was hanging bed sheets on a clothesline. They billowed suddenly white in the sun. To the left of the road I could only see a boy turned around on the seat of a mule-powered high-sided wagon while two farmers in straw hats and rolled shirtsleeves, one of them William Gilbert, quickly shucked husks of corn and tossed them against the bangboard.

Bob had his horse in a swinging trot and his woman was riding next to him, with wisps of long hair squiggling out over her eyes in the breeze. I rode up beside her but she didn’t look in my direction. I said, “Autumn is my favorite season; because the colors are so radiant and the air smells like apples and you can reap the bounty of the hot weather’s toils. If there was a country where it was autumn all the time, I believe that’s where I’d go.”

Eugenia said, “It’s autumn every day in Argentina. That’s why so many Germans inhabit the place.”

I said, “I don’t like Germans and they don’t like me.”

My brother complained, “Why don’t you two go over what we’re about to do instead of prattling about foreign countries? Do you know what your jobs are, and where and when they have to be done? Ask yourselves those questions.”

Eugenia smiled at me. “Do you feel chastened?”