Bob was astonished by Grattan then, before Grat became alcoholic. He was twenty-seven years old, five-feet-ten inches tall, and weighed over two hundred pounds; broad and hard as a desk he was, with hands the size of telephones and too little imagination to ever be scared of anything. He could break through doors with his forehead. He could throw barrow hogs onto a porch roof. He was a bully throughout his school days, and after he flunked sixth grade two years in a row, he never returned. If someone snickered at his reading, he’d make the kid’s mouth bleed at lunch. If someone fired him for letting a cow get mired during calving, Grat would sneak back at night and castrate the rancher’s best seed bull. But Bob got a kick out of him. He’d write, “Good old Grat. Never smiles. Trims his mustache with lighted match sticks. Seen him peel the ears off a drunken Indian. The doors slam on churches when he rides past. He’s an original Grat is. Tough as a night in jail.”

I don’t believe I saw Bob or Grat three times until December 1888, when my fourteen-year-old brother Simon died. He’d always been puny and crouped, but that autumn he kept shoveled-up in his bed and withered away and turned the sheets brown with his fever.

I’d already arrived at our Labette County farm in Kansas when the undertaker drove his black carriage up. It was cold enough that the road out was jagged with frozen horse tracks and the saddle stock tied up to our white picket fence were shaggy with winter hair. I stood on the porch with my hands in my jeans, staring at a Christmas wreath of pine needles and cones that had been dipped in black paint and nailed to the front storm door, and when the hearse stopped I fetched four large men out of the whitewashed farmhouse, all kin to Simon and me, each with mustaches and suspenders and their pants shoved inside their high boots. We wobbled some as we carried the coffin up two steps and into the living room where we set it down on two chairs, picked our plates up, and ate lunch standing up, not saying a peep to each other.

Later I sat at a window and heard the screen door bang and saw Minnie in the backyard, taking down the gray laundry that flapped on the line. Red leaves swam around her on the grass. I saw her shade her eyes and stare across the cornfield to the pinkish woodrows and then I saw Bob and Grat on their horses, ducking under the colored trees. Minnie looked into her apron and walked back inside the house.