Julia was fastening a necklace in the bureau mirror; Macdonald stood next to my chair, rubbing a cigarette out. “Ready?”

And the Dalton party took the elevator down to the lobby where there was a large audience of applauding people, drugstore clerks and foundry men and secretaries in polka-dot scarves, and under the shade of the hotel’s roof were gas station attendants and boys chewing gum and house painters in white coveralls, men in dark suits and gray felt hats, two schoolteachers with small schoolchildren, and flashbulbs going off when I waved my left hand.

I walked to the First National Bank just as I had at twenty and little boys tried to place their shoes on whatever bricks I stepped on. Maybe a thousand people gazed in awe as I stood at the doors of the Condon bank, my hand skating over the riddled wood, and gave my version of the Great Coffeyville Kansas Raid. Then I crossed Walnut Street just as my brother Grat had, recalling aloud the withering gunfire and wagon barricades and the smoke hanging at Isham’s. I walked with a crowd shoved around me, adults and children gaping at the picket fence with pea vines on it where my brother Bob was killed. I scraped my heel in the cinders to indicate the place where I lay dying, and then I saw that the crowd had retreated, and there in the alley in black suits with red ribbons on their pockets were six survivors of those men who’d shot at me there forty-five years before. One sat in a wooden wheelchair; two leaned on canes; they shaded their eyes from the sun and grinned at me, and then they slunk up to shake my hand.

About the Author

Ron Hansen is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and a book of essays. He graduated from Creighton University in Omaha and went on to study at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. His novel Atticus was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. Hansen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives with his wife, novelist Bo Caldwell, in Northern California, and teaches at Santa Clara University.

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