he had of his mother, fell asleep

and woke up another day

and they sent word again.

The Old Man was calling out for him,

but Papa said, “I got a hen’s neck to wring.

We’re having baked chicken for dinner,”

and he went in the barn

and came out with eggs still warm from laying

and he took them in the kitchen

washed off the shit, put them in a basket

and went to sit on the front porch.

He rocked back and forth in his glider

and Mama brought him a glass of hot apple cider.

“Where’s that chicken, John?

Nevermind, I’ll do it myself,” she said.

“The way he treated my mother,” said Papa.

He remembered riding to Texas in a wagon

from Oklahoma when he was five

with his Choctaw mother

and his white father.

An older brother left behind,

because he resembled Choctaws more than Papa did.

“That,” he went on, “was a time.”

The Old Man on a bay horse,

just staring at him,

until Papa waved,

then turning and riding off.

His father, Charles’s silence at dinner,

biscuits and a basket of fried chicken

sent from the ranch house

and a teddy bear with all its fur nearly gone.

“That was mine,” said his father,

“now it’s yours.”

Papa nodded and picked up a chicken leg.

He ate ranch beans, potato salad

and washed it down with buttermilk.

Then his mother put him to bed.

Her long black braid had come undone

and he touched her hair

and it made a sound like silk rustling

in his dreams anyway.

The next day, his father took him to see cattle grazing

as far as the eye could see and further.

He saw a pond for fishing, horses and a bunkhouse,

a doghouse, an outhouse his father once used

and he met a lot of people—cowboys, two cooks

a man who took him up in the saddle of his horse.

That was his uncle, but he didn’t know it then.

He died in the Great War.

He didn’t see his grandfather.

His father took him in the kitchen of the ranch house.

“You be quiet as a little mouse,” he told him.

The cook gave him hot chocolate and a book about the ABC’s.

When his father came back, he just said, “Let’s go, son.”

He didn’t return to that house,

until he was twenty,

after his father got killed when a steer trampled him

and ran clear to Abiline,

before anybody could catch it,

at least that’s what they say.

Papa didn’t know what would happen,

so he started packing.

Then a message came from The Old Man,

whose name was never uttered in their house.

John went that time.

He didn’t know what he expected to find.

I’ll tell you what he didn’t, The Old Man.

The foreman had a letter for him.