Mateo came forward slowly across the kitchen floor, turning his hat in his hands, and stopped beside my chair. The long white envelope lay on the table where I had left it, tucked into the old Bible of Joan. His name was written on the front in the hand of a woman, a looping, careful script that I would have known in my sleep. “Mr. Curtis,” he said quietly, “why is my name on this?” I picked up the envelope and held it out to him. “Open it, Mateo,” I said. “It is not from me. It is from my wife.” He hesitated, a lean brown man of fifty nine with silver in his mustache, and then he slid his thumb under the flap.
Inside lay two sheets of paper. The first was a letter, written on blue stationery with a faint scent of lavender, and the second was a deed. Mateo unfolded the letter first, and I watched his lips move as he read. His eyes filled, and he put his free hand over his mouth. “Read it aloud,” I said. “Colton should hear it.” His voice cracked at the first line. “Dear Mateo. If you are reading this, then I am gone, and Curtis is a stubborn old man who has not yet found the words. You have been a son to us. You were with Curtis in the hospital when I was dying. I want you to have a home of your own.”
He read on, haltingly, through the tears. “The house on the creek and the four hundred acres around it are yours, with water rights and mineral rights. Curtis will argue. Do not let him. We made this decision together, in the spring of 2019, and we have not wavered. Love, Joan.” He lowered the page. The deed lay beneath, notarized, signed by both of us, and I had added a small codicil after the sale. The creek parcel went to Mateo free and clear, not subject to any claim, with a cashier check for one million dollars stapled to the corner. “Mr. Curtis,” he whispered, “I cannot.” “You will,” I said. “She wrote it down.”
A long white envelope tucked in an old Bible and addressed to a ranch hand held a letter and a deed from a wife who had planned it years before.
Colton had been standing near the stove with his arms folded, and now he moved, the way a man moves who has remembered that he has something to say. “This is insane,” he said. “Grandpa, you are giving four hundred acres to a hired hand. That is my inheritance. That is the inheritance of Dad.” “It is my land,” I said, “and I will give it to whom I choose. Joan and I decided on this before you were born to ranch it.” His face had gone a dark red. “He is nobody. He is a Mexican who came up from Chihuahua with a duffel bag.” The kitchen went entirely quiet. Mateo did not move. But he looked at the floor.
I stood up. I am seventy nine years old, and I have a bad hip, and I did not hurry. “Colton, you are going to leave this house now,” I said. “Not forever, I hope, but for tonight. Sheriff Dobbs is waiting at the end of the lane. You have a brand inspector coming at nine in the morning, and you will tell him every word of the truth.” He stared at me. “Grandpa, you would call the sheriff on me? On your own blood?” “I called him on a man who sold my cattle,” I said. “And who tried to destroy another man for it. I did not call him on my blood. I called him on a thief.”
Colton went. He took his coat and his hat and walked out the door with his jaw set and his shoulders stiff, and I heard the sound of his truck starting. I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Twenty two years,” he said finally. “I never asked for anything.” “That is why you are getting it,” I said. “Joan used to say that the people who ask for the least deserve the most.” He let out a long breath, and then he did something I had never seen him do in twenty two years. He took off his hat and put his arms around me, and wept on my shoulder like a boy.
Colton gave his statement the next morning. He admitted everything, the brand, the forty three head, the account in Cheyenne, and he agreed to repay the thirty one thousand dollars and an additional twelve thousand in penalties. The county attorney offered him a plea, with probation and community service, which I did not oppose. He moved to Casper and found work on a drilling rig. For a year, I heard nothing. Then a letter arrived in December, three lines in pencil. Grandpa, I am sorry about what I said to Mateo. It was the worst thing I ever said. I have learned a few things. Colton.
I drove to Casper on the first of January and found him in a diner, with grease on his hands, drinking coffee with a crew of roughnecks. Then I sat down across from him and ordered a plate of eggs. We ate in silence, as men do. When we were done, I laid a small envelope on the table. “It is not money,” I said. “It is a bus ticket to Laramie, and a phone number. Mateo says you are welcome to come help with the spring branding, if you want to learn it the right way.” Colton looked at the envelope for a long time.
He came in April. Mateo met him at the gate, and handed him a pair of gloves without a word, and they worked the whole day, side by side, in the dust and the noise. At sundown they sat on the corral fence with bottles of beer, and I watched from the porch. But as the light went gold over the creek, and the cattle began to bawl, the two of them sat together on that fence like two men who had finally found a way to work the same ground.
Mateo brought his family up from Chihuahua that summer, his wife and two daughters and four grandchildren, and they settled in the house on the creek. On Sundays I eat supper at their long wooden table, with tortillas and beans and roasted green chiles, and a small boy named Joaquin climbs on my lap and asks me to tell him about the cows. In the corner of the front room, on a shelf by itself, sits the old Bible of Joan. Mateo asked if he could keep it there, and I said yes.
