The hardest thing we've ever seen

I didn't wear a shirt outside today, a hundred hours before Christmas. The pastures are brown except for the stalks of green weeds; the sporadic oaks are bald like dark-skinned old men. But the warmth hasn't fled, neither the mockingbirds, still in the throes of desire: swooping at each other to mate while I read on a tattered lawn chair. The gnats also swarmed. I forgot how flat this state can be, so a sunset can encircle 2/3rds of the horizon. I forgot my grandfather will describe some hymns as Negro Spirituals, and that he is going blind. Texas isn't changing; its seasons repeat their same stories year after year.

Yesterday I heard the story of a saddle from my neighbor's grandfather. I grew up around him. He's told this anecdote often, but now, three months short of being a hundred, he has let it sprawl into a longer narrative. He bought the saddle at an estate sale; he's imagined a wild history. It can extend for hours: a novel, which he has been writing for ten years. He told me a publisher has been sending him letters every month but his progress slowed after he buggered his leg.

"David. They will come after you."

The importance of the saddle is its rawhide core. The significance is its age: 150 years. He told me once he researched its origins. I don't doubt he did, but the history he now tells is as fabricated as authentic.

"It's the story of a boy returning to Texas," he said: "with his saddle after the war." There is certainly a girl; advising me, he once insisted all good plots need romance and mystery and action. "She doesn't know yet they'll get married. She moved down there to get away from fighting, but there's still a war coming up with Spain, and look: Texas is at war with Mexico even today." He gestured then to the door that faces south. He told me the boy falls in love, because the woman is a widow and so already skilled in housekeeping. "I'm a little stuck there."

I haven't seen him in two years but knew all of this already. He doesn't talk about many other things.

He said he tried to keep it clean: the language, I suppose the romance. "But the fighting is pretty dirty. Have you read much about the Civil War? In some ways, it was the hardest thing we've ever seen. Brother against brother, son against father, North against South." He spoke to the ceiling, the leather arm of the couch. I suddenly remembered that he wouldn't vote in the last election: he could choose neither a black man nor a Republican. "In some ways," he said in the same progression of thought, "I envy you young kids, your youth, but this is a terrible world, all that's going on. All of it." He paused and just stared forward. I thought of war, of romance, of the mystery that is everything I don't know and can't predict. He began nodding off, sitting there. I told him I thought I knew what he meant.