The barn had always been a refuge for Clint. His mornings and late afternoons were spent doing the things he loved, easily passing away the hours into years working for the Kelso family. His world was in perfect harmony, and his life ambitions met. He had enough of everything he needed. He prided himself on being content with his life. He was at that perfect balance between his past, present, and future, sitting at a point that suited his nature. His salary paid by the estate was more than enough to pay his bills. Frugal in nature, his only bills were household expenses and maintenance on his twenty-year-old Chevy short-bed truck. He’d bought it with the money he received after his injuries working for the traveling rodeo. The rest of the settlement money was in the bank.
In stark contrast to the peace of his current perch, there was the Clint of just about a decade ago. He remembered with disdain those mornings, clouded by the fog of liquor and the effort involved in surviving another day surrounded by the inherited property and home of his only brother.
A few weeks after his brother had died, Clint’s mother warned him not to let the bottle take him too. “I don’t know why the men in our family fall to the wickedness of liquor; first your father, and now your brother. I thought he would learn after watching your father suffer from his failing liver, but it is our doom,” she’d said to Clint as they sat on the porch of his dead brother’s house.
Clint reassured her that he was not going to fall to the same ruin as his brother—and father before him. However, it was a promise he’d already known he would break. After his mother left that afternoon, he closed the door and turned on the TV. He then retrieved a bottle of whisky from a well-stocked cabinet and submerged himself in it, pulling the cork in behind him. His life faded further each day into self-inflicted despair. His plans for the future had been simple: stay locked up in his personal prison and medicate his crippled knee with pity and whisky.
His daily tasks were easy enough. He came to each morning in a haze, fed the two horses that used to be his brother’s, then returned to the house to drink the remainder of the day away. At the end of the week, he would drive into town and purchase groceries along with a healthy supply of liquor to get through the next week. On Saturdays, he occupied the same barstool in the same bar until they closed at three in the morning. He repeated this treacherous routine for eight months, until the turning point.
One Saturday night in April, Clint had driven home a little drunker than usual. Stepping out of his truck, he lost his balance and fell to the ground, where he passed out and remained the entire night.
The horses in the small stable behind the house woke him with their incessant whinnying and snorting in an effort to motivate him to bring their breakfast. The mare was a fine Thoroughbred and her foal was about two years old. Both horses were all that remained of his brother’s stock legacy. Also a working cowboy, his brother would hire out to ranches during roundups all over the state of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. He, too, loved his job, traveling and assisting with roundups and sometimes working for traveling rodeos like Clint. The two horses that remained were now Clint’s to do with whatever he wished; however, the injuries to his knee kept him from riding.
From the cool ground that morning, Clint had lifted his head, the sounds from the horses flushing the fog from his mind. As if climbing from a hole, he crawled his way to the edge of the truck, placing one hand on top of the tire and the other on top of the hood. He then pulled himself up on his good leg and struggled to bend the other and bring it underneath him to sturdy himself and stand upright. As he did this, the fog returned and his face flushed. He lost his balance, falling over backward onto the ground. He let go of everything at that moment—his strength, his desire, his resolve—and started to cry.
Oh God, what have I become? Tears streaming down his face, he managed to roll onto one side. He pulled his knees to his chest, rolled onto his knees, and crawled to the edge of the porch, dragging his bad leg. The cold had set into his bones. Everything ached, but mostly his knee, as he placed one hand over the other and pulled himself up the handrail and onto the front porch. He swung his body around when he got to the top step and sat upright for a moment. Then he leaned forward, placed his hands over his face, and wept like a child. He recognized his despair.
Thoughts flashed through his mind—thoughts that he should fight to keep away, but he did not. He allowed his mind to search for an end to his self-inflicted suffering. He did not use his rational thought, which was far too difficult. He did not consider asking for help: I can solve my own problems. He did not think of his mother, nor did he think of his friends, because he had none. All his friends had moved on with the rodeo when it moved to the next town. He only thought of ending the agony he felt. That is when he thought of the single-barrel shotgun behind the bathroom door.
When his tears ran dry on his face, he stumbled into the house. Upon entering the kitchen, he passed up the cereal bowl for a breakfast of booze. The bottle felt comfortable in his shaking hand. He carried it with him into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, pulled out the cork and lifted the bottle to his lips. He took a long pull. Bubbles danced inside the bottle when he hoisted it up. He lowered the bottle, dangled it between his knees. Head down, he stretched out his right leg and swung the bathroom door shut. It slammed against the frame and latched. Behind it was the single-barrel shotgun that had belonged to his brother.
“That’s what I need right there,” he said aloud, the sound of his voice strange, thick and cold. “It’ll be better if I do it this way instead of dying by the bottle, slowly dwindling away, listening to my mother’s voice in my head. Hell, I’m dead anyway.”
He leaned forward to grasp the shotgun. Before his fingers touched it, the horses out back began a raucous protest, whinnying together as loudly as he’d ever heard them. Clint bargained with himself. He would give this dying a deadline. First he would sell the horses, and then he would reconsider his options.
He took a second pull from the bottle and sat back on the toilet. He reached down to the floor, retrieved the cork, and pushed it back into the bottle. The sound of the cork twisting its way into the neck of the bottle was like a comforting song. So familiar to him, the sound was a prelude to that first long drink that calmed his nerves and steadied his hand and, a few drinks later, filled him with soothing comfort.
“All right, I’m coming!” he yelled out the bathroom window so the horses would calm down.
The next day Clint placed an ad in the local newspaper advertising the mare and the two-year-old for sale. He did not have a telephone at the house, so the ad came with directions to his ten-acre farm, which was located not more than a few miles from the Kelso Ranch.