So Bob made his choice, to give his loyalty to who trusted him. I know that Jack Rockwood did what he had to do to test the dog, and I know that he regretted it and thought often that maybe there had been another way. But a dog has the wild in him, too, just like a man, and either you go down the road of peace, or you take the other path. Dogs have the choice, people have it, whole nations, too.
I know I have been at that fork in the road many times, and in my career I have often found myself defending men who took the wrong path. To uphold the rights of the good, a lawyer must sometimes defend the bad. So I have seen up close how hard it can be to find the right path. I know how hard it must have been for Bob.
After I came back to the house, I had supper in the kitchen with the Rockwoods, a mess of quail and some runner beans from their kitchen garden, and fried potatoes. We drank wine that a fancy Texan has been making near here. Pretty good, too. Sign of the times.
Afterwards, young Buddy and I took a walk. We went to honor his namesake, and I prayed at his marker a little. I reflected on the strangeness of warfare, and the often obscure disagreements over which we choose to kill each other. Buddy died a hero and he died hard. Bob, too. They shared their fate, dog and master, even after life separated them. Sometimes dog and man can join souls. Love like that, between beings of different species, is one of nature's greatest mysteries.
Buddy said, "Will I go to war?"
"Good folks go on that journey, son, if they must. God willing, you won't need to."
I ended up spending the night at the Rockwood place, in the same attic room I'd been put as a boy, in the same bed.
I was waked up in the same way, but the sun pouring in the east facing dormer.
The ranch had been up since five, of course, and you could hear dogs faintly in the distance, their voices saying that they were working hard. But the cattle were far out in grazing pasture this time of year, so I didn't go out to watch.
Instead I walked to the end of the house pasture, to the place where the Rockwoods have buried their family animals for a long time. Bob is in there, and Culebra. The place is marked by a fence, and honored with a small cross. There's flowering creeper on that fence, a good bit of it. Nature wastes nothing.
Sam Rockwood came along after a while. Neither of us said anything. He's a smart boy, Sam, wise in the way the Rockwoods tend to be. He understands the grace of silence, Sam does.
When we went back up to the house, there was breakfast on the table. Good food, fresh eggs, fresh beef sausage, grits and coffee. Food like that used to bring Bob's big old nose up to the edge of the table. He felt so close, I was almost tempted to slip him some sausage and see if it would just disappear.
Sam said, "We gotta buy hay again, looks like." His eyes said, 'it's likely to be a hard year in the high plains. Another one.'
But when the rains finally do come, the A-Bar will still be here, and the Rockwoods, part of this earth, and Buddy out there on that windy hill, and Bob and Culebra, and all whose journeys have unfolded here.
Even in this windy, hard place life will go on, memory will slip away, and the dead will be left to their rest. Such is the symmetry of it, the wheel of the world turning round, echoes sounding in the prairie night.