Dear Caroline,
I am in Phoenix now, I hope everything back home is good and that you and the baby are okay. The other day, I woke up in the early morning and my horse was up on a ridge by the border. The other men were still asleep and the stars were still lit up too. I followed her up the rocks and when I got to where she was standing she had gone on a little way, further in the dust. I whistled for her but she only twitched her ears and began to walk away from me again. I followed her for about two miles and then we came to a great red pass, I was nervous that the foreman would think I had deserted. When I called for her, my voice echoed out over the red rocks and into the sand, forever.
I finally got her outside a white-walled town over the border, she was sniffing at the dirt in their cemetery. A local woman who was praying said something I didn’t understand and kept giving me these funny looks. When I got back the foreman was mad, I explained and it made him laugh but he still put me on the night round-up again. The other cowboys say I have a dead man’s horse and that she was trying to find her owner. I never did like spook stories.
Mathew
Dear Caroline,
I hope you are still well and that the fever cleared for good. Tell Doc Smith he will get his pay when I’m home; which I hope is soon. Wyoming is very beautiful and I wish you could be here with me to see the mountains. In the distance, when it has snowed, the shape they make looks like your swollen stomach when you lay on your back in bed.
An Indian woman wanted to read my palm today but I told her that I wasn’t interested. Some of the other cowboys had theirs done, but that sort of stuff doesn’t interest me. I had my first bath in a week and it was as good as a week without a warm bath might sound. The water was very hot at the start, my legs and feet got that needle-like feeling you get when you’ve not stood up in a while. After a few minutes, it was just fine and although you said people can drown, I slept a little in it too.
I look forward to the way my gut flutters on the ride in when I haven’t been home in months.
Mathew
Dear Caroline,
Before we left Caspar, the sheriff told us that there had been reports of Comanche attacks on the trail back to Colorado. We didn’t think much of it because we all carried pistols and two of the other cowboys rode with shotguns too. A little way into the journey we were resting on the edge of a deep gulch, we had just eaten our beans and bread when one of the men came back from having to relieve himself and told us there was some trouble down in the pass below. When I looked over into the blackness I could see a fire pit and the light from it threw the shadows of the dead folk on the walls of the rocks. The foreman said it was Comanche work and we were lucky to have just missed them. I don’t know how I feel about claiming luck over someone else’s death.
The next morning when we had woken, I looked down into the pass again, I don’t know why, I didn’t really think about it, sort of how you don’t think about which sock you put on first. I bent over the gulch and the bodies were gone. The fire was just old ash. I thought maybe it had been a dream but now in the dawn, I could see there was an upturned carriage down there buried a little in the sand. It might have been there for a long while or maybe it was just a dream after all. I was too afraid to ask the other cowboys if they had seen it too.
I miss you terribly.
Mathew
Dear Caroline,
We are passing through Utah now, staying in a little town called Garden City. It borders a great body of water called Bear Lake, and in the summer they call it “The Caribbean of the Rockies.”
I imagine about now you are getting the room ready for the baby, but I don’t want you to overwork yourself. When I get home, I’ll start work on the crib. I still have those planks in the barn from when I said I’d build us a porch swing. Sorry I never got round to that.
I went winter fishing on the lake too. The ice must have frozen about three feet deep. The locals said if I would have been staying until the end of January I could have caught a Cisco, which you can’t get anywhere else but on the Utah/Colorado border. It was bitterly cold and when the wind came through the mountains over the lake it whistled. I thought of the train on Sunday mornings when it would wake me up and you would still be asleep. I felt a little warmer after that.
I’m in a nice hotel now, the man who owns the place said he wouldn’t have us stay outside in this cold because the wind would cut us in half. The mattress is a little too soft and if I don’t move around once in a while, I just sink right into it. But it beats the ground, I guess. You know I can find anything to complain about.
I love you, forever.
Mathew
Dear Caroline,
We just crossed the border; I’ll be home in three days no more no less.
Arkansas through Colorado is always my favorite part when riding back East. The mist from the water runs over the rocks and covers the snow and the horse’s hoofs like the story about the headless rider.
The foreman had to let some men go, told them that there wouldn’t be work on the next cattle drive to Texas. I held the round-up again tonight, so I couldn’t write some of the other cowboy’s letters for them like I used to. They were bitter and I think they saw me as the foreman’s little dog.
After I round up the cattle, I sat by the fire whilst the other guys slept. I wasn’t very hungry. The day before coming home is always the longest, I feel close to you and still very distant, sort of how a sad donkey might feel chasing a carrot on a string. I read the letter you gave me the first time I rode out. I read it every night before I lay down to bed. I can picture your voice in my head so clearly that sometimes I get a little lump in my throat and it hurts to read on; but I always do. I know that when I get home tomorrow morning, even if it’s early, you’ll be waiting on the porch. The house will be cut out and black behind you, and we’ll go straight to bed, even if the day has only just begun and the sun has barely touched the clouds.
I love you always.
Mathew
Joshua Nagle currently lives in small coastal town in mid-Wales with his partner, where he is completing his first novel. He enjoys writing and reading coming of age narratives, and literature that explores the Vietnam war & 70’s America.