10. The Bonfire
The Bonfire
JAKE
Wilder Ranch — Morning
Bacon hisses in the skillet as Cody finds out at breakfast that Lila grew up on a cattle ranch.
He discovers this when she calmly corrects him—ears first, then eyes. He says you watch the eyes first; she says you watch the ears first, then the eyes, and she is right, and the way she says it makes it clear she has known this since before she could drive.
Cody stares at her.
"You grew up on a ranch," he says.
"Panhandle," she says. "Texas."
"Like Jake."
"Like Jake."
Cody looks at me, then at Lila, then back at me, with the expression of someone putting together a picture he doesn't yet have all the pieces for.
My father is looking at his coffee.
"Ears first," my father says to the table.
That is his contribution to this conversation, and he considers it complete.
Cody writes something on the back of his hand.
I eat my breakfast, and I don't look at Lila.
She has been on this property for three days in a place that is more like where she came from than anywhere else she has been in years, and she has not said it out loud once, nor have I.
We share that knowledge quietly, like two people in the same room who never mention the furniture.
* * *
Afternoon
Cody asks at lunch if we ever do bonfires out here, and a spark of nostalgia lifts a quick grin out of me.
He says it the way young ranch hands say things, casual, slightly hopeful, trying not to look like he is trying.
My father looks at me.
"We do now," I say.
Cody looks pleased with himself in a way that reminds me of being twenty-three, which was a very good age for thinking things would go the way you wanted.
Lila, across the table, says nothing. She is eating and reading something in her notebook, with the focused absence of someone who is neither ignoring the conversation nor in it.
My father says, "East fire ring. After dinner."
That settles it.
The Wilder Ranch east fire ring is not complicated. It's a circle of flat stones my grandfather laid sometime in the 1960s.
He chose a low spot behind the east pasture where the wind breaks just enough to keep a fire manageable. We've burned there my whole life—after roundups, branding, bad days, and good ones.
My father doesn't do much purely for enjoyment; the fire ring is one of the few things he does.
I catch Lila's eye across the table.
She raises an eyebrow, just slightly, and my stomach flips into a half grin I can’t quite hide.
I nod.
She goes back to her notebook.
* * *
The afternoon work is fence repair on the south side. I take Lila with me because she is good at it. After all, Cody needs to learn it, and because three people on a fence job is the right number.
Cody drives the posts. I run the wire. Lila does the tensioning, which she is better at than Cody and close to as good as I am.
I don't tell her this. She would find the comparison unnecessary, and she would not be wrong.
We work for two hours in the late-afternoon heat, and the work is good. I get that certain satisfaction of physical labor that produces something visible: a fence that was pulling and listing is now straight and solid and will hold through the winter and probably past it.
Cody talks while he works. He rambles about Lubbock rodeos, a girl named Haley he texts too much, and how a wide sky invites philosophy. Twenty-three, in love, and knee-deep in dust, he fills the silence while Lila simply quirks an eyebrow and keeps tensioning wire.
I let him talk. You learn more about a person in two hours of shared fence work than in a week of meals.
At one point, he drives a post at the wrong angle. I correct it without making a thing of it; he resets and drives it straight the second time, and he doesn't do it again.
He is a quick learner. He just needs the reps.
Lila says almost nothing throughout all of this.
Cody, undeterred, asks her: "You ever do rodeo?"
"Watched it," she says. "Grew up near Amarillo."
"No kidding. Did you ever?—"
"Drums," she says. "That's my rodeo."
Cody considers this. "I guess that makes sense," he says, with the earnest uncertainty of someone who is not sure it makes sense, but is willing to take her word for it.
"It really doesn't," she says. "I just didn't want to explain touring."
Cody laughs. Genuine, unguarded, the laugh of a young man who did not expect to find something funny and is delighted by the accident of it.
Lila almost smiles.
I keep my eyes on the wire.
* * *
Evening
The fire ring fills up after dinner in the easy way of people with nowhere else to be.
My father brings two chairs from the porch.
Cody drags a log over from the woodpile and settles onto it with contentment.
I build the fire the way my grandfather taught me, small at the base, plenty of air underneath, patience on the front end so you don't have to fight it later. You cannot rush a fire.
You can only give it what it needs and let it do what it does.
Lila comes out of the house while I'm still building it. She holds her coffee mug and stands at the edge of the fire ring, watching me lay the wood.
"You stack it differently from how my father did," she says.
"What did your father do?"
"Bigger base. Denser in the middle. More impressive for the first five minutes and then a pain to manage."
"My grandfather's method," I say. "Slower to catch. Goes all night."
She sits down in the chair. "That's the better method."
"I know."
Cody, from his log: "How do you know which method is better before you've tried it?"
Lila and I look at him.
"You try it," she says. "That's how."
Cody nods like this is profound. It is not profound. It is just true, which sometimes amounts to the same thing.
I light the fire.
The fire catches and grows, and the Panhandle dark closes around the light, and the four of us settle into the quiet of people sitting around a fire that is doing its job. The east pasture is just past the ring of light.
The cattle are settled. The stars out here are a different thing from the stars anywhere else, no town glow, no hills to interrupt the sky, just the full, unfiltered dark and the Milky Way in an unbroken band from one horizon to the other.
Cody tips his head back, watching an ember drift skyward, and looks up.
"I've never seen it like that," he says.
"Like what?" I say.
"The stars. That many."
"Lubbock's too bright."
"Yeah." He keeps looking. "My grandmother used to say you could see God's fingerprints out here."
My father, who has not spoken for twenty minutes, says, "She wasn't wrong."
Cody looks at him like he's just been given something he didn't know to ask for.
Lila is looking at the fire. Her expression is the one she gets when something has landed, and she is deciding where to put it.
She puts it somewhere quiet.
I put another piece of wood on; the fire comes up, and we sit in the quiet glow, with smoke curling up and out, and the crackling that breaks the silence now and again.
* * *
It happens the way it has been happening all week, without me deciding to let it.
I am looking at the land past the fire ring, the east pasture in the dark, the slight rise at the far end, the beauty of the property in the starlight.
I go back to Cody seeing the stars for the first time tonight. How many people have never stood in this light and don't know they're missing it? And what would it mean to give someone that?
The thought that follows is an old one. I put it away.
"I keep thinking about what Cody said," I say. Not specifically to Lila. To the fire.
"God's fingerprints," she says.
"Not that part. The part where he'd never seen it before. All those stars. Just never had access to them."
The land spreads out before us.
"There's so much out here that people don't know exists. The light. The space. What it feels like to work this land for a day and understand, in your body, where things come from."
She is quiet. She is listening the way she listens.
"You love it," she says.
"I do."
She looks at the east pasture.
"I know what you mean," she answers.
I don’t ask what she means by that. I let it sit where she put it.
The vision hangs just beyond the firelight, the way it always does when I sit here too long. I look at it for a moment, and then I put it back in the drawer. Tonight is not the night for it.
My father is looking at the far edge of the fire ring. Cody has fallen into a half-doze on his log, his coffee mug balanced on his knee with the precarious confidence of a man who has not yet learned what happens when you fall asleep holding a mug.
The fire settles and pops.
"There's a place in town," I say. "Honky tonk. Good band on Fridays. We used to go after roundup when I was coming up."
"Is it Friday?" Lila asks.
"Tomorrow."
She looks at the fire.
"I'll think about it," she says.
That is more than I expected.
Lila's phone buzzes in her jacket pocket.
* * *
LILA
I already know before I look at it that it’s Nashville.
The distinct buzz. The specific hour. Studio people operate on studio time, which is approximately three hours behind the rest of the world and two hours past when normal people eat dinner.
I get up from the chair and move to the edge of the fire ring, where the light is.
"This is Lila."
Marcus. A producer I have worked with three times, reliable, good ears, slightly too confident about tempos, once argued with me for twenty minutes about a half-time feel before admitting I was right.
He wants me for a two-week session block starting in ten days.
Major label artist, full album. He names the rate.
The rate is good.
I put the professional voice on the way I always do. Quick, clean, and efficient. Dates, chart requirements, and whether I need to see a full breakdown before I commit. It is not a different person.
It is just the version of me that the industry needs, the one that doesn't have a guest room at a Panhandle cattle ranch or a notebook full of observations about grazing rotations.
"Send me the details by Wednesday," I say. "I'll confirm by Friday."
I hang up.
I stand at the edge of the fire ring light.
Two weeks ago, I would have confirmed on the call. The rate is right, the timing is workable, and Marcus is professional. Thirty seconds of calculation and done.
I have been doing exactly this for years, and it has never once taken more than thirty seconds.
Tonight, it is taking longer than thirty seconds.
I turn back to the fire.
Jake is watching from his chair. Not intrusively. Just the way he watches things, present, taking note, not requiring anything from what he sees.
I sit back down.
"Session work?" he asks.
"Two-week block. Ten days out."
"Will you take it?"
I look at the fire.
"Probably," I say.
He nods. He doesn't ask what it probably means. He doesn't point out that I said 'probably' instead of 'yes'. He just accepts it and looks back at the fire.
I am aware that I said probably.
I realize this may not be what I would normally say.
I am choosing not to look at that directly tonight.
* * *
The fire burns down slowly, the way good fires do.
Cody's mug loses the battle with gravity. He startles awake, grabs it one-handed, and looks around at the three of us with the expression of someone who hopes nobody saw that.
All three of us saw it.
My father says nothing. This is mercy.
Cody clears his throat and takes a dignified sip of his now room-temperature coffee.
"Good fire," he says.
"It is," I say.
My father says good night at nine-thirty. Cody follows shortly after, still carrying the mug with the measured attention of someone who has learned a lesson.
Jake puts another piece of wood on, and the fire comes back up, and the two of us sit in the light with the Panhandle dark all around.
What he said keeps circling in my head.
Not a plan, not a pitch. Just Jake looking at his land and saying what it was, what it could give a person who had never had access to it.
The light. The space.
The feeling of working on something real and going home knowing something you didn't know before.
He said it the way he said the drainage seam observation at Cash's breakfast table.
Not performing. Just true. Something he knew so well that stating it plainly was the only option.
And then he put it away. I watched him do it. Whatever was behind that thought, he decided tonight was not the night for it. He looked at the fire and let the conversation go somewhere else.
I understand that completely.
I have things I keep looking at and putting back.
The piano.
The songs with no second verses.
The call I kept meaning to make to my father, but never made, until there were no more calls to make.
The difference between Jake and me is that he put something away tonight, and I could see it on his face, what it was, even if not the exact thing.
With me, nothing shows. I close the drawer, and my face stays the same, and nobody can tell it was ever open.
I am not sure which of those is better.
Jake once said to his father in the kitchen, “This is just what I am.”
I have not been able to say that about anything since I was nineteen.
But I stop pretending the drawer is locked.