Intro

A proper Southern weekend can begin with silver coffee service and end with somebody roasting squirrels over a fifty-gallon drum.

Nothing contradictory about it.

Friday evening belongs to the old house—the one with family portraits nobody particularly resembles anymore, linen napkins, inherited silver, and enough polished manners to keep three generations of bad behavior looking respectable through dessert. Somebody mentions land. Somebody mentions money. Somebody says neither matters, which usually means both do.

By Saturday morning the good dress has been traded for boots and the highway is open.

The road runs past cattle trailers, abandoned filling stations, courthouse squares, oil pumps, pecan trees, and towns where the railroad left seventy years ago but everybody still remembers whose grandfather owned the depot. Somewhere beyond the county line a hand-painted sign promises the best barbecue in Texas. Another promises the same thing six miles later.

Both require investigation.

The cook-off is already smoking by noon. Brisket, venison, squirrel, beans, pies, cast-iron pots, folding tables and men guarding family recipes as though Moscow had requested them. Grandmothers judge without mercy. Children run feral between smokers. Somebody’s uncle has brought homemade liquor in a jar with no label and several legal implications.

The silver fork would look ridiculous there.

Naturally, it comes along.

By late afternoon everybody moves toward the rodeo.

Men who spent breakfast discussing fertilizer prices now volunteer to sit on two thousand pounds of offended livestock for eight seconds. Women place bets. Children scream. Somebody loses a hat. Somebody loses consciousness. The bull loses nothing and appears increasingly confident about the arrangement.

Night brings cards.

Cattle money lands beside oil money. A lease hound puts drilling rights into the pot. A dentist pays somebody’s bail and then spends the evening trying to win it back. Three silver buckles reach the table. A Purple Heart follows and finally discovers the exact point where gambling stops being amusing.

By two in the morning, the dentist has acquired a second source of income.

Then comes Sunday.

The same men appear shaved, pressed and respectable. The same women wear black. A horse walks behind the coffin with empty boots turned backward in the stirrups. Nobody talks much on the way to the cemetery.

By supper somebody remembers something funny.

That is usually how grief begins becoming a story.

Life rarely separates itself into proper categories. Old money eats barbecue. Cowboys cry at funerals. Beautiful women know how to change a tire. Respectable men lose acreage over cards. Romance becomes obsession, disaster becomes family history, and a terrible weekend eventually becomes the story everybody asks to hear again.

Give it enough road, enough weather and enough time.

Eventually, it rhymes.

Scarlett Sky