The sky was turned to striations of autumnal colors. The garden was thriving in unfurling leaves and crimson buds at my right. The sun was slipping to bed behind the mountains far to the west.

The far fields opened up to me as I crested the knoll – as did the distant limit of the fence. Beneath me, on the relative flat which was the mangled remain of our playing green, were some figures clustered up into the general industry of husbandry.

Mr Sadiqi stood in clean, practical riding gear, with Jibanananda watching over him (gold-and-dark as she was). The mare’s lead was in his hand, and his attention flicked eastward while he made adjustments to his saddlebags though they needed none. Triangulated from, and about the man, were little Su-Hope and Mabel Jeminee standing out with him in the field. Their dresses were of blanched, practical hemp with smocks and leather boots, and Auntie Geminee had her hand firmly gripped into the scruff of a broad, struggling loaf of beast.

Its face was hued like slate-licorice, and tapered to a wedge (much like a blunt awl); its neck stretched and twisted overlong, and a great trailing mane draped from its body. I recognized it as one of our deviations from the sheep: Agares, that was on the far edge of changed – such that it scarce fit its species. A season’s worth of the spoil of grass, and sediment of various mineral earths crusted its white coat; such to leave it tangled heavy in curtains, and mottled in wenge and walnut.

Restrained, its biforked hooves stamped nervously. At the bulk of seventeen stone, Agares was featured of all the strength (and spare) to overpower my Auntie, but was impoverished of the imagination to see itself free. Ms Jeminee only adjusted her bonnet with her wrist, and shuffled so not to be bowled over.

As I came into their attention, I discerned the mode subject of the ladies’ inquiry, and that Su-Hope clutched the bronze, spring-jointed shears to her chest as if to restrain them from their purpose. Agares’ lank-hair wool was a unique and promising aberration of product amongst our flock. I recalled the Residence, eager to discover a use and market, had past spoken at supper with anticipation on the subject of his Spring fleecing.

I raised my voice and open palm to them. A hale, “Howdy,” I hollered. “Sir, ma’am, and kin. And a temperate dusk, such as it is.”

Mr Sadiqi appeared to be held as hostage to questions of procedure, which my Auntie plied to him in quantity and with gusto; though they were none for her benefit, meant and mediated instead as proxy for the instruction of my cousin. Su-Hope only stared at Agares and delayed to advance towards her task.

Having been focused on Agares, the three turned late to receive me and replied their greetings. I gave Su-Hope my encouragement, and some small advice, but she was cross with nerves and I had enough to carry without taking offense as she offered it, so I let her be. Ms Jeminee professed genuine, brief approvals for my completed attire, then steered her livestock towards the young girl, so not to be derailed from her schedule before the fall of dark.

“I still need to check in with the boys,” our first hand told me as we stepped aside. “Maynard will be in charge of the dailies until I get back. I shouldn’t be more than three or four days.”

He looked me over, and nodded. I stood proper, so to display that I was capable of gentlemanry to the pride of his expectations. Creases deepened on Mr Sadiqi’s brow as he detected my satchel, and a stranger shadow crossed his expression as he discovered the jacket over my arm.

He reached out for it without a word, and I delivered it into his care. He held it up, unfolded, and inspected it until his horse nuzzled him. Stroking Jibanananda’s nose, the man returned the coat to me with delicacy.

Mr Sadiqi cleared his throat. “That was Debesh’s,” he spoke hoarsly.

For that reason, I held the blue jacket with redoubled care and new respect. It had belonged to his son.

He tapped me gently in the shoulder with a closed fist. “Naw, it’s fine. It’ll look good on you.”

He flicked a beleaguered look at the satchel, and I, ashamed of the transparency of my intentions, overcame an instinct to cower from his scrutiny.

“But open the bag,” he sighed, massaging his temple. With a gesture, he indicated for me to withdraw an item, and I produced (out from it to him) the slim, tan-bound Poetry of Babylon in the Middle-Bronze: A Comparative Study of Enheduanna’s Exaltations of Inana.

His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment as he turned the book over in his hand. A dark befuddlement settled on him, as he pushed it back into my keeping. “I swear. What, by Sam Hill’s tarnation, is up with these books? You are dire in need something your own grade-level to read.”

Our first hand turned, hoisting himself by pommel and stirrup in one fluid motion to mount his saddle.

“Ms Jeminee, with due respect, y’all and I got to make appointment to talk about that conflammed library. Kids need fairy-tales and picture books, they’re gonna sprain their gray-matter on a doctoral thesis one of these days.”

He paused, considering me.

“I am sorry I can’t teach you a proper dedication yet,” he expressed, “but I think it’s for the best. We’re just not positioned well to sponsor a new gun; neither nor from Fortitude or Retort. More’n that, the last thing we’d want for you’d be to hallow up a tertiary: so. Anyways, we’ll talk about it when I’m back.”

Shaking his head, and long-passed pressed for time already, Mr Sadiqi dismissed me and bade us all farewell. Then he spun his horse about with a yip, and the brush of his heels, and quit us in a flash. With luster of coat and in precipitous haste, Jibanananda wove (hooves beating) round the slight roll of the terrain so to curve towards the east – and on the eventual, to their destination at Broccoli Springs Ranch.

Hitching my bag again, I fared the ladies well with their wool and made my way on again for a spell of quiet. I made the distance just until the cemetery before I was stopped again. There’d been only a square perimeter of stones for demarcation of our tiny mortual plot, with individual slates to mark the plurality of the interred. Only two graves were memorialized with respectable wooden boards, and some scattered wildflowers. The only object of any real height was a log plinth devoted to the lost and unknown. From the last shade of that poor monument, rose up Ashli Hektor and Ursula Jeminee to waylay me.

“Yo!” Ashli growled. She stalked the gulf closed into my censure; for all of the inch she was taller, she leaned to tower over me with her hands in her coat pockets. “The fuck are you doing?”

Ursula followed close behind our eldest, legged in corduroy and showing all the warning signs of a new and burgeoning habit for pants. As she came, she was made lopsided by carrying an oak pole of twice and more her height; a vakero by virtue of an iron spike capped at its top. It (and she) wobbled as Ashli and I omitted her from our quarrel.

I adjusted the strap of my truckage, and held stood against my incline towards trepidity. “I intend to put use to your counsel: which’d been right and I think, sensible,” I declared.

“Gad-fuck’n-zounds, Todd. I didn’t roll out of bed, and like, heresy on a whim.”

I frowned. “You’d implied it so,” I accused.

“Whatever, knuckle-squat. It’s like: omission for the sake of mystique. Totally in bounds. Oldest’s prerogative.”

I advanced to dubious scowl.

“Oh, come on.” Ashli tossed her head back, then blew furiously until her hair retreated from her face. “Of course I wanted to find you-know-who since forever. And maybe I only knuckled down lately, but I’d been working on the Proskauer stitch for like, two years.”

“I may not’ve laid such firm fundament as yours in my effort,” I persevered, “but I’m happy enough to chance what providence is mine in the interval I have it. I’ll not, soon enough, either way.”

“Omigod,” my blonde cousin stamped a frustrated circle, “you malingering copycat!” She made claws of her fingers beneath my chin, then withdrew. “I’m not even steamed for you to mess it up anyways. It’s just that – look at that rucksack – you’re being like, zero percent clandestine. My mom’s gonna figure out I hallowed for another team.”

“Oh,” I snorted, “no Ash, she definitely knows already.”

“She does know, it’s true,” Ursula echoed timidly.

The color drained out of Ashli Hektor and she pulled at her hair in torment. “No,” she denied. “No nonono. No. Do you have any idea how passive aggressive mom’s gonna be about this? This is a nightmare.”

Ursula and I looked between ourselves along the side-eye. Then I reached towards her and she delivered me the spear. I made to distribute my loads more evenly as my younger nervously wrapped her dark braid around her throat like a noose.

“You shall instruct me as to your means and success, I do trust,” she obligated me.

“I intend to take notes,” I agreed. We both chose to ignore Ashli while she was self-destructing. “Have you come to any illuminations in your own enquiry, Urla?”

“They are distant in a way, I suspect, that yours was not. Nonetheless, I am of their season and their design does traverse my veins. I’ll not be outdone by a slugabed such as you, you may be assured.”

I thanked my kin with a slight smile, and patted the other consolingly on her shoulder. “You are overwrought, mademoiselle,” I drawled. “It is most uncool.”

Then Ashli swatted the backside of my head, and I proceeded on from there with a grin. Then, as I passed out of that yard of most final repose, I spotted a tiny cone of textile with a girl inside it and squatted over a headstone.

“Stay,” Priscilla burbled, staring at the dirt. As was her fashion, she repeated herself like a parrot and I paid her no mind in going.