The Cup of Milk

Agent Lopez, Wednesday the first of November 2023, the afternoon before the night line.

I had the night line, so I had the afternoon, and I spent it the way I spend most of them, at the station corral with a curry comb and a horse who would rather be eating.

The wind was coming down off the Mules with the first of the cold in it. Jefe stood with one hind foot cocked and let me work the dust out of his back in circles. Every so often he swung his head around to see whether my hands had any business besides him. They did not.

"Primero de noviembre," I told him. The first of November. "You know what that is?"

One ear came back.

"It's for the little ones. Tomorrow's for everybody else."

My mother did not keep it, not out loud. Her people had, a long way south of anywhere I went as a kid, and she married a cattleman in Gallatin County, where the first of November means the stock tanks are skinning over and somebody has to go out with an axe.

But one year, I was eight, I came in from chores before light and there was a cup of milk on the kitchen windowsill. Just the cup. No candle, no picture. Frost on the glass behind it. She was at the stove with her back to me.

I did not ask. I was eight and I already knew which questions got answered in that kitchen. By the time the school bus came the cup was washed and back in the cupboard with the others, and nobody said a word about it, that year or any year after.

"Thirty-nine years," I told Jefe. "Never did ask her. Nobody left to ask now."

He blew out through his nose and went back to watching the hay shed.

I thought about the four on the line road. Three with county numbers and a ride to Tucson, one with nothing in it at all. Nobody was going to set a cup out for any of them.

"There's a cemetery up in Lowell," I said. "Families go up there today. Candles, flowers, the works."

He shook his head at a fly that was not there.

"Out of our way. I know."

I put the comb in the bucket and ran my hand down his neck to the withers, where the hair lies flat and warm, and stood there longer than the job needed.

"We'll just drive past," I said.

He did not believe that either.