Note: I wrote this story in 2018, as an homage to the memory of Buster Dunlap, a longtime family friend who was a cowboy from Circle, Montana. It was originally published in an online literary magazine titled Literally Stories, in a slightly altered form. I respectfully dedicate this story to the memory of Buster Dunlap, and to the memory of my father, Dana Sibra (1918-1993). I also want to dedicate it to the people of and from Big Sandy, in hopes that they remember that, in troubled times, there are those who have gone before, and they just might still be out there, keeping an eye on us.
The summer after I got out of high school, the summer of 1974, I was in Chester, Montana with my father. Chester is about sixty miles from Big Sandy, the tiny town where I grew up – actually I grew up on a farm a few miles out, but Big Sandy was my home town.
My father and I were in Chester picking up a machinery part from an implement dealer there. When something broke down you just had to get on the phone and start calling to find who had the part you needed, and then go there and get it. If it was sixty miles of dirt road one way, you were probably lucky. It could have been only available in Billings, three hundred miles to the south.
We were getting the machinery ready for harvest, and my dad was always in a hurry when it came to harvest. Get the grain cut as soon as it was ripe, get it in the bin or hauled to town, out of the field, out of harm’s way, before the wind, or a hail storm, wiped out an entire year’s work.
I was driving as we were leaving Chester. I knew my dad wanted to get back home and get back to work and I was looking forward to some high speed driving on those gravel roads, sliding the corners just a little more than I had to. But as we drove by the Chester Cemetery, the old man put up a hand.
“Hold up,” he said. “Turn in here for a minute. And go slow.” There was a burial taking place.
I drove slowly up to the gravesite. There were about fifteen cars parked helter-skelter nearby, and up close to the open grave I saw three saddle horses. They stood at attention, the way a wellbred horse will do, just as the small group of people also stood around the grave with deference, some with heads bowed, many of the men holding cowboy hats.
We just sat in the pickup for about fifteen minutes. I had turned off the engine, we opened the windows and – this being eastern Montana – there was a hot wind blowing through the cab.
“Nice cool breeze,” I said to my father. It was something we always said while enduring ninety-degree weather with a sharp wind blowing dirt into your face.
We could hear the preacher talking, but couldn’t hear much of what was being said, thanks to the distance and the wind. Something about returning to the soil, an eternal reward, telling people not to be sad or fearful but rather to be glad, for the man who had died was returning home to his God in the sky.
A bit after that the graveside service came to an end, and people started to mill around, talking to one another; some returning to their cars. Two cowboys came and mounted two of the horses; one of them took up the reins for the third.
Before they started to depart, my father said, “Okay, let’s get back on the road.” I turned the pickup around and we headed out of the cemetery, then out of town, back on the gravel cut-across road that would plant us back at the farm.
My dad didn’t always say a lot, and on this afternoon he was silent. After we had driven a ways, I asked him, “so, what was the deal there? Did you see somebody there you knew? Should we have talked to somebody?”
He shook his head. “Nope, no need for that.” Then he didn’t say anything more.
A few more miles down the road I spoke up again. “You gotta tell me what that was all about,” I said.
After a long minute, my father spoke. “I saw those horses,” he said, “and I knew it was a cowboy funeral.”
“Okay . . . “
“You know before my legs got wrecked in World War II, I practically grew up on the back of a horse.”
“I guess . . . I guess I kind of knew that, never thought about it much though.”
My dad turned and looked at me. He was a very unemotional person, but I could tell by the look on his face and the tone of his voice that right now he was struggling with his emotions.
“A man who spends his life on a horse,” he said, “is a man who sits up above the rest of ‘em. He is a man who holds his head high, and who looks up into the sky whenever he wants, just to look his boss square in the eye.”
I had never heard my father talk like this before. “That kind of man,” he said, “when he passes on, he is always due a few minutes of your time, no matter how much of a hurry you might otherwise be in.”
I didn’t say anything. I just did not have any idea what to say. Instead, for once, I thought about the words my father had spoken.
In a couple of minutes, he spoke again. “One more thing,”, he said quietly.
“Uh, okay,” I said.
“Stop driving so God-Damned fast around those corners. This ain’t the Indianapolis Speedway, you know.”
I took my foot off the accelerator and ever so gently applied just a little bit of brake.
