The mule stood still in the morning hush, its ears twitching at the wind that moved in dry currents through the mesquite and creosote. There was a silence about the land that did not welcome voices, nor did it yield to memory without cost. The man moved slowly through it, burdened not just by age but by the weight of something far heavier than years. A weight shaped like absence.

In the lean shade of the adobe wall, he crouched beside the wrapped shape and cinched the canvas tighter around it, his hands knotting rope with a kind of solemn precision that spoke to experience, or perhaps regret.

The shape beneath the canvas did not shift. It was long and narrow, the outline of boots faint beneath the fold near the feet. There was a darkening stain that had dried hard into the cloth where the chest might have been, and another near the side of the head, darker still. The man did not look at them directly. He kept his eyes on the knots. When he finished binding the last of the ties, he leaned back on his heels and looked at the mule. The animal blinked at him, then lowered its head to sniff the dust, uninterested in the ritual.

He stood, bones clicking, and adjusted the saddle on his own horse, a gelding the color of old tobacco. With the reins of the mule in one hand and the rifle strapped tight behind the saddle, he mounted. The horse shifted under him, uneasy, but not disobedient. He sat for a while before turning the horse toward the open trail that ran east out of the scrub. Behind him, the house stood in the bleached light, its door hanging open like a mouth that had forgotten how to speak. There was no one to lock it.

The trail wound out along the broken ridgeline and dropped into the bed of a long-dry river, its banks crumbling and pocked with the holes of burrowing animals and collapsed mesquite roots. Here and there, he could see old bones whitening in the sun, deer mostly, sometimes cow, their ribcages like picked fruit. The sky above was hard and clear, pale blue like the inside of a shell. A pair of vultures circled high in the heat, far off, watching nothing in particular.

He did not know if this was the right way. He had ridden this path before, years ago, when the land had looked different and he had been different too.

Memory was a poor guide in country like this.

Still, he followed the turn of the earth where it sloped down, and then rose again into foothills of shale and dust. The mule followed behind, and the body on its back did not move, nor make any sound.

The ash tree had not always been alone. This came to him then.

There had been others once, further up the basin. A cluster of them near a trickling spring. They had camped near there once, the two of them. The fire had burned low, and they had listened to the frogs and the crickets and the voice beside him talking about death like it was nothing more than another place to ride toward.

But when the spring dried, the cluster died with it. Only the old ash tree remained, standing in defiance of the land’s laws, as if it had not been told what the world does to things that live too long.

He remembered how they had found the ash tree the second time. They had been trailing a deer through the hills. The air had smelled of blood, and they had come over the ridge and seen it there, though not expecting to. It stood out from the dying brush around it like it had been planted on purpose. The bark pale and the leaves gray-green against the light.

The voice beside him had said, It’s alone this time. He had answered without pause. Said, In time, all things find themselves on their own. The other told him, When it comes my time to be alone, that’s where I want to be. He had answered without thinking. Said, Don’t talk like that. You got time enough yet to die an old man with a bottle in your hand and no teeth to drink it with. They had laughed — a low, breathless sound, more like the letting go of something long held. Then said, Just saying. That’s the spot. When I go, that’s where I’d like to rest. I can feel it. It knows too.

It knows.

The sun moved slow overhead. The hours passed without notice, measured only in sweat on his back and the dust that rose from the hooves behind him. He stopped once to water the mule and the horse, and drank from his canteen, though the water was warm and tasted of metal. There was a ridge of stone ahead, shaped like a crooked finger pointing north. He thought he remembered that. Thought there had been a turn before it, to the left. A dried arroyo leading into higher country.

He took the turn.

The ground here grew rockier, and the horse picked its way more carefully. There were no tracks but his own, and the faint outline of wind-worn hoofprints that might have been days or months old. The air thinned. He stopped again to rest the animals, and sat on a flat stone near a scrub oak that had split from the root, half-dead, half-blooming.

He thought about the sound they used to make when they laughed. It was not a loud sound. It sounded like relief does, as if the weight of living had eased just enough to slip out. He thought about that sound and then about the last breath he had heard them take, though he had not known it was the last at the time. There had been two shots, deliberate and purposeful. One had taken him. The other had left nothing to save. The smell of powder had hung in the air, sharp as rust.

The mule snorted and shifted its weight. The canvas stirred slightly in the wind. He looked at it, but only for a moment.

The trail rose again. He passed through a narrow pass between two slabs of stone that jutted like teeth from the hillside. On the other side, the land opened wide and bare. It might have been any basin in any part of this country. He did not stop. He kept riding.

As day shifted toward dusk, the light grew long and gold. He looked for a place to make camp. The air was cooling, and the shadows grew sharper across the stone. In one of those shaded turns along the trail, the horse stepped wrong. Loose rubble gave way beneath its hooves, and it stumbled, cried out sharp and sudden, and collapsed to its knees. The man was off the saddle in a breath. Blood ran from a gash in the horse’s foreleg, quick and dark.

He tore the sleeve from his shirt and crouched beside it, tying a bandage around the wound as tight as he dared. The horse trembled under his touch. It tried to stand but favored the leg, unwilling to place weight. He pressed his forehead against the horse’s shoulder for a moment, steadying them both.

He led them after that. Mule behind, the body swaying. He walked beside the gelding, reassuring through the twilight. They found a flat spot beneath an outcrop where the wind curled low and the sky opened wide. He gathered sticks, the dry kind that cracked like old bones, and built a fire. It caught easy, and he fed it slow, sitting with his rifle across his lap. The mule chewed the air, and the horse dozed on three legs.

Later, long after the fire had turned to coals, he woke to the sound of snarling. The mule stomped once, restless. He reached for the rifle and crept from his blanket. Shapes moved beyond the firelight, low to the ground and circling. The smell hit next — mange. Feral dogs.

He fired once, and the sharp crack split the night. One dog fell. The rest did not run. They darted in, drawn by the blood of the horse, toward the mule, and the scent of what the canvas held.

He thought of the battle at Glorieta Pass. Of the shattered Confederate line, the smoke, the screaming. But mostly he remembered the silence after. The dogs that came with the night, teeth slick with blood, tearing at the fallen, dead and dying both. He remembered one still breathing. Eyes open. The dogs did not wait.

He looked at the gelding, trembling, eyes wide. Then he looked at the mule. At what it carried.

He stepped forward and cut the horse loose. The rope fell away. The gelding bolted as best it could. The dogs went after it.

The fire flared, then settled. In the distance, he heard the gelding cry out. Then again. Then silence.

He did not sleep after that.

When the sun rose, the land looked no different, but something in him had gone cold. The dogs were gone. He followed the trail of blood until he found the body of the horse. Torn open. The flies already gathering. He knelt, took the canteen and the shovel from the saddlebags, and walked back the way he came.

The mule stood waiting. It had not moved. He did not speak to it. He tied the shovel to the side and swung the canteen over his shoulder. Then he took up the reins again and turned them east, where the trail rose and the memory of a tree still waited.

The sun climbed above them, hot and bright, and no sound followed but the soft tread of hooves and the breath of a man who had not slept.

The land unfolded slow before him, a succession of ridges and hollows, each the color of old parchment, worn thin by wind and the quiet erosion of years. He walked now beside the mule, its hooves dull against the baked ground, the canvas swaying faintly with each step. The shovel knocked gently against its side.

The air had thickened with heat, the sun high and dry, and his shirt clung to the middle of his back like a second hide. The canteen was lighter than he would have liked, though he still rationed it. He looked up once to see a band of vultures carving slow arcs in the air above, and he kept his eyes on them until they moved past, searching for easier prey.

Now and again, he would stop, not because he needed to rest, but because something in the land stirred at him — a curve in the rock, a bend in the path, a dry stream bed that looked like a scar. It was not certainty. Nothing so strong. But recollection has its own shape, and it pressed faintly against his mind like a forgotten tune heard again from far away.

There had been a ridge once. He would know it. That much he knew. He could remember the feel of it underfoot, the way the air changed just before the climb, the scent of old stone warmed by the sun. He kept walking. The mule followed. The silence was complete.

He moved more by conviction than direction, the land giving no sign and the sky offering little favor. A thread pulled at him, a way not known, only half remembered. How long he walked, he could not say. Fires were built. But time had a different pace out here, and counting lost its meaning.

One day, he saw the ridge. He did not need to question. It rose ahead of him in a slow, even line, not steep, but broad across the top, the kind that overlooked a wide basin below. He stared at it for a long while, and then he put one hand to the mule’s reins and started forward, his boots crunching lightly over the grit. The climb took time. His breath was heavy by the end, but he did not pause until he reached the crest.

He stood at the top, his body aching from the pull of the climb, sweat streaking the dirt along his neck and brow. Below him, in the wide, empty stretch of valley, there was the tree.

It stood where nothing should. The bark held a dull shine like old brass left in the sun too long, and its limbs bent in long, reaching lines, some curled skyward, others twisted toward the earth. The leaves shimmered faintly in the heat, their green not dulled by dust. At the base, the earth had cracked slightly, as if the tree had grown from stone itself and forced the ground to break around it.

He exhaled once, slowly. Then he started down the ridge.

The descent was easier, and when he reached the flat, he walked to the tree without hesitation. Up close, it was even larger than he remembered. The trunk was thick, wide enough he could not wrap his arms around it. The bark was ridged with age, cross-hatched in a pattern like the grain of old wood. One branch had fallen at some point, its remains curled into the dirt, gray and smooth where weather had stripped it bare.

He let go of the mule and sat beneath the tree, his back against the trunk, his legs stretched before him. The shade was cool, the only mercy the land had offered in days. He closed his eyes. The wind moved gently through the leaves. The mule shifted its weight and stood quiet nearby.

He thought of the land and its hardness. How it never gave more than it took, how it wore you down until you were shaped by it or broken. He thought of water and how little there was, how it meant everything and came only in fits and starts, leaving behind cracked earth and the bones of animals who had not made it to shelter. He thought of how a man could live forty years in a place like this and still not call it his.

He opened his eyes and looked at the tree.

It had no right to be here. No right to grow, to last, to keep itself upright in a world that had turned to dust around it. And yet it had. Somehow, it had lived.

He nodded once, more to himself than anything else.

It was a good place.

The sun fell slower now, slipping past its peak and beginning its descent behind the hills. He stood, stretched his back, and untied the shovel from the mule. The canvas shifted slightly as he moved, and he adjusted it without looking beneath. Then he chose a place near the roots of the ash tree, where the shade reached furthest, and he began to dig.

The ground was hard, the top layer brittle and sun-baked, but below it the soil darkened, clumped with old root and thin stone. He worked in silence, each shovel stroke cutting through thought and time alike. The light dimmed. When the sky turned the color of amber, he stopped to build a fire. He did not want the feral hounds to come back.

The flames caught quick, fed by dry scrub and the thin branches he had gathered on the ridge. He ate nothing. Drank again. Then returned to the hole. He dug through the night, the fire casting strange shadows across the bark of the tree. His hands blistered. His shoulders burned. He kept going.

He finished before sleep took him. It came sudden. He curled near the fire with the rifle beside him, and the mule settled close. What remained of the night passed quietly.

At first light, he stood again. The grave was deep now, the bottom cool to the touch. He walked to the mule and untied the canvas. The body slid carefully into his arms. It was not heavy, not anymore. He carried it to the grave and lowered it down, the canvas rough against his arms.

He stood over the hole for a long time. Then he filled it with dirt.

There was no marker. No words. The tree would be enough.

He said something to the tree, but it was not language. A sound, half-formed, caught between breath and grief. He did not repeat it. The wind took it, and the branches of the ash shifted faintly, their leaves brushing together like dry hands in prayer.

Then he turned and began the long walk back.

The sun rose behind him, already sharp, already burning. The weight of his coat was more burden than comfort, but he kept it on to shield his neck. The rifle was slung over his shoulder. The canteen was empty, his mouth dry. The mule followed without sound, head low, its steps dragging.

There was no trail now, not one he could see. He moved by instinct, or what passed for it, drawn by a notion more than a direction. Each hour passed slower than the last. The heat grew until it was not a condition but a presence. It pushed against him, pressed down from the sky and rose from the ground, filled his throat and his ears and the space behind his eyes.

He scanned for shelter, not markers, not signs. Shade mattered more than the road. He kept walking.

At the crest of a shallow incline, he found a cut of rock that jutted out from the hillside. Not high, but enough. He stepped beneath it and sat, his legs pulled to his chest. The rock held a sliver of shadow, and it fell over him like a mercy.

He looked out at the land.

He did not recognize it.

There were no fence posts. No cattle paths. No sign of fire rings or broken wagon wheels. Only dust, brush, and the shimmering line of air where the heat split the world. The mule stood nearby, its ears twitching at insects, its eyes slow and dull.

When the worst of the sun passed, he stood again. They moved on. The ground rose and fell, but gave no sign of familiar places. The sky reddened. He found a patch of cracked clay, built a fire, and slept without dreams.

In the morning, the light came too early, too bright. The sun returned stronger than before, and by midday, it was more than he could take. He moved slower now. The mule lagged behind. He did not look back often, but when he did, the distance between them had grown.

At some point, it was gone.

He did not know when it had turned off or stopped or simply stood still in the heat. He did not call for it. It did not matter. He thought of the weight it had carried and kept walking.

He walked.

He believed he was heading west, though seeking proof in the sun meant squaring off with the devil himself. He knew of a fence once. Wooden posts with rusted wire, half-fallen in places, but still enough to follow. It ran beside a dry riverbed, long empty, and if he found it again, he could trace it back to the flats, to the basin, to home.

He reached the rise where the fence should have been.

It was not there.

No broken wood. No wire. No scrub where the posts had leaned. Just land.

He turned in a slow circle and saw nothing he knew. Every ridge looked like the last. Every patch of rock the same. The wind had died. The heat was whole.

His breath came harder now. He moved with effort. With each step, he looked for shadow but found only thin brush and stone too small to cast it. His feet dragged. His throat burned. The sun pulsed above him like a judgment.

Still, he kept walking.

There was a small hill ahead, nothing high, but higher than the plain around it. He made for it without hope, only the dull pull of instinct. The climb was short, but steep, and it cost him. When he reached the top, he saw what he expected to see — nothing. Just the shape of a place without names.

He sat on a rock. The heat was inside him now. In his bones. In the slow thud of his chest.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a stub of pencil and a torn piece of paper.

He wrote five words twice:

Bury me with my son
under the old ash tree

He folded the paper once.

Tucked it carefully into his pocket.

He looked out at the land, though there was nothing to see.

Then he laid back against the stone.

And waited.