Old Horse just wouldn’t let go. He kept chewing at the rope and barking and snarling every once in a while. My little brother Gilly and I laughed at him. Old Horse, he didn’t know when to quit.

Finally we got tired of watching him getting at the rope, and we went to tell Tony his dog was going nuts. Tony was nailing a horse stall together for his truck, and he just said Old Horse was a dumb dog.

Gilly said, Hell, Old Horse sure is a stupid dog, hell! He used to like to say cuss words when he was a kid, just like Tony said them. I did too, but I didn’t so much as Gilly did even though he was younger than me.

Gilly and I went down to the creek to cool off, and we forgot about Old Horse because we figured he’d quit after a while. Anyway, we didn’t expect anything unusual would happen that day. Nothing ever did in the summer. Once in a while there were the Grab Days on the saint’s days and that was pretty exciting because you could catch a lot of goodies, but practically nothing else.

Sometimes my father would come home with a funny story. Or a story about something that happened to somebody, but most times we didn’t get to hear what really happened because when my father got to telling it good, my mother would say something to change the subject. That’s when the story was about something we weren’t supposed to hear. Hell, it was probably nothing and we would learn about it anyway, but that was the way my mother was.

Anyway, Gilly and I didn’t know something was going to happen that day. Sometimes you never find out about important things until they actually happen, and then it’s already too late to do anything about them.

I used to wonder what was the use for important things to happen when it was already too late to do anything about them, like to jump out of the way or to act differently so they wouldn’t happen the way they do. And, afterwards, not to think about them so much. But it never worked out like that. And all my mother would do about those important things was to explain them—so that we could understand them, she said.

We were having a good time down at the creek. We were chasing trout upstream into a little trap we had made two days before out of rocks and a piece of curved roofing tin. We had figured to trap the trout in there and feed them in order to fatten them. We caught a couple then, but they had got out somehow. So we tried again this time, but we didn’t have any luck.

We were having a good time, though, like I said, and after a while we figured we’d better go home before my father got home from work on the railroad. Gilly had a time washing some mud off his Levis, and I was telling him to hurry when Tony came down the trail to the creek.

Tony wasn’t smiling, and my little brother Gilly probably thought he’d kind of say something about the mud on his Levis, get after him or something, although Tony wasn’t close family kinfolk or anything.

Tony, like I just said, wasn’t smiling or joking as usual. And he just looked at Gilly for a moment. Old Gilly was really scrubbing away at his Levis, and Tony reached down and said it looked pretty good, nobody’d notice. Gilly smiled real big and glad then. And I was about to say goodbye and we’ll probably see you tomorrow when Tony said that OId Horse got choked to death.

My little brother Gilly and l just stood there. Silent as hell. We didn’t know what to say because of the way Tony said Old Horse was choked to death and nothing after that. Nothing, not a word.

I looked at Tony, but his face was a blank, just like my father sometimes joked with him about: blank as a stoic Indian. And then I looked at Gilly. His eyes were really funny, ready to cry, I knew. But he’d hold it back for a long time, and then when he did start to cry you would hardly notice it. Gilly was like that a lot and it used to bother the hell out of me. Everything was quiet, just the little creek kind of making noise and a couple of birds in the bushes.

And then I said that maybe Tony shouldn’t have tied Old Horse up.

That was the wrong thing to say because the next thing that happened was Tony pushed me hard and I fell on my side into some bushes.

I don’t know why he did that, push me. That was something, and I was frightened like a little kid. But immediately, or right in the next moment, Tony picked me up by the arm and brushed me off. I was still kind of frightened, and I didn’t say anything.

Go on home, Tony said then, and he said he was sorry he pushed me. And then he jumped over the creek and walked west alongside it.

Gilly and I started for home. We didn’t pass too close by Tony’s house, but every once in a while we’d sort of sneak a look over toward where Tony had tied Old Horse to the clothesline pole. It was getting dark by then and we couldn’t see anything.

Gilly was pretty silent, and I knew he was either crying or about to. I tried to take a sneak look, but I knew he’d notice and be angry with me so I stopped looking anymore. But all of a sudden, he said, Shit and helllire. And spit. And then he started to sob loudly.

I didn’t know what to say except to cuss Tony out for being so stupid. Old Horse didn’t need to be tied up even if he was a dumb dog. He could have come down to the creek with us or we could have taken him toward Horse Spring to chase rabbits like he liked to do. That was easy. Hell, Tony could have just asked us instead of tying his dog up like that.

I was pretty mad too and maybe about to cry at the same time, so I said to Gilly, Let’s race. And I started to run. But he didn’t run with me, so I stopped. And I looked at him and said, Come on, let’s race. But he wouldn’t. He just kept sobbing loudly and hiccuping. And then I said, The hell with you, and started to really run.

I ran hard and ran hard some more until my lungs were hurting more than the other hurt. I stopped and went off to the side of the road and got sick.

Alter a while my little brother came along. He had stopped crying and he was quiet. I was okay by then too, and I told him I was sorry I had said the hell with him and I didn’t mean it. He didn’t say anything, but I knew that be believed me.

When we got home, it was already dark. My mother was more or less mad at us. She told us to wash up and come eat supper. My father looked us over, and he seemed about to say something to Gilly about his Levis, but he didn’t. Usually he didn’t, and he wouldn’t tell my mother about it either. Instead he told us about the Rabbit Hunt the Field Chief was having over toward Dahskah in a couple of weeks. Gilly and I were excited about it, and we were all talking about it for a while.

And then my father asked about Tony and what was he doing these days. I didn’t say anything, or I thought of saying that Tony was fixing a horse stall for his truck, but I didn’t say anything.

And then Gilly said, Tony choked Old Horse to death, hellfire. Immediately, my mother warned him about that kind of language again. And she glanced over at me and then looked at my father. I didn’t want to talk about it yet, and my father didn’t say anything about it either. I guess he figured, too, that what my little brother Gilly said was the end of everything that happened that day.