Edgar Allan Poe becomes a cowboy and the story ends there. All his stories end there. He knows this because he emptied folders of them into Ma’s suitcase on his way out of university to use as a buy-in for a game only to lose that, too. He thinks Pa’s gonna slap him in the face for it when he gets home but all he does is mention West Point over supper with the promise that it won’t be the last time he does. Edgar doesn’t want to go to West Point, though. He doesn’t have the money to keep writing either, so now he’s a cowboy, and all of his stories end there. Everything after is dirt.

But cowboys have their own stories, passed through lips as they trade licks of whiskey over the campfire. They’re sowed with names Edgar doesn’t recognize: Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill, Billy the Kid. It’s not the Bills that trip him up—he’s familiar with Bills, what they do for work, their noble lineages and all the Bills that came before them—but rather where the rest of them had gone. He imagines their fathers’ names and all that comes with them dragging lamely behind them, hidden like tails between their legs, onlookers politely averting their eyes from the shame—he says as much. Artie tells him he’s a terrible drinking buddy and to shut the fuck up with that shit, then gets the rest of his cowboys to start calling him Eddie. Just Eddie, cause they’ve never had an Edgar before, but if they do they’ll cross the Wild Buffalo bridge when they get to it. Eddie rattles the empty canteen when it gets to him and watches the night shudder at the sound, a lull permeating the switchgrass as insects reorient to the new presence. Artie slaps it out of his hand.

None of the cowboys had much on their person to begin with and they drank eagerly through what they did, streams pouring down unfillable pits. Their flickering forms throw back with laughter, flames casting shadow puppets over the soil Eddie learns to lie with each night, curled into a ring of a trunk. And he waits for transformation, some kind of liquid possession, though none of them can remember if it had happened come morning, and so Eddie watches them do it all over again. Supplies run dry fast, though, at which point they turn to yard work. And he’s never been much for the sticky heat, let alone working in it, the way it clung to the sharp edges of his form and trapped him inside himself, but in his war with all things nature the cowboys run at them like collies pawing for a fight, biting and tearing with breathless smiles, so he tries to match their pace.

He helps four cowboys hold Belle still in the stables of the family estate, her grunting and thrumming with hate as the crude slopes of a U burn into her side, and doesn’t dream of her kicking back to press her upside-down horseshoe into his. He watches a cowboy wade through the swamp with an axe for cypress and hardwood and doesn’t wait for something to pull him under, for something else to come crawling out in his place. He drinks the sweet tea Madeline Usher leaves out for them and doesn’t tell her that she will be buried not once but twice, that she will take her brother and crumbling shell of a home with her the second time because it was always going to happen, and that she might not have known it but she’d been waiting for it her whole life. He doesn’t tell her any of this because that story is over, and Madeline will simply have to find a new way to die. He stares after her for an awful long time, though, and Gordy asks if he’s trying to get himself killed.

By that time next year his skin’s tan and taught and his whole family has died, pale as the cracked earth in winter. The cowboys lower their hats for a day or two but don’t see the point in grieving any longer than the seconds it had taken any of them to cross over. They tell him death’s one shot in the dark and there’s nothing more to it, but Henry’s cheeks had sunk in time with the sun and at night Ginny would soak the sheets in sweat like Richmond rain, and if tuberculosis was the land and the land was everything then what then? Cowboys don’t have time for his word games, though, so they hand him Belle’s reins and point him towards the rodeo. They tell him to take death for a short ride and see how he feels then.

So mounted over Belle and delirious under the sun he looks out at the stands and finds Ma. She asks him if he’d like to come home now and Eddie can barely speak, can barely soothe his sanded throat with the gurgling desperation he’d swallowed down with whiskey all these years, so he nods and the chute gates swing open and he realizes he’s going to die. He looks Death in the eye and finds it a striking grey-blue, knows her to have always just been a matter of time so he asks her to make it a long one, but Death, practically blind as she flails for him, could use a little help right now. And it’d be nice if he could make things a bit easier on her, but, as I said, Eddie’s a cowboy, a real true cowboy with a hat and everything because he never could stand the sun, and nothing and nobody tells him what to do. So Death is stuck in this arena with him for now, a wild horse bucking beneath him, whose thundering feet he can’t help but think sound just like a beating heart, and the best of his stories start there.