There’s a story I was told when I was young, told so many times and

from such an early age, I can’t remember who told it to me first. It was
about Grandpa-down-the-hill and how he got the dent above his right
temple.

When Grandpa was a younger man, he had spent a hot summer on
the mountain, riding the white mare he used for cowboy work. She was
a tall horse, calmed with age. To hear Mother tell it that mare was
steady as a rock, and Grandpa didn’t pay much attention when he rode
her. He’d drop the knotted reins if he felt like it, maybe to pick a burr
out of his boot or sweep off his red cap and wipe his face with his
shirtsleeve. The mare stood still. But tranquil as she was, she was
terrified of snakes.

“She must have glimpsed something slithering in the weeds,”
Mother would say when she told the story, “because she chucked
Grandpa clean off.” There was an old set of harrows behind him.
Grandpa flew into them and a disc caved in his forehead.

What exactly it was that shattered Grandpa’s skull changed every
time I heard the story. In some tellings it was harrows, but in others it
was a rock. I suspect nobody knows for sure. There weren’t any
witnesses. The blow rendered Grandpa unconscious, and he doesn’t
remember much until Grandma found him on the porch, soaked to his
boots in blood.

Nobody knows how he came to be on that porch.
From the upper pasture to the house is a distance of a mile—rocky
terrain with steep, unforgiving hills, which Grandpa could not have
managed in his condition. But there he was. Grandma heard a faint
scratching at the door, and when she opened it there was Grandpa,