I met a Man on the Prairie when I was Younger, and I haven’t been the Same Since

I reckon this is the place to share this kind of thing, and I hope in good faith it’ll be understood for what it was happened to me. For context, I want it to be known that I live in a fly-over state on the Great Plains of the American West on the same homestead my family has occupied since the early 20s. We’re not cut off from civilization, and we’re not a bunch of hicks with no concept of big fancy things you get in shit hole cities on the coast. We’re simply a bit remote, and being remote comes with a lot of grass, corn, and the occasional ruins of an old house. That said, all of this is just to help you understand where I’m coming from. 

When I was growing up on my family ranch, I had free rein of that land. Acre after acre was my playground, and I spent my boyhood days playing in the tall grass and shooting my BB gun at anything that looked too threatening. I killed a snake one time. That much I remember, though I can’t remember what kind. Poor thing was just minding its business, and some nine-year-old with a god-complex decided to take its life. 

I remember the color of its red blood against the yellow grass. It convulsed and writhed until finally it stopped. I’d never really seen anything die until that moment, and it stuck with me worse than I could say. I didn’t even know why I’d done it, except for the sake of killing. I think that day stays with me because of the man I met soon after. 

While I was in mourning for the innocent little creature I’d murdered, I found myself once again in the field outside my house. In my roaming through the tall grass, I found myself on the edge of the property. I’d made a little cross out of popsicle sticks and was placing it out for the garden snake when a deep voice made me jump. 

“Lost a friend, there?”

I spun around to see a tall man standing about four yards away. He was dressed like an old cowboy. He had one of those bib shirts you see them wearing in old photos, along with a wide hat, dirty from use. In fact, he was caked in soil and clay, so much so that I couldn’t tell what the color of his clothes and what was earth. The only thing he was missing was his boots. He stood there, in the hot, dry grass of the prairie, with bare feet, bloody from walking. 

He looked from me to the little grave I’d made and sighed. 

“A crying shame, ain’t it?” I nodded as he continued. “What was it did your little friend in?”

I gave a sharp look back at the house, wondering if my parents could still see me and if they saw this stranger, but I felt rude, so I answered him. 

“I did, sir…. I killed him.” 

He tilted his hat back and sucked his teeth. “Damn shame.” He kicked up a clump of grass with his foot. “Ain’t no use getting too broke up about it. Somethings got to get done, and I can’t say I haven’t done the same.”

His words were odd to me, and the longer I stood there with him, the longer I felt I was doing something wrong. However, as I took a step back, he knelt down to my eye, meeting me with a large mustache and dark, grey eyes. 

“We all gotta shuffle along at some point,” he said, “but that don’t mean we ever get to leave.”

I started feeling something in his words that tugged at me. There was something magnetic to the man that almost forced me to look at him. 

“Where you from, mister?” I asked, still looking for my parents. He chuckled and pointed with his thumb.

“I’m from back over yonder. A few hills away,” he told me, “But before then I had a family and home in Tennessee.” 

“Where are your family now?” I said. He gave me a pensive look as his eyes welled up.

“They’re far from here,” he told me. “I miss them dearly.” 

I told him I was sorry, but glanced away. I expected my parents to come running any minute then, but instead the cowboy leaned in close to me with breath that smelled like rotten fruit. 

“Can you help me get back to them?”

It was then that I heard a shotgun blast and looked to the house. My mother and father were running towards me, guns in hand, and screaming something about trespassing. My mother scooped me up and started carrying me back to the house, but in the confusion, as I looked over her shoulder, the man was gone. My father was blasting shells into the wide grass, but nothing was hit. Not a thing was there to hit. 

When we got back to the house, my parents phoned the sheriff. She and the deputies swept our property for the man, but came back with nothing. I heard my father giving them a statement as the night closed through our windows.

“He was there one minute and gone the next,” he told them, “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

My parents made me go to bed early that night, and my father told my mother he’d be staying up for a bit in the living room, pistol at the ready. They locked me in my room and told me they loved me, but I couldn’t shake the feelings of confusion and attachment I’d developed for that stranger from the prairie. There was a sadness in my mind that plagued me like a disease. It was an intense loneliness that made my heart break and consumed my thoughts, young though I was. Something from that man’s gaze and voice had leaked into me and stained me in some way. I wanted to help him, if for no other reason than ridding myself of that pain. 

Then, as if in direct response, there was a tap on my window. I don’t need to tell you who it was. He was there, beckoning me to come to the glass, and I went. I quietly slid open the pane, and he met me at the window’s base.

“Hello again, youngin,” he said. He looked through me for a moment before a sad smile set into his whiskered face. “I see it’s got hold of you, too. You feel that same gnawing pain, don’t you?”

“What is it?” I asked him. “What’s happening to me?”

“It’s the plains, youngin,” he said. “The lonely places have a hunger, and we are their unfortunate food.”

“How do you get it to stop?” I asked him. “How do you make it stop?”

The man bit his lip and looked at me, his dark eyes filled with that same intense pain that stung deep in my chest. “Come with me,” he said with an outstretched hand, “and I’ll show you.” 

I remember very little after he took my hand. Somewhere in my brain, a part of that night lives like a dream, and the rest is the fractured recollection of my senses. He hummed a song I couldn’t quite place, but that sounded familiar to something my grandfather used to sing. It was low, raspy, and mournful as a heartbroken houndog. The smell of the damp clay on his back and the sight of the starry sky that held no moon blurred between the words he spoke.

“The prairie is a hungry land,” he told me as he carried me on his back. “It’s a starving place that is never full.”

“Why is it hungry?” I remember asking him. He waited a long time to respond. 

“We made it hungry,” he said, “and now the Earth is greedy for its meals. It don’t want to let some of us go, y’understand. It needs us still, so it can get every last drop and bite out of us. Then, just maybe, it’ll let us go.”

“I didn’t think the earth got hungry,” I told him. He spat at the ground and sighed. 

“Neither did I.”

At some point, after a while of walking, he placed me down and gestured to me to come over a dip in the hillside. Waiting there for me was a hole in the ground, narrow and rectangular, with clods of sod and damp grass caked around its edges. There was a piece of broken wood that sat at its head, sticking out of the pale grass. One or two rocks were gathered at its base, but there was nothing more to decorate the informal crater. The man continued humming his song as he walked behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. They were cold and cracked like old oven mitts. My heart raced. 

“What is this?” I said. He patted me softly.

“This is my home now,” he told me, “Far from Nashville, from Tennessee, from everywhere really. This is the plot I owe the prairie, and she don’t like me wandering far.” I was confused and asked him what he was talking about, but he ignored me. “When they shot me and took my horse and boots, they fed me to the prairie. For nothing more than a joke, they left me here and bound me to the soil that drinks me.” He leaned in close to my ear, and I could feel his whiskers brush my cheek. “I’ve been in the womb of the earth, boy, and I’ve heard the prairie name its price. Ain’t nothing can be got except by what is begotten.” His hands tightened on my collarbone. “Ain’t nothing old can come out less something new is put in.” 

Shaking, I looked at the man who’d led me into the wild grass and beheld him in the pale starlight.

The man was skeletal, with dry, tissue-thin skin stretched over a mud-stained frame. His mustache clung to his bone lips like cobwebs, and his dark eyes, I realized, had never been there at all. There were only sockets darker than his grave before me, and a crack between them where a bullet once must have entered. 

“Please,” he croaked at me, but I didn’t listen. I was running before I even had the chance to cry. I didn’t know what direction I was running in because all I saw was grass. Endless grass. For miles ahead of me, there wasn’t a light of life or presence besides the earth under my feet. I could still feel the man’s whiskers against my cheek and hear his begging pleas to help him, save him, from the torment he was in. I couldn’t pay that price. I couldn’t go there instead of him. I shouted to him as loud as I could how sorry I was. I was so sorry.

Eventually, I ran face-first into my dad’s legs. He was holding a lantern, and I swear he would’ve shot me if he hadn’t recognized my cries. He and my mother had searched for hours once they realized I wasn’t in my room. I couldn’t believe I’d been gone for so long.  I could see police lights out in the driveway of our house, and hear the sighs of relief that piled in as I was taken inside and cleaned up. 

I had to sleep with my parents that night, but I couldn’t shut my eyes. Past their window, where the moonless sky was lit up with stars, I could still hear the shadow of his voice. I heard his lonesome sobs, his groaning, and his song, that low, raspy tune from so long ago.

I’m a grown man now, and my parents still live in that house. I’m visiting with them and talked with them about that incident last night. My dad hardly remembered it, as did my mom, but I think they were downplaying it. I heard my dad singing a tune I never managed to forget. I asked him what it was called, and he couldn’t remember much about it, just that grandpa used to sing it when he was younger. He only knew a handful of words.

“I want to be laid where mothers’ prayers

And sisters’ tears will mingle there

Where friends will come and weep over me

O bury me not on the lone prairie….”

I don’t go to the prairie anymore by myself. This evening, from the guest bedroom of my family’s old house, I saw a figure on the horizon of the sunset waving at me. I still hear his tune on the wind. I still feel that ache in my chest. The man is still there on the horizon, waving at me in the dying light, begging me to come to him.