Old Man

My grandkids are the greatest folks and last week when they came visiting they asked that since I was the oldest man in the world, had I ever met anyone real famous.

So I hum and haw, and I rubs my chin a little, but I know what I’m going to say, ‘cause it’s the only real famous person I ever met.

In the winter of 1908, I was working down south in a little county in Arizona. I was a kind of dogsbody – doing this and that for a nickel here and there. I was young, and I loved my world. I’ll tell ya.

One November night, the boss, Mister Shill, pulls me aside and asks if I would be ever so kind and do him the smallest of favors. So I says, sure, that it ain’t no skin off my nose either.

And he says that he’s glad that I sees it that way. So here’s what I want you to do, he says, kinda strange like. He wants me to take the big grey mare and go down to the north canal and wait.

For what is what I asks him. Oh, you’ll know it when it happens, he says to me.

So I waits. And I waits. Nothing. So I waits some more, and then I begins to drift off in sleep. When this guy comes out of nowhere, puts his goddamn hand over my mouth and tells me to be quiet.

So that’s what I do. Quiet as a mouse, I am. He takes his saddle and puts it on the big grey mare and here’s me saying nothing. Not a word.

The man thanks me kindly and shoves a piece of gold – yep, you heard, gold, in the palm of my hand and then he rides off.

Tell no one he shouts back, that you’ve been given a gold piece by the great and mighty Butch Cassidy.

Seems that he never really did die down there in Bolivia. Seems he died in his bed up in Washington State just before the second war.

Don’t know if my grandkids knew who Butch Cassidy was, but it sure kept them quiet for a spell.

Bobby stevenson 2019

painting: Arizona. Maxfield Parrish. 1902