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I’ve set out to sing you a death song. I’ve set out to tell you the truth, and the truth is that my father drank whiskey in the truck, but I loved him anyway. Most of what you’ll read about me is summed up right there. He was the man he was, but I loved him. My father was the last real cowboy. He wore pearl snap shirts. He could draw from a leather holster, quick as lightning. He could lead a horse to water, though not even he could make it drink.  

Now, I look back at a time long gone by, from a city that can’t sleep, and there’s something like nostalgia if it got sick. Back then I’d say it wasn’t his fault, the life we lived. I’d say there was good about growing up the way I did. I knew more than any other girl in the world. That’s another truth. I knew that brown bottles could look beautiful when the sunshine came through tinted windows and illuminated the plastic containers littering the floor of that old Chevy. I knew how to change a clutch on a 4440. I knew that the song of the prairie only sang for you if you were completely yourself. Later, I would learn what could make that song incomplete.

My father introduced himself as Paul Bauer, but I always called him Papa Paul. I’d say it fast and smooshed together. Papapaul. Papapaul drank. He played cards and sang Tom Petty songs and gave the best hugs in the whole world. And he drank. But I loved him anyway.

When I lived with him, we would spend all the time in the world together and mostly it was alright. He owned a ranch out by Lemmon, a town named after a sour fruit. It sits along a paved road, in the middle of a grass ocean. The town lives and dies by the cattle that congregate along the barbed fences. Life was different there, as much the place as the time, more slow. Ranchers rarely hurry to get with the times. Many families in town didn’t even have TVs when I was that age, though I didn’t learn that until I met Correy. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life puts you in Lemmon, you do what you can to get by, I guess. 

That’s not the truth, you know. About the name. Lemmon wasn’t named after the fruit. You could probably tell because of the extra M and all. Lemmon was named for George Edward Lemmon, a rancher born in 1857 according to the town’s website. But the truth as a kid is something that can be whatever you need it to be.

Lemmon is up on the border of North and South Dakota. It’s a cowboy town. Papapaul ranched to the east, near the reservation border. He was a real man of the prairie, a real John Wayne, even if that ranch never made a dime. Part of that was the cattle we ran, more rib than ribeye. Mostly, though, it was the fact that my father never really cared for animals. The money, and he’d tell you as much if you ever found him belly up to a bar, was in equipment.

Paul Bauer knew equipment the way a bird knows to fly south. The way a ranch hand knows to move down the line at the sound of a rattle. The way a bullet knows to find a gut. He knew machines naturally. He knew which transmission would shell out after four thousand hours and which diesel was actually made for a truck and then just stuffed into a red tractor for the sake of glorified dick-measuring. He knew them much better than he knew how to be a father, but that didn’t matter until later. 

The man himself was tall, at least in my eyes. Looking back, he wasn’t so big, not really. I was just little, is all. Paul Bauer stood tall in my eyes, and for a while, he could do no wrong. I loved him, loved his pearl-snap pink shirts, the everpresent chin whiskers that would scratch your cheek when he hugged you, the smell of tobacco that almost overpowered his cheap aftershave. He prided himself, in those early years, on his appearance. Paul spent what felt like hours in front of the mirror, perfecting the combover, brushing the dentures.

He had dentures because he was old for a father. I suppose that’s perspective. Abraham in the Bible was a hundred. Paul was only sixty-two, but he had long passed the days when he should have had a daughter. But he had me and a belief that a father should care for a daughter, even when her “no-good-bitch” mother didn’t send the child support. 

He never said stuff like that sober. Just when he’d have too much, and he’d always say sorry after.

The house could have been a palace to young eyes. I had a whole room all to myself, and a record player he bought me one Christmas. Like all good cowboys and cowgirls, we’d listen to Marty Robbins or Waylon Jennings. 

During rainstorms, when the roof would leak and the house would creak, he’d look at me with glassy eyes and say, “Go get your records, Rosie.” And I would, and we’d listen to them all through the night until we both passed out on the couch. Music was our way of connecting. We jammed to the same tune, we beat our hearts in sync with the beat, we knew how to dance a two-step. 

My name isn’t Rosie, by the way. My name is Samantha Rose Bauer. Only Papapaul and Corey called me Rosie, except sometimes Papa called me Lemondrop. The rest of the world called me Sam or Samantha, which suited me just fine.

Samantha Rose Bauer. Samantha’s my mama’s name. I never met her except one day in court when I was older. My mama never did look me in the eye. She told the state to keep me. I don’t know if she’s still alive today. We got by without her. It didn’t bother me, not if you’d asked me then. Paul taught me how to lie, too. 

As a daughter, you need a father. It wouldn’t occur to me until years and many miles had separated us that maybe Paul needed a daughter. 

Everything in my little life didn’t come unraveled all at once. The good times tie themselves in with the bad, and the bad doesn’t show up so fast. It happened slowly, like disease making its way through a herd. The heads dropped a few at a time, and the worry built up a little at a time. The first metaphor cow keeled over at a sale.