There is a place in Wyoming where the wind behaves oddly, and the man who built his home there learned its secret the hard way. In the autumn of 1910, Anel Kirkbride kept a homestead of 160 acres northwest of a settlement called Lost Cabin, between the Big Horn Mountains and the Powder River. He had filed on the land in the spring of 1902 under the Homestead Act, coming out from a small farm town in eastern Ohio with his wife, Marlet. She died two winters later of a fever that took her in nine days, and he buried her himself on the little rise east of the house, setting a slab of red sandstone at her head with only her name and her years cut into it.

After that, he stayed. He said to the few who asked that leaving would feel like leaving her. He was 43 years old, tall, long in the reach, with hands so knotted from work that his wedding ring had to be filed down to come off. He broke horses for the outfits up in the Bighorn country, kept a small herd of never more than 30 head, and lived by a routine as fixed as the seasons: up before dawn, coffee on the stove, out to the corral, the fence lines twice a week on the west quarter and once on the east.

On Sundays he read a chapter of the Bible aloud to himself softly, because Marlet had liked to hear him do it and he had never fallen out of the habit. He was not lonely in the way townspeople imagined homesteaders to be lonely. He had been a quiet person before he was a widower, and he was a quiet person after. In July of that first summer, before the frame house was even up, he and Marlet had walked the property looking for the right bank for a root cellar.

Every homestead had one; without it, you lost half your winter food to freeze and the other half to spoilage. They found, 40 paces west of where they meant to build, a low earthen rise, maybe eight feet high at its tallest, running about sixty feet north to south. On a map it would not have looked like anything. Standing on the flat, it barely registered as a swell.

But it was the only piece of higher ground within a quarter mile, and its bank faced east, which meant morning sun and afternoon shade. The right side for a cellar door. They dug into it together. He remembered later that Marlet had worked with a short spade, taking the finer earth out around the edges while he swung the pick against the hardpan.

When they broke through the crust about three feet in, they hit a layer of very fine, almost powdery gray soil, the kind you sometimes find in an old buffalo wallow. Marlet said, laughing, that they must have been the first people ever to stand in that particular hole, and he had laughed, too. The cellar, finished, was about ten feet deep, seven across, and six high at the crown. He shored it with pine timbers hauled in from up the Wind River, hung a heavy oak door on iron hinges with a stout iron latch and a bar he could throw from inside, and cut his initials and Marlet’s and the year into the lintel: M and A, 1902.

The nearest neighbor, a man named Frell Joerger, came over that first summer to see the new place and brought a jar of honey as a housewarming gift. Frell looked at the low rise for a long moment without saying anything, then said very mildly, “So, you’re digging into the hump, are you? ” Anel, who had never heard the rise called anything at all, assumed the word was Frell’s own private name for it, and went on with his digging, and thought no more about it. For eight years the cellar was just a cellar.

It kept the potatoes and onions and carrots, the crocks of preserves Marlet had put up and, after she was gone, the plainer jars he did himself. It kept a barrel of salt pork in winter and a wheel of cheese in fall, and the two hams he smoked each autumn. It smelled, in the way all root cellars smell, of cool earth and old wood and the faint sweetness of stored apples. Nothing wrong with it.

Nothing at all, for eight years. It started in October. Anel came down from the house one morning just after sunrise to get onions for a stew. The Wyoming light at that hour in October comes across the plains almost sideways, low and orange, turning every stone and clump of grass into its own long black shape.

He came to the cellar door, lifted the latch, pulled the door open, and stepped down. He stopped, one boot on the top stair, because the crocks on the second shelf were not where he had left them. He was a tidy man. He had to be.

When you live alone on a homestead 43 miles from a post office, tidiness is not vanity, it is survival. He knew where every jar in that cellar stood because he had put every one of them there himself. The crocks on the second shelf were in the wrong order. Not thrown down, not broken, not stolen, just rearranged.

The plum preserves that had been at the far left were now at the middle. The pickled beets at the middle were now at the right. The strawberry preserves at the right—the last jar Marlet had ever put up, which he had never opened and never would—were now on the far left. He stood in the doorway with the cold air of the cellar on his face and looked at those jars for probably a full minute without moving.

He also noticed, standing there, that the wind at his back had gone quiet the moment he stepped down onto the top stair. Not lessened. Gone. He put it down at the time to the shelter of the earth and bank, the way the wind drops when you step into any dug-in place.

But it had not been a step-in kind of quiet. It had been an absence. He had been the only person on the property for two days. His hired man, Kettering Post, had ridden into Lost Cabin for supplies on Monday and was not due back until Wednesday.

No one else came out that way. No stranger would have opened the cellar, moved three jars, and closed it again. There would have been tracks in the yard. There were none.

Anel took the onions he had come for, shut the door, threw the latch, and walked back to the house. Over the stew that afternoon he told himself he must have moved the jars himself in the dark one evening and forgotten. That was the only sensible thing. He put them back in the order they had been, and he did not think about it again for four days.

On the fifth day, they were rearranged again, this time in a different pattern. Kettering had come back by then. He was 28 years old, thin as a rail, with a shock of pale hair, pale gray eyes, and the wide flat cheekbones of a man whose grandmother had probably been Shoshone. He was quiet, worked hard, and had been with Anel for three seasons.

Anel asked him in the yard whether he had been in the cellar. Kettering thought about it, as a man who thought about small questions the same way other men thought about big ones. Then he said no, he hadn’t. A root cellar wasn’t his business without being asked.

If he’d wanted a jar of preserves, he’d have gone in the pantry. Anel said he wasn’t accusing him of anything. Kettering said he hadn’t taken it as an accusation. That was the end of the conversation.

But Anel watched the hired man that evening over supper, and he saw that Kettering was watching him too, in the same careful sidelong way, because Kettering knew Anel wouldn’t have asked the question if there wasn’t a reason. The next thing was the door. Anel had latched it—he was sure of it—one Thursday evening after taking down a smoked ham. On Friday morning, when he came out to the yard, the door was standing open.

Not wide open, not thrown back, about four inches ajar, as if someone had opened it in the night and started to step out and then paused. There were no tracks in the frost. There were no tracks anywhere. He closed the door, put a stick through the outer loop in addition to the latch, and walked back to the house.

By evening he had convinced himself the wind had done it. There had been a hard wind in the night, a chinook, the warm winter wind that comes down off the mountains, and it can once in a while force a door that isn’t properly latched. He decided he must not have thrown the latch all the way. He had been tired.

Men alone forget things. On Saturday afternoon he ran an experiment. He walked out to the cellar with a piece of cotton thread and a piece of tallow. He melted the tallow at the corner of the door with a warm knife blade, pressed the thread across the gap so half of it stuck to the door and half to the jamb, and the wax cooled clear and hard around it.

If the door opened even a quarter of an inch, the thread would break. He checked it that evening at dusk. Intact. He checked it before bed.

Intact. On Sunday morning, before dawn, he woke because he heard the cellar door. It made a very particular sound: heavy iron hinges, a little rusted, groaning low when the door swung, and the oak itself, about two inches thick, thumping against its stops with a muffled weight. He heard it once.

He lay still, listening. He heard it a second time. Then nothing. He got up in the dark, pulled on trousers and boots, took the shotgun down from over the door—a twelve-gauge single barrel kept loaded with buckshot for coyotes—and went outside.

The moon was down; there was no light at all except the stars, which on a clear Wyoming night with no moon are enough to see by if you give your eyes a minute. He gave his eyes a minute. Then he walked to the cellar. The door was closed.

The latch was thrown. The stick was still in the outer loop. He stood there with the shotgun in his hands, and the wind, which had been up when he lay down, was now completely gone. Not dropped.

Gone. The way it goes when you step into a barn out of a gale, except that he was standing outside. No wind at all. And under his feet, from inside the earth, from the direction of the cellar door, he felt a slow, low pressure.

Not a sound, not a vibration, a pressure, the way you feel it in your chest when a train is a long way off but coming. It lasted perhaps three seconds. Then it was gone, and the wind came back, a small gust and then the steady bluster of a Wyoming autumn night. He did not open the cellar door.

He went back to the house and did not sleep. At first light he walked out and looked at the thread. The thread was intact. The wax was unbroken.

He stood there in the cold gray morning for a long time, looking at that unbroken thread across a door he was very sure had opened and closed twice in the night. And he understood, in the flat animal way of a man who has been out on a range too long to lie to himself, that whatever was doing this was not doing it from the outside. Whatever was doing this was doing it from the inside. Over the next two weeks, things got worse in a way that was hard to describe.

Nothing dramatic, nothing sudden, just worse. The cellar was colder than it should have been. Even on warm afternoons of a chinook thaw, when the air outside might climb to fifty degrees, the air inside had a bite to it that a root cellar shouldn’t have. The smell changed too.

Underneath the apple smell there was something else, and one evening, standing at the door with the lantern, he realized what it reminded him of. It reminded him of the inside of a cave. He had been in a cave once as a boy in Ohio, and remembered the smell very clearly: very cold water, very old stone, and something else, something he would have called the smell of a place where no living thing had been for a very long time. That smell was creeping into his root cellar, underneath the apples and the salt pork.

The third thing was harder to talk about. When he went into the cellar now—and he only went in the daytime, and only for as long as he had to—he had the feeling of being watched. Not from the door. From the back wall.

The wall of packed earth at the deep end, where no one could possibly be standing, because the earth was six feet of hardpan and then the whole rest of the low rise and then more earth beyond that. But the feeling did not ask his permission. The feeling was just there. And once he had noticed it, he could not unnotice it, and every trip into the cellar became a small ordeal in which he moved as quickly as he could, taking what he needed and getting out.

One afternoon in the second week of November, on a day when the wind was coming out of the northwest at about twenty miles an hour, he walked out to the low rise with his hat pulled down and his coat buttoned to the throat. He walked around the base of the rise, keeping about twenty paces out from it, counting his steps, watching his hat. The wind was a steady press against his left side. At a certain point on the eastern side of the rise, roughly opposite the buried face of the cellar door, the wind at his side simply stopped.

It was as though he had stepped through a wall of glass. The pressure against his coat vanished. The brim of his hat, bent back by the wind, sprang forward. He could hear the wind hissing across the sage behind him and in front of him, but where he stood there was nothing.

He took three more steps forward. The wind came back with a slap, as if it had been waiting for him. He turned around and walked back. The wind stopped again in the same place.

He stood in that patch of stillness for perhaps a full minute, with the gale roaring at him from twenty paces off in every direction. And he understood, with a clarity that made his mouth go dry, that Frell Joerger had not been telling him a story for the pleasure of telling. Frell had been telling him what was so. That night at supper, when he set his spoon down and looked across the table at his hired man, he saw Kettering already looking back at him with an expression that told him Kettering had walked the same circle on some earlier afternoon, and had already known.

Finally, one evening in the second week of November, over a plate of beans and cornbread, Kettering set down his fork and said, “Mr. Kirkbride, that cellar is not right. ”

Anel looked up. “I know,” he said.

The next morning he saddled his mare and rode east. Frell Joerger kept a place thirty miles east and a little south, near the head of a creek called Alkali. Frell was 67 that fall. He had been in that country since 1872, run a freight wagon between Rollins and the mining camps up in the Bighorn country in the 1870s, and married into an Arapaho family in 1879.

He had lived out among them for eleven years until his wife, whose name was Nihani, died in the winter of 1890. After that he came back onto white country and took up a small homestead on Alkali Creek. Frell was the closest thing Anel had to a friend within a day’s ride, and the one man he knew who might have heard, in his long life, of a thing like what Anel was living through. Anel rode in a little after sundown.

Frell came out into the yard when he heard the horse, a stooped, bird-boned man with a long face and a thin white beard, using a walking stick he’d carried since a horse rolled on him in 1898. “Anel,” Frell said. “It’s late for a call. ”

“It is,” Anel said.

They ate stew, drank coffee. Then Anel told him about the jars, the door, the cold, the smell of the cave, the pressure under his feet at three in the morning, the feeling of being watched from the back wall. He told it flatly, without embellishment. He was a flat man.

That was how he talked. Frell listened without moving. When Anel was finished, Frell got up, refilled his cup, came back to the table, and looked at his coffee for a long time. Then he said, “Which bank did you dig into?

”

Anel described it. The low rise forty paces west of the house, the bank that faced east, the powdery gray soil about three feet down. Frell nodded slowly, as if he had been expecting the answer and hoping he wouldn’t get it. “That hump,” he said.

“You dug your cellar into that hump. ”

Nihani’s people had a name for that piece of ground, Frell said. They had names for a lot of ground—practical names, for what a place looked like or what happened there or who died there. But there were a few pieces of ground that had older names, names from before the horse, from before the Arapaho, even.

They didn’t say much about those pieces of ground. When they had to ride through that country, they rode around them. Nihani’s name for it, as close as he could get it in English, meant the place where the wind lies down. You’ve noticed, Frell said, the wind stops there.

It doesn’t stop anywhere else on the plains. Ride a hundred miles from that hump and the wind is with you every step. But on the hump, and about thirty paces off it in every direction, the wind lies down. That’s how the old people told it.

There is something, they said, under the ground in a few places in the world that the wind respects, not fears—respects. And where such a thing lies, the wind will not cross over its head. Nihani had told him once, on a winter night when a storm made the walls of their small house move in and out like a slow breathing chest, that the sleeping things had been on this earth before the first people came to it, and that they had gone down under the ground when the first people arrived. Not out of fear, but out of a kind of courtesy, because the earth was becoming crowded, and a large old thing that wished not to be disturbed was well advised to lie down and be quiet.

Most of them slept the whole long sleep and never stirred. A very few, once every long while, were woken not by malice but by carelessness—by someone doing an ordinary thing in the wrong place, digging a hole, setting a fire, building a wall. And when one of them was woken, she had said, the trouble was not that it was angry. The trouble was that it was curious.

“You believe that? ” Anel said. “I believe I’ve watched the wind stop over that hump on a day when there was a gale on every side of it,” Frell said. “And this thing—Nihani said it was sleeping.

”

The two men sat for a moment. Then Frell said, “Anel, I don’t know how to tell you this in a way that won’t sound like an old man’s story, but you dug your cellar down into the top of its head. And now, after eight years, it has begun to notice. ”

Anel did not answer.

Frell said, “Fill in the cellar. Take a wagon of stones and start throwing them down the stairs. Fill it to the roof. Bury the door.

Move your winter stores into the pantry and take the loss. Do it before the ground freezes hard. Take the stores out first, but fill it in, Anel. Fill it in before it wakes.

”

Anel rode home the next morning. Thirty miles is a long time to think about a thing. By the time he came inside his own house, he had decided that Frell was mostly right, and that he would empty the cellar over the next few days, then fill it in with stones from the creek bank. He did not entirely believe the story about the wind and the sleeping thing, but he had felt the pressure under his feet at three in the morning, and he was a man who took his own body seriously.

If his body said there was something to be afraid of, he would act as if there was. He rode into his yard a little after four in the afternoon. Kettering was not in the yard. The horses were in the corral, all except the one Kettering rode.

That one was gone. The cellar door was closed. Anel unsaddled his mare and went into the house. There was a plate of cornbread on the table with a cup of cold coffee next to it.

Kettering had made his own supper the night before and eaten alone. On the table, on top of the ledger where Anel kept the accounts, there was a piece of paper, with four words written in Kettering’s careful blocky pencil. I went to see. That was all it said.

Anel stood in his own kitchen with the paper in his hand, and he understood, in a way he did not want to understand, that Kettering had gone to see the sleeping thing, and that Kettering—being a curious man and a fearless one, and in the private way of a very quiet man, a lonely one—had not been able to help himself. He ran out of the house, across the yard, to the cellar. The stick was out of the outer loop. The latch was open.

The door was standing four inches ajar. He took the shotgun off his back, took the lantern down from the peg, and lit it. His hands were shaking so hard he broke two matches doing it. Then he pulled the door open and stepped down.

Kettering wasn’t there. The cellar was empty. All eight years of shelves and stored food and hanging hams stood where they always stood, the lantern throwing yellow light over the timbers and the earthen walls and the barrels along the back. But at the back wall, the wall of packed hardpan at the deep end, there was something Anel had never seen before.

The wall had a shape in it. Not a hole, not a doorway, just a shape, as if something the size and rough form of a man had leaned into the earth from the other side and pressed a shallow curved depression into the wall. The depression was fresh. The soil around it was still crumbled and loose.

And on the floor at the foot of the wall, there was a single boot. Kettering’s left boot, standing upright, as if he had stepped out of it. Anel did not stay in the cellar. He did not go closer to the wall.

He turned around, went up the stairs, closed the door, threw the latch, put the stick back through the loop, and sat down on the ground in his own yard with the lantern next to him. He stayed there until the sun went down. Then he went into the house and did what he had never done in eight years alone on that homestead. He barred the door from the inside.

He sat in his chair until morning. He did not sleep. He did not ride for the sheriff at first light. He wanted to, but he made himself wait, made himself sit at the kitchen table with his hands flat on the wood and think through what he was going to say and what he was not going to say.

He was 43 years old and had lived long enough to know that a man who rode into a sheriff’s office in Casper, Wyoming, in the year 1910, and told a story about a shape in the wall of his root cellar and his hired man’s boot standing on its own, was a man who would afterward be spoken about carefully. So he worked out what he could say. He could say: my hired man rode out yesterday and did not come back. I found his horse on the north range this morning, saddled, no rider.

I have looked for him and cannot find him. Come and help me look. That was true, or true enough. He did not have to mention the cellar.

He saddled his mare and rode north across his own land, looking for Kettering’s horse. He found it a little past ten, four and a half miles north of the house. The horse was standing by itself in a shallow depression in the sage. Its reins were dragging.

Its saddle was on straight. It was not lame, not wounded. It looked, in the way horses can look, mildly puzzled, as if it had been expecting someone to come along and had decided to wait. Anel took the reins and looked around.

There were no tracks. There should have been the horse’s own tracks coming in, at the very least, but the ground was hard and it had been dry for a week, and even where he could see clearly, there were no tracks. Not the horse’s. Not a man’s.

Not anything’s. He rode into Lost Cabin that afternoon. The postmaster, a man named Winford Aldrich, who had held the office for 19 years and considered himself a person of some importance in that country, took the wire without much comment. Anel wired the sheriff in Casper from the post office.

His hired man had gone missing on the range. The sheriff, a man named Asen Mundy, rode out the following day with a deputy and a tracker. Mundy was 52, with a long gray mustache and a quiet, patient way of asking questions. He had been sheriff of that county for the better part of twelve years and had seen a great many things that had not turned out to be what the people reporting them thought they were.

He was not an unkind man. He was a tired one. He listened to Anel’s story, rode out to where the horse had been found, and he and his tracker and his deputy searched the range for the better part of two days. They found one thing.

They found Kettering’s hat, seven miles north of the homestead, sitting on a piece of dry ground with its crown up. That was all. No body. No other clothing.

No other boot. No tracks. Asen Mundy stood over the hat with his hands on his hips and looked at it for a long time. Then he picked it up, put it in his saddlebag, and rode back to Anel’s homestead.

He came into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and asked for coffee. “Mr. Kirkbride,” Asen Mundy said, “was your man in trouble? Owed anybody?

Family situation, debts? ”

“Nothing I ever heard him speak of. He was not a drinking man. ”

Mundy nodded and drank his coffee.

Then he said, “In my experience, men in this country who walk off by themselves in November do it for one of two reasons. Either they are running from something, and I can usually find out what, or they have lost their heads for a little while and gone out onto the range without meaning to. In both cases, if they walk far enough and the weather turns, we find them come spring. Sometimes we don’t find them at all.

This country keeps things. ”

“Yes,” Anel said. “I’ll write it up,” Mundy said, “as an exposure death, presumed, pending a body in the spring. That is what fits.

”

Anel said nothing. Mundy looked at him across the table with those patient, tired eyes. Then he said, “Mr. Kirkbride, is there anything else you want to tell me?

”

Anel thought about the shape in the wall. He thought about the boot standing upright at the foot of it. He thought about Frell Joerger saying, “You dug your cellar down into the top of its head. ” He thought about how it would sound in Asen Mundy’s report.

He thought about what would happen to him, a widower alone on a homestead 43 miles from a post office, if the sheriff in Casper began to speak of him as a man who had begun to see things. “No,” Anel said. “There isn’t. ”

He began the next morning to fill in the cellar.

He did it alone. He didn’t want another man on the place. He rode down to a creek bank a mile south of the house, where the water had cut through into a shelf of round river stones most of them the size of a large melon, loaded them onto his flatbed wagon, and hauled them up to the yard. He emptied the cellar first, as Frell had advised.

He took out the hams, the salt pork, the crocks of preserves, and last of all the strawberry preserves in the jar Marlet had put up in the summer of 1904, which he sat very gently on the kitchen counter and looked at for a moment, and then put in the pantry, where it would stay for the rest of his life. Then he began to throw stones. He worked from sunup to sundown for three days. He filled the cellar completely, piled stones up the stairs until the stairs themselves were gone, up to the frame of the door.

He shoveled loose earth over the stones, tamping it down until the door frame was buried. He nailed the door shut with four heavy spikes, top and bottom and both sides, and piled more earth against the outside of it, so that from the yard you could no longer see that there had ever been a door there at all—just a slight, unnatural swell against the eastern face of the low rise. He did not feel the pressure under his feet again while he worked. He also did not feel the wind lie down.

He did feel once, on the second day at about three in the afternoon, that he was being watched from behind—not from the buried door, but from a spot in the sagebrush about twenty paces to his left. He turned. There was nothing there. He went back to work.

When it was done, he stood in his yard and looked at the low rise, at the small unnatural swell where the door had been, and he felt for the first time in three weeks that he could breathe. But he did not stay on the homestead through the winter. He rode into Lost Cabin the next morning and rented a room in the boarding house for the season. He arranged with a neighbor to look in on his cattle and horses twice a week and write him if anything went wrong.

He rode back out once in December to check on things himself, but did not sleep in the house. He slept in the barn in his bedroll with the shotgun beside him. In the morning he walked out to the low rise, saw that the ground over the door was undisturbed, and rode back to town. In February he heard from the neighbor that a coyote had gone missing from a trap on the east range, and that the trap had been pulled up by its stake and dragged some distance.

The neighbor mentioned it as a matter of curiosity, without alarm. The neighbor thought it was unusual, because coyotes generally chewed a leg off rather than move a trap that heavy. Anel, reading the letter in the boarding house in Lost Cabin, folded it in half and put it in the fire. He did not answer.

In April of 1911, when the snow had gone off, he rode out to the homestead one last time. He packed what he wanted to keep into a wagon, turned his cattle out onto the range—there were only nineteen head by then—and gave the mare and the two working horses to Frell Joerger. He locked the house and drove the wagon into Casper. He never came back.

He filed the abandonment papers in the county office in May, giving the reason on the form as personal circumstances. He rented a small room over a hardware store, took work as a carpenter, and made a modest living. He did not marry again. He did not talk about the homestead.

When people asked where he had come from, he said eastern Ohio originally, and if they pressed, he changed the subject. He kept on a small shelf in his room three things. The first was the strawberry preserves in Marlet’s jar. He never opened it.

He looked at it sometimes. The second was the small square of paper with Kettering Post’s four words, which he kept in the front of his Bible. The third was a length of iron latch cut from the original oak door of the cellar, which he had unscrewed and carried out in his coat pocket on that last April morning without exactly knowing why. The years in Casper were quiet.

He built shelves, hung doors, fixed porch rails. When he passed a low rise on the road outside town, he did not look at it. When the wind stopped briefly at a corner of a street on a windy day, he crossed the street. In 1922 he was sitting on a bench in a small park on the east side of Casper when a very old man sat down next to him and asked whether he was Anel Kirkbride.

Anel said he was. The old man said he had known Kettering Post’s mother. Anel had not known until that moment that Kettering had a mother anywhere, living or dead. The old man said she had been a Shoshone woman from a small settlement south of Fort Washakie who had raised Kettering by herself and had died two years before Kettering came to work for Anel.

He said Kettering had come out to that country partly because his mother, before she died, had told him something about the ground east of the Bighorn Mountains that had made him want to see it for himself. He said his mother had told him not to go. He said Kettering had gone anyway. The old man said all of this in the same mild tone as a man commenting on the weather.

Then he refolded his newspaper, stood up, and walked away. Anel never saw him again and never learned his name. He was 70 in the summer of 1937. He had moved to a small boarding house on a side street on the north edge of Casper, run by a woman named Laura Lee Voss, who had a soft spot for old men who kept themselves clean and paid their rent on time.

His room was on the ground floor at the back, over the root cellar. That is a detail worth holding in mind. It was a good root cellar. Laura Lee kept it well, used it for canning and potatoes, the same as every root cellar in Wyoming.

Anel, in the six years he had lived there, had never once gone down into it. He gave as the reason that his knees would not take the stairs. On the night of the 14th of August, 1937, at just after three in the morning, Anel Kirkbride woke up in his bed. He woke because the wind had stopped.

He lay very still and listened. Casper is a town of some size, and even at three in the morning there is usually some small sound in it: a dog, a train in the distance, a horse in an alley, wind in the eaves. On that night there was nothing. The stillness had the particular quality he had felt only once before in his life—the stillness of wind not merely gone, but at rest.

He lay with his hands on the sheet and listened, and under the floor of his room, from below the pine boards on which his bed stood, from the direction of the root cellar of Laura Lee Voss’s boarding house, 27 years after Anel Kirkbride had abandoned a homestead 140 miles to the northwest, he heard very faintly the sound of someone who had been asleep for a very long time turning over. He listened until it stopped. It stopped after perhaps ten seconds. Then the wind came back, a small breath at the window sash, then the ordinary night wind of a Wyoming August.

And Anel Kirkbride, at 70 years of age, lay in the dark and understood, in a way he had not understood in all the intervening years, that there are some things a door cannot keep out, because they do not need doors. They need only the ground under your feet—and the ground under your feet is everywhere. He got out of bed, lit the lamp, and sat in his chair by the window until dawn. He did not go back to sleep.

In the morning he wrote a letter to Frell Joerger, who was 94 years old and still living on Alkali Creek. He told Frell what had happened and asked him what he should do. The letter came back three weeks later, marked deceased. Frell had died in his sleep on his own porch on the same night of the 14th of August, 1937.

Anel Kirkbride lived seven more years in that boarding house. He never went down into the cellar. Laura Lee Voss buried him in the Casper Cemetery in the winter of 1944. On the shelf in his room when she cleaned it out, she found a jar of strawberry preserves forty years old, unopened; a small square of paper in the front of a Bible with four words written on it in a very careful pencil; and a length of black iron latch, the kind that would once have fitted the door of a small country cellar.

She kept the Bible. She did not know what to do with the latch or the jar. She put them in the boarding house cellar on a shelf against the back wall and forgot about them. The boarding house is not there anymore.

It was torn down in 1961 when the street was widened. Whatever was under it is under something else now—a parking lot, most likely. A patch of asphalt in a small city on the western side of the Wyoming plains. If you drove past it today, you would not know.

It would look like nothing. That’s the trick of open country. What’s flat can still hold something down. What’s quiet can still be waiting.

And there are patches of the earth, not many, but a few, where the wind, if you watch it long enough, seems to go around rather than across. Anel Kirkbride is buried in the Casper Cemetery on a small rise on the west side, next to a low sandstone slab he had shipped up from the homestead in April of 1911 and set into the ground next to his own future plot at his own expense, with the letters M and A cut into it and the year 1902. He is next to his wife, or next to the stone he set for her. Whether she is under the ground with him is a question with no known answer.

And whether the thing that lay down under the low rise on his old homestead, and that turned over one August night under a boarding house in Casper, is still lying down somewhere—under a parking lot, under a wheat field, under a road you drove on this morning—is a question with no known answer either. Laura Lee Voss wrote about him once in the small ledger she kept of her lodgers, in an entry dated the 5th of December 1937. She wrote that Mr. Kirkbride, at the back of the ground floor, was a quiet gentleman who kept a jar of very old preserves on his shelf and would not go down to the cellar, and did not have to explain why, in her opinion, because he had the look of a person who had already given his explanations somewhere and had none left.

That is the whole entry. She underlined the word explanations.