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Somewhere south in Sonora

Chapter 19: XIV A LETTER
By Will Levington Comfort
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About This Book

The narrative alternates between a mining-border settlement and the Sonoran countryside, following Bob Leadley as he endures community scorn while raising a son with Mexican roots amid ranch life and horse culture. Social tensions, questions of belonging, and everyday violence and camaraderie shape family and town relations, with episodes that range from quiet domestic moments to confrontations. Interwoven is the story of Elbert Sartwell, a late-born young man confronting familial expectations and deciding his own path. The prose focuses on landscape, horsemanship, and moral choice rather than theatrical plotting.

XIV

A LETTER

They had put out the lights. Even the night-light at the far end of the hall was turned low, but sentences wrote themselves out on the ceiling; a pause, then a sentence; a pause, then another.

‘... Could it have been the wine she gave us at supper—the barefooted old woman? I was so very thirsty!... I can’t understand. I can’t believe, yet I distinctly remember insisting that I ride that horse.... I was so horribly frightened—except when I was near you.... I couldn’t help seeing how the others turned to you.... Won’t you please believe I never acted like that before?... It was because you were so firm—that I could breathe better where you were.... And in the car—it was like hanging on a cross, wasn’t it?... Oh, won’t you get word to me that you forgive?’

Such a stillness around each sentence.