Love of My Days is a western set around the time before telephones, as the opening of the story tells us, and communication plays a significant role in the events that unfold. Or, rather, the lack of communication. I’ll give away the plot a bit, so if you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you do so. It’s a good one.
I’ve been on an Elmore Leonard kick this year, reading four of his novels. This story reminds me of Last Stand on Saber River. A man returns home to find that someone has taken it as their own. The circumstances are different, but the chase and the scenes remind me of Leonard’s writing, if only in theme and description. Erdrich has a much deeper emotional connection to her characters, and those emotion’s come to a head at the end.
Timble is the man charged with trespass and the one who steals Weir’s buggy, along with his precious mother and son horses. These horses have been trained together and have become one unit. By the end, though, the pursuit of Timble leads to the mother’s death. Timble escapes on foot for the moment and is later shot. The final two scenes encapsulate the entire story. The young male horse stands next to its dead mother, knowing the distant calling of a cold barn, where he’ll never again be happy. This is the same for Timble, whose lover died while he was away, of typhoid, and he’s been without happiness ever since.
In the final scene, Timble encounters his dead lover walking towards him. She’s beautiful, as he remembered, and we get a glimpse into his past. At this point, it’s interesting how much I care about Timble. In the beginning, he’d shot a sheriff, which we later came to realize he did by mistake. He wasn’t meaning to fire, but the sheriff shot his hand and thus triggered the incident. Timble appears to be in a mental health crisis. He’d squatted at the farm because it’d belonged to his dead lover’s family. He’d wanted to return to that time in his mind, if no where else. So when we see him shot and encountering his dead lover once again, by this time, we have come over to his side as readers. We’re sad that he’s going, but there’s some peace knowing he’s with his lover again and then the emotional gut punch happens. We are shifted back into the reality of the moment.
The moment is shattered. Beatril is not really there. She’s in Timble’s mind, soothing his swift exit from this world. It’s a heartbreaking and powerful moment. By suggesting that Budack loomed over them, not him, but them, we know we’re still seeing this moment as Timble sees it. We’re in his lens of the world. Budack doesn’t see anyone but Timble, so it’s equally poignant.
Excellent story. This is one of my favorite stories from my pile of New Yorker magazines sitting next to my chair. I have maybe thirty to forty magazines to go through. I read the fiction before shelving them. I think the resonance of that final paragraph will stick with me, and I imagine I’ll return to this one again.
