There was a cool breeze accompanying the day’s gentle decrescendo. Everything had been touched by a profound sense of calm; even the pigs, normally anxious to gorge themselves on dinner slop, were strangely quiet. The moment was not lost on the young man, whose tall figure was silhouetted against a daylight drifting ever closer to quiescence. With him was an old but iron-willed stallion, into whose dark eyes, deep and mysterious, he looked searchingly. “A damn quiet night, isn’t it, Keynes?” The horse said nothing, but looked at him as if to say Yes, quiet. But not for long.
It was a life that Milton Friedman could not have argued with. Each morning he awoke, ate sparingly, took the simple tools of a lonely farmer into his sinewy, sun-beaten arms, and met the land to which he was bound head on. He had but one small, round mirror with a crack in its centre, and rarely did he see himself in it. Had he been able to see himself, the face that looked back at him would have very much reflected the soul hidden beneath it: though roughened by work and weather, he was still strikingly handsome, his blue eyes suggesting the profundity of the laborer, he whose wisdom is that of sweat, tears and the salted earth. He was a mountain of a man, a monument to physical strength. He carried sick heffers from the pasture to the barns as easily as he tossed bales of hay the size of refrigerators onto his wagon. With a knife he could slice the eyelash from a deer and with a gun graze its nose from a hundred yards. He rose before the sun and worked long after it had gone. The years passed him by in this way, hard but good, and he believed himself content.
But he was without something; Friedman was lonely. He was a man with everything but companionship, and so felt himself to have nothing. Not even shooting a deer’s nose and then slashing at its eye could cure his gloom, though he had tried and tried again. The way that Keynes looked at him, that day, brought his spirits all the lower. And then came the voice:
“I reckon it’s past the time any God-fearin’ man should be in the pasture. Least I s’pose it is so for myself, but I am a tired man, and my stomach is empty.”
Friedman let his head drift to the right, his chestnut hair brushing against the opposite shoulder as he did. He was at first surprised to see no one; but there was another man at the fence’s edge, no more than fifty yards away. He could not make out anything more than the immense size of the stranger and the glint of moonlight on silvered spurs.
“Sheep need turnin’ in, and the fence is broke. I have no hands but my own to tame this place, and I do not rest.” Friedman paused, unsure of what to say next. “If it’s food and a bed you’re lookin’ for, I reckon I can give you both. Ain’t got a bed, but there’s hay down in the barn and the night won’t be a cold one.”
The man began walking forward, revealing himself as he did. Friedman’s eyes shot open, for here was a creature defying description. The stranger’s face was almost entirely hidden beneath a broad-brimmed hat and a cascade of long hair like pure-spun gold, but what he saw was the hard but strong eyes of an outlaw. As he drew closer, Friedman found his heart pounding uncontrollably. Words failed him. He felt bewitched.
The stranger was close, a few paces in front of him, his hands on the holsters at his side. His brow was low and his teeth flashed in the smile of a rogue. “I surely can’t refuse that offer, friend.” He reached a hand out. “Frederick Hayek’s the name, some people call me ‘The Rabidly Anti-Socialist Kid.’”
Milton looked at the hand, and then made as if to take it; but Keynes whinnied from behind him, and, when he turned to look, he saw a deep distrust in the tired face of the horse. He turned back to Hayek. The hand still floated out in front of him. “Friedman,” he said, taking Hayek’s hand into his.
Keynes neighed long and loudly, pouring his agony into the night sky. Then he was gone, in a storm of dust and hooves. Friedman wrenched his hand away from Hayek and lunged in the direction of the fleeing stallion, but he felt powerful arms encircle his chest and wisps of hot breath on his neck, and he could not move. “Let him go,” came the silken voice of the bandit. “Reckon we can have more fun without him.”
Friedman’s lungs had begun to work in fits and starts. His body tingled; he could feel Hayek’s muscles against his back and around his body, and he desperately wanted to melt into them. When at last it came to him that he should say something, it was all he could do to consent. “Reckon we could, Kid.”
Something stirred in both of them, making their leather chaps almost unbearable. He could hear the pigs begin to squeal rabidly, as if in orgiastic madness. The breeze had died. The air was hot.
“Reckon we could.”
~Lion Summerbell
