Since Frederic Remington saw fit to cast bronzes, my father saw it as a responsibility, of a sort, to have a couple of them around. One of them used to stand on the square oak table in the barroom where I did all of my homework until I was in high school. The figure, a cowboy on a bucking bronco, had a whip in his outstretched arm. By the time I was in high school, I had bent all the whip’s lashes off. By then, the statue had been replaced with one of John Wayne in the role of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, the moment after he yells,”Then fill your hands, you son of a bitch!” Then he gathers his reins in between his teeth, and goes full gallop at his enemies. I would stare at him, on and off, all through the hours of trying not to deal with my math homework.

Years later, after my father’s death, we liquidated the collection; not all houses are able to contain a stack of cowboys, after all. Therefore, it was probably unavoidable that the bronco-bucking cowboy had turned out to be a fake. No word on the John Wayne sculpture, though.