Holdfast: A Novel

HOLDFASTThe grass failed before the calendar said it should. The note was due before first freeze. The Company had already run wire over the water.On a thin fork of the Canadian, Calder Quinn is holding a ranch that no longer has anyone left to hold it for. Two boards stand on the rise. A bank in Tascosa wants twenty-two hundred dollars. A cream-colored letter from Chicago wants the rest.Then a remuda comes in off the east trail.Eliza Ward is not passing through. She has thirty-two horses, a deed that can be made to vanish, and a book that does not lie to buyers. She will not winter as a guest. She will not sell the graves. She will not let a man named Voss turn a kitchen into a rented stove.What follows is a gather, a river that collects, a sale that is not a victory, and a winter the geese already promised. Partnership is written on a page and tested in weather. A segundo who remembers sheep ground will not watch the bend become a line on a plat. A boy who lied about his age will learn the difference between a legend and a job. And the last open range will not end in a speech. It will end in paper, ice, and whoever is still standing when the date arrives.Holdfast is a literary Western about land, debt, and the people who refuse to become a story told in someone else's office.