There are men who know exactly who they are at 51. They have made their peace with the mirror and with the calendar. They have settled into the second half of their lives with the quiet confidence of someone who has read the last chapter and found it acceptable. They know what they want and what they have stopped wanting.
And the distance between those two things no longer troubles them at 3:00 in the morning. John Wayne was not quite that man. He was 51 years old in the fall of 1958, and he was not at peace with much of anything, though he had become very skilled at not showing it. He had been in pictures for 30 years. He had played men who were certain, men who rode into towns and knew without hesitation what needed to be done, and did it without asking anyone’s permission.
He had played those men so many times and so convincingly that the country had come to believe he was one of them. He was not entirely sure anymore whether he agreed. He had stopped in Msila, New Mexico on a Tuesday in October because the shoot for Rio Bravo didn’t pick up again until the following Monday, and Howard Hawks had told him to go somewhere and rest and stop standing around the lot, making the crew nervous.
So he drove east from Tucson and stopped in Mesilia because it was late afternoon and the light was good and the town had a hardware store and a diner and a quality of quietness that he had been looking for without knowing he was looking for it. He checked into the one motel the town had.
He ate dinner at the diner alone. He walked back to the motel in the dark and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall for a while. He was 51 years old and he had two ex-wives and three children who were growing up faster than he could keep track of and a career that required him to be a hero every 18 months on a budget and a schedule that left no room for uncertainty.
He was tired in the specific way that has nothing to do with sleep. He was in Messiah for 4 days before he met Eleanor Hatch. He met her in the way you meet people in small towns, which is accidentally and in front of other people, and with no time to prepare. He was coming out of the hardware store on Wednesday morning with a new work glove.
His left glove had split at the thumb somewhere between Tucson and here, and she was coming in, and they met at the door, and he held it, and she said, “Thank you.” without looking up from whatever she was reading. And then she looked up. She was 27 years old. She had dark hair pulled back in the practical way of someone who works with children and cannot afford to think about her hair during the day.
She had steady eyes, the kind that look at a thing directly and see it as it is. She was carrying a stack of papers with a book balanced on top of the stack, and the book was about to fall, and he caught it before it did. Thank you, she said again. And then, I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. Neither was I, he said. Which was not true.
He had been paying attention to everything in Messiah since he arrived with the restless alertness of a man who has been standing still too long. She taught at the school three blocks down on Khaled Principe. She had come from Laskrutz 8 months ago when the previous teacher left without giving much notice.
She taught all grades in one room, 22 students between the ages of 6 and 14, and she was very good at it, which he did not learn until later, but could have guessed from the way she moved through the door of the hardware store. Purposeful, organized, already thinking about the next thing. He thought about those 14 seconds of conversation several times that afternoon. He did not tell anyone that.
There was no one to tell. He saw her the next morning at the diner. She was sitting alone with coffee and papers, and she looked up when he came in and nodded, the nod of someone who recognizes a face without being sure yet what to do about it. He took a table two tables away. He ordered coffee and eggs.
He read the newspaper. He was aware of her in the specific and inconvenient way of a man who is trying not to be aware of something. She left before he finished eating. He watched her go without appearing to watch. He went back to the motel and sat on the bed again and said out loud to the empty room, “She is 27 years old.
” He said it the way you state a fact that you want to be a deterrent and it isn’t working as well as you hoped. He was 51. That was 24 years. 24 years was not a gap. It was a geography. It was the kind of distance that had a different weather on either side. He knew men his age who had married younger women and watched it go badly in ways that were predictable and undignified.
He was not going to be that man. He was already tired of being so many other men. He told himself this clearly and without sentiment on Thursday morning, and then walked past the school twice between 10 and noon, for no reason he could entirely account for. He heard her through the open window the second time, reading something aloud to the class.
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And he stopped for a moment on the sidewalk and listened to her voice, and then kept walking because standing on a public sidewalk listening to a teacher read to children was not a behavior he was prepared to examine too closely. Thursday afternoon, she came into the diner while he was there, and this time she sat down at his table. not asked.
She simply looked at the other tables which were all occupied and looked at his which had an empty chair and sat down. You’re John Wayne, she said. Not like an exclamation, like a piece of information she was filing. Yes, he said. I thought so. My father has all your pictures.
She opened her papers and began reading. He looked at her for a moment. That’s all. She looked up. What would you like me to say? He did not have a good answer to that. He picked up his coffee. She went back to her papers. They sat like that for 20 minutes, which was the most comfortable 20 minutes he had spent in Messia or possibly in a much longer period than that.
And he was aware of the comfort in a way that made him careful. She had a particular quality of attention when she did speak about the papers she was grading about a student who was struggling with long division about a fence at the edge of the schoolyard that needed repair. She said the things she meant and did not say the things she did not mean, which sounds simple but is rarer than people acknowledge.
He had spent 30 years in an industry built on saying things you did not mean in the most convincing possible way, and he found her directness disorienting, in a manner he could not immediately categorize as unpleasant. She left again before he finished his coffee. She put on her coat and gathered her papers and said it was nice to meet him properly, and that she hoped he enjoyed the rest of his time in Msilla.
She did not say she would see him again. She did not suggest it or imply it. She simply left. He sat at the table for a while after she was gone. He went back to the motel and lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling. He thought about the way she had said, “My father has all your pictures without ceremony or performance,” as if it were simply a fact about her father.
He thought about the 20 minutes of sitting without obligation. He thought about 24 years and the specific geography of that distance. He got up and went to the small shelf above the dresser where he had stacked the two books he had brought. He looked at the titles. One of them was a novel he had been meaning to read for 2 years and kept not reading. He picked it up.
He had not read this book. He had never read this book. But in the morning, if she asked what he had been reading, he could tell her, which was a thing he noticed himself planning, and then noticed himself noticing, and then put the book back on the shelf, and stood there for a moment with his hand on the shelf, because that was the kind of thing a 27year-old did, not a 51-year-old.
And he was not going to be that man, either. He picked the book back up and started reading it. He read 40 pages before he fell asleep. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this one reaches. On Friday, she was not at the diner in the morning. He had his coffee alone and read the paper and did not look at the door more than a reasonable number of times, and a reasonable number of times in this context was more than he would have preferred.
He spent the morning at the motel writing letters. he had been putting off. In the afternoon he drove out past the town to the east, where the land flattened into the long view that New Mexico does better than anywhere. The kind of distance that makes a man feel both very small and very located. As if the earth is saying here, specifically here, this is where you are. He was back by four.
She was on the sidewalk in front of the diner talking to an older woman he had seen before but not spoken to. He nodded when they made eye contact and she nodded back and the older woman looked at him with the frank curiosity of someone who knows everything that happens in a small town and is keeping a running account.
He kept walking. He had gone half a block when he heard her say, “Mr. Wayne.” He turned around. She was standing on the sidewalk with her coat buttoned against the October afternoon. The older woman had gone. She said, “I wanted to ask you something.” He walked back. She said, “You’ve been here since Tuesday, and you’re leaving Monday.
” She said this as a statement, not a question, which meant she had learned it somewhere, which meant the town knew his schedule, which in a town this size was not surprising. He said that was right. She said, “Is there a reason you haven’t asked me to have dinner with you?” He looked at her for a moment.
He had not expected the question. He had expected, if anything, to be the one asking it. and he had been not asking it with some effort. He said, “You’re 27 years old.” She looked at him steadily. “You said that like it’s a problem you’re trying to solve.” He said, “It’s 24 years.” She said, “I know how arithmetic works, Mr.
Wayne.” He said very quietly because there was no good way to say it, and the only option was to say it plainly. I’m going to leave on Monday. I’m going back to a picture and then another picture. I live in a truck and a hotel and a set and occasionally a house in California that I don’t spend enough time in.
He paused. You deserve someone who stays. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You’re going to tell me what I deserve without asking me what I want.” He didn’t have an answer to that. She said, “I have spent two years in Las Cusus being very sensible.” She said this without self-pity as a plain accounting.
I was engaged to a very sensible man who had a sensible job and a sensible house, and I ended it 3 weeks before the wedding because sensible was the only thing it had going for it, and that turned out to not be enough. She looked at him. She was not asking for sympathy. She was giving him information.
She said, “You’re 51 years old and you make pictures and you drive through towns like this one and you stop sometimes and apparently you notice things.” Because I have not met many men in Msila who read a book in one evening and can tell you which chapter they fell asleep in. She said it quietly and without drama. to me.
She said, “You’re just a man who showed up, and that is not nothing.” He stood on the sidewalk in Missila, New Mexico on a Friday afternoon in October 1958, and he was 51 years old, and he had played a thousand men who knew exactly what to do in this moment. And he did not know what to do in this moment. He said, “Have dinner with me.
” She said, “I thought you’d never ask.” They had dinner that evening at the diner and talked for three hours about things he could not have predicted, about her students, about a book she had read twice and disagreed with herself about both times, about his father, who had been a pharmacist in Iowa, and who he still thought about more than he said, about the particular quality of light in New Mexico at 6:00 in the evening that was different from the light anywhere else he had ever been.
He did not perform. He did not tell stories about pictures or famous people. He talked the way he sometimes talked alone in a truck on a long drive when there was no one to be for. She walked back to her rooms after dinner and he walked beside her. At the door she said good night and he said good night and she went inside.
He stood on the sidewalk for a moment. Then he walked back to the motel. He had dinner with her on Saturday. He walked with her to the school on Sunday morning while she prepared her classroom for the week. He fixed the fence at the edge of the schoolyard that she had mentioned on Thursday.
He found the tools in the utility shed and spent 2 hours on it and she brought him coffee at 10:00 and they stood in the sun for 20 minutes and talked about nothing in particular. He left the fence post set and the wire tight and the latch working. He left Messia on Monday morning.
He drove west toward Tucson and the Rio Bravo set and Howard Hawk’s schedule and the machinery of being John Wayne which required a great deal of him and gave back a great deal and was not nothing but was also not everything. He drove a mile west of Mesilia and stopped the truck on the shoulder of the road. He sat there for a moment with the engine running.
He looked at the road in front of him, which was straight and long, and led where he had agreed to go. He looked in the rear view mirror at the town behind him, which was small and still in the Monday morning light. He put the truck in reverse. He drove back. He parked in front of the school. He went inside.
She was writing something on the blackboard with her back to the door and she heard him come in and she turned around and she looked at him with the direct steady look that he had been thinking about since Wednesday morning outside the hardware store. He had his hat in his hand. He said he would be back in December when the picture wrapped.
He said he did not know what that meant or what he could offer that was worth anything or whether it made any sense at all for a 51-year-old man who lived in a truck to be standing in a one- room schoolhouse in Mesia, New Mexico at 7:30 in the morning with his hat in his hand. She said, “I’ll be here.” He was back in December.
He came back in March. He came back in the summer. He came back in October of the following year. He kept coming back which turned out to be the one thing he was better at than he had believed himself to be. I have told a great many stories in the course of my work. The ones that stay with me longest are not the stories of grand gestures or dramatic reversals.
They are the ones about the man who stood on a sidewalk in a small town in New Mexico and told a woman she deserved better. and she said, “I’ll decide what I deserve.” Thank you. The ones about the man who drove a mile down the road and then turned around. He had confused the arithmetic of years with the arithmetic of presence.
He had counted 24 and concluded it was a distance too great to cross. Eleanor Hatch counted something else entirely. She counted the man who caught a book before it fell, who fixed a fence without being asked, who came back in December when he said he would. You do not age out of being worth showing up for.
It is never too late to turn the truck around. They don’t make men like John Wayne anymore. Keep riding.
