Listen · Read by Willa

Read by Willa, named after the writer Willa Cather.

For three days every autumn, a door between the Living and the Dead is said, and written, to be left open.

In the year my novel takes place (1901), All Hallows’ Eve fell on Thursday, October 31, All Saints’ Day fell on Friday, November 1, and All Souls’ Day fell on Saturday, November 2 (these exact dates are extremely important to better understanding my novel, its story, and several of its themes).

Across Mexico, all across Texas, and in the Catholic and Lutheran parishes of the Old World, families walked out to the graves, much in a similar way as I did with my Mother (God rest her soul) when I was a small child learning to sweep clean and make tidy the graves of my ancestors in Texas and in Louisiana long ago.

Back then, in 1901, they likely carried flowers, candles, bread, and they spoke the names of the people they had lost. Cowboy—or, A Communion of Saints also lives inside those same three days.

Long have I lived with that belief, longer than I had a book to put it in. It is not a metaphor I invented. It is an old way of speaking about a season that belongs to Mexico, to the Church, to all of Texas, to the parishes of the Old World, and to anyone who has ever spoken a name aloud at a grave and hoped, for a briefly fleeting moment, that the name was heard across the vast expanses of Time and Space, that which is Known and Unknown.

I did not set out to write a book about a holiday, but I did set out to write a book about a boy and his beloved horse, and about the Dead who would not stay as far from them as the Living sometimes pretend.

The calendar, when I came to it, was not a decoration. It was a responsibility. If a story is going to stand in 1901, then Friday must be Friday, and Saturday must be Saturday, and the days of the saints and of the souls must stand where they stood.

What follows is not a skeleton key to the novel (though it does help), and it is not a history lesson, though it leans on both. It is an attempt to describe why those three days matter to the book, to the story, and why the book and story, I hope and pray, might matter to those three specific, special days.

Three Days, One Season of Remembrance

Western Christianity calls the season Allhallowtide: All Hallows’ Eve on October 31, All Saints’ Day on November 1, and All Souls’ Day on November 2. Día de los Muertos grew up alongside it.

History describes the holiday as “a blend of Mesoamerican ritual, European religion and Spanish culture,” celebrated each year from October 31 to November 2.

These two calendars do not cancel each other, but they do keep one another company. On both sides of the river, and in the old countries from which so many Texas families had come, the same three days were set aside for the Dead, and for the Living who still had names to speak aloud (just as I read the novel aloud many times through the crafting and writing process).

Tradition holds that the Gates of Heaven open at midnight on October 31. The spirits of children come home for twenty-four hours, and the spirits of adults follow on November 2. Treating the Dead as honored guests, the Living set out marigolds, candles, water, and pan de muerto (“bread of the Dead”).

The door is not forced, but left open. There is a difference, and I have come to think it is the difference on which the whole season turns.

A forced door is a haunting. An open door is welcoming. Día de los Muertos, as I have understood it, is not a night of doom and fright. It is the season of hospitality.

The Dead are not barging in. They are expected. A place has been made for them at the table (a similar table to where much of this book was handwritten in a small, black Moleskine notebook in the predawn hours), and a path of flowers has been laid so that they can find their way home again, just as Cowboy is attempting to do in my novel.

When I was writing Cowboy—or, A Communion of Saints, that type of hospitality would not leave me alone, but stayed with me constantly, incessantly.

The book is full of thresholds — cemeteries, ceremonies, rivers, heavy fog, the thin places where one world seems to lean against another — and I wanted those thresholds to feel, as the season feels, less like a breaking-in than like a door that someone, in kindness, had remembered to leave unlatched.

The Long Road to Mictlán

The roots of the holiday go back thousands of years. The Aztecs and other Nahua peoples saw death not as an erasure, but as an ever-present part of life.

The Dead travelled through Nine Challenging Levels before reaching Mictlán, the Final Resting Place. Families left food, water, and tools to help the Dead on their way.

I have always been deeply moved by those old beliefs; the journey is long, and the dead might be thirsty. They might need a drink of water or of wine, or a tool to build and to create, or a little food, or a pen and paper to write that letter to a loved one or that novel they never did, or they might need help along a difficult road.

The Living cannot walk the Nine Levels for the Dead, but the Living can help provision the way.

That belief is still alive in today’s ofrendas: the Dead are on a Journey, and the Living can help them along. A glass of water left out overnight is not a decoration. It is a form of care and respect and remembrance. (I was once again deeply reminded of this in mainland China when my wife’s father passed away.)

I did not attempt to retell the Nine Levels in the novel, and I did not need to (though you might easily find them all).

What I wanted was the intuition underneath them: that the Dead are still traveling, and that our Remembering is a way of walking a little of the road with them.

In Cowboy—or, A Communion of Saints, a boy will move through passages of his own — a Primordial Sea, a Dark Forest, a River of Time — and each passage will strip something away. I will come to that night in a moment.

For now, it is enough to say that I recognized, in that old road to Mictlán, a pattern older than any single Faith and younger than every new Grief: the Dead go on, and they do not have to go on entirely alone.

All Souls and a Cleansing, Not a Punishment

On November 2, the Church prays for the faithful departed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: “All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.”

This is Purgatory. As the Catholic Apostolate Center’s essay on All Souls’ Day puts it, Purgatory “is not a state of punishment, but rather a cleansing very much like our Baptism.”

I want to keep those two attributions clear, because they are not the same voice, and the difference matters. The Catechism speaks of purification, of a holiness still to be achieved, of a joy still to be entered. The essay, drawing on that teaching, names the tone of the thing: not punishment, but a cleansing, and a cleansing likened to Baptism, which is to say a washing that belongs to mercy rather than to the courtroom, which is what Fishgirl cries out for (Mercy!) at the novel’s end inside that small chapel in Dickens, Texas.

Two traditions, one intuition: the Dead are still on the road, and our prayers, our candles, and our remembering go with them.

Grief is already a hard enough country. What All Souls’ Day offers (if we will hear it) is not a ledger of debts but a work of accompaniment.

We pray because the Departed are not finished, and because we are not finished with them. We light a candle because light is a language the Dead have always seemed to understand.

In the novel, that same word — cleansing — will surface in another register, far from any cathedral.

A Karankawa man of peace will take up the mapacho and explain to the boy, and to the Reader, that it begins “the cleansing process.”

I did not plant the echo as a trick. I found, writing, that the old Catholic intuition and the old ceremonial one were already speaking to each other.

Suffering, in Cowboy—or, A Communion of Saints, is not there to condemn a soul. It is there, when it is there at all, to wash one.

November 1: The Gates Open

My novel names November 1 for what comes next.

The boy wakes before dawn on November first, after All Hallows’ Eve, with his head resting on a white wolf. Chief Goodheart, a Karankawa man of peace, brings back his lost horse, Buddy, and tells him the cliff is holy ground: “a place where the Great Before and the Great Now and the Great Beyond reside side by side.”

Then Chief Goodheart says the line at the heart of the chapter: “But this place, like death, is a kind of freedom, too. It can take you to the ones you love, to places you have never been, meeting new souls you would never otherwise have met.”

I have returned to that sentence more than any other in the November pages. It does not beautify death; it does not deny the loss; it simply refuses to let death be only an ending.

If the gates are open, then death can also be a crossing — to the ones you love, to places you have never been, to souls you would never otherwise have met. The Chief is not offering the boy a doctrine. He is offering him a place, and a way of standing in it.

That night, on All Saints’ Day, the Ceremony begins. The mapacho, the Chief explains, begins “the cleansing process.”

In the smoke the boy sees six silent figures, three men and three women, keeping watch. Only six people stood at his father’s grave in Greenleaf Cemetery.

The echo is hard to miss, and I will not explain it. The strangers who buried his father are answered, in the smoke, by an unseen company.

Readers may decide for themselves what these details might mean; a serious novelist’s job, however, is to show what readers might see, not to explain (though readers do need help from time to time).

The boy’s ceremonial vision (or his transcendental voyage across Time and Space) moves him from a Primordial Sea, to a Dark Forest, and onwards to the River of Time. (And even Beyond!)

By the end of his spirit quest or his divine journey, Cowboy meets an Old Woman in White, very much like his grandmother, who touches his chin the way his grandmother used to do on Sunday mornings. For one night the gates are open, and an orphaned boy is gathered back to his own.

I will not describe more of what the boy sees during his rite of passage or his initiation rite. A ceremony is not a scene to be unpacked like a writer’s portmanteau.

What I will say is that I wanted November first, All Saints’ Day, to be the day the boy is not left alone with the dead, but returned to them, briefly, as the tradition promises the children are returned, and as the saints themselves are honored: not as absences, but as a company.

November 2: A Cemetery Outside Swedonia

The novel does not print an exact date for what follows. After the Ceremony, the boy loses track of time, as a boy in such a night might.

As I wrote the pages that come next, the visit falls, however, on All Souls’ Day, November 2 — the day the Church sets aside for the faithful departed, and the day the adult dead are said to come home.

I placed Cowboy there on purpose, even if the page itself does not say the date aloud (these are details a serious writer should leave to the reader to notice and to see, but most readers read for entertainment or for pure pleasure, and do not wish to think too deeply).

Buddy stops in the only shade for miles, beside a small cemetery of Swedish settlers outside Swedonia. It takes the boy several minutes to understand what the horse has done.

Then he reads the names aloud as if he had known these strangers in life. Prayer for the dead, it has always seemed to me, begins there: not with a formula, but with a name said correctly, in the open air, as if the person who wore it might still be listening.

Then he finds two children, David and Dora, with no family buried beside them: “which meant little David and little Dora were buried there alone.”

Cowboy sits with them as strangers once stood with him at his father’s grave in the opening pages of the book.

I have never been able to write about the deaths of children without feeling the sentence go quiet in my hands. The book does not attempt to solve that silence.

The boy does not solve it, either. He does what the season asks, and what the strangers at Greenleaf once did for him. He stays. He keeps company. On a day when the spirits of children are welcomed home first, he finds two children who have no family waiting at the plot, and he becomes, for an afternoon, the company they did not have.

If the first of November is the night the gates open for the boy, the second is the day he learns to be a gate for someone else.

That, for me, is the turn the book had to make. It is not enough to be visited by the Dead. Sooner or later, the Living have to sit down in the grass and do the visiting.

A Communion of Saints

The subtitle of the novel comes from the Apostles’ Creed: the communion of saints, the old article of faith about the bond between the Living and the Dead.

Early on, with every intention, I gave the book two parallel plots and two titles on purpose.

Cowboy is the name of a boy, and of a road, and of a kind of American loneliness. A Communion of Saints opens a different door. It suggests that the figures on that road — the Living and the Dead, the named and the barely remembered — are bound to one another whether they know it or not.

I have come to believe that a novelist’s job is not to shut that door on a reader’s imagination. Both readings are valid. The book may be a journey across Texas in the last months of 1901.

It may also be a journey through something more like a Country of Souls. I will not decide that for anyone who takes the trouble to read my novel.

Part Two of Cowboy—or, A Communion of Saints is built on Joseph Campbell’s idea that the old gods are dead or dying.

In the book’s words, “even the old gods were dead or dying and people everywhere were searching… seeking out some sort of new mythology that might unify them to the rest of the world.”

Campbell, whose Masks of God volumes I have read and studied over the decades, taught me to see the old myths not as relics but as living patterns, stories that keep returning because people keep needing them.

The year 1901 was such a moment of searching. The old forms were cracking. People were looking for a story large enough to hold them together. I did not think I could invent a new mythology, and I did not want to. What I could do was look again at an old one, and ask whether it was still alive.

My answer was the Communion of Strangers. A minister and four strangers at a Brownwood grave. A Karankawa chief. Swedish settlers and their forgotten children. The Living who keep the Dead company, and the Dead who keep the Living company in turn.

The Creed names a communion of saints. The road, as I have known it and as the boy comes to know it, is often a communion of people who will never be canonized, and who may never even be properly named.

They meet for an afternoon, or for a night, or for the length of a burial, and then they go on. Something is exchanged anyway. Kindness. A watching. A chin touched the way a grandmother used to touch it on a Sunday morning.

That, to me, is the beginning of a mythology still fit for use: not that we are all saints, but that we are all, if we will consent to it, one another’s company.

A Candle for a Stranger

I have no interest in telling anyone how to keep a holiday. I have only the hope that a book might send a reader back to a grave, or to a table, or to a name that has not been spoken in a while, and that the speaking might feel less lonely than it did before.

This November, light a candle for someone you have lost. Then light one for a stranger.

Somebody, somewhere, might remember your name, too.

The first candle is the one we already understand. We light it for a parent, a child, a friend, a love that did not last the length of a life.

The second is the one the season and the book have been trying to teach me: the candle for David and Dora, for the six who stood at a grave on October 17, 1901 in Greenleaf Cemetery, and for the ones who had no one.

It is the candle you light without knowing who will need it.

If the door is left open for only three days, then those three days are not a small thing.

They are a practice — a way of rehearsing, in public and with flowers, the faith that the Living and the Dead have not finished with one another, and that a stranger’s name, said aloud, is never wasted.

Sources

• HISTORY, “Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos)”: history.com
• Catholic Apostolate Center, “What is All Souls Day?”: catholicapostolatecenter.org
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1030.

Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints will be published by Thor Media on Christmas Day, 2026.

Readers who wish to listen to or read an excerpt can find one on the novel page. My site and Amazon author page are linked below.

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