Harvesting Ballads (1984)

Philip Kimball's first novel is a portrait of the Great Plains told, as its jacket says, as a string of related stories. Sorry, a young field hand, learns that Keeper, the aging cowboy who raised him, is only his guardian and that his dead father was Roger Lyons, rodeo rider and poet; he tunes up the '31 Chevy that is his inheritance and drives to his only living relative, his mother's brother Marcus Baldwin, a farmer whose sod-house birthplace still stands on his land within sight of the lights of Oklahoma City. (Open Library)

Watches

Illinois watch: In the section headed "Old-Timer Takes a Drink", an unshaven old man in a crumpled pinstripe suit earns free shots in an empty afternoon bar by naming each whisky blind, and fumbles a gold watch from his vest pocket by its chain to show the bartender: a fob the bartender reads as Woodsmen of the World, a grinning horse engraved on the back and, inside the case, the engraved factory of the Illinois Watch Company. He says he was a horsetrader who took the watch from a young homesteader in Coffeyville, Kansas, about 1879, in an even trade for an Appaloosa. He is never named. The text names the maker only.

Source text: Retrieves watch. Bartender still holding chain, looking at the fob. Old man opens the back, displaying engraved factory. "But look a here. Illinois Watch Company. And there's ..." (Philip Kimball, Harvesting Ballads, scan cataloged as Dutton, 1984, p. 21, in the section "Old-Timer Takes a Drink", which begins on p. 19; the trade for the Appaloosa is told on p. 22; Internet Archive scan OCR)