PrimeWire

Around the turn of the 19th century into the 20th a man is being educated.  He goes to college, a rare and entitled thing at the time.  He studies the classics and is heralded as brilliant.  As a young man, both he and his brother are taught the ways of the ranch by an older man only known as Bronco Henry.
Now Phil is grown, as is his brother George.  They ranch more successfully than most in the wilds of Montana, 1925.  A cattle drive takes them to a remote restaurant owned and operated by a widow called Rose and her son, the delicate paper-flower-making Peter.
As the rowdy group of men are served chicken by a pale waif of a boy, Phil bristles like a dog.  His words spit and sting.  He sees something in George that he cannot tolerate.  And as for Rose?  Well, she, as a woman, is of no interest nor use to Phil.  None whatsoever.
In short time George and Rose marry, bringing their newly melded family of three into the large mansion on the ranch with Phil.
It turns out, what Phil sees in George may just be everything he hates in himself, everything he has worked these many years to press down and down.  Artful, weak, effete, delicate, and civilized.  Nowadays Phil never washes, never bends, never shares.
And yet, when he spends time alone, it is with a length of silk.  Our boy may have been taught a bit more of the ways of the Greeks by Henry than anyone else knows.
He now spends his life struggling against this personification of what his life may have been, what he still may wish it had been.  Until Phil starts to bend, until he starts to share, until he starts to wash.  And we see him there, exposed without his armor of mud and smoke and bitterness.
Laid bare, what will pierce his heart now?  An arrow or a knife?