The Branding I Ran Myself

The Spring Everything Tilted

Wayne found the lump himself, shaving, the February before last.

By April he had a port under the skin of his chest and a schedule of treatments two hours away in town.

Our whole life tilted on its edge and slid.

I will not make you sit through all of it. If you have watched someone you love go through chemotherapy, you already know the shape of that year.

The counts and the fevers. The way a strong man gets careful on the stairs. What it meant for the ranch was simple. Wayne could not work.

His numbers would drop and the doctor would say stay away from the dust and the cattle and the crowds.

A cold that would knock me down for a day could put him in the hospital.

We hired a kid from town to do the feeding when I was gone, and Gil stayed on and ran the day to day.

For a while I was so swallowed up in Wayne’s care that I barely saw the ranch at all.

I would leave before light to drive him to town. I would sit with him while the bag dripped into the port and drive him home in the dark.

The place ran itself around me like a river around a rock.

So I took over the books. All of them, the ones I had always done and the ones Gil had always done.

Somebody had to see the whole picture now, and I was the only one left standing to see it.

I sat at the kitchen table that first week with the checkbook and the lease folder and the bank statements.

I started matching things up the way my mother taught me. A pencil and a steno pad and no hurry.

I did it to feel useful. Wayne was asleep in the recliner by two in the afternoon and the house was too quiet.

I needed a job my hands and my head could both hold. I did not do it to catch anybody. I want that on the record.

I was not suspicious. I was just finally, for the first time in twelve years, looking at all of it at once.

And the longer I looked, the colder the kitchen got, though the woodstove was going the whole time.

The Grass That Walked Away

The first thing that did not add up was the summer grass.

We graze other men’s yearlings on our north country every summer, have for thirty years. A rancher down south brings up four hundred head in May.

They put on weight on our grass till September, and he pays us by the head for the gain.

It is good money and steady money. And it was money Gil handled start to finish.

He weighed the cattle in and out, dealt with the owner, and brought me the check.

The checks I had were short. Not every year, and never by a wild amount. But short.

The count Gil wrote in the book was three hundred and twenty head one summer.

The brand inspection slip in the same folder, the one the state man wrote, said four hundred and two.

Eighty-two yearlings, grazed all summer on our grass, that never showed up in our money. That was one summer.

When I went back year on year, there was a short count in nearly every one.

I sat there with the brand papers in one hand and Gil’s tally in the other. I kept thinking there has to be a reason.

I am reading it wrong. Wayne will know.

But Wayne was asleep, and the papers did not change when I read them again. The state inspector does not make up numbers.

He counts cattle through a chute. That is his whole job. Gil had been bringing me a check for part of the grass and keeping the rest.

Year after year, in amounts small enough that a busy woman running a sick husband to town would never catch them.

I did not cry that afternoon. I remember being surprised at myself. Something just went very quiet and very level inside me, like water finding its line.