The Branding I Ran Myself

Letting Him Go

I let Gil go on a Tuesday, in the shop, with the door open and the wind coming in off the hills.

I did not want it said anywhere that I did it sneaking. I had thought about how I would say it for two days. I am not a yeller.

My mother was not a yeller and neither am I.

Anyway, yelling would have told him he had reached something in me, and I was not going to give him that.

He came in wiping his hands on a rag, easy, like any morning. I said, “Gil, I went through all the books.

The grass and the hunting both. I called the hunters.”

I watched his face. For one second there was nothing. Then there was everything. Then he put the nothing back on like a man pulling a cap down.

“Trisha,” he started, “you don’t understand how thin you two paid me out here. Twelve years. A man my age, no family.

I built this place up as much as either of you ever did, and I never saw a dime of it in my name.”

So there it was, his reason. In his own head he was not a thief.

In his own head he was a man taking what he had earned and been denied, balancing a book that only he could see.

“You had a house and a truck and a wage and our trust,” I said. “If the wage was thin you could have said so to my face.

Wayne would have given you the shirt off his back. You know that better than anybody.”

He did not have an answer for that one. He looked at the floor.

“The sheriff has it already,” I said. “That part’s not up to me anymore. But you’re done here today. Leave the ranch truck. You can come back Saturday with somebody for your tools.”

He gathered a few things and he drove off in his own old pickup.

I stood in the shop door and watched his dust go down the county road until I could not see it.

Then I went in and made Wayne his lunch.

That was the hardest part, I think. Not the firing. The lunch after. Carrying on with the small things while the big thing sat in the house with us.