The Branding I Ran Myself

The Phone Calls I Dreaded

Firing Gil was easy next to what came after.

That was picking up the phone and asking my neighbors to come help, after four years of us pulling back into ourselves and letting the branding crew drift away.

That is the thing nobody tells you about a sick house. You stop asking. You are so tired and so proud and so scared that you quit calling people.

Then one day you look up and the help has drifted off, not from meanness, just from not being asked.

Gil had been the one who asked. And Gil had been the one, I came to understand, who quietly turned people sour.

A word here about Delbert, a word there about somebody else.

He kept the crew small and himself the center of it, because a small crew is easier to run money past.

So I had to call people I had not spoken to in years. I had to say, in so many words, I need you.

I need you at sunup, I need your horse, and I cannot pay you anything but dinner and a day of mine when you brand.

That last part is not nothing, understand. Out here you do not pay cash for branding help.

You trade days. You come to my calves in May and I come to yours in June.

The books between neighbors are kept in work, not money, and they always balance in the end.

But I had missed four years of coming to anybody’s. My book with the whole county was four years in the red.

And here I was calling to ask for more. I called Delbert first because he was the hardest. He let me get it all out, the whole stumbling ask.

Then he was quiet a second and said, “I always wondered what Gil told you about that water gap. Figured it wasn’t the truth.

You should’ve called me two years ago, Trisha. I’d have come.”

I called nine houses, and nine times somebody said yes before I was finished asking. Some of them I could hear getting their boots on while we talked.

My girls sat at the table listening to me make those calls. Jo was sixteen and Mae was fourteen.

They had spent two years being quiet in a quiet house, and I watched something come back into their faces with every yes.

“We’re really doing it,” Mae said when I hung up the last one. “Just us.”

“Not just us,” I said. “That’s the whole point. Not just us.”

The Fire and the Irons

A branding in the Sandhills has not changed much in a hundred years, and I was glad of that.

I needed the old way to carry me when my own nerve ran thin. We gathered the pairs the evening before.

We eased them into the big corral, cows and calves together, so they would mother up in the night and be settled by morning.

You do not run fat off a calf the day you brand it. At sunup the ropers saddled and the fire went under the irons.

It was a propane pot my dad bought in 1986 that still throws heat like the devil’s own stove.

The irons laid in it till the Lazy T Bar, our brand, glowed the color of a sunrise.

Two neighbors roped. Delbert and a younger fellow named Cy Petersen rode into the herd slow and easy.

They heeled the calves by the hind legs, one loop, and dragged them to the fire on a tight rope.