The Spring Branding Nine Neighbors Ran

Earl Tolliver looked at the copies of the canceled checks for a long time.

Then he squared the stack with two fingers, the way he used to square a stack of sale barn receipts, and slid it back across my kitchen table.

“You’d never have missed it, Rachel,” he said. “That’s the truth of it. You and Kyle would never have missed a dime.”

He said it the way a man tells you it might rain. No heat in it at all.

The clock over the stove said ten minutes after six, and the light through the west window lay across the oilcloth in a long yellow bar.

I had practiced what I would say for nine days.

I had practiced it in the pickup on Highway 83 and in the waiting room at the cancer center in North Platte and in the shower, where nobody could hear me.

None of it came out. What came out was smaller. “You don’t work here anymore, Earl. I need the keys to the shop and the gas card, and I need you off the place tonight.”

He nodded slowly. He did not argue. He took the ring of keys off his belt loop, worked two of them free with his thumbnail, and set them on top of the checks like a paperweight.

Then he stood and put on his hat, and at the door he turned around.

For one second I thought he was going to say he was sorry. I wanted it so badly that I leaned toward him.

“Branding’s in the morning,” he said. “Who do you think is going to show up for it? Those men come because I call them. They’ve come because I call them for twelve years.”

The screen door slapped shut behind him. I heard his pickup start, and I heard it go down the lane and over the cattle guard, and then I heard nothing but the refrigerator and my own breathing.

I sat at that table until the yellow bar of light slid off the oilcloth and climbed the cabinet doors and went out.

Twelve Years

My name is Rachel Sorensen. I was forty-three that spring.

I keep the books for our ranch, which sits on twelve thousand acres of Sandhills grass north of Thedford, and in those days ran about three hundred cows.

Earl came to work for us when our oldest, Kenzie, was four. Kyle’s dad had just died, and Kyle could not run the place alone and keep the hay up.

Earl had worked for the Hagen outfit for years before that. Everybody in Thomas County knew him.

He was good. I want to say that plainly, because it is true, and because the rest of this does not make sense unless you know it.

He was the best hand with a young horse I have ever seen.

He taught both our girls to rope. He sat on a five gallon bucket in the round pen for whole summer evenings while Kenzie and then Brynn swung at a roping dummy, and he never once raised his voice at either of them.

His wife Norma made the potato salad for every branding we ever had.

She brought it in a big blue enamel roaster, and she always made a second small bowl without onions for Brynn, who hated onions.