The Spring Branding Nine Neighbors Ran

The Phone Call

It started with a phone call on a Tuesday in late April.

A man named Jim Brandt runs a yearling outfit out of Broken Bow, and for years he had rented our north pasture, about twenty-two hundred acres along the river, for summer grass.

Earl had always handled the renters. That was the arrangement from the start.

He showed them the fences and the windmills, he counted their cattle in and out, and he brought the checks to the house, and I deposited them and wrote them in the ledger.

Jim did not usually call me. But Earl had not answered his phone, and Jim wanted to lock in the pasture before he bought his cattle.

“Same as last year?” he asked. “Forty-two thousand for the season? I can get you a check this week.”

I was standing at the sink with a dish towel over my shoulder.

I remember that I laughed a little, because I thought he was teasing. “Jim, last year was eighteen. Earl said the price came way down.”

There was a pause on the line. A long one. Then Jim said, very carefully, “Rachel, I paid forty-two thousand last year. And the year before that. I’ve got the canceled checks.”

The Statements

That night, after the girls were in bed, I carried four years of bank statements to the kitchen table.

Kyle was in North Platte. He had stayed over at the hospital because his counts were low after his fifth round.

I want to explain about Kyle, because people always ask where my husband was. He was diagnosed with lymphoma the October before last.

He had the first chemo, and it worked, and then in the winter it came back, and he started a second kind that was harder.

For eighteen months I had driven him the seventy-five miles to North Platte and back more times than I could count.

I had sat in the infusion room with my laptop open on my knees, entering hay bills and vet bills, half listening to the pump beep.

So I sat at the table that night with the statements and a yellow highlighter.

What I found was simple once I knew what to look for. Grazing money that came in short. Hunting money that did not come in at all.

We lease hunting access on the river pasture to an outfitter out of Kearney, deer in the fall and turkeys in the spring.

Earl had told me the outfitter skipped two seasons. When I called the outfitter the next morning, he said he had never skipped one.

Jim mailed me copies of his checks. They were made out to Sorensen Ranch, the way they always had been.

But on the back, every one of them was endorsed by Earl and deposited at a bank in Broken Bow where we have never had an account.

I added it up three times on the old adding machine that had been Kyle’s mother’s. It came to one hundred ninety thousand dollars over four years.

Some years he took part. The last two, while Kyle was sick, he took nearly all of it.

I put my head down on the statements and cried like a child.

Not about the money, though the money was our operating loan and our hay and part of Kenzie’s college. I cried because it was Earl.