The Spring Branding Nine Neighbors Ran

Telling Kyle

I told Kyle the next afternoon, in the infusion chair, with a warm blanket over his knees and the bag dripping into the port in his chest.

I almost did not. He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds that spring, down from a hundred and ninety.

He listened to the whole thing without saying a word. Then he looked out the window at the parking lot for a long time, and I watched his jaw work under the gray stubble.

“Earl stood up with me at our wedding,” he said finally. “Did you remember that? He wasn’t even working for us yet. Dad asked him to, because my cousin got the flu.”

“I remember,” I said.

He reached over and took my hand. His hand was cold from the infusion and the bones in it felt like a bird’s bones.

“Do what you’d do if I wasn’t sick,” he said. “Don’t do it softer because I’m in this chair, and don’t do it harder because you’re scared. Just do it right.”

Why I Did Not Just Fire Him That Day

I know what some people would say. Call the sheriff. Run him off that night. Sue him for every penny. I thought all of that too, believe me.

What I did was drive to Thedford and sit down with the county attorney, a quiet woman named Kathy Ostrander who grew up two ranches over from my folks.

I laid every statement and every check copy on her desk.

She read them all. Then she told me the truth.

“This is felony theft, Rachel, and I’ll file it. But I need the Broken Bow bank records first, and that takes a subpoena and some time. If he knows before then, he can move money.”

“How long?” I asked.

“A week or two to file,” she said. “The case itself? Realistically, a year. Maybe more. These things move slow out here. I’m sorry. The law moves in seasons.”

The calves did not move in seasons. They were already two and three months old, and our branding had been set for the second Saturday in May since February.

You brand them young, while they are still small enough to wrestle, before you turn the pairs out to summer grass.

So for nine days I kept Earl on, because the county attorney asked me to. I said good morning to him. I signed the feed bill he brought me.

I watched him load the round bale feeder and joke with Brynn about her rope, and I smiled back at him, and I felt sick every single minute.

On Friday at four o’clock Kathy called and said the charges were filed. A deputy would deliver the summons Monday. I called Earl and asked him to come to the house at six.

The Night Before

After Earl drove away, I did the math on the branding. Three hundred cows meant somewhere close to three hundred calves.

That is a full day’s work for a crew of fifteen. Without a crew, it is not a day’s work at all. It is impossible.

Out here you do not hire a branding crew. You trade.

The neighbors come to your branding, and you go to theirs, and the women bring food, and nobody sends a bill. It has worked that way since before Kyle’s grandfather.

But Earl had always made the calls. Every year in March he got on the phone and set the dates with the Hagens and the Lindqvists and the Pruitt brothers and the rest, so nobody’s branding landed on anybody else’s.

I tried calling Walt Hagen at eight o’clock. It went to his machine.

I tried Mike Lindqvist and got his wife, Barb, who said Mike was out checking heifers and she would have him call. He did not call.

All night I thought about Earl’s voice at the door. Those men come because I call them. I could not stop hearing it.