The Stand I Built by the Alley

“Gates are a man’s job now, Frances,” Ferris said, and he put his shoulder into my mother like she was a gate post that would not swing.

I was twenty feet up the alley with a sorting stick in my hand and a black heifer calf trying to turn back on me. I saw it the way you see a wreck from the road. Slow, and too far away to stop.

Mom was seventy-four. She had run the sort gate at the Pruitt pens for forty years, every spring and every fall, since before I could see over the boards.

She went sideways into the wooden post at the corner of the alley. She threw out her right hand to catch herself. I heard the sound it made over forty bawling calves.

Then she was sitting in the dust with her arm held against her chest and her mouth pressed flat, the way she pressed it when she would not let a thing show.

Ferris had the gate. He swung it, sent the heifer into the steer pen, and did not look down.

I dropped the stick and climbed the boards. I did not scream. I have never been a screamer. I got down on my knees in the dirt beside my mother and said, “Let me see it.”

“It’s fine, Vivian,” she said. “It’s not fine,” I said, because her wrist had a bend in it that wrists do not have.

The Morning It Happened

I should tell you who we are, because it matters for why I did what I did and why I did not do the easy things.

My name is Vivian Pruitt. I am forty-five. I teach agriculture and welding at the high school in De Leon, Texas, which is in Comanche County, peanut and pecan country, where the mesquite comes back no matter what you do.

I married Barry Pruitt twenty-two years ago. Barry is a good man and a quiet one. He works for the electric co-op and runs cattle on the side with his older brother, Ferris, on the place their daddy left them.

My mother is Frances Sutton. Her land joins the Pruitt land on the south. My daddy and Barry’s daddy worked cattle together for most of their lives, sharing one set of pens because building two made no sense.

Those pens sit on the Pruitt side. Wooden pens, old cedar posts and oak boards, with a long alley that runs down to the squeeze chute. Daddy and Mr. Pruitt built them in 1984.

When Daddy died eleven years ago, Mom kept her forty cows and kept running them with the Pruitt herd. When Mr. Pruitt died three years ago, Ferris took over the Pruitt side, and Mom kept running the gate.

That is how it worked in our family and in a lot of families around us. Nobody wrote it down. Everybody knew it.

The sort gate is the gate in the alley that decides where a calf goes. You stand at it and look at every calf coming down, and you call it and swing it. Steer this way. Heifer that way. Pairs back to the trap.