The Stand I Built by the Alley

After

When the calves were out on the cows and the crew was eating biscuits on the tailgates, Homer climbed up the stand and sat next to his grandmother. That is what he calls her now. Grandma Frances. She is not his grandmother, but nobody has corrected him and nobody is going to.

He took out his phone and showed her the picture of the 1996 tally book, the page with her name and the little star.

She laughed. “Your Granddaddy Clarence never let me forget that one,” she said. “I had that heifer in with the steers and he had to cut her out at the sale barn.”

Then she opened the new book and turned to the page for today. Next to the line that said sixty-two, she wrote, in pen, “Ferris.” And next to it she drew a little star.

She did not explain it to anybody. Homer looked at it and looked at her and looked down the alley at his father, who was loading the cooler into his truck.

“Can I show him?” Homer asked.

“Not today,” she said. “Let him have today. Show him in the fall.”

The Fall Working

We worked the spring calves again this past October. Mom’s cast has been off since the middle of March. She has a scar across the inside of her wrist and she says it tells the weather better than the radio.

She sat on the stand. She called the gate. Ferris ran the alley right behind me and did not say one word about how fast or how slow.

When we were done, Ferris walked up to the stand and held up his hand for the book, and she handed it to him, and he wrote the count in it himself, and handed it back.

He saw the star. I saw him see it. He stood there looking at it for a while. Then he said, “That’s fair,” and went back to his truck.

What I Know Now

I have thought a lot about that day in the alley. About the sound her wrist made against that post. About Ferris not looking down.

I have thought about how easy it would have been to do the other thing. To call the sheriff, or go to a lawyer in Comanche, and make it a war. I would have been in the right. I might even have won.

But we would have lost the pens. We would have lost the working. Barry would have lost his brother and Homer would have lost his uncle, and Mom would have lost the one place in the world where she is still the best at something.

Instead I welded a stand. Homer helped. Barry leveled it. Ike and Joe and Jerome said what needed saying, in their few words. And Ferris found his own way back up the alley, with that dusty book in his hand.

My mother is seventy-five now. She still keeps the tally book. She still calls every calf before it reaches the gate.

And I still stand down in the alley in my cap, swinging the gate the way she taught me on a milk crate when I was nine, listening for her voice above me.

“Steer,” she calls. “Heifer. Watch him, Vivian. Now.”

And I swing it, and they go through clean.