Mom could call a calf from thirty feet in poor light. She could tell you whose cow it came off of by the set of its ears. She kept the tally book in her shirt pocket, a green stenographer’s pad, and wrote every count in pencil.
She has a stack of those books going back to 1985. The first ones are in Daddy’s handwriting. After he got sick, they are in hers.
Two weeks before Ferris shoved her, at the fall working, she had corrected him in front of the crew.
We had five neighbors helping that day, and two high school boys of mine earning forty dollars apiece. Ferris was running the alley. He sorted a calf into the steer pen, and Mom said, “That’s a heifer, Ferris. Look again.”
He looked. It was a heifer. One of the boys laughed. Not mean, just the laugh a sixteen-year-old cannot keep in.
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Ferris’s neck went red under his cap. He did not say anything. He moved the heifer and went on. I thought that was the end of it.
It was not. There was a second day of working, for the late calves and the cows that had come in thin, and that is the day he took the gate.
Getting Her to Town
Barry was at the head of the squeeze chute that morning with his back to the alley, running the head catch. Between the calves bawling and the chute banging, he did not hear a thing.
I went and got him. I did not run. I walked down that alley fast and put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Mom’s hurt. Ferris pushed her off the gate. I’m taking her to Brownwood.”
He looked at me. He looked up the alley at his brother. I watched his face go from not understanding to understanding.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll finish the cows. Call me from the hospital.” Then he said, “Vivian. I didn’t see.” “I know you didn’t,” I said.
I got Mom into my pickup. She would not let me lift her. She climbed in with one hand, the way she has climbed into pickups her whole life, and she set her hurt arm on a folded feed sack in her lap.
It is close to an hour from the pens to the hospital in Brownwood, and I took her there because that is where the bone doctors are. She did not cry once. She talked about the cows.
“That big brockle-faced cow of mine is open again,” she said. “I want her on the trailer next week. And there’s a steer with a bad eye in the north pen. Tell Barry.”
“Mom,” I said. “Your wrist is broken.”
“I know it is,” she said. “I can still think.”
At the emergency room they took X-rays and said it was a broken wrist, the big bone right above the joint, and a bad one. A doctor set it there and put her in a splint and then a cast, and sent us home with pills she would not take.
Barry met us in the parking lot at dark. He had driven over in his work truck with the cows still not quite finished. He hugged Mom very carefully, and she let him.