The Stand I Built by the Alley

The Words Nobody Said

Driving home on the farm road that night, she said one thing about Ferris.

“He was embarrassed last time,” she said. “About the heifer. I should have let it go and fixed it at the pen.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

“I’m not saying I did wrong,” she said. “I’m saying he’s a proud boy and I know it, and I did it in front of people.”

That is my mother. Somebody breaks her wrist and she wants to be fair about it.

Barry went to see Ferris the next morning. I did not go. I would like to say it was because I was being decent, but mostly it was because I did not trust what my face would do.

Barry told me afterward what was said. They stood out at the hay barn, by the round bales, and Barry asked him straight what happened.

Ferris said she was slow on the gate. He said he had calves stacking up and she was too old to be standing in an alley with five-hundred-pound calves coming at her, and that it was a man’s job now and somebody had to say it.

“Did you push her?” Barry asked him.

“I moved her,” Ferris said. “She tripped.”

Barry said he stood there a long time. Then he said, “I saw her face in that truck, Ferris. She didn’t trip.” And he walked back to his pickup.

Why We Did Not Do the Obvious Thing

People have asked me since why we did not call the sheriff. Or a lawyer. Or just tell Ferris to stay off Mom.

The plain answer is this: Mom’s cows were worked in Ferris’s pens, there was no other set of pens closer than twenty miles, and Mom said she would not sue a neighbor’s boy and split two brothers over her own wrist.

She said it to me in her front yard, standing by the cattle guard with her cast in a sling. She said it once and did not say it again.

“I’m not going to the law over this,” she said. “And neither are you. Daddy and Clarence Pruitt built those pens together. I’m not going to be the one who tears them down.”

I want to be honest. I did not agree with her. I thought Ferris should have been made to pay out of his own pocket, and I thought somebody besides family ought to know what he did.

But it was her wrist and her name and her cows. I am her daughter, not her boss.

So I did the thing I know how to do. I started thinking about steel.