The Stand I Built by the Alley

The Bills

The cast did not hold. That happens sometimes with older bones, the doctor said. At three weeks the X-ray showed the bone had slipped, and she needed surgery to put a plate in it.

The surgeon in Brownwood did it the week after Christmas. Mom went in at six in the morning and asked the nurse if they had coffee for the family. They put her in a new cast after and said eight more weeks.

The bills came in through January. The emergency room, the X-rays, the surgery, the anesthesia, the follow-ups. Medicare paid its share. When it was done, Mom’s part came to $3,100.

She paid it out of the coffee can she keeps in the pantry, which is mostly calf money. She did not tell me she had paid it until it was done.

Three thousand one hundred dollars is not nothing for a widow running forty cows in Comanche County. It is nearly the price of a good bred heifer. It is a year of her property taxes.

I found the receipts in her truck, clipped together with a clothespin. I did not say anything to her. I took a picture of them with my phone and put them back.

Under the Lean-to

I teach welding. I have taught it for nineteen years. I have kids who have gone on to the pipeline, kids who build trailers, kids who weld for the refinery in Big Spring.

What I know is that you can fix a lot of things with a good plan and a good bead.

Mom could not stand in the alley anymore. That part was true, even if Ferris had said it the worst way a man could say it. She could not stand there with one good arm and calves coming at her.

But nobody ever said she had to stand in the alley to call a calf.

I measured the alley at the Pruitt pens one Sunday afternoon while Ferris was at church in town. The board fence was fifty-four inches high. The sort gate sat about ten feet up from where the alley widened.

I drew it on a feed store receipt on my tailgate that evening. A raised stand on skids, set outside the alley fence right at the sort gate, so that a woman sitting up there could see every calf coming down and call it before it got to her.

A four-foot deck. A rail all the way around at hip height. Three steps with a handrail on the left side, because her right wrist was the broken one and she would need her good hand to hold on.

A seat. A flat shelf for the tally book. A hook for her coffee thermos. Skids underneath so a tractor could drag it up to the pens and back.

I built it under the lean-to of Mom’s hay barn, with the big doors of the shed open to the pasture and an extension cord run out from the shop for the welder.