The Stand I Built by the Alley

Mom Sees It

Mom was not supposed to know what I was building. She knew. She had known from the first week. A woman who can call a calf from thirty feet in poor light can hear a welder running in her own hay barn.

She came out one evening in February in her barn coat with the right sleeve split up the side to get over the cast, and she stood at the edge of the lean-to and watched.

I had the deck on by then. The rail was up. Homer was tightening the bolts on the steps.

“Vivian,” she said. “What in the world.”

“It’s for the alley,” I said. “You sit up top. You call them. You keep the book. I’ll run the gate down below.”

She walked around it one time. She put her good hand on the rail and shook it hard, the way she shakes a gate to see if it is hung right.

“It’s solid,” Homer said. “We put in the gussets.”

She looked at him. She looked at me. Her mouth did that thing it does.

“Your granddaddy Clarence would have built this,” she told Homer. “He built half those pens.” Then she climbed the steps one-handed, all three, and sat down in the seat and looked out over the pasture.

Nobody said anything for a while. The cows were coming up to the feeder in the last light, black shapes against the grass.

“Well,” she said finally. “It’ll need a cushion.”

That was the closest my mother has ever come in her life to crying in front of me.

Barry Hears About It

I told Barry about the stand the night I started. I am not a woman who does things behind her husband’s back.

He was quiet, the way he gets quiet when something has two sides and he is weighing them. Then he said, “He’s my brother. She’s right. Build it.”

“He’ll fight it,” I said.

“Let him fight it with me,” Barry said. “It’s half my pens.”

That was the thing I had forgotten, or let myself forget. The pens were not only Ferris’s. Clarence Pruitt left the place to both boys. Ferris ran it because he was older and because Barry had the co-op job, but half those cedar posts were my husband’s.

Barry went out to the lean-to the next Saturday and saw Homer there with the grinder. He stood and looked at his nephew a minute.

“Your daddy know you’re out here?” he asked.

“No sir,” Homer said.

Barry nodded. “All right,” he said. “Hand me that level.” And he stayed and helped us set the rail.

Ferris Finds Out

Of course Ferris found out. It is Comanche County. People know your business before you do.

He came out to Mom’s place on a Sunday in late February. I was not there. Mom told me about it afterward, standing in the yard with her coffee.

He pulled in at the cattle guard and got out and walked up to the lean-to and looked at the stand. Homer had oiled the steel by then. Mom said Ferris stood there with his hands on his hips and did not touch it.

Then he walked over to where she was sitting on the porch steps.

“I hear you’re coming back to the gate,” he said.

“I’m coming back to the book,” she said. “Vivian’s taking the gate. I’ll be up on that thing where I can’t get in anybody’s way.”

He stood there. She said he looked tired. She said he looked like Clarence did the year of the drought, when he had to sell down half the herd.

“I’ve got to have the calves on the trailer by noon,” he said. “I can’t have it slow.”

“Then don’t let it be slow,” she said. “I’ll call them before they get to the gate. You’ll be done by eleven.”

He did not say yes. He did not say no. He got back in his truck and left.

Mom said to me afterward, “He didn’t say a word about my arm. Not one word. He looked at the cast like it wasn’t there.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “He’s carrying it. I could see it on him.”