The Stand I Built by the Alley

The Neighbors Talk

The spring working was set for the first Saturday in March, for the fall-born calves. Branding, shots, tags, and the bull calves banded. Sixty-two calves, give or take.

The week before, Ike Whitley called me. Ike has helped at the Pruitt pens for twenty years. He runs a few cows down the road toward Gustine and used to rodeo.

“I hear Frances is going to be at the working,” he said.

“She is,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “I wasn’t coming if she wasn’t.” Then he hung up. Ike is not a talker either.

The day before the working, Joe Stamps called, and then Jerome Mercer. Same thing. Different words. Jerome said, “Clarence Pruitt would come out of the ground if he knew.” I told him I did not need anybody coming out of the ground. I just needed help working calves.

I found out later that every one of them had called Ferris, too. None of them said it ugly. Ike told him, “Frances calls the gate or I don’t sort.” That was the whole conversation.

That was the consequence, I suppose. Not a court. Not a sheriff. Just the men Ferris had worked beside his whole life telling him plain, in their own way, that what he did was not how it is done.

It is a hard thing for a proud man, to have his neighbors tell him that. I know it was. I am not glad it was hard. But I am not sorry, either.

Hauling It Up

Friday evening, Barry hooked the stand to his little tractor with a chain and dragged it on the skids, slow, across the pasture and through the gate into the Pruitt side.

Homer rode on the deck the whole way, holding the rail. Mom walked beside it with her coffee in her good hand. It took twenty minutes to go less than half a mile.

Ferris’s truck was at the barn. He did not come out.

We set the stand outside the alley fence right at the sort gate, where I had measured it. Barry leveled it with a jack and some old boards. I chained it to a corner post so a cow could not shove it.

Mom climbed up and sat down and looked down the alley. She moved the seat four inches to the left. She asked for her cushion. Homer ran to get it out of my truck.

“Well,” she said, looking down the alley at the empty pens. “Now I can see everything.”