The First Saturday in March
It was dry that morning, the way it gets in March in our part of Texas before the spring rain. The pens were dusty. The calves were black and bawling and full of themselves, mostly Angus cross, a few with white faces off the Hereford bull Mom kept.
The crew came at six thirty. Ike, Joe, Jerome, two of my high school boys, Homer, and Barry. Kerry came with a box of sausage biscuits from the store in De Leon and set it on the hood of her car.
Ferris came out of the barn last. He had the vaccine gun and the cooler and the ear tags. He looked at the stand and looked at Mom up on it and did not say anything.
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Mom was in her blue chambray work shirt with the right sleeve cut and pinned around the cast. She had her white braid down her back and a red bandana tied at her neck, the one she has worn to every working I can remember.
She had a pen in her shirt pocket and the new tally book on the shelf in front of her. A new green book for a new year. She had written “Spring 2026” across the top of the first page in her own hand.
I was down in the alley in my tan cap with the sorting stick. Barry was at the head catch. Homer was on the back gate.
“Bring them,” Mom called.
Calling the Calves
Ike and Jerome pushed the first bunch into the crowding pen and then into the alley. They came down in a line, black and dusty, crowding each other.
Mom called every one before it reached me.
“Steer,” she said. “Steer. Heifer. That’s the Mercer cow’s heifer, Jerome, she’s got your cow’s ears. Bull calf. Bull calf, Vivian, he’s turning, watch him.”
I swung the gate. I swung it the way she had taught me when I was nine years old, standing beside her on a milk crate. Steer this way. Heifer that way.
She wrote every count in the book, her fingers sticking out of the cast. She did not miss one. She did not slow us down once. If anything we went faster, because she could see them coming twenty feet before I could.
At one point a big bull calf hit the alley boards and bounced and came down sideways, and she said “Hold him,” and I held him, and she said “Now,” and I swung, and he went through clean.
Ike looked up at her from the crowding pen and grinned. He did not say anything. He did not need to.
By ten forty-five we had sixty-one calves through the chute. Branded, tagged, shot, the bull calves banded. One heifer was still out in the trap with her mama, and Jerome went to get her.