Fifty throws a night. Then a hundred. She kept count in the spiral notebook. Catches in one column, misses in the other, and the date at the top of every page.
In July she helped at four neighbor brandings and asked every one of them to let her drag. Most did. Elliot Hager let her drag his whole second bunch, forty-some calves, and told her afterward she threw a heel loop like his dad.
At the Johnson County Fair in Buffalo she entered the ranch rodeo with a team of girls from Kaycee and Barnum. They placed fourth in the branding event. She came home sunburned and mad about the fourth.
“We were fast enough,” she said. “I missed one. One. It cost us eight seconds.”
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“Fourth is good, honey.”
“Fourth is fourth,” she said, and went out to the barn.
In August her hands blistered so bad she taped her fingers with vet wrap. I found bloody gauze in the bathroom trash and nearly took the rope away from her.
Doyle stopped me in the hall.
“Leave it,” he said. “Those’ll be calluses by September.”
“She’s fifteen.”
“She’s fifteen and she’s decided something,” he said. “You did the same thing about your bus route when old Mr. Pruitt at the bus barn said a woman couldn’t handle the Mayoworth hill in winter.”
He had me there. I had driven that route nine winters by then and never once missed a day.
In September she rode Rooster on the fall gather and helped sort pairs. She roped two calves that needed doctoring out in the open, on the sagebrush flats, no pen, no fence. One was a big black baldy heifer that went three hundred pounds easy.
She came back to the trailer with the heifer doctored and the rope coiled, and our hired man, an old fellow named Edwin who had worked for their father, took off his hat to her.
He didn’t say anything. He just took off his hat. Elsa pretended not to see it. I saw her see it.
Earle was there for some of this. He had to be. We share the same corrals and the same fences and the same coffee pot in the shop.
He’d drive by on the feed truck in the evening and see her roping the dummy and slow down a little, and then speed up again. He never stopped. He never said a word to her about it, good or bad.
His wife Ellen said something to me at the post office in October.
“He knows he did wrong,” Ellen said. “He won’t say it. You know how those Brandt boys are.”
“I know how Doyle is,” I said. “Doyle would have said it by now.”
Ellen looked at the floor. “Their dad was harder on Earle. Earle was the oldest. You didn’t see that.”