“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
I drove home thinking about that. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted Earle to be simple. People are almost never simple, and it makes me tired that they’re not.
Winter in Kaycee does not care what you’ve decided.
By December the snow was drifted to the top rail in the pen. Elsa shoveled out a strip along the south fence, maybe forty feet long, where the wind kept it thin. She roped the dummy there with frost on her eyelashes and her breath going straight up.
When it was too cold for Rooster she roped on foot. Over and over at a bale with two sticks jammed in the bottom for heels. I’d watch her from the kitchen window with my coffee, a small figure in Doyle’s old Carhartt coat, swinging and throwing.
In January she started calving season with us, which means nights. Doyle and I and Elsa took turns checking heifers every two hours. She did her checks and then came in and slept three hours and got on my bus at 6:40 in the morning.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
I did not cut her any slack on that bus. She sat in the fourth seat with her earbuds in and her roping notebook on her knee. Sometimes she’d fall asleep against the window going over Mayoworth hill.
There was one night in February I want to tell about.
It was about two in the morning and twelve below. Elsa was on the heifer check and she was late coming back in. I pulled on my boots and went out to find her.
She was in the calving shed with a heifer that had a backwards calf, and she was on her knees in the straw with the chains on. She’d already called the house phone from the shed and Doyle was coming, but she hadn’t waited.
By the time I got there the calf was out. A little red bull calf, steaming in the straw, and Elsa was rubbing him with a feed sack, hard, the way Doyle taught her.
He took his first breath while I watched. Elsa sat back on her heels and laughed out loud. Just once.
Then she looked up at me and her face changed. She was crying. My girl who never cried.
“I thought I lost him,” she said. “Mom, I thought I lost him.”
I got down in the straw with her. I didn’t say anything. I just put my arm around her and we sat there, the two of us and the heifer licking the calf, and the light bulb swinging a little in the draft.
“I’m going to rope him,” she said after a while, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “At branding. I’m going to rope this one myself.”