The Rope She Handed Her Uncle

“You’ll rope all of them,” I said.

I didn’t know I believed it until I heard myself say it.

Etta, Doyle and Earle’s mother, still lived in the old house on the place. She was seventy-seven and she still drove herself to church in Kaycee every Sunday and to the senior lunch in Buffalo on Wednesdays.

Elsa went over there in March with a pan of brownies I’d made and stayed two hours. When she came home she was quiet.

“Grandma Etta told me something,” she said. We were out at the clothesline, because it was the first warm day and I’d hung sheets out in the wind.

“What?”

“She said Grandpa pulled Uncle Earle off a horse at branding when Earle was twelve. In front of everybody. Because he missed three in a row.” Elsa held a clothespin in her teeth for a second and took it out. “She said Earle didn’t rope again for two years.”

I stood there with a wet pillowcase in my hands.

“Did she tell you that so you’d forgive him?” I asked.

Elsa shook her head. “She said she was telling me so I’d know what I was up against. She said a man does what was done to him, unless somebody shows him different.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I still don’t, exactly. I hung up the pillowcase.

By April the notebook was full. She started a second one.

Doyle and I sat down with it one night and went through the numbers, because Elsa had asked us to check her math. She wanted to know her catch percentage on heel loops over the last thirty days.

It was ninety-one percent. On the dummy and on the neighbors’ practice calves both.

Doyle closed the notebook and set it on the table. He didn’t say anything for a minute.

“Your grandpa never threw ninety-one percent in his life,” he said finally. “Don’t tell your Uncle Earle I said that.”

Elsa grinned. It was the first time I’d seen her grin about roping since the year before.

“I’m not telling Uncle Earle anything,” she said. “I’m just going to rope.”

We set our branding for the Saturday before Memorial Day again. Doyle called the neighbors in April, same as always. Thirty-four people said they’d come.

The week before, Elsa rode Rooster every evening, slow, just loping circles, to keep him legged up. She also borrowed a second horse from Edwin, a sorrel mare named Penny who was old and steady and had dragged more calves than anybody in the county. Penny would take the morning. Rooster would finish the day.

“You’ll need two,” Edwin told her. “One horse can’t do a whole branding. Not a hundred and forty head.”

“How many are we branding?” I asked Doyle.