The Rope She Handed Her Uncle

“One fifty-three,” he said. “Heifers did good.”

That Friday night I couldn’t sleep. I got up at midnight and went out to the porch and Elsa was already sitting on the step in her pajamas and a hoodie, looking at the stars.

“Nervous?” I said.

“No.” She shrugged. “Little bit.”

I sat down beside her. The pen was dark down there. You could hear the cows talking in the trap.

“Whatever happens tomorrow,” I said, “you already did it. You did the year. Nobody can take that.”

“I know,” she said. “But I want to do the day too.”

Saturday came up clear and cold, the way it does in late May in that country. Frost on the pickup windshields at five. By eight it was sixty degrees and the dust was already rising.

The neighbors came in trucks and stock trailers, a long line of them down the county road. Elliot Hager and his boy. The Larsons from Barnum. Edwin in his old Ford. Ellen brought two dozen cinnamon rolls and set them on the tailgate without looking at me.

Earle came last. He parked by the shop and got out in his tan hat and a denim shirt and stood by the fence with his arms crossed.

Doyle walked up to the fire and said, loud enough for everybody, “Elsa’s roping today. Start to finish. Anybody wants to spell her, she’ll tell you.”

Nobody said anything. A couple of the older men looked at Earle. Earle looked at the herd.

Elsa rode Penny into the pen with her braid down her back and a teal shirt on, and brown chaps that had been mine when I was a girl. She shook out a loop.

The first calf she missed.

I heard somebody on the fence breathe out. I didn’t look to see who. I watched Elsa.

She didn’t look at anybody. She pulled her slack, built another loop, and rode back in. The second throw caught both hind feet, and she dallied and turned Penny and dragged that calf to the fire like it was nothing.

Elliot Hager’s boy and the youngest Larson flanked it. Doyle put the iron on. The smoke went up. And Elsa was already riding back in for the next one.

After that she didn’t miss for a long time.

I was back at the vaccine table. I lost count by noon, but someone on the fence didn’t. Edwin was keeping a tally on a feed sack with a carpenter’s pencil, the way they used to in the old days.

At noon we stopped to eat. Elsa switched to Rooster and drank a bottle of water standing up. She had dust caked on her face so thick her freckles were gone.

“How many?” she asked Edwin.

“Ninety-four,” he said. “You missed six.”