The Rope She Handed Her Uncle

“Six,” she said, and frowned, and went back to her horse.

The afternoon was harder. The calves that are left are always the big ones, the ones that dodged the loops all morning, and they’re smart and they’re heavy.

Rooster was fresh and he wanted to work. He had a year of dummy sleds and snow and neighbor pens in him, and he watched the calves like a cutting horse. Elsa would point him and he’d set her up for the throw.

There was a moment around two o’clock when Elsa dragged a big bull calf that hit the end of the rope hard and nearly pulled Rooster around. Her dally slipped. The rope burned through her glove.

I saw her shake her hand. Just once. Then she took the rope back and finished the drag.

Doyle looked at me across the pen. I knew what he was asking. I shook my head. Leave her alone. She’d tell us if she needed us.

Somewhere in there, I looked up at the fence. Earle was still standing there. He hadn’t gone to the ground crew. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He was watching every throw with one hand on the top rail.

Around four o’clock there was one calf left in the pen.

It was the little red bull calf. The one from the February night in the calving shed. I knew him by the white spot on his flank, and I knew Elsa knew him too.

The whole pen had gone quiet. The ground crews were sitting on their heels in the dirt. Doyle had an iron in the fire and nothing to put it on.

“One fifty-two,” Edwin said loudly. “Hundred fifty-two. Lord help me.”

Elsa coiled up her rope. She didn’t build a loop. She sat there on Rooster for a second, looking at the last calf. Then she turned and rode across the pen to the fence, right to where Earle was standing.

She held the rope out to him.

“Your turn, Uncle Earle,” she said. “Last one.”

He didn’t take it at first. He just looked at the rope in her hand.

I was standing maybe twenty feet away. I could see his face under the brim of that tan hat, the black mustache, and his jaw working.

He looked at Elsa. Then he looked at the fence, at all of us, at his brother at the fire, at his mother sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of the stock trailer.

“You did it,” he said. Not loud. “Every one of them.”

“Every one but this one,” Elsa said. “This one’s yours.”

“Why?”

She thought about it. I could see her decide to tell him the truth.

“Because Grandma Etta told me what Grandpa did to you,” she said. “When you were twelve. And I figure nobody ever handed you the rope back.”