Earle stood there a long time. Long enough that the neighbors on the fence started looking at their boots.
Then he took off his hat. He held it against his chest for a second, the way men in our country do at a funeral, or when the flag goes by at the Fourth parade in Buffalo.
“My dad pulled me off a horse,” he said. “In this pen. Right about there.” He pointed with the hat. “And I never once asked if he was right. I just did it to the next kid who was slow, because that’s what you did.”
Elsa didn’t say anything. She just held the rope out.
“I did it to you,” Earle said. “I’m sorry, Elsa. I was wrong. I was wrong in front of everybody, so I’m saying it in front of everybody.”
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He put his hat back on. Then he reached up and took the rope out of her hand.
Elsa got off Rooster and handed him the reins. The same bay horse he had taken from her a year before. He swung up, slow, an old roper’s careful swing, and rode into the pen.
He built a loop. He rode up on that little red bull calf, and he threw, and he caught both heels on the first try.
He dragged it to the fire. Elsa went to the ground herself and flanked it, with Elliot Hager’s boy holding the front end. Doyle put our brand on it. The smoke went up white in the sun.
When it was done, Earle rode back to the fence and got down. He handed Rooster’s reins back to Elsa.
“I’d be glad,” he said, “if you’d let me rope with you next year. You take the first half. I’ll take the second.”
Elsa looked at him for a long time.
“Second half’s the big ones,” she said.
“I know it,” Earle said. “I’m older than you. I’m used to it.”
And then, for the first time in a year, she laughed at something he said.
People on the fence started clapping then. Not loud. Just neighbors clapping, the way you do at the end of a ball game when your team didn’t win but played well.
Edwin walked over and handed Elsa the feed sack with the tally on it. Hundred fifty-two marks in carpenter’s pencil, and at the bottom, in different handwriting, he’d written “Earle, 1.”
Grandma Etta got up out of her lawn chair. She walked across the pen in her church shoes, through the dust, which I had never once seen her do. She put her hand on Earle’s arm.
“Your dad would have been wrong about that one too,” she said to him. “I should have said so when you were twelve.”