The Girl Who Rode the Sheep

“No,” I said. “They didn’t have mutton busting at our fair when I was little. I would have, though. I would have wanted to so bad.”

She buttoned the top button herself and looked at me in the mirror with her chin up. “Then I’m riding one for you,” she said, like it was decided and filed.

I had to go stand in the hallway for a minute after that.

The county fair arena sits at the north end of the fairgrounds, with metal pipe fences gone rusty brown with age and bleachers on the west side so the crowd has the sun at its back in the afternoon. By one thirty those bleachers were full.

It was a sunny August afternoon, ninety-four degrees with no wind to speak of, which in eastern Colorado is something close to a miracle.

You could smell funnel cake from the midway and cattle from the barns and the water truck that had just wet the arena dirt down.

The mutton busting kids lined up behind the chutes with their parents. A man from the fair board went down the line and pinned a paper number to the back of every shirt. Emmy’s said nineteen. Bentley’s said seven.

“Emmy! Are you riding too? Are you really?”

“I’m nineteen,” she told him, and turned around so he could see the number pinned on her back.

“I’m seven,” he said. “Seven goes way before nineteen.”

“I know,” Emmy said. “I can count, Bentley.”

Ashlyn was right behind him, with Dane behind her. Ashlyn’s eyes went to the number on Emmy’s back and stayed there.

Dane walked over and put his big hand on top of Emmy’s helmet and gave it a little knock with his knuckle.

“That’s on tight,” he said. “Good. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

The man running the chutes was a former rodeo clown named Rollin.

He was maybe forty, lean as a fence post, in jeans, a blue plaid shirt and a straw cowboy hat. He had worked rodeos all over the high plains for twenty years.

When he got to Emmy, he crouched down until his hat brim was level with the top of her helmet. His boots creaked like a saddle.

“First time?” he asked her.

“Yes, sir,” Emmy said, and she stood up very straight, the way I taught her to with grown-ups she does not know.

“You scared?” he asked.

Emmy thought about it, the way she does, with her lips pressed together. “A little,” she said. “In my stomach. Not in the rest of me.”

“Good,” Rollin said. “Everybody worth anything is a little scared in their stomach. Now listen to me, because this is the whole secret and I only tell it to the good ones.”

He held up one finger. “You hug that sheep. Don’t sit up like a cowboy on the television. You lay down flat, you put your face in the wool, you wrap your arms around her neck and hook your feet in under her. She runs, you go with her.”

He held up a second finger. “You come off, you roll and you get up. You don’t lay there. You get up. That’s it. That’s all twenty years of what I know, right there.”

“Face in the wool,” Emmy said, and she said it like she was writing it down inside herself.

“Face in the wool,” Rollin said, and he tipped that cowboy hat to her and went on down the line to the next kid.