The Mother Who Heeled For Her Boy

“Too green,” Lance said. He said it to me, not to Colt, but he said it loud enough, and my boy was sitting his horse ten feet away.

It was the Monday before the county fair. Late morning, already hot, the kind of August day in western South Dakota when the grasshoppers click up out of the grass ahead of your boots.

Lance was leaning on the top pipe of our arena fence with one boot on the bottom rail. He’d driven over in his pickup the way he had nearly every afternoon since school let out, only this time he hadn’t brought his horse.

“I’m roping with a buddy from over east on Saturday,” he said. “He’s got a fast horse and he’s been winning. We can split a bigger pot than anything Colt and I would draw.”

I looked at him. I think I was waiting for the rest of it, the part where he said he was kidding, or the part where he said he’d found Colt another heeler.

“The kid’s not ready, Trish,” he said. “He’s too green for a rodeo. Next year, maybe. You know I’m right.”

Over in the arena, Colt was sitting his sorrel gelding with his rope coiled in his left hand. He had been waiting for his uncle to back into the box so they could run the first steer of the day.

He didn’t say anything. He just nodded, once, and then he started building his loop over again, slow, like the rope needed fixing, which it did not.

That was the part I could not stand. Not what Lance said. The way my boy nodded, like he had expected it all along.

All Summer

I need to tell you about the summer, so you understand what Lance walked away from that Monday.

Colt turned fifteen in May. He had been heading steers on the practice dummy since he was nine, and on live cattle since he was twelve, mostly with his dad heeling behind him in our home arena.

Then in the first week of July my husband got his leg caught wrong coming down off the hay stacker, and he broke it in two places below the knee. The doctor in town put him in a cast to the thigh.

He was not a man who sat well. He sat in a lawn chair by the arena gate with his crutches across his lap and watched every steer we ran, and you could see it cost him something not to be out there.

That was when Lance stepped in. Lance is my husband’s older brother, forty-seven, and he is a good heeler. I will say that for him all day long. He has roped since he was a boy and he has the buckles to prove it.

“I’ll rope with the kid,” Lance told his brother, the second week of July. “All summer. We’ll take him to the county rodeo in August and we’ll win it.”

My husband shook his hand on it. I remember that. Two brothers shaking hands by a lawn chair, one of them in a cast.

And Lance showed up. I will say that for him too. Three, four afternoons a week, he hauled his bay horse over and they ran steers until the cattle got sour and we had to turn them out and bring in fresh ones.

Three steers a day, sometimes five. Colt turned every one of them for his uncle. By the end of July he was getting a clean head catch on most of them, and he was learning to set the steer up so the heeler had a good shot.

“Kid’s handy,” Lance said once, coiling up after a run. “He listens. That’s half of it.” Colt didn’t say anything then either, but I saw him smile into his horse’s mane.

So you can see why I stood there that Monday with my mouth half open. A month of afternoons. A promise made to a man in a cast. And four days before the rodeo, a buddy with a fast horse.