The Mother Who Heeled For Her Boy

The Phone Calls

Lance drove off. Colt roped the dummy for a while, alone, and then he unsaddled and went to the house without a word to anybody.

I walked over to my husband’s lawn chair. He had heard all of it. He was looking at the dirt between his feet.

“I’d go out there and heel for him myself if I could get my leg over a saddle,” he said. “You know that.”

“I know it,” I said.

“Lance isn’t a bad man,” he said. “He just sees money and he forgets what he said. He’s been that way since he was ten. I’ll talk to him.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Not yet. Let me make some calls.”

A partner can drop you in team roping, and there is nothing in the world to complain to anyone about. It is not a contract. It is a handshake. You do not call the rodeo committee. You just find another heeler.

So I sat on the porch step with the phone and called every heeler I could think of in the county and the next one over. I called four men that afternoon. All four were kind about it. All four were already entered.

“I’m sorry, Trish,” the last one said. “I’d do it in a heartbeat, but I’m roping with my nephew and I’m heeling for a girl in the breakaway besides. I’m spread thin as it is.”

I thanked him and hung up and sat there a while longer. The wind was coming up out of the southwest and moving the grass on the hill behind the barn. The heifers were bunched along the creek in the shade of the cottonwoods.

Entries closed Wednesday at noon. That gave me two days.

I went in the house. Colt’s bedroom door was shut. I could hear him in there, not crying, just moving around, the way a boy moves when he does not want anybody to know what he is feeling.

I knocked. He said come in. He was sitting on the edge of his bed with his rope across his knees, running the honda back and forth with his thumb.

“I called around,” I said. “Everybody’s roped up.”

“It’s fine, Mom,” he said. “He’s right anyway. I’m probably too green.”

“Is that what you think?”

He shrugged. Fifteen years old. He shrugged the way his father shrugs, and his grandfather before that, Kolb men who would rather take a beating than say a thing hurt them.

“I don’t know what I think,” he said.

I stood in his doorway a minute. Then I said, “Get your boots back on. I’ll meet you at the barn.”