The Mother Who Heeled For Her Boy

Pepper

Pepper was out in the near pasture with the two old saddle horses we keep for company. She is a gray mare, nineteen this spring, and she was standing in the shade of the windbreak switching flies.

I bought her as a three-year-old when I was twenty-four years old with money I had saved from two summers of waiting tables at the café in town. Everybody said I paid too much. Everybody was wrong.

She was my heel horse for the two seasons before Colt came along. I won a buckle on her. I won a saddle on her once, at a roping two counties over, heeling for a girl I went to high school with.

Then Colt came along, and then his little sister, and there were calves to pull and a garden and four hundred cows and a husband who needed me in the hayfield more than on the rodeo road. I hung up my rope. I did not hang it up on purpose. It just stayed on the nail.

Pepper became the kids’ horse. Colt learned to ride on her. His sister still rode her to the mailbox some days, a mile and a half down the gravel and back.

I had not heeled at a rodeo in fifteen years. I had thrown a loop now and then, doctoring calves in the pasture, but that is not the same thing. That is roping a calf that is standing still and hoping it stays that way.

I walked out to her with the halter over my shoulder. She lifted her head and looked at me. She came to me across the grass like I had called her, though I had not.

I saddled her at the hitch rail in front of the barn. She stood quiet while I cinched up, and when I put my boot in the stirrup she did a thing she used to do years ago. She cocked her head around and looked at my knee.

“I know, old girl,” I said. “I know. It’s been a while for both of us.”

Colt came out of the house with his hat on and stopped at the barn door. He looked at Pepper, and at me, and at the rope I had taken down off the nail in the tack room.

“Mom,” he said. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t,” I said. “Go get your horse.”