The Mother Who Heeled For Her Boy

Four Days

The first afternoon was bad. I am not going to pretend it was anything else.

We started on the roping dummy, a plastic steer head on a frame with a set of hind legs that we pull on a sled. My husband’s lawn chair was set up by the gate, his crutches across his knees.

My first ten loops were ugly. My swing was flat. My loop closed up before it got there. Twice I roped my own horse’s front feet, and once I threw the whole loop over the dummy’s back where no hind leg has ever been.

“Turn your wrist over,” my husband said from his chair. “You’re throwing it like a calf rope. You used to have the prettiest swing in the county.”

“I used to be twenty-six,” I said.

But I turned my wrist over. And on the eleventh loop it went where I wanted, and the legs came into it, and I pulled my slack, and my husband slapped his cast with his open hand.

“There she is,” he said.

Then we put two of the slow steers in the chute. Colt headed them and I came in behind on Pepper, and I missed the first one entirely. On the second I caught one hind foot, which in a rodeo is a five-second penalty.

On the third I caught two feet. I dallied around the horn, and Pepper stopped and sat down on her hocks the way I had trained her to do when she was five years old, and Colt turned his sorrel to face us.

Nobody said anything for a second. The steer stood there in the loops looking put out. Colt looked at me from under the brim of his hat.

“That was good, Mom,” he said. “That was real good.”

Pepper was the one doing it. I knew that. She remembered every bit of it. When the steer turned off, she was already moving to where my loop needed to be. She rated the steer like she had never stopped. All I had to do was stay out of her way and throw.

Tuesday afternoon we ran twelve steers. I caught nine. Five of them were by two feet. Wednesday morning, before entries closed, we ran ten more and I caught eight, and six of those were clean.

At a quarter to twelve on Wednesday I called the rodeo secretary. Her name is Leatha, and she has kept the books for the county fair rodeo since before I was born.

“Kolb and Kolb in the team roping,” I said. “Colt heading, me heeling. Seventy dollars apiece.”

There was a little quiet on the line. “Trish Kolb,” she said. “I haven’t written your name on a heeling sheet since your boy was in diapers.”

“I know it,” I said.

“Well, I’m glad to see it,” she said. “Bring cash or a check to the window by Saturday noon. You’re entered.”