The Mother Who Heeled For Her Boy

Lance

The draw was posted Thursday. Twelve teams in the open roping. Lance and his buddy were fourth out. Colt and I were ninth.

Lance saw our names. I know he did, because his wife saw them and called my husband, and my husband told me at supper.

“She said he looked at that sheet a good long time,” my husband said. “Didn’t say a word. Just got in his truck.”

Lance did not call. Not Thursday, not Friday. I want to be fair to him, so I will say I do not think it was meanness. I think he did not know what to say, and Kolb men, when they do not know what to say, generally say nothing.

Friday afternoon Colt and I ran six more steers and then turned the cattle out. You do not want to rope the edge off a horse the day before a rodeo, especially a horse that is nineteen.

I gave Pepper a bath with the hose behind the barn. She dropped her head and let me wash her face. Her gray was going white around her eyes. I had not noticed that before. Or maybe I had noticed and not let myself think about it.

“One more time,” I told her. “Just one more time, and then you can go back to taking the little one to the mailbox.”

That night I lay awake a long time. I was not worried about the steer. I was worried about Colt. I was worried I would miss, and he would think it was his fault, and that one more grown-up would have let him down.

I said my prayers twice. The second time I just said the same thing over: Let me catch for him. That’s all. Let me catch for him.

Saturday

Saturday was a hot sunny August afternoon. The fairgrounds sat at the edge of town with the grain elevator standing up white behind them, and the dust off the parking lot hung in the air like flour.

The arena was dirt, worked up soft and smooth that morning with a disc and a harrow. Metal pipe fences ran around it, painted white a long time ago. The small grandstand was only about a third full, with folks spread out along the benches.

Mostly ranch families, sitting in ones and twos. Women in lawn chairs they had carried up into the stands, grandkids with sno-cones, men in feed store caps. And along the pipe fences down by the chutes, the old ropers stood the way they always do, forearms on the top rail, watching every run like they had money on it.

The rodeo opened at one o’clock with a prayer from a rancher’s wife who teaches Sunday school, and then the anthem. Everybody stood. My husband stood on his crutches with his hat over his heart, up in the second row, and I watched him do it from the back of my horse.

I was wearing my good red western shirt, the pearl-snap one I had not had on since a wedding two summers before. My braid was down my back under my tan straw hat. Colt had his white straw on, the one he got for his birthday.

The team roping came after the saddle broncs. Colt and I were horseback early, warming up slow in the back pen behind the chutes. I kept Pepper at a long trot, letting her loosen up.

That was where I saw Lance. He and his buddy were horseback over by the stock trailers. His buddy was riding a tall, fast-looking dun. Lance was on his bay.

Lance looked at me across the pen. He touched his hat brim. I touched mine back. That was all.

Colt saw it too. He didn’t say anything.