The Mother Who Heeled For Her Boy

Pepper

I got off Pepper behind the stock trailers. My knees almost did not hold me. Her sides were going in and out, and her neck was dark with sweat under the gray.

I loosened her cinch. Then I put my face against her neck, right there in the dust behind the trailers, and I just stood there.

She let me. She did not move her feet. She turned her head around and set her nose against my back, the way she used to do when I was twenty-six and had just won that buckle in front of a crowd.

“Thank you,” I said into her mane. “Thank you, old girl. You didn’t forget a thing.”

I heard Colt come up behind me. He did not say anything. He put his hand flat on Pepper’s shoulder, next to mine.

“Thank you, old girl,” he said. Real quiet. And then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a carrot he had been carrying around all day, and he held it out to her on his flat palm.

She took it. She took it as gentle as you please, the way she used to take carrots from him when he was four years old and could barely reach her nose.

I looked at my boy’s face. He was crying a little and trying not to. I did not say anything about it. I just put my arm around his shoulders for a second, and he let me do that too.

The Old Ropers

When we walked back around to the arena, a few of the old ropers came along the fence to us. Not making a fuss. That is not how they do.

Philo shook Colt’s hand. “You turned that steer real nice, son,” he said. “Set him up right where your mother needed him. That’s how it’s done.”

“Thank you, sir,” Colt said.

Philo looked at me. “Your daddy would’ve liked that run, Trish,” he said. That was all. Then he went back to the fence.

Another man I did not know well, a rancher from south of the river, tipped his cap to Colt. A woman I had gone to church camp with forty years before squeezed my arm on her way past and said, “Well, look at you.”

That was it. Nobody made speeches. That is not how it works out here. A slap on a fence rail and a handshake and a few words, and you know where you stand.

My husband came hobbling down from the grandstand on his crutches. He had to come down the steps one at a time with a teenager holding his elbow. He got to us and he did not say anything at first.

Then he put one arm around Colt’s neck and pulled him in, crutch and all, and held on.

“That’s my boy,” he said, into Colt’s hat. “That’s my boy.”