The Mother Who Heeled For Her Boy

The Pay Window

Leatha keeps the pay window at the back of the rodeo office, a little white building by the gate with a sliding window and a counter. When the performance is over, the winners line up there to sign for their checks.

Colt and I walked up together. My husband stayed on a bench in the shade with Pepper’s lead rope in his hand. The old ropers were still standing along the fence not twenty feet off, visiting.

Leatha had our check made out already. First place in the team roping paid one thousand one hundred and forty dollars a team. She slid the paper across for me to sign.

“Five hundred seventy apiece,” she said. “I’d say that’s the best seventy dollars you’ve spent in fifteen years, Trish.”

I laughed. I picked up the pen. I was writing my name when Colt touched my arm.

I looked up.

Lance was walking straight toward us across the gravel.

He had his rope coiled in one hand and his bay tied back at the trailers. He walked up to the window and stopped, and he did not look at me. He looked at Colt.

The old ropers along the fence had gone quiet. Philo had turned around with his back against the pipes. I saw Leatha set her pencil down.

Lance stood there a second. Then he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet.

“Leatha,” he said. “Is the entry open yet for the fall roping in two weeks?”

“It’s open,” she said. “I’ve got the sheet right here.”

He took out two fifties and two twenties and laid a hundred and forty dollars on the counter. Then he said, loud enough that the men on the fence could hear it, “Put down Kolb and Kolb. Colt heading. Me heeling. If he’ll have me.”

Leatha looked at him over her glasses. “That’s up to the header,” she said.

“I know it is,” Lance said.

Then he turned to my boy. He took his hat off. I had never in my life seen Lance Kolb take his hat off to anybody but a preacher and a casket.

“I was wrong, Colt,” he said. “You weren’t too green. I was too greedy. I saw a bigger pot and I forgot what I promised your dad, and I forgot what I promised you.”

Colt did not say anything. He was standing very straight.

“That was the best-turned steer I saw all day,” Lance said. “Better than my partner’s. A lot better than mine.” He looked at me then, finally. “And your mother out-heeled me, and she hasn’t roped in fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years and four days,” I said. I could not help it.

Lance almost smiled. It was not a happy smile. It was the smile of a man who knows he has earned what he is getting.

“I’m sorry, Trish,” he said. “I’m sorry I put you in that box.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’d do it again.”

“I know you would,” he said. He turned back to Colt. “I’ll tell your dad the same thing, to his face. I’ll tell anybody who asks.”

Colt’s Answer

Colt looked at me. I knew what he was asking. He was asking me whether he was allowed to be glad, and whether he was allowed to be angry, and which one he was supposed to pick.

“It’s your call, son,” I said. “You’re the header.”

He looked at Lance for a long time. Then he looked at the money on the counter, and at Leatha, and at the old ropers on the fence, who were all pretending very hard not to listen.

Then he looked past them all, over to the bench in the shade, where his dad was sitting with Pepper.

“Uncle Lance,” Colt said, “my mom heels for me at the county next year. She already said.”

I had not already said. But I nodded like I had.

“That’s fair,” Lance said. “That’s more than fair. She earned it.”

“But I’ll rope with you at the fall roping,” Colt said. “If you practice with me every day until then.”

“Every day,” Lance said. “I’ll be at your place Monday.”

And Leatha picked up her pencil and wrote Kolb and Kolb on the sheet for the fall roping, and the old ropers along the fence went back to talking about cattle prices.