The Steers She Sorted Into His Pen

The check

Lyle wrote the checks on the hood of his pickup a little before noon. He uses the same black checkbook he has used for twenty years, the kind with three checks to a page and the stubs on the left. He wrote mine first.

He wrote the amount out in words, slowly, the way he always does, and then he blew on the ink and tore it out and held it out to me.

“Tessa Kimbrough,” he said, reading it, like he wanted to be sure I heard my own name on it.

“Thank you, Lyle,” I said.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I just weighed them. You’re the one who rode.” Then he tipped his hat to Merle and Ardith, who were loading their horses, and got in his pickup and followed the pots out the lease road toward the highway.

Merle and Ardith would not take anything. I tried. Merle said he would see me at the brandings next spring and I could buy him a cup of coffee at the café in town.

Ardith only said, “Your mother would have done the same thing,” which is the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.

Afterward

That Sunday, Kenna and I sat in our usual pew. The hymn was the one about the ninety and nine, and I did not plan it that way, and I could not sing the last verse.

Kenna held the hymnal for both of us and sang it alone, in that thin, true voice of hers, and nobody turned around.

The note at the bank got paid in December, on time, like it always has. I fixed the well house roof.

I bought Kenna a new saddle pad and myself a pair of overshoes, and I bought Biscuit a whole sack of the good horse cookies from the feed store, which she did not deserve, and ate anyway.

The lease ran out on the first of April. Royce found grass for his cows south of the river, and I found a smaller piece for mine near Shawmut.

We do not run cattle together anymore. That is how it should be.

I heard, later, that the truck went back to the dealer anyway in January. I heard Shawna went back to work full time at the clinic and that she and Royce were trying.

I hope they make it. I mean that. I would rather Kenna’s father be married to a woman who learned something than to a woman who never had to.

This spring, I calved out my cows in the lot by the house again. Every calf got a tag.

Every calf got a number in my little green book, and a new brand of my own, a Bar T, burned clean on the left hip in May with Merle and Ardith and half the valley there to help.

But I still use orange tags. I punched every one myself. Some habits are worth keeping, and the color of your own tags is one of them.

Lyle Pettibone bought my calves again in October. Sixty-six going on sixty-seven, same hat, same scale book. When the last draft came off the scale, he looked over at me and grinned and said, “Forty-four steers. All orange. I counted.”

The check that first year had my name on it. And Royce shipped light that fall.