The Tally Book At The Pen Gate

I was in the round pen with Ty, showing him how to take a soft dally. Chad sat in his pickup for a while before he got out.

Ty took his horse to the barn without being told. He is a good kid.

Chad walked over to the round pen and leaned on the rail. He looked tired. He looked older than forty.

“I’ve got twelve hundred dollars,” he said, and he held out an envelope. “I sold four pairs. The rest will come when I ship calves in the fall. I’ll pay it all, Riley. Every bit of the thirty-eight forty.”

I took the envelope. I did not count it in front of him.

“I was behind,” he said. “The note was due and I didn’t have it. I told myself you were new and I was doing you a favor. I told myself a lot of things.” He stopped. “It was wrong. I know it was wrong.”

“It was,” I said. “But I appreciate you saying it.”

He nodded at the rail for a while. Then he said, “Jenna won’t talk to me.”

“She will,” I said. “Give her time. And pay her husband.”

He almost smiled at that. He got back in his pickup and drove away. Jenna watched from the kitchen window, and she did not come out, but she did not draw the curtain either.

He shipped his calves the second week of October. Three days later he drove into our yard again and handed me a check for two thousand six hundred forty dollars. With the twelve hundred, that was the whole thirty-eight forty.

I wrote it in the back of my tally book, on the page that had held all those ninety-dollar lines. Paid in full. Then I closed the book and put it in the drawer with Grandpa’s.

Jenna went to her mother’s for Sunday dinner the week after that, and Chad was there, and she sat across the table from him.

They did not talk much. But she passed him the rolls when he asked, and that was a start.

He does not book crews anymore. He works his own place, and he hires out a day here and there when somebody calls, at whatever they pay him. I hear he ropes more than he used to.

I have seventeen outfits that call me direct now. I rope for two-fifty a day and I keep every dollar of it, and every calf still goes in the tally book in pencil, with the date and the brand drawn at the top of the page.

Ty has gotten good. He ropes with nylon, but he dallies like a rawhide man now, soft and easy, and the ground crews have started to notice.

Merle told me at a fall shipping that it was the best thing that happened on his place all year.

But the day I think about most is still that Saturday in May.

The bright clear morning, the dust in the sunlight over the pen, the small fire with the irons going gray, and Merle Faber standing at that gate in his black hat reading every page of my tally book.

After dinner that day, Merle’s wife sent us home with a pan of bars and a hug for Jenna.

I loaded Pete, and I took Grandpa’s reata off the saddle and checked it one more time for wear, every foot of it, the way he taught me.

I coiled up and drove home with my wages in my shirt pocket.