The Tally Book At The Pen Gate

I had no reason to doubt him. He was family. I took ninety a day all spring, and I would have taken it the next spring too, if Bev had not written that check in front of me.

I drove home from Bev’s that Thursday with the ninety dollars in my shirt pocket and the radio off.

Our place is a rented house on twenty acres, with a set of pens and a barn I share with my sorrel horse and Jenna’s two old geldings.

Jenna was in the garden with our little girl, who was five that spring and planting radishes in a crooked row.

I sat on the tailgate a while before I went over. Jenna knew something was wrong before I said a word.

“What happened?” she said. “Did somebody get hurt?”

“Nobody got hurt,” I said. Then I told her about Bev’s kitchen, and the check, and the five hundred dollars for two hands.

She did the math faster than I had. Jenna keeps the books for a feed and seed business in town three days a week, and numbers do not hide from her.

“That’s a hundred and sixty dollars a day,” she said quietly. “Every day you’ve worked for him.”

“Six days so far,” I said. “That I know of.”

She stood there in the dirt with a seed packet in her hand, and I watched her face go from confused to hurt to angry.

Chad is her big brother. He taught her to ride. He walked her down the aisle when her dad’s knees would not let him.

“I’m calling him,” she said. “Right now. Tonight.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I said.

That stopped her. She looked at me like I had lost my mind, and I suppose from where she stood, I might have.

I have thought a long time about why I said that. Some people would have called him that night, or quit the crew, or gone to the sale barn café and told the whole room.

I understand every one of those choices. Here is why I did not make any of them.

Easter was that Sunday. We were going to Jenna’s mother’s house, like every Easter, with the ham and the scalloped potatoes and her mother’s good dishes.

Chad would be there with his family. So would Jenna’s grandmother, who was ninety-one.

You do not fight your wife’s brother over the Easter ham. I was raised better than that, and so was Jenna.

And there was the work. Chad had eighteen more brandings on the book for April and May before Merle’s, and his crew was the crew. Those ranchers had set their days around us.

If I quit in the middle of the season, it was not Chad who would be short a roper. It was the neighbors and their calves.

You do not leave a neighbor’s calves unworked on a branding day he already set. That is the other thing I was raised with.

And if I called Chad, I knew exactly what he would say. He would say Bev misunderstood, or that the extra went to his truck and his fuel, or that he had the phone calls and the risk and I had the easy part.

It would be my word against his, and he had been booking that country for fifteen years.

“Then what are you going to do?” Jenna said. “Just keep taking ninety dollars?”