The Tally Book At The Pen Gate

He is a decent roper. I want to say that. He is not a bad hand. He just stopped roping as much once he had me.

By the middle of May, Chad was mostly working the gate, visiting with whoever owned the place, and coming in to rope a while when the rancher was watching.

He would ride in, catch a dozen, and ride back out to talk.

“I’m on the business end,” he told me once, grinning. “Somebody has to keep the phone ringing.”

At Arlo’s branding, an old rancher I did not know stood at the fire most of the morning watching me rope.

He had a white mustache and wore a black hat, and he did not say a word to anybody. He just watched.

When we broke for dinner, he walked over while I was loosening my cinch.

“That your granddad’s reata?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He nodded slowly, looked at the rawhide coiled on my saddle, and walked away. I did not learn his name until later. It was Merle Faber.

Merle was seventy that spring. He runs about three hundred cows on a place his family has had since homestead days, out on the prairie northwest of Faith.

People in that country say Merle Faber has never said a word he did not mean and has never said two where one would do.

His branding was on the book for the twenty-third of May, a Saturday. Chad had booked it back in February like always.

On the Tuesday before, Chad called me. He sounded put out.

“Merle Faber called me this morning,” he said. “Wants to know if I’m bringing you. By name. I told him you’re still learning, and he said, and I quote, ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ What did you say to him?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I never talked to him but once.”

“Well, he wants you on the heels. His grandson Ty is roping too, the young one. Sixteen. You’ll have to babysit him.”

“I don’t mind,” I said, and I did not.

That Friday after supper I sat at the kitchen table with the tally book and counted. Twenty-four brandings since the third week of March.

Twenty-four times ninety dollars, which was two thousand one hundred sixty dollars. Twenty-four times two-fifty, which was six thousand.

Three thousand eight hundred forty dollars. That was what Chad had kept.

Jenna sat down across from me and looked at the numbers for a long time. Then she reached across the table and closed the book, gently, with my hand still on it.

“I’m coming tomorrow,” she said. “Merle’s wife always needs help with the vaccine, and I want to be there.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“I know I don’t have to,” she said. “He’s my brother, Riley. And you’re my husband. I’ve been quiet for seven weeks. I’m not going to be quiet if somebody finally asks.”

After that, with the sun still up over the hills, I went out to the barn and took Grandpa’s reata off the saddle.

I worked rawhide dressing into it in the tack room doorway where the evening sun came in, the way he showed me, one coil at a time, rubbing it into the braid with my thumbs until the hide went soft and dark.

Our little girl came out in her pajamas and rubber boots, which she was not supposed to do after her bath.

She sat on an overturned bucket and watched me without asking anything, which is not like her at all.