The Tally Book At The Pen Gate

“Is that Great-Grandpa’s rope?” she finally said.

“It is,” I said.

“Does it remember him?”

I did not know what to say to that. I sat there with the rawhide in my hands, and I thought about Grandpa’s hands, which were brown and cracked and could tie any knot in the dark.

I thought about the winter he spent braiding a new honda for this reata when I was ten and how he let me hold the strands.

“I think it does,” I said. “I think it remembers how he wanted it used.”

She nodded like that settled it and went back to the house. I sat in the barn a while longer than I needed to.

Saturday the twenty-third of May came up bright and clear. We were at Merle’s by five-thirty, with the sun just over the rim of the prairie, the grass wide open in every direction and the wooden corrals gray and sound in the early light.

I wore my gray felt hat, my tan canvas vest with the tally book in the chest pocket, and my chaps.

I saddled my sorrel, a nine-year-old gelding I call Pete, who is the best heel horse I have ever owned and knows more about a branding pen than some men.

Merle’s crew was about fifteen people. There were neighbors from four or five places, several of whom I had roped for that spring.

Arlo was there. So was the man with the Rafter T. Merle’s wife ran the vaccine table, and Jenna went straight to it.

Merle stood at the pen gate in his black hat, his arms on the top rail. When Chad rode over to talk with him, Merle said something short and pointed at me. Chad’s face went flat.

“Riley,” Merle called. “You’re on the heels with Ty. Chad, you can spell them when they need it.”

So Ty and I rode into the pen. Ty Faber was sixteen, all elbows and freckles, roping with a nylon rope and trying too hard, the way all of us did at sixteen. His first three loops missed. His fourth caught one hind foot.

“Ease off a little,” I told him while we rode back. “You’re throwing at the calf. Lay it where he’s going to step. Let him catch himself.”

He tried it. He missed. He tried it again and caught both feet clean, and the grin on that boy’s face was worth the whole morning.

Then we went to work. I am not going to tell you about every calf, because there were two hundred sixty-eight of them, and I counted every one I caught.

The fire was small and hot, the irons just the right gray. The dust came up off the pen floor in the sunlight and hung there.

The ground crew was good, two pairs of flankers working fast, and the knife man was an old neighbor who had cut more bull calves than I had seen.

I heeled a calf, dallied soft on the horn, and eased him to the fire. Pete walked him in like a gentleman.

The flankers had him down, the irons went on, the shot went in, and I pulled my slack and rode back for the next one.

Over and over. A pencil mark between every few calves, when Pete stood still long enough. Bundles of five on the page.