The Tally Book At The Pen Gate

Chad roped some. Around nine o’clock he rode in and caught about twenty, then went back to the gate to visit, and came back in whenever Merle walked over to the fire.

Ty caught more and more as the morning went. By the end he was catching one of every three or four he threw at, which for a sixteen-year-old on a busy day is fine roping.

I caught most of them. I do not say it to brag. I say it because it is what the tally book says.

At a quarter past eleven, the last calf went to the fire. Merle’s wife called that dinner was on in the house. The crew started standing up, slapping dust off their jeans, and stretching their backs.

I rode Pete to the fence, got off, and loosened the cinch. Then I coiled Grandpa’s reata slowly, the way he taught me, laying each coil the same size as the last.

Chad was already at the pen gate with Merle. Most of the crew was drifting that way too, because the gate was the way to the house and dinner.

“Good day,” Chad was saying. “Good clean calves. Three hands, Merle. Me and Riley at two-fifty. You said you’d cover Ty.”

Merle did not look at him. He looked past him to me.

“Riley,” he said. “You keep a count?”

The crew was all around the gate by then. Arlo, the Rafter T man, the knife man, the flankers wiping their hands.

Jenna had come from the vaccine table and was standing with Merle’s wife. Ty was still on his horse, coiling his rope just inside the pen.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I do.”

I walked to the gate, reached into my vest, and handed him the tally book.

Merle licked his thumb and turned the pages slowly. He did not rush.

He looked at each brand as he passed it, and I saw him stop at a few. Arlo’s. The Rafter T. Bev’s. He knew every one of them.

He found his own brand, drawn in pencil at the top of the page with that day’s date. Below it, the marks, bundled in fives, and the totals.

“Two hundred sixty-eight calves,” Merle said.

He reached into his own shirt pocket and pulled out a tally book older than mine, its cover worn to the cardboard. He opened it to the day’s page and ran his finger down it.

“Two hundred sixty-eight,” he said. “Same as mine. I counted them at the fire.”

Then he looked back at mine. “And you’ve got who caught them. Riley, one hundred seventy-one. Ty, forty-six. Chad, fifty-one.”

Chad laughed a little. “He’s generous with himself, Merle. That’s a lot of calves for one man.”

“I watched every one of them,” Merle said. “He’s short himself, if anything. He missed marking a couple when that black calf went through the fence.”

Then Merle turned the tally book over and opened the back page.

I had not meant for him to see the back page. That is the truth. I had handed him the book for the count.

But a tally book is a tally book, and Merle Faber was a man who read every page of anything he was handed.

He read the column. Date, brand, paid. Twenty-four lines. Ninety dollars beside every one.

He read it twice. I watched his mustache move as he read the brands under his breath. Nobody at that gate said a word. The calves bawled across the fence. The fire popped once behind us.