The Tally Book At The Pen Gate

The Rafter T man came next, and then a rancher from the next place north who had been working the fire all morning.

By the time we went in to dinner, I had three outfits booked for the rest of the season, at my own rate, with my own phone number written in their tally books.

Bev called that night when she heard. News travels fast across those miles of grass.

She said she had been thinking about my face in her kitchen ever since April and wondering. She booked me for her fall preg-check before she hung up.

Before we went into the house, Merle stopped me at the corner of the corral. He looked down at Grandpa’s reata coiled on my saddle.

“I asked you at Arlo’s if that was your granddad’s,” he said. “I knew it was. I roped beside that rawhide at a branding on the Moreau River in nineteen seventy-one. Your granddad could heel a calf off the far side of a pen without the calf knowing he was caught.”

I did not trust my voice, so I just nodded.

“He was the kind of man who’d tell you a tally book is no place to lie,” Merle said.

“He told me that,” I said. “More than once.”

“I figured,” Merle said. “I saw it the minute you rode in. You rope like him. Smooth. That’s how I knew to ask for you.”

He put one hand on the coil of rawhide for just a second, the way you might touch an old friend’s shoulder, and then he walked to the house.

I stood there by the corral with my hand on Pete’s neck and cried a little, which I have never told anyone but Jenna.

I was not crying about the money. I was crying because for one minute an old man I hardly knew had brought my grandpa back to a branding pen.

Ty rode over on his horse while I was standing there. He was trying not to stare at me and doing a poor job of it.

“Mr. Brost,” he said. “Would you show me how to dally on rawhide sometime? Grandpa says nobody ropes with it anymore.”

“Somebody does,” I said. “Come by the house any Sunday afternoon. I’ll show you.”

He came the next Sunday, and the one after that.

Now I want to tell you what happened with Chad, because a story like this is not finished just because a man drives away from a gate.

For about two weeks, Jenna did not hear from him. Her mother called, upset, because word had gone all the way around the county.

Jenna told her mother the truth, plainly and without any meanness. Her mother cried on the phone and said she had raised him better.

Chad lost more than Merle’s place that spring. Word went around, and people out there did not need a lawyer or anybody else to tell them what to think.

They called the ranchers whose brands were in my book and asked. Most of his booking dried up for the rest of the season.

He still had his own cows to brand. He had to put on his own branding in June and call around for help, and very few people came.

I heard it took them most of a day and into the afternoon with a short crew.

The second week of June, on a Sunday afternoon, Chad pulled into our yard.