The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

She answered on the fourth ring, out of breath from the porch.

When I told her, she was quiet for a second, and then she said, “Well, praise the Lord. I knew you would.”

Then I called Emmett at the elevator, and he said, “I told you. You don’t rattle,” and I could hear the men in the scale house cheering behind him because he had put me on the speaker.

Curtis never paid the twenty dollars. Nobody asked him to. Emmett said he would bring it up at Easter, and I asked him not to. It was not about the money, and we both knew it.

At Easter Curtis said, “Heard you got your license,” across the ham, and that was all. Not congratulations. Just that, the way you would say you heard it might rain.

I started for Bertram in April. The first month he rode with me on every load, sitting in the passenger seat with a thermos of coffee, saying almost nothing.

Bertram’s truck is a red Peterbilt he has kept up himself for longer than I have been married.

His trailer is a fifty-three-foot aluminum cattle pot, the kind with the dropped belly in the middle that some people call a possum belly.

A pot like that has compartments inside, with gates between them, so the cattle ride in sections and do not all slide to one end.

Loading it right is a skill all its own, and Bertram taught me that too.

“You put the heavy ones up front and over the axles,” he said. “You don’t overload a compartment. You count them in. A cow that goes down in a crowded section won’t get back up.”

By June I was hauling on my own. Yearlings off grass to the feedyards. Cows and calves to summer pasture.

Bulls to a sale. Some mornings I left at four and got home after dark.

I learned that cattle trucks smell exactly the way you think they do, and that you stop noticing by the second week.

I learned that a ranch wife will always have coffee ready and will always ask if you have eaten.

I learned that men at the sale barns would look twice when I climbed down out of the cab, and then they would see me open the trailer and count cattle out like I had done it all my life, and they would stop looking twice.

Most of all, I learned how to back. Feedlot alleys, sale barn docks, ranch corrals built in 1950 for trucks half the size of mine.

I learned to get out and look whenever I was not sure. Bertram called it “getting out and looking,” and he said nobody ever wrecked a trailer doing it.

That summer, Curtis lost two of his regular customers to Bertram. I did not know it at the time. I found out later, and I will tell you when.

Now I have to tell you about Grandma Hazel’s lane, because the whole thing turned on it.

Hazel Pike is 86 years old. She has lived on the same place outside of town since she married, and she has run cows on it by herself since her husband died eleven years ago.