The Pay at the Sale Barn Cafe

The envelope was in the mailbox on the fourth of November, the first Monday of the month, the same as it had come the first week of every month for eleven years. Same blue checks. Same handwriting. Same Hollister Cattle Company printed in the corner.

I opened it standing at the end of our gravel drive with the wind pulling at my jacket. The check was made out to Travis Mays in the amount of eight hundred dollars and no cents.

I read it three times. Then I turned it over, like there might be a second number hiding on the back. There was nothing back there but the bank’s little lines where you sign.

Travis made four thousand dollars a month. He was paid at the start of each month for the month before, and he had worked every single day of October, right up until three in the afternoon on Halloween.

That was the afternoon a black baldy cow came through the alley wrong, hit the chute gate with her whole weight, and pinned his right arm between the gate and the pipe.

I walked back up to the house with the check in my hand.

Travis was at the kitchen table in his sling, trying to butter toast left-handed, and our four-year-old, Jake, was helping him by holding the plate down with both hands.

“Mail come?” Travis asked.

I set the check down next to his coffee. He looked at it for a long time. He did not pick it up.

He just looked, and I watched his jaw work the way it does when a calf will not take the bottle.

“There’s a mistake,” he said.

“Call him,” I said.

He called Don Hollister from the porch so the kids would not hear, but our house is small and the porch is right outside the kitchen window. I heard every word he said and most of what Don said back.

Don said it was no mistake. He said Travis was going to be out six weeks, maybe eight, and somebody had to do his work, and he was keeping thirty-two hundred dollars of October to cover the days Travis would miss.

“Those are days I worked, Don,” Travis said. “That’s October. I was there every day of October.”

“We’ll settle up when you’re back,” Don said. “Arm heals, you come back, we’ll square it all. You know I’m good for it.”

Then he said he had a truck waiting and he hung up. Travis stood on the porch a long time with the phone in his good hand, looking out at the milo stubble across the road.

When he came back in, he picked Jake up with his left arm and set him on the counter and said, “Daddy’s boss is going to fix a mix-up.” Jake said okay. Jake was four. Everything was okay to Jake.

I want to tell you who Travis is, because the rest of this does not make sense unless you know.

Travis Mays went to work for Don Hollister when he was twenty-three years old, the summer after he quit the junior college in Amarillo because he would rather be horseback than in a classroom. He was a good hand from the first week.

Don ran about six hundred cows on rented grass and his own place north of Hereford, and he ran stockers on wheat pasture in the winter.

There were two full-time hands, Travis and an older man named Mike, and Don himself, and day help when they shipped.