The saddle rack in Dad’s shed was empty, and for a second I honestly thought I had walked into the wrong shed.
I was forty-four years old, standing in the doorway of a building I had been in and out of since diapers, with a can of cat food in my hand.
But there was Dad’s vise on the bench, his calving chains on their nail, his good bridle with the split
reins looped just so. There was the old yellow tomcat coming out from under the bench to complain at me.
And there was the rack he built out of a cedar post and a length of two-by-six the year he
bought the saddle, with a dark shape worn into the wood where it had sat ever since.
Nothing on it but a saddle blanket, folded.
It was Friday. We had buried him Thursday.
I set the cat food down. I put my hand on the rack. The wood was cool and slick. There were two clean spots in the dust on the floor, right where the stirrups always hung.
Somebody had folded that blanket. A thief does not stop to fold the blanket.
And I knew who folded like that, corners squared and the fold turned to the wall, because the same man taught both of us.
I fed the cat. Then I went in the house.
Dad’s place was a little two-bedroom on the east edge of Mooreland, ten miles out of Woodward, that he bought when he came off the Miller ranch for good. He had cowboyed for the Millers forty years, and when his knees finally quit he moved to town with a pickup, a recliner,
and that saddle.
He kept every piece of paper he ever got in a red coffee can on top of the icebox. Feed tickets. Vet bills. The receipt for Mama’s headstone. If you were in that family and you had a paper that
mattered, that’s where you put it.
So that’s where I looked.
It was right on top. A yellow slip about the size of a bank deposit ticket.
Hale’s Pawn and Gun, Woodward, Oklahoma.
One western saddle, roping, used, with rear cinch.
Amount financed, $300. Finance charge, $50. Total due, $350, on or before the twenty-ninth of
October.
And at the bottom, in the square, careful printing he has had since the second grade, my brother’s name. Randy.
It was dated Tuesday.
I sat down in Dad’s recliner with the ticket in my lap and worked it out.
Dad died Monday morning in that very chair, with the television on and his boots off. The
neighbor, Jeff, found him when he didn’t come out for the paper. Tuesday at ten, Randy and I sat side by side in the funeral home in Woodward and picked the plainest casket they had. Dad’s burial policy came up $800 short of the total, and the man said, very kindly, that they would need
the difference before the service.
“Four hundred apiece,” Randy said. He took out his wallet and counted twenties onto the desk, right then, without a flicker.
I wrote a check. I remember being proud of him.
That was ten o’clock Tuesday morning. The ticket said Tuesday afternoon.
So my brother had walked out of that funeral home, driven the ten miles back to Mooreland, let
himself into Dad’s shed with the key off the nail, carried our father’s saddle out to his truck, folded the blanket, and driven it straight back to Woodward. And then he had come here, into this kitchen, and put the ticket in the coffee can.
Two days later he stood beside me at the grave in Dad’s own bolo tie and shook every hand in the county.
I wanted to drive out to his place and throw that ticket in his face. I had the truck keys in my
hand. I got as far as the porch.
What stopped me was the coffee can.
A man who means to get rid of a thing does not file the ticket where his sister will find it. He put it
where the important papers go. Some part of him was treating it like a bill that would get paid.
That didn’t make it right. But it made me sit back down.
Scott got home from the feed mill a little after five, dusty to the eyebrows the way he always is,
and I let him wash up and eat before I laid the ticket beside his plate.
My husband reads everything twice. He read it twice.
“Three hundred,” he said. “That saddle would bring a thousand from a stranger.”
“It isn’t for sale to a stranger.”
“No.” He turned the ticket over and looked at the back, where the fine print was. “He’s got till the twenty-ninth. He might be planning to get it.”
“With what? If he had three hundred dollars he wouldn’t have needed three hundred dollars.”
Scott let that sit.
“You going to call him?”
“I want to.”
“Then call him.”
“And say what?” I got up and ran water in the sink for no reason. “I call him, I light into him, and
he hangs up on me. Or he doesn’t hang up, and he says something he can’t take back, and I say something worse. Then we’ve got Dad one day in the ground and his two kids not speaking, and the saddle is still sitting in Woodward with a tag on it.”
“All right.”
“And here’s the other thing.” I turned the water off. “It’s half his. Dad never said who got it. Randy didn’t steal anything from me. He had as much right to carry it out of that shed as I did.”
“He didn’t have the right to hock it without telling you.”
“No. He did not.”
Scott folded the ticket along its crease and slid it back across the table. In twenty-two years I
have never had to ask him to stay out of my family’s business or to step into it. He waits to see which one I need.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I want it home. Before anything else. I want it out of that building.”
“Then go get it.”
So I got down the egg jar.
I keep about thirty hens, and I sell eggs at three dollars a dozen to the women at church and the girls I work with at the care center, where I cook. The money goes in a quart jar on the shelf over the stove, and I don’t touch it except for Christmas. I dumped it out on the table and Scott and I
counted it together, ones and fives mostly, soft as cloth and smelling a little like the henhouse.
A hundred and twenty dollars. Forty dozen eggs.
Then I got the envelope out of my Bible. I’d picked up two weekend doubles in September, and I
had been setting the extra aside for front tires on my car. Two hundred and thirty.
I put the two piles side by side.
“That’s three fifty,” Scott said.
“That’s my tires.”
“I’ll rotate them. They’ll go till Thanksgiving.” He reached for his wallet. “Or let me put in half.”
“No. Thank you. This one’s mine.”
He put the wallet away without arguing, and I loved him for that too.
Hale’s opens at nine on Saturdays. I was in the lot at ten till.
It’s a long room with a glass counter down one side, deer rifles on the wall behind, and three
rows of tools that tell you exactly how the oil patch is doing. When there’s work, the shelves are thin. That morning they were full.
Mr. Hale was unlocking the register. He’s a tall, stooped man, sixty or close to it, with reading
glasses on a cord.
He looked at me over the glasses. “You’re Gene’s girl.”
“Yes sir. Tammy.”
“I was sorry to hear. I’d have come Thursday but I can’t close.” “He was as good a hand with a rope as I ever watched.”
“Thank you.”
I laid the yellow ticket on the glass. Then I laid my driver’s license beside it.
He looked at the ticket a good while. He didn’t act surprised.
“That’s your brother’s name on it,” he said.
“I know it is. Can I redeem it, or does it have to be him?”
“Whoever holds the ticket and shows me who they are gets the goods. That’s how the state has
it.” He pulled a ledger toward him. “I’ll write your name and your license number beside his, so there’s no question later who took it out.”
“What do I owe you?”
“Three fifty.”
I’ll admit I had hoped. “It’s only been four days.”
“I know it.” He took the glasses off. “A month’s charge is a month’s charge, first day or the thirtieth. I don’t set it, and I can’t shave it on a ticket that isn’t in your name. If your brother ever wants to know what was paid, I want my book to say exactly what his ticket says.”
I counted it out on the glass. The overtime money in twenties, the egg money in its ones and
fives. He counted it behind me, stamped the ticket paid in red ink, and handed it back.
Then he went into the back, and I heard his steps on a wood floor, and I heard it before I saw it. The creak. There is no sound like an old saddle being lifted. It’s like a porch swing and a pair of
boots at the same time.
He carried it out against his hip with the horn forward, the way a man carries one who has carried them before.
I had to put my hand flat on the counter.
It’s not a pretty saddle. It’s a plain brown roping saddle, built heavy, forty pounds if it’s an ounce, with a tree made to hold a steer on the end of a rope. No silver. A little basket stamping on the
skirts, worn nearly smooth. The seat is dark and slick as a creek rock from one man’s Wranglers. The horn is wrapped in strips of black rubber cut from an inner tube, and the rubber has a
groove burned in it where his rope ran.
And the off stirrup is wrapped in rusty baling wire.
It smelled like him. Neatsfoot oil and horse sweat and dust, and under that the cab of his pickup.
“I kept it in back,” Mr. Hale said. “I don’t put a man’s saddle out on the floor before the date, and I wouldn’t have put this one out after. I told your brother that. I told him, you get in a bind on the date, come see me, I’ll hold it.”
“What did he say?”
“Said he’d be here before the date.” He set it down on its fork, horn to the floor, gently. “He sat out there in his truck twenty minutes before he came in. I watched him through the window. I
thought sure he’d drive off.”
“Tammy.” Mr. Hale rested his hand on the cantle. “I’ll tell you something, and you can do what you want with it. This is the second time this saddle has been in my back room.”
I looked at him.
“January of 1982. My daddy ran the place then, and I was fifteen, sweeping this floor. Gene came in with that saddle over his shoulder. He had a baby coming and the hospital wanted money down.”
He nodded at the rack of ledgers behind him. “It’s in the old book if you want to see it. He got it back out in March, soon as he’d put together enough day work.”
I was born the ninth of February, 1982.
“That baby was me,” I said.
“I figured it was.”
“He never told us.”
“No, I don’t expect he would.” Mr. Hale put his glasses back on. “But he didn’t come in alone. Your mother came with him. She stood right about where you’re standing, and she held his hat.”
He carried it out to my truck himself. He stood it in the back seat on its fork, on the folded
blanket I had brought from the shed, and he tucked the stirrups so they wouldn’t swing.
“The tag’s still tied on the saddle string,” he said. “You’ll want to cut that off.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
I drove home with the windows rolled up so I could smell it. Three miles out of Woodward I pulled over at a section road and cried into the steering wheel, which I had not done at the funeral.
I spent Saturday afternoon on the back porch with a rag and a tin of saddle soap.
It didn’t need it. I just needed my hands on it.
When Randy and I were little, the best thing in the world was to be allowed to lift the near fender
and look underneath. On the rough side of the leather, where nobody would ever see, Dad had scratched two marks with a horseshoe nail.
R 79.
T 82.
The years we were born. He did Randy’s the week he came home from the hospital, and mine, I now understood, sometime after March.
I lifted the fender to soap under it, same as I’d done a hundred times.
There were four marks.
Below ours, newer, the scratches still pale against the old leather.
C 12.
L 15.
Cody and Luke. Randy’s boys.
Dad never told a soul. He just went out to the shed with a nail, twice, when each grandson was born, and wrote them into the one thing he owned that was worth passing down.
I sat on the porch step with the fender across my knees until Scott came out and sat down
beside me. I showed him. He ran his thumb over the four marks and didn’t say anything for a while.
“Randy know about those?” he said.
“I don’t think anybody does.”
Then I picked up my sewing scissors, because there was still that tag.
It was a little paper tag on a loop of white string, tied to the saddle string behind the cantle.
Hale’s Pawn and Gun, it said, and a number in ballpoint. 4417.
I had the scissors open around the string.
I didn’t cut it. I closed the scissors and put them back in my pocket.
I had already decided two things. I would not tell one lie about that saddle, and I would not start a fight in front of those boys. If nobody asked, then nobody asked, and Randy and I would settle it some other day.
But I wasn’t going to tidy it up for him either.
“You’re leaving that on,” Scott said.
“I am.”
“All right,” he said, and went to check the oil in the truck.
Randy had asked us to Sunday dinner back on Thursday, at the meal the church ladies put on after the graveside. “Y’all come eat Sunday,” he’d said. “The boys need people around.” I had said
we’d bring a pie.
After church I changed into jeans and my denim shirt, since I knew what I’d be carrying, and Scott drove us the six miles north.
Randy rents the old Baker farmhouse, a white two-story with a stock pen and a windmill that doesn’t turn anymore. He’s had the boys by himself for four years, since their mother moved to
Amarillo. He drives a water truck for an oilfield service outfit. He packs those boys’ lunches and he has never missed a school program, and I want that said plainly before I tell the rest.
What I didn’t know that Sunday was that his hours had been cut from fifty a week to thirty-two
since August. I didn’t know his rent was $650 and due on the first. I didn’t know that on the last Monday of September, the day our father died, my brother had $750 to his name.
Four hundred to the funeral home left three fifty. He was three hundred short.
I only knew what the yellow ticket said.
Scott parked by the propane tank. I got the saddle out of the back seat and up on my hip, horn forward, and it about pulled my arm out of the socket. The stirrups knocked my knee all the way
up the porch steps. Scott carried the pie in one hand and held the screen door with the other.
“You sure?” he said, low.
“Hold the door.”
The kitchen smelled like chili and cornbread. Randy was at the stove with his back to us, stirring. Cody and Luke were already at the table in their T-shirts, Cody tipped back in his chair, Luke building something out of crackers.
“Hey, Aunt Tammy,” Luke said. And then, “Whoa.”
I set it on the end of the table, between the cornbread and the butter. I set it on its side, easy, but the cinch ring swung down and hit the wood like a dropped spoon.
Randy turned around.
I watched him see it. I watched his eyes go from the saddle to the little white tag to me, and I watched every drop of color go out of his face and then come back twice as dark.
He didn’t say a word.
Neither did I. Not to him.
“Boys,” I said, “come here and look at your granddad’s saddle. There are some things about it
you ought to know, and I’m the only one left who knows a few of them.”
Cody’s chair came down on all four legs. Luke was already up on his knees.
Luke put his nose right down on the seat. “It smells like Grandpa’s truck.”
“That’s neatsfoot oil. He rubbed it in every spring and every fall. And that’s horse, and that’s close to fifty years of dust.”
He got both arms under it and lifted it maybe an inch. The leather groaned.
“About forty pounds,” I said. “It has to be. See how thick it’s built through here?” I knocked on the fork. “When your granddad roped a steer, he took two wraps around this horn, and then six hundred pounds of animal hit the end of that rope. Everything came down on this saddle and the
horse under it. A pleasure saddle would have come apart in a season.”
Cody had come around to my side. He’s the roper. He has worn the grass off the yard throwing loops at a plastic steer head stuck on a hay bale, with Dad coaching from a lawn chair.
He touched the horn. “That’s rubber.”
“Cut from an inner tube. It grabs the rope so the dally doesn’t slip. Feel that groove?”
He felt it. I saw him understand that his grandfather’s rope had made it.
“He won a buckle off this saddle in 1986,” I said. “At the roping in Woodward. He was heeling for a man named Don, and they caught in seven seconds and something, and it was the only buckle he ever won in his life. He wore it to church every Sunday for the next forty years. He was buried in
it.”
“I saw it,” Luke said quietly. “Thursday.”
“I know you did, honey.”
“What horse?” Cody said.
“A buckskin gelding named Biscuit. He’d bite anybody in the county but Dad. He bit me twice. He bit the preacher.”
Luke laughed, and it was the first time I had heard that child laugh in a week.
“Your dad rode in this saddle before he could walk.” I didn’t look at the stove when I said it. “Right here, in front, with both hands on the horn, and Granddad’s arm around his middle. They’d
ride the fence that way. I’ve seen the picture.”
Behind me the spoon had quit scraping the pot.
Cody ran his thumb over the off stirrup. “Why’s there wire on it?”
“That’s my favorite one. Spring of ’94, branding at the Miller place. A cow mashed him against a pipe panel and cracked that stirrup clean through the wood. He had sixty calves left to drag to the fire. So he got a piece of baling wire off the fence, wrapped it, twisted it tight with his pliers,
and finished the day. Said he’d buy a new pair of stirrups Saturday.”
“Did he?”
“That’s the same wire.”
Cody grinned. He looked so much like the pictures of Dad at that age that I had to study the cornbread for a second.
“Lift up that fender,” I told him. “The big flap. The near side. Go on.”
The leather creaked when he raised it.
“What’s that scratched in there?”
“Read it to me.”
“R 79.” He bent closer. “T 82.”
“That’s your dad and that’s me. The years we were born. He scratched them in with a horseshoe
nail.”
“There’s more.” Luke had shoved in under his brother’s arm. “C 12. L…” He stopped. He’s eleven. He was born in 2015. “L 15.”
Nobody in that kitchen breathed.
“Is that me?” he said.
“That’s you.”
“Grandpa put me on his saddle?”
“He put both of you on it. And he never said one word about it to anybody. I only found them yesterday.”
Luke laid his whole hand flat over those four marks and kept it there.
I heard my brother make a sound behind me, a small one, like a man who has been hit somewhere soft. I still did not turn around.
And then Luke, with his head down there under the fender, found the tag.
He turned it over in his fingers. He read it out loud, slowly, the way he reads everything.
“Hale’s Pawn and Gun. Number 4417.”
Cody looked at the tag. Then he looked at me. He is fourteen and he is nobody’s fool, and he’s
been in Hale’s with his dad to look at rifles.
“Aunt Tammy,” he said. “Why was Grandpa’s saddle at Mr. Hale’s?”
The chili was the only thing in that kitchen making a sound.
I had promised myself I would tell no lie, and I had promised myself I wouldn’t be the one to say it.
“That’s not mine to answer, honey,” I said.
Both boys turned around in their chairs.
Randy set the spoon down on the stove. He turned the burner off. He wiped his hands on the dish towel he had over his shoulder, and he took the towel off and folded it, corners squared,
and laid it on the counter.
He looked at his sons for a long time.
“Boys,” he said. “Sit down.”
They sat.
He didn’t sit. He stood at the end of the table with his hands on the back of a chair, across the saddle from me, and I’ll say this for my brother. He didn’t look at the floor.
“I pawned it,” he said. “Tuesday. The day after Grandpa died.”
Luke’s mouth came open.
“I was short on the rent. Three hundred dollars. My hours got cut back in August, and I’ve been
making it stretch, and then the funeral home needed money I hadn’t planned on. I gave them what I had, because he was my dad. And then I didn’t have the rent.”
“You could have told me,” I said. It came out before I could stop it. “Tuesday. At that desk. I’d
have covered it.”
“I know you would have.” He looked at me then. “That’s exactly why I couldn’t. You’ve got a husband and a paid-for house and a jar of egg money, and I’ve got two boys and a landlord. I
wasn’t going to sit in a funeral home and tell my little sister I couldn’t bury our father.”
“So you took his saddle.”
“I borrowed against it. That’s what I told myself. I’d get a couple of extra loads, I’d have it out
before the date, it’d be back on the rack and nobody would ever know it had been gone.” His jaw worked. “I put the blanket back nice. Like that made it all right.”
Randy’s hands were white on the chair.
“Your aunt found out. She didn’t call me and cuss me, which I had coming. She went down there yesterday and paid Mr. Hale three hundred and fifty dollars of her own money and brought it home. And then she carried it in here and told you all of that about your granddad, when she
could have just told you what I did.” He swallowed. “So I’m telling you what I did. I hocked my father’s saddle before he was in the ground, and I hid it from my sister, and I’d have hid it from you. That’s the truth. I’m ashamed of it.”
Cody was staring at the table. His ears had gone red. When he finally spoke, his voice cracked in the middle the way it does at fourteen.
“I’ve got sixty dollars,” he said. “From hauling hay for Mr. Baker. It’s in my boot box. You could
have had it.”
“I know, son.”
“You didn’t even ask.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“You always tell us to ask.” Cody looked up, and there were tears standing in his eyes that he was too proud to let go of. “When I broke the window on the stock trailer, you said the breaking wasn’t the bad part. You said the bad part was I hid it.”
Randy took that the way you take a horse’s hoof. He just stood there and absorbed it.
“I did say that,” he said. “And I was right when I said it. And I didn’t live up to it.”
Luke had been very still. Now he said, in a small voice, “Are we going to have to move?”
That’s when I came around the table. I couldn’t help it. I got my arm around that child.
“No, sir,” Randy said. He came around the other side, and he crouched down by Luke’s chair. “No. The rent’s paid. We’re not going anywhere. That’s what the money was for, and it’s done. You
don’t have to carry that. That one’s mine.”
Luke nodded against my shoulder.
Scott had been standing by the door this whole time with a pie in his hand. He set it on the
counter now, pulled out a chair, and sat down at my brother’s table like it was any other Sunday.
“Randy,” he said. “You’ve still got your commercial license.”
Randy looked up. “Yeah.”
“The mill’s been short a Saturday driver since Labor Day. Bulk feed, the route up through Fargo and Gage and back, about four hours. Pays seventy dollars a run. The boss asked me twice if I knew anybody.” Scott shrugged. “I didn’t know you needed it. You never said.”
“Five Saturdays,” Randy said slowly.
“Five Saturdays is three fifty.”
Randy stood up. He looked at me across the saddle.
“You’ll get every dollar. The fifty too.”
“The fifty was my doing. I went early.”
“A month’s charge is a month’s charge,” he said, and I knew then that Mr. Hale had given him the
same speech. “I’ll bring it by every Saturday when I get off the truck.”
“All right,” I said.
There was one thing left, and I had gone back and forth all night on whether it was mine to tell. I
decided Dad would not have minded. I decided Mama would have insisted.
“Mr. Hale told me something yesterday,” I said. “Sit down, Randy. This is for you as much as them.”
He sat.
“This isn’t the first time this saddle has been in that back room. January of 1982, Granddad carried it in there himself. He had a baby coming, and the hospital in Woodward wanted money down,
and he didn’t have it. He borrowed on the only thing he owned worth anything.”
Randy stared at me.
“That baby was me. He got it back out in March, with day-work money. And then he came home
and scratched T 82 under the fender.”
“He never said,” Randy whispered.
“No. He was as proud as you are. It’s where you got it.” I put my hand on the horn. “But here’s the
difference, and I’d want you to hear it from me and not think it up yourself at two in the morning. He didn’t go alone. Mr. Hale said Mama went in with him, and stood at that counter, and held his hat.”
My brother put both hands over his face.
Nobody said anything. Scott looked out the window. Luke got down from his chair, went around the table, and leaned his whole self against his father’s side.
After a minute Cody got up too. He stood behind Randy’s chair, awkward as a colt, and put one hand on his dad’s shoulder. He didn’t say it was all right. It wasn’t yet. But he put his hand there.
Randy reached up and held on to it.
We did eat. The chili had scorched a little on the bottom and Randy apologized for it, and Scott said he liked it that way, and Luke ate three pieces of cornbread with the saddle sitting right there at the end of the table like a fifth grown-up.
It was Randy who brought up where it should live.
“It ought to go home with you,” he said to me. He was turning his tea glass around and around. “I gave up my say in it.”
“You didn’t give up anything. You’ve got your initial in it same as me.”
“Tammy.”
“I don’t rope, Randy. Scott doesn’t rope. If I take it home it sits on a rack in my garage and I oil
it twice a year and cry.” I looked down the table. “It ought to go to the one who’ll put a rope on that horn.”
Cody went very still.
“It’s the family’s,” I said to him. “I want that understood. Your brother’s mark is in it right beside yours. It doesn’t get sold, and it doesn’t get borrowed on, not ever again, not by anybody at this table. If any one of us is ever that short, we say so out loud. In this kitchen or in mine.” I
waited until Randy met my eyes. “Out loud.”
“Out loud,” Randy said.
“But somebody ought to ride it. And I’d like it to be you.”
Cody tried to say thank you and couldn’t get it out. He nodded instead, about six times.
“Mr. Baker says I can use his sorrel for the junior ropings,” he said finally. “I’ve been riding his saddle, but the stirrups won’t go short enough.”
“Granddad’s will,” Randy said. “I’ll show you how to set them.”
After dinner the boys carried it out to the barn between them, arguing the whole way about who was doing more of the work. Scott went along to help them hang a rack.
Randy and I stood on the porch.
“He didn’t look at me the whole meal,” Randy said. “Cody.”
“He will.”
He leaned on the rail. “You could have brought that saddle out to the barn. Handed it to me. I’d have thanked you and paid you back, and they’d never have known.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t bring it for you,” I said. “I brought it for them. They buried their granddad Thursday, and by Sunday the best thing he owned had been to the pawn shop and back and
nobody had told them one thing about it. Not the buckle or the horse or the wire. I wasn’t going to let it just be an old saddle in the barn.”
He nodded slowly.
“And I left the tag on,” I said. “I want you to know I did that on purpose. I’m not proud of it. I’m not sorry, either.”
“I know you did.”
“I sat in that lot twenty minutes,” he said. “Tuesday. I had it in the back seat, and I kept looking at it in the mirror.”
“Mr. Hale told me.”
“I should have driven to your house.”
“Yes,” I said. “You should have.”
That was as hard a thing as I said to him, and it was enough. He’s my brother. I had watched him
tell the truth to his own sons with his hands shaking, and I didn’t need more out of him than that.
I held out the yellow ticket. He looked at it, and then he took it.
“Put it in the coffee can,” I said. “Where the important papers go.”
He drove for the mill the next Saturday, and the four after that.
Every one of those Saturdays, about half past two, his truck pulled into my drive with feed dust all over the hood. He’d come to the back door, wipe his boots, and lay a mill pay envelope on my
kitchen table. Seventy dollars. The third time, he stayed for coffee.
The fifth Saturday he laid down the last envelope and stood there.
“That’s three fifty,” he said.
“That’s three fifty.”
“The boss asked me to keep the route. I told him yes.” He turned his cap around in his hands. “I should’ve asked Scott in August.”
“You should have,” I agreed, and this time we both laughed.
I put a hundred and twenty dollars back in the egg jar that afternoon, in ones and fives, because it didn’t seem right to pay a quart jar back in twenties. The other two hundred and thirty went on
two front tires the next week.
In April the junior rodeo club held its first roping of the year at the fairgrounds in Woodward. Scott and I sat on the bleachers with Luke between us eating a corn dog, and Randy stood
down at the fence with his arms folded on the top rail, exactly the way our father used to stand.
Cody backed Mr. Baker’s sorrel into the box. He was heeling, like his granddad.
He had the stirrups taken up four holes. Randy had shown him how. I couldn’t see the baling wire
from the stands, but I knew it was there. Randy had offered to buy him a new pair of stirrups for his birthday. Cody told him to leave it alone.
The steer came out. The header caught. Cody swung twice, and threw, and caught one hind foot,
and when he took his dally around that black rubber horn I heard my brother yell from the fence loud enough to spook the pigeons out of the announcer’s stand.
One foot is a five-second penalty. They didn’t place. Nobody in our row cared.
Afterward Cody rode over to the fence, grinning, and Randy reached up and put his hand on the horn. He left it there a second.
Luke tugged my sleeve.
“Aunt Tammy. When I’m fourteen, do I get a turn?”
“Your mark’s under that fender, isn’t it?”
He thought about that. Then he nodded and went back to his corn dog, satisfied.
The coffee can sits on top of my icebox now. Randy and I cleaned out Dad’s house together in November, and when we got to the kitchen he took the can down and handed it to me without a word.
The feed tickets are still in it. The receipt for Mama’s headstone. And right on top, where anybody in this family would look first, a yellow pawn ticket stamped paid, and a little paper tag on a loop of white string.
Number 4417.
I never did cut it off. Cody did, the day he hung the saddle in his barn. He brought it to me in his shirt pocket and said he figured it was one of the important papers.
He was right. It is.
