Everyone turned toward the barn as I walked through the wide wooden doors, and my nephew had forty-some people in that lot and nine of them had already gone home.
Branding day out here is not a party. It is a debt.
You do not hire a crew to work calves. Your neighbors come and rope and wrestle and vaccinate all day for a plate of food, and then you go to theirs, and the whole thing runs on the fact that everybody keeps count in their heads and nobody ever says it out loud.
There is a calendar on the tack room wall. Feed store calendar, new one every January, and every branding date in this end of the county gets written on it as soon as it is set, and it goes in the drawer at the end of the year with the twenty-one before it.
Twenty-two years. I have not missed one. Not the year of my back, not the year my wife’s mother died, and there is a September in 2011 where I went to two in one day and drove ninety miles between them.
Cody had the keys and he had the beef and he had a cooler of good beer.
He had never once written on that calendar and he had never once gone to anybody else’s.
Grandpa started the calendar in 1979 and it is his handwriting at the top of the first one, which I have got in a drawer with the rest.
Every date on here is a day somebody else’s calves got worked because we showed up. Do not ever let anybody in this family think we own this outfit. We are borrowing it from the neighbors one Saturday at a time.
I did not read that out in the lot. I am not going to humiliate a twenty-six-year-old in front of the Kolstads.
I took the sorting stick and I worked the alley the way I have worked it since I was thirty-four, and I hollered at Cody twice about the crowding gate, and the crew came back the following Saturday and we finished four hundred head in a day and a half.
Then that night I took him in the tack room and gave him the calendar and the drawer.
He has been to eleven brandings since. He does not love it and he goes anyway, which is the entire point and I have not explained it to him yet because he is figuring it out on his own and that works better.
He has the keys. He should have the keys. He is going to run that place a long time after I am done and he is smarter about grass than I ever was.
The calendar hangs in the tack room and he writes on it. His handwriting is bad.
Twenty-two springs does look like a ring of keys from where he was standing. From where I stand it is a feed store calendar with two hundred and forty Saturdays written on it, and every one of those Saturdays is a family that will come when we call, and that is not something you can hand to a man. He has to go earn it a Saturday at a time, same as I did.