Chapter 13
Holt
Branding day came before we were ready and right on time, same as it came every year, the one day the whole valley emptied out onto one ranch and everybody owed everybody and nobody kept a tally.
We did the home place first because Gus's was the oldest brand in Orion Valley and the order ran oldest to youngest, set before any of us were born.
By seven the trucks were coming up the drive with the gates rattling, the Dwyers and the old Pruett brothers and a dozen others, horses unloading and dogs going mad and the propane branding pot already roaring blue out by the corrals.
Gus stood on the porch in his good hat directing a war he was too old to fight in and loving every second of it.
I'd been dreading what the day would do to Morgan and I had it exactly backward. The valley took to him like he was something they'd ordered and forgotten was coming.
It helped that Dez had run his mouth at the North Star for two weeks, so by branding day the whole county knew there was a movie star at Three Saints learning to be a cowboy.
A movie star learning to be a cowboy was the single most entertaining thing that could happen at a branding.
Better than a green colt. Better than a wreck. They came to watch him fail.
He did not entirely fail, which was somehow funnier.
By the second hour he'd stopped being a celebrity to them and started being the new hand at Three Saints who couldn't rope to save his life but would wrestle calves till his arms gave out and never once complained. In this valley, that was a passport.
We branded a hundred and twelve head and he was in the dirt for most of them.
Two men flanked each calf the second it was dragged to the fire, one at the head and one on a back leg, pinning it on its side while the iron went on and the shots went in and the knife did its fast quiet work on the bull calves.
It was hard, hot, and filthy work. Forty seconds of fighting an animal that wanted a man dead then up and onto the next one.
Flynn put Morgan on calves with him and rode him from the first one.
"Head. Not the neck. The head. You're going to get kicked in the teeth and I am going to enjoy it."
"You've been enjoying yourself since seven this morning."
"I have. It's been a good day."
By the fourth calf he'd started giving it back.
"Your grip is a disgrace."
"Your truck has a check engine light on."
"That light's been on since 2019 and that truck has never once let me down, which is more than I can say for anybody standing at this fire—"
"Head," Morgan said. "Not the neck. The head."
Flynn laughed so hard he lost the calf.
Neither of them missed another one all morning. I understood after a while that this was Flynn's version of adoption.
Somewhere in there Morgan got one down clean and held it like he'd been doing it his whole life, and Flynn looked over at me across the smoke and the bawling and gave me a single nod.
I had to look away. The nod meant Flynn had decided to love him, and Flynn loved nothing he didn't intend to keep.
Mid-morning a calf got loose off the ground crew and came barreling back through the work, two hundred pounds of panic with no plan in it, and it ran straight for Gus's chair by the fence.
Before the rest of us had so much as turned, Morgan was there.
He couldn't rope and he didn't try. He put his whole body between the calf and the old man and turned it off its line with his shoulder and a yell, sending it bawling back toward the bunch.
Then he stood there blinking, not knowing what he'd done, looking around to see if anybody had seen it.
Everybody had seen it. And what they'd seen wasn't a movie star.
It was a Three Saints hand putting himself between trouble and Gus Rhodes without stopping to think about it first. Every man at that branding would have done the same and not one of them would have thought it was worth mentioning.
It was somewhere around then that I quit being able to tell myself this was temporary.
I worked the fire. From there I could see everything, the kids running drinks, the women I'd known my whole life setting up the long tables under the cottonwoods, the men I'd grown up beside doing the thing we did every spring.
In the middle of it, a man who had flown in on a private terminal asked Dez whether he could put a brand on.
Dez looked over at me. I nodded before I'd thought about it.
So Dez showed him, hand over hand, where to set it and how long and not to lean on it.
Morgan knelt down in the calf mess with one of my irons in both hands and put the Three Peaks mark on a calf that would still be wearing it in ten years, when he was somewhere else entirely.
Three triangles, about the size of my palm.
He held it the count Dez gave him, lifted it clean, and the smoke came up white.
Then he looked over at me to see whether he'd done it right.
Gus watched the whole thing from the porch with a look I knew. It was the look the old man got when one of his strays finally took root.
I stood at the fire with the smell of singed hair in my nose and I was so happy it frightened me.
Somewhere in the last few weeks I'd stopped standing at the edge of my own life and walked into the middle of it. On branding day with the sun out and the valley loud and Morgan looking back at me through the smoke grinning with somebody else's blood on his face, I felt the full size of what I had.
Right behind it was the full size of what it was going to cost when he got on a plane on the seventh. Nine days out and closing in. I heated irons all morning and the smoke got into my clothes and stayed there. So did the seventh.
***
We finished by two and the eating started.
Gus had come down off the porch for the meal, which he shouldn't have.
He was holding court at the head of the long table with a plate he wasn't touching and telling the one about the blizzard of '97, which got better every year and had not been true since about 2005.
The whole table was leaning in. I was three down from him watching Morgan listen to my old man with his whole face, the open hungry attention he gave everything now.
Gus stopped in the middle of a word.
He put his hand flat on the table, the same as he set it on the counter in the mornings, and his face went a color I had never seen on a living person. His other hand came up to the center of his chest and gripped his shirt there like he meant to tear it off.
"Holt," he said, very quietly, like he was telling me a secret.
And he started to go down.
I don't remember crossing the distance. I was three seats away and then I was holding him, an arm behind him before he hit the bench.
The whole loud sunny world had gone down to one small terrible point that was Gus's face and Gus's hand twisted in his shirt, his breath coming in short awful sips that weren't enough.
"Call it in." My voice came out somebody else's, low and far away. "Somebody call it in. Tell them heart. Tell them it's Three Saints and the road's the long way around."
The day exploded into motion around me. Dez was already on his phone and running for the gate to flag them in. Lane was there with a folded coat for under Gus's head. Flynn moved people back. Somebody's grandmother who'd been a nurse forty years pushing through to put her fingers on his neck.
I knelt in the grass under the cottonwoods holding the man who'd taken me in at eleven years old and handed me a pitchfork and a roof and a life, and I begged him. Out loud. In front of a hundred people, in a voice I didn't know was in me.
"Don't. Gus. Not today, you hear me. The roof's handled, all of it's handled, I've got all of it, you don't have to—"
And that was as far as I got, because he was looking at me and I couldn't get the rest of it out with him looking at me.
His eyes found me. Going gray and hunting my face down anyway, and his mouth worked, and what he got out was, "Roof on the barn."
Telling me. Even then. The roof on the barn before winter.
"I know," I said. "It's handled. All of it. I swear it to you. You just breathe."
Then we waited. The nurse kept two fingers on his neck and told me what to do and I did it. Somebody put a coat over him.
He was so light. That was the thing I wasn't ready for. I'd carried him up the porch steps twice this winter and told myself both times it was nothing. Now I had the whole weight of him across my arm and there was hardly any of it.
The tables sat there with the food going cold and people standing off at a distance not knowing what to do with their hands. The branding pot was still roaring away out by the corrals because nobody had thought to shut it off.
The ambulance took fifty-one minutes. I counted every one of them.
They got him onto the gurney and the doors were closing and I was climbing in after him without a thought. A hand caught my arm. I turned and it was Morgan, filthy and white-faced. He didn't say anything stupid. He didn't say it'll be okay. He didn't perform one thing.
"I'll follow in the truck. I've got the boys. Go."
***
They took him through doors I couldn't follow.
I sat in a plastic chair built for nobody's body and came apart very quietly, on the inside, where it wouldn't trouble anyone. Bad coffee. A television nobody watched. The clock.
I'd been in that room before. Ten years back, for Gus's gallbladder, which turned out to be nothing.
I'd sat in maybe the same chair and found out I could not pray and didn't know who I'd have been praying to.
I made myself a promise that night that I would never need anybody the way I needed that old man.
Needing was a debt. The debt came due at a desk like that one.
I kept that promise for ten years. I built a whole life on it.
I'd broken it twice in a single night. Needing Gus behind those doors, and needing the man who came through the entrance forty minutes later still smelling of branding smoke.
The boys came in behind him. Flynn couldn't sit and wouldn't, wearing a track past the vending machines all night. Dez sat down and was quiet, which I had never in my life seen him do. It was worse than anything he could have said. Lane took the chair by the door and did not move for four hours.
Morgan sat down beside me, close enough that our shoulders were touching. He didn't say anything at all, and he stayed there.
At some point in that long gray night my hand found his on the cold arm of the chair, or his found mine, and I would never know which. It didn't matter. Our fingers laced together and held.
I let him see it. Under the fluorescent lights, in front of the boys, I let myself be a man holding another man's hand, because I could not have gotten through the next hour without it.
Flynn quit walking for a second when he saw it. Then he went back to walking.
Dez got up and came back a few minutes later with two coffees, setting them both down on the little table by my elbow.
Lane never looked up at all.
He would be gone in nine days and Gus might not last the night, so I sat there in that room holding onto the one of them I could reach.