4. Dalton
Dalton
I’d just finished dressing after my shower and was about to suggest to Cameron and Dillon that they get up and follow my lead so they’d be awake enough for breakfast, when I heard a series of shouts outside.
I opened the door and went down the pair of steps to see almost a dozen young calves, red with white faces, running past. They were sticking close to the wooden fence line, kicking up dust, and they were making a strange crying sound as they went, as though they were determined to find something while not actually knowing what they were looking for.
Near the barn, where the double doors were open wide, a man in a cowboy hat was leading a brown-and-white horse. The second the horse saw the calves, its head went up in a furl of mane, its eyes bright and focused. Its legs were bunched beneath it, a runner at the starting gate.
It was just about to take off like a rocket when the first guy tossed the reins to a second guy. Who was Jake. He sprinted with the horse for a foot or two, then swung himself astride in one fluid motion.
His hands barely touched the reins as they sped past where I was standing, my mouth open. Dust settled on my shoulders as Jake lifted a sturdy, coiled rope from the saddle and swung it out in front of him. The rope did not look light, but he threw it like it was a spool of cotton.
The toss missed, and then one of the calves was coming straight at me like I was its mother.
Jake quickly gathered the rope and threw it again, and this time the loop settled around the calf’s neck.
Two other men on horseback went after the other calves, but my eyes were on what Jake was doing, because he was about to rescue me from my frozen awe.
His whole body tightened to stay in the saddle as the horse sat back on its hind legs, its forelegs planting stiffly in the dust like it was on tiptoes.
I fully expected, as Jake got off—a swing of thigh, a balance of shoulder—that he was going to haul the calf onto its side and tie up its legs, as I’d seen on TV when I’d happened to pause on a rodeo event.
He’d be all manly and cruel and yank that calf into submission, throwing up his hands afterward to demonstrate his prowess.
But he didn’t. Instead, as he walked toward the roped calf, which was bawling and pulling back, he clicked to the horse.
The horse, almost instantly, stood up, easing the tension on the rope, but otherwise held absolutely still.
Jake approached the calf, his strong fingers curling around the rope. Not tugging or pulling, just holding.
“Hey, baby,” he said to the calf, ignoring me completely. “Looking for your mama? She’s in the upper pasture. She’s not the way you were going a’tall.”
As he came right up to the calf, he scratched it behind the ears with one hand, still holding firmly onto the rope with the other. A perfect balance between force and gentleness.
Jake clicked again. The horse moved. The rope went slack, and the calf stood still, and that’s when Jake looked at me.
“We’re weaning them,” he said, as calmly as if we were in a schoolroom and I’d just raised my hand to ask a question. “Gently as we can, but it’s still upsetting to the calves.” He looked down at the calf and patted its young neck, and I saw that he’d left a streak of blood behind.
His hands were bare. He’d thrown that rope without gloves; that was why he was bleeding. As he went back to the horse, pulling the mostly quiet calf with him, making a circle of the rope around his elbow and along the cup of his hand, he didn’t even seem to notice the deep scores in his palm.
Getting the calf back to where it should go, that was what he was focused on. That and a hearty pat for the horse. He talked to both animals as he led them back to the barn or the paddock or wherever they needed to go. And I realized something.
The worn jeans and ratty boots made more sense now. Why wear something new and clean when you were liable to ruin it before the day ended?
He’d been covered with dust, a thin, shiny streak of sweat cutting through the dust along his cheek, a damp curl plastered darkly behind his ear. His eyes had glittered with more animation than I’d seen since I’d met him the day before.
And he’d actually smiled at me, mouth curved in a lovely way, as if to share his pleasure in this small event coming to a successful conclusion.
I didn’t imagine the calves—or any animal—got loose very often, but he’d been on it, all go and no stop.
Using those muscles I’d sensed beneath his simple clothes.
Behind me, Cameron and Dillon tumbled out of the cabin.
“Wow, did you see that?” Dillon asked.
I looked to see Cameron leaning over Dillon’s shoulder, both of them barely dressed in new briefs and white t-shirts, barefoot, at the top of the bunkhouse steps.
“Yeah.” I said, not hiding my admiration. “It’s a lot different up close, isn’t it.”
They were looking at me with wide eyes now that Jake and the other cowboys had gone into the barn. Perhaps for leadership or some kind of guidance.
“We ought to tell them thank you,” I said, though I was thinking specifically of Jake. “That calf nearly ran me over.”
I shooed them inside the bunkhouse to get dressed for breakfast and looked over at the paddock where the calves had been placed.
Someone was hammering on the fence, repairing the break where the animals had gotten through.
It wasn’t Jake, but a moment later, he came out of the barn with a bucket and poured the contents, which looked like brown pellets, into the troughs hanging on the inside of the pen.
All before breakfast, he’d been hard at work. Doing what he loved, or at least doing something that made him look less glum. Even from this distance, as he was concentrating on his work, he was tall and steady. Focused.
My heart thumped in my chest. I wanted to go over to him, to say hello or something, an urge that felt foreign and exciting at the same time. I preferred to be among people I knew. Yet here I was with the impulse to talk to him.
He wouldn’t like it if I interrupted his work, anyway, so there was no point, right?
By the time the teens and I got to breakfast, people were gathered around where Jake and his fellow heroes were already halfway through their meal.
Jake’s shoulders were hunched forward as he dug into his eggs and hash browns, the whole plate covered with hot sauce or maybe ketchup.
I liked to think that the expression on his face was the unspoken version of some hokey cowboy response: Aw, shucks, t’weren’t nothing.
Except maybe it wasn’t hokey. Maybe it was real. That’s what he would say, because maybe to him it was nothing. Rounding up cattle before breakfast. That’s what you did on a ranch.
The way he’d mounted that horse had been breathtaking, though. You had to have strong thighs to make that kind of maneuver work. Getting astride a horse already in motion.
The teens and I finished our breakfast and bused our places, then went over to the three cowboys. It was easier now to get closer to them, since the dining hall was clearing out.
Jake was finishing his coffee, holding the white china mug not by the handle but by the sides. His coffee wasn’t black, as I would have expected. Tough men drank their coffee plain, right? Instead, it was light brown, like he’d piled on the milk and maybe even sugar.
“That was cool,” Dillon said.
Cameron chimed in. “Way cool.”
“Thank you,” I said to Jake. “That calf could have run me over, the way he was going.”
“He wouldn’t have hurt you none,” Jake said. There was a bit of tease in his voice, and his eyes glittered like blue-and-gold stars. “Maybe scuffed your jeans a bit.”
The other two cowboys laughed into their breakfasts, like Jake was a venue-filling comedian. Jake didn’t join in.
Jake had a strip of paper towel wrapped around and around his right hand. Not a bandage or anything like that. Just a narrow line of white with a red streak in the middle. He had to hold it in place with two fingers, as if in a little while he was going to dispose of it altogether.
“I’d like to learn how to do that roping thing,” Dillon said.
“They all say that, kid,” one of the cowboys replied. “But the roping lariats we use weigh almost three pounds.”
Three pounds didn’t sound like much to me, but the cowboy in question had his lariat with him, all coiled up. He took it from the bench seat and handed it around.
Cameron and Dillon pretended it was heavier than it was, fooling around the way they had been since I picked them up at the Center, but I could see by their expressions that they were surprised by the weight. By the time I got it, I was expecting it to be heavy, and it was.
Jake’s rope probably had blood on it, but I jerked my brain away from that raw image and handed the rope to Jake. Who handed it across the table back to its owner like it weighed nothing.
“I expect we could teach them,” Jake said. “We could start them with a roping dummy and a junior lariat.”
I didn’t think Cameron or Dillon really wanted to learn, but who was I to squash their enthusiasm? Especially when I wouldn’t be on the ranch for much longer.
Jake and the cowboys, having finished their breakfast, stood up.
Jake was a little taller than the others, and as I looked up at him, I realized that he wasn’t a story or a stereotype.
He smelled like soap from his shower and sweat from hard work.
He was the real deal. I’d never met a real cowboy before, and maybe my mouth was hanging open a little bit, and maybe I had to snap it shut and turn away and focus on the next step. Which was packing up and driving home.
As I walked with the boys out of the dining hall, Lucas came up behind me, reached around, and slammed something against my chest: nearly new cowboy boots, smelling like polish. The toes curled up as if they’d not been worn in a while.