The Weight of It

Cows bawl and mill around outside the corral. Inside the pen, calves cluster in a corner, bawling, too. I’m astride my grulla mare, Savanna. She is the color of a mule deer’s winter coat, with a dorsal stripe and zebra markings on her legs that trace back to the original wild horses, though she is quarter horse, not mustang. She stands calmly in the midst of this commotion as the ground crew bustles over the calf I just roped.

The calf flanked and down, my son Tyler holds the back legs still and our friend TJ kneels on the neck as my elder son, Ken, applies the brand. My grandchildren stand close by with the nut bucket, and their mother has syringes ready. Smells of blood, singed hair, and dust texture the air.

This is my world on this day — this family and work. I sit there watching, my saddle as comfortable as a good chair, and rub my hand along Savanna’s neck — my hand with its age spots and dry, thinning skin, fingers longer and more slender than my body has ever been but strong, too — all my life I have been strong except sometimes — the busted fingernails and calloused palm showing work and persistence but not the softness they have felt in a newborn’s head or a lover’s cheek. The mare’s smooth coat, warm with try, fills that same palm of my hand that holds all the years of my life.

Beyond the corral fence, the green, irrigated pastures of southwestern Colorado undulate toward Sleeping Ute Mountain, which angles up out of the land. The southern skyline holds Mesa Verde’s high buttes and to the east La Plata range still shows seams of snow above the timberline, though it’s summer and the cows know it’s too early for their calves to be weaned, which will happen in the fall. They also know their calves are being manhandled and they are in deep protest. I feel for them as their bags tighten with unspent milk but I can’t linger long in empathy, or memory. The ground crew releases the branded calf and I slip rope through the honda of my lariat, building another loop, holding it out and feeling the weight of it. Savanna moves, anticipating.

“Go get another one, Mom,” Ken says.

I flip my graying braid over my shoulder, out of the way of my rope, and my left knee, wrapped in Neoprene beneath denim, presses Savanna’s left side. We turn toward the huddle of calves, plotting our next move. I lift my arm and swing the loop in a slow circle above the wide-brimmed cowboy hat I wear these days for sun protection; feeling the smooth momentum, I point my finger at a calf and let the loop slide through the air. And miss, the calf bouncing away.

This kind of missing is so different from the other missing — that of missing someone you love — but it’s still laden with something akin to sadness or disappointment, perhaps the defeat of age. I get mad at myself, which doesn’t help. I miss again.

The mare is patient and my family is patient, all watching and waiting for me to rope another calf, which I do. Of course I do. I must. When that loop sails out and lands over a head, I keep Savanna steady with my left hand gripping reins and coils, and hold the rope high with my right as the calf startles at this new feeling, then jumps and bucks. I jerk the slack out of the rope and go to the horn, dally, and we head toward fire and family, the calf trotting behind my horse. It’s as if I’ve been doing this all my life without a gap between go-rounds. And that just plain feels good. I’m right in my body, my head.

So I do it again, but between the catches there are the misses. The wind starts up. The grandkids are getting tired — I see it in their faces as I re-coil my rope. My boys, on foot, swing their own loops at the calves and catch one and pull it to the fire by hand.

My boys. Young men in their thirties, brothers working together, using all their long tall muscles and laughing as if they are three and six years old, wrestling each other instead of the calf. But it wasn’t always like this.

•

I’m on a leggy bay gelding trotting off behind Keith, my husband, leaving truck and trailer parked in the shade of a California live oak as we ride out to find some bulls that we have to gather today, my baby but a month old and bundled up on top of blankets on the floor of the pickup. My breasts are full and nipples seizing as I leave my baby to follow this man.

We’re not gone long but does it matter? My baby is crying when I return, my breasts crying, too, clear through my shirt, and resentment sets in. Not for the baby-love of my life — no — but how does anger not curdle your milk?

Hastily tying my gelding to the trailer, I pick up my bundled baby from his nest on the pickup floor. Lifting baby and shirt, I feel his tight lips find the nipple and pull. And say to me in the language of animals, Mother. You are a Mother now.

A young mother, even though I’m thirty. A naïve mother, even though I wanted this baby with all the want I’ve ever had.

My breasts and baby know what to do, but not me.

Baby nursing, husband angry — we found and corralled the bulls but my hurry to get back annoyed him. Would I ever learn to say no to the right person? The wrong person?

Elk and deer and mountain lions and bears fight to raise their own. Wild horses run with their foals to protect them, and if that doesn’t work, the stallions fight the enemy. Cows are forced to leave their calves, each season of weaning a heartbreak. How is it that a human mother can leave her baby, even for minutes, and a human man doesn’t understand the anguish?

I sit on the pickup seat and see love in liquid blue eyes as my hot mother’s milk fills my baby’s belly. But my body jerks when I hear the trailer door open and feel the horses stepping in — my job to load my own horse and here I am, nursing my son.

•

When I’m lost I make mistakes. I get lost when there is too much distance between my head and my gut, that place of listening, of reckoning, of guidance if you listen well and reckon right. But how well could I listen when the baby knew my breasts were his and the father still thought this body belonged to him?

Among my mistakes: choosing directions that were not always best for my children, or for me. Yet those directions led me here, to the middle of a corral on a ranch in southwestern Colorado, my children the young men to whom I’m dragging calves.

My life is layered, like landscape. Like story. I want to see what lies beneath the layers I have piled onto this body like fat, or winter clothes, or blankets on the passenger side of a pickup truck floor.

The grulla mare waits to see which way my legs will guide her, which calf we will follow next. Each calf a life, a story. I know their mothers. The days they were born. Which ones I saw dropped to the ground, which calf I found still wet in the willows, cow licking calf as if that’s all there was to do in the world, no bull around saying follow me.

My knees squeeze and Savanna moves toward a light red heifer. I lift my arm up into a swing and throw and catch and dally and pull the calf to the fire.

Both sons are smiling. “Nice loop, Mom,” Ken says. I smile, too, and allow the feel-good.

This is my world on this day — these horses and cows, this family and work.

But it wasn’t always like this.

•••

Kathryn Wilder’s work has appeared in such places as High Desert Journal, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Southern Indiana Review, High Country News, and more than a dozen anthologies. Ellen Meloy Fund Desert Writers Award finalist in 2016 and 2019, and Waterston Desert Writing Prize finalist in 2018, Wilder was Artist-in-Residence at Denali National Park and Preserve in 2016 while earning an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives with cows and mustangs in southwestern Colorado.