They Ran Me Dry in the Desert, So We Came Back for the Whole Rim novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Branding Day

Ximena vaccinates calves, meets the Water Master's false numbers, and at the evening fire Colt puts his hand under her jacket, so she names a price.

Branding day started at five, in the dark, with sixty calves bawling in the pens.

By seven I had my sleeves rolled and a syringe in each hand.

A vet tech's job at a branding is simple: catch the calf, give the shot, say sorry, and move to the next.

I was good at it, and for once I was glad to be.

Work kept my hands from shaking.

Tammy Kimbrough found me at the second pen with a clipboard against her chest.

She was twenty-six and pretty in a pressed shirt.

Every summer she read the Count aloud, in a clear, sweet voice that carried to the back of the crowd.

In the first life, she had pulled a dead javelina out of the Upper Spring in front of everyone.

She had cried while she did it.

"Ximena!" she said, and she hugged me.

I stood stiff with a syringe held out to the side, and she did not seem to notice.

"I'm so glad your father brought you up," she said.

"You have to see the Upper Spring in June, when the snowmelt is gone and it's so clear you can count the stones."

"I'll try to make it," I said.

My voice came out light and friendly.

I was ashamed to find how well I could do that.

Behind her, at a folding table under a canopy, sat Ardith Pritchett with her glasses on a chain.

She was the Water Master, sixty, with iron-gray hair, and she kept the tally board for the springs and the wells.

She had a ledger open, with a long measuring stick laid across it.

She did not look up when my father walked to her table with his hat in his hand.

I watched him lean toward her and ask something respectfully.

She answered without raising her eyes, and my father's shoulders went down.

When he walked away he looked ten years older.

"What did she say?" I asked him, at the water barrel.

"That the Salcido wells are reading low this season," he said.

"She says it is only a number, mija."

I knew those wells.

I had lowered the stick myself every month since I was twelve, and they were not low.

I looked across the corrals for Ramiro.

He stood at the far fence in a canvas coat, kept the fire going, and helped no one and watched everything.

When our eyes met, he gave me the smallest nod, and he did not smile.

I turned back to my calves, and my face was warm, which was not the sun.

By dusk the irons were cold and the work was done.

The families came in to the big fire, and the Kimbroughs' hands set out platters of ribs and fry bread.

Lyle Kimbrough took his hay bale at the head and told his story about the winter of the big snow.

It had everyone laughing.

I sat on a bench near the end with a plate and a coffee, and tried to eat.

My father sat three seats away, with the other elders, and he had begun to laugh with them.

In the first life, I had sat on this same bench and looked at my plate when something happened at this fire.

I remembered that, and it burned.

Colt Kimbrough slid onto the bench beside me.

He was twenty-nine, broad in the shoulders, with a gold rodeo buckle and a smile that had gotten him out of everything.

"There she is," he said.

"The little doctor."

"Vet tech," I said.

"Hell, I'll take it," he said.

"Nobody has put a needle in a calf that gently since my mama."

He laughed at his own joke, loud, and some of the families laughed with him.

Colt always arranged the room that way, and I watched him do it.

He leaned in, close, and his arm went around my back.

"Daddy wants tenants to feel welcome," he said.

"Come sit on the good side, by me."

I could smell whiskey on him and the fire's smoke.

His hand slid down my spine.

It stopped at my hip, and then his fingers went under the hem of my jacket and flattened against the skin at my waist.

He did it slowly, in front of forty people, with his smile still on.

Nobody moved.

My father looked at his coffee.

Across the fire, I saw Ramiro standing very still with his hands at his sides.

He was not coming.

The law of the fire gave the first word to the one who was touched.

The Warden could say it only after I had named the price myself.

I thought of the girl from the south fork, and of every plate I had stared at.

Then I took Colt's wrist in my fingers, lifted his hand out of my jacket, and put it back on his own knee.

I stood.

The bench scraped, and the circle went quiet.

I looked at the heir of the Rim, and I did not look away.

"I'm a guest at this fire," I said.

"And I name a price."

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