They Sent Me to Prison for the Family Fire, So I Came Home to Sell the Ranch Out From Under Them novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Chute

The Elko sale yard started at six on Monday mornings, and by seven the lot was full of stock trailers and men with coffee.

I walked in beside Ansel in the same blue dress, because it was the only clean one I had.

He wore the gray jacket with the county patch.

He had stopped being the man on his grandmother's porch somewhere between the truck and the gate.

Here he was the brand inspector, and the men on the rail nodded to him one at a time and watched me over their cups.

They knew who I was.

I had expected that.

I had not expected a man in a feed cap to take the cap off as I passed.

"Ma'am," he said.

I kept walking.

"Why are they doing that?" I whispered.

"You said it into a microphone," Ansel said.

"Half this valley has waited five years for somebody to say it."

"Half?" I said.

"The other half is related to your father."

The loading chutes ran along the east fence.

A man was working a gate at the second chute, hauling a ram up the ramp on a rope.

He was tall, with a sun-peeled neck, and I knew the back of his head before he turned.

He was twenty-seven now.

He had slept in my bed in the foreman's cottage for a year, and at twenty-two he had stood up in a county courtroom and said that I talked about burning the place down.

I stopped at the bottom of the ramp.

He saw me.

The rope went slack in his hands, and the ram bolted past him into the pen.

"Maite," he said.

The men on the rail stopped talking.

Eleven or twelve of them were close enough to hear, and more were coming along the fence with their coffee.

"You said I talked about burning it," I said.

"I said, I didn't mean," he said.

"You said it under oath," I said.

"Iker told me what the district attorney wanted."

It came out in a rush, as if it had been sitting behind his teeth for five years.

"Iker came to the cottage the night after.

"He said you'd done it, everyone knew, and all I had to do was say you'd been angry.

"I thought I was telling the truth.

"I thought you must have."

"Did I ever say it?"

He looked at his boots.

"Say it," I said.

"You never did."

A low sound went down the rail.

Somebody said, "Well, hell."

I didn't want to hit him.

I had imagined it a hundred ways on the steel shelf at night.

Now that he stood there with his hands hanging, I only wanted him to keep talking.

"Tell the sheriff what you told me," I said.

"They'll arrest me," he said.

"They might."

He said, "Maite."

"I was arrested five years ago," I said.

"It's your turn to find out what it's like."

Ansel put his hand lightly against my elbow.

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