He started baling hay at 5:00 that morning, then he and his boys branded cows at 8:00, breakfast missed, again.  He’d heft the heifers and throw them down, while a son hit the cow with the hot iron, The Bar Double B, the hair sizzling, smelling like what his Sunday school teacher must have meant by fires of hell, “mephitis” she called it, in her prim voice, all nose and lavender perfume. 

After tending the herd, the latter part of the day was spent stringing barbed wire between the post oaks.  No lunch, again.  Only one torn thumbnail on his left hand; only one burn on his right palm.  Not bad for a day’s work. But the sons were off to the city for “real work,” they said, in a bank or insurance job.  He faced the setting sun, gray clouds heavy on the horizon, the weather uncertain as the farm’s future.  He rested one heel on the fence, his Nocona boot tip scuffed and torn, his Llano Stetson low, a shadow on his face.  And he thought of generations past, his generation passing like farm loans due, unpaid. 

– Steve Gerson