The cattle buyer took off his hat and held it against his chest, a tall, weathered man in a canvas jacket named Clay Burris, and he said in a voice that rolled across the pens, “Mr. Kittredge, I bought cattle from your daddy in 1968. I would know a Kittredge brand in the dark.” He turned slowly, with the hat still in his hand, and looked at Jody. “I did not come to buy anything today, son. Your father called me on Wednesday. I brought a friend with me.” I am Bud Kittredge, eighty two years old, and I walked out of the barn into the pale morning sun.
The driver of the second truck climbed down from the cab. He wore a gray Stetson and a badge pinned to his shirt, and his name was Ray Don Pickett, a special ranger with the cattle raisers association, thirty years on the job. He walked across the dirt to the pens in no particular hurry, with a clipboard in the crook of his arm. “Mr. Kittredge,” he said, tipping his hat, “I have been waiting a long time to meet the man who owns this brand. Mr. Burris tells me somebody has been trying to sell his cattle.”
Jody stood by the fence with his hands loose at his sides, thin as a rail in his old rodeo jacket, and his face went the color of the dust. A mockingbird sang in the live oak behind the stock tank. Sixty head of black Angus milled quietly in the pens, switching their tails in the cool air, unaware that they were the center of a trial. “Dad,” my son said, in a hoarse voice, “I can explain. I was only going to borrow against them. I was going to put it all back.”
A brand and a borrowed hat gave one Angus rancher the length of a Saturday morning to bring his son back to the truth in Abilene.
I gave my terms at the pen gate, with my cane planted in the dirt. “Jody, I have loved you since the day you were born, and that is why I am doing this. The deed that you filed in the courthouse is void, and my lawyer is taking it to the clerk on Monday. I will not press charges if you go to the treatment ranch in Weatherford tomorrow and stay the full ninety days. When you come out, you will work for me for wages, and you will keep the books in my sight. And you will never sign my name again.”
My son leaned his forehead against the top rail of the pen, and his shoulders began to shake. “Dad, I owe the casino on the Red River a hundred and ninety thousand dollars,” he said. “I started with the pills after the fall, and then the casino was the only place I did not hurt. I forged the deed because I could not stand to ask you for money. I could not stand to see your face.” He took a long, shuddering breath. “I have been robbing you for two years, and you have been so kind to me.”
But panic is a wild horse. Jody wheeled around, snatched the thick envelope of cash from the hand of Clay Burris, and ran for his truck parked behind the barn, boots pounding the dirt. He ran forty feet. I had left the gate of the back pen unlatched that morning, on purpose, and the sixty head, spooked by the sudden noise, surged forward in a slow black river and filled the lane between him and the truck. Ray Don Pickett stepped in behind them with his hand on his belt. And Clay Burris called softly, “Whoa, son.”
Jody stopped in the middle of the lane with the envelope held over his head, the black cattle swirling around him and the dust turning gold in the sunlight, and the old windmill creaking above the pens. The cattle lowed, a deep, patient sound. A big Angus heifer with a white star on her forehead pushed her nose into his chest, and he staggered back. Then something broke in him. He lowered the envelope, sat down in the dust of the lane among the cattle of his own grandfather, and wept like a child, with his hat in his lap.
The consequences were steady. Clay Burris handed the cash back to me, and I put it in my shirt pocket. Jody entered the treatment ranch in Weatherford the next morning. The county clerk voided the false deed on Monday, and Ray Don Pickett, who had his own view of such things, wrote it up as a family matter that had been put right. I visited Jody every other Sunday, driving the pickup with a thermos and a pecan pie, and each time he looked a little more like the boy who used to rope fence posts in the yard.
In the name of my wife Nell, who passed in 2021, I started the Nell Kittredge Fund. It pays for treatment for ranch families struggling with addiction and for scholarships for the children of ranchers and cowhands, in Taylor, Jones and Callahan counties. In the first year we paid for twenty nine treatment stays and sent fourteen students to college. One was a seventeen year old from Tuscola who had raised a prize steer and sold it for his tuition, and who led it across the arena at the county fair, tears running down his face.
On a bright Saturday in October, I sat on the tailgate of my pickup beside the pens with a cup of coffee, watching Jody work a bunch of calves in the pen with a quiet whistle and a flick of the hand, the way his grandfather had taught him. He was one hundred and twenty days clean, in a clean hat, with dust on his jeans. When he finished, he leaned on the rail and looked across the pasture to the stock tank and the live oak. “Dad,” he said, “Mama would be proud of this view.” I handed him the second cup.
