It happened at three in the afternoon.

Travis was at the head gate of the squeeze chute. That’s the end where the cow’s head comes through, and you close a gate on her neck to hold her while the vet works.

A big black baldy cow came through. Mean. Wild-eyed. One of the old ones from the north pasture that hadn’t seen a person since spring.

She hit the head gate going full speed. Before it was latched.

The gate swung back on its hinge. Hard. Fifteen hundred pounds of cow behind it.

Travis’s right arm was between the gate and the pipe frame of the chute. Reaching for the latch.

It pinned his forearm against the steel pipe.

I wasn’t there. I was at the school in town, in the cafeteria, where I work. But the day hand told me later what it sounded like.

He said it sounded like somebody snapping a broom handle over their knee.

Two bones. The radius and the ulna. Both of them. Clean through.

The vet who was there doing preg checks splinted it with two boards and a roll of vet wrap. Then the nephew drove him to the hospital in Dalhart. Forty minutes on Highway 87, with Travis holding his arm in his lap.

Dalhart took one look at the X-ray and sent him on to Amarillo. Northwest Texas Hospital. Another hour.

A plate and six screws in Amarillo.

Surgery at nine that night. An orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Patel put a titanium plate along the radius and screwed it in with six screws. She said the ulna would heal on its own if he kept it immobilized.

Six weeks in a cast, at least. Then physical therapy. No heavy lifting for three months. No roping. No working cattle. No chute.

I got there at eleven. He was in a room on the fourth floor, groggy, with his arm propped up on pillows.

He looked up at me.

“I finished the black baldies,” he said. “Before it happened. All but that one.”

I sat on the edge of his bed and cried.

The bill came three weeks later.

Thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars. The ambulance. The ER in Dalhart. The transfer. The surgery. The plate. The screws. The anesthesiologist. Two nights in the hospital.

We have a marketplace insurance plan. Bronze. The cheapest one. It’s all we can afford, because Don doesn’t offer insurance. Our deductible is seventy-five hundred dollars per person. Our out-of-pocket max is ninety-four hundred.

So we owed ninety-four hundred dollars. Before physical therapy. Before the follow-ups.

And there was no workers’ comp.

I didn’t know that until the hospital billing office asked. Texas is the only state in the country where an employer doesn’t have to carry workers’ compensation insurance. They call it being a nonsubscriber. And a lot of ranches don’t carry it. Ranch work is exempt from a lot of things anyway.

Don didn’t carry it. Never had. His daddy never had.

Eleven years. Travis never asked. Neither did I.

Chapter Three: The Check

When the November check came, it was eight hundred dollars.

It comes on the fifth of every month. Don writes it himself. In his slanting handwriting, on checks from the Hartley County State Bank, with HOLLISTER CATTLE COMPANY printed across the top.

I opened the envelope at the kitchen table. The check slid out.

Eight hundred dollars and no cents. Memo line: October.