The sale barn cafe was full by six thirty.

It always is on sale day. Every Tuesday in Cimarron Wells, Texas, from September to May. The ranchers come in from forty miles around with their trailers hitched and their calves loaded, and before the auction starts at nine, they eat.

The cafe sits at the front of the Cimarron Wells Livestock Auction, a long metal building on the edge of town with pens out back as far as you can see. You can smell the cattle from the parking lot. Inside, you smell coffee and bacon grease and the sweet, sharp smell of the pens drifting in every time somebody opens the back door.

Don Hollister sat where he has sat for thirty years, at the near end of the long table.

Everybody in Hartley County knows that table. It’s a long Formica table by the front window, with mismatched chairs and a sugar shaker in the middle that’s been there since the Reagan administration. The big ranchers sit there. The ones with the land and the cattle and the names on the barn walls.

Don’s seat is the one at the end closest to the door. Where he can see everybody come in.

Felt hat. Tan canvas jacket. White mustache over his coffee cup.

He’s seventy-one. He runs about nine hundred mother cows on twenty-two thousand acres south of the Canadian River. The Hollister place. His granddaddy started it in 1919.

A row of cattlemen in hats sat with him over plates of eggs, talking calf prices.

Six of them. Seven. Dale Pruett, who runs the ranch north of Hollister’s. Bobby Ray Tillman, who owns the feedlot in Dalhart. The Kessler brothers, who farm wheat and run stockers. A man I didn’t know from Oklahoma.

They were laughing about something. Coffee cups going up and down. Forks scraping plates.

My husband Travis stood beside me in his straw hat, his right arm in a white cast and a sling.

The cast went from his knuckles to above his elbow. The sling was the blue hospital kind, with a strap that went around his neck. He’d tried to cover it with his jacket that morning, but he couldn’t get his arm through the sleeve. So he wore the jacket over his left shoulder only, the right side hanging empty.

He stood very straight. He always does. Thirty-six years old, six foot two, with sun lines around his eyes from fifteen years outside.

He wasn’t wearing his work boots. He couldn’t pull them on one-handed. He was wearing his church boots.

Travis worked for Don eleven years.

Since he was twenty-five. Since before we were married. He started as a day hand, working cattle for twelve dollars an hour. By the fourth year, Don made him foreman. He ran the whole cow-calf operation. Hiring. Doctoring. Moving cattle. Fixing fence. Working the chute.

Four thousand dollars a month. Plus the house on the ranch. A little stone house by the windmill, built in 1937, that we’ve lived in for nine years.

He was good at it. Everybody said so. Don said so. At the Christmas party every year, Don would stand up and raise his glass and say, “To Travis. Best hand I ever had.”

Chapter Two: Halloween

He broke that arm on Halloween.

A Thursday. We were weaning calves. You separate the calves from their mothers in the fall and ship them, and before you do, you run every single one through the chute. Vaccinate them. Tag them. Check them.

Then you run the cows through too. Pregnancy check. Vaccinate. Pour them for lice.

Nine hundred cows. Three days. Travis and two day hands and Don’s nephew, who’s twenty and mostly stands around.