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terrible distress, and she couldn’t control her bladder. Dad and Smokie held her upper body to help her into the truck. I grabbed her legs and carefully lifted them in. Urine ran down over my hands. That really scared me. I knew Mom was bad. I knew it was awfully serious.
    Dad left us at home, took off with Mom for the hospital, and we went on to school. We worried about our mother all day and all night, but Dad never called. Mom was in the hospital for three long days, and during that entire time we never heard from him.
    Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, Dad came home. He just came into the house and stood before us, and said, “Boys, your mother’s gone.”
    That was it. I was shocked. Mom had been in and out of the hospital so many times with her diabetes that I figured she’d come home, and we’d go on. But she didn’t, and we had to.
    *     *     *
    For Mom, trick roping had meant more than anything. It was the glue that held our family together. When Smokie and I did the Sugar Pops commercial, she loved it. The spot ran nationally, and we were dubbed “The Sugar Pops Kids.” Mom’s only moment in the limelight had been as a dance instructor at an Arthur Murray dance studio when she was a young woman, and she was elated that we were on national television. She would sit in front of the TV and pray that the commercial would come on.
    After Mom passed away, one of her nurses who went to the funeral told me that while she had been in a coma the entire time she was in the hospital, they had left a TV playing in her room. I guess they thought the constant voices and sounds would help stimulate her back to consciousness. Just before she died, our Sugar Pops commercial came on and Smokie and I were doing our rope tricks. As soon as the commercial was over, Mom passed away.
    I can’t help but think that she heard our voices, and maybe that was all she needed. Maybe hearing her babies one last time was her way of saying good-bye. I guess we all have our way of saying “I love you and good-bye.” Timing again. It just keeps showing up.
    With Mom gone, Dad changed for the worse. He had always been pretty rough on us, and it had gotten to the point where he’d been turned in to the law quite a few times, but he never did anything life-threatening while Mom wasalive. The moment he told us she was gone, I knew life was going to get tougher.
    Within a year of Mom’s death, Dad had pretty much fallen apart. He really loved Mom, and losing his wife seemed to drive him over the brink. He drank heavily, and he just didn’t want to live anymore. He’d had a rough life. He had been a prisoner of war in Germany for over a year during World War II. God knows what they did to him—he never told us—but maybe he never got over the experience. To make matters worse, Dad had a near-fatal accident in Alaska, receiving a big jolt of electricity while working as a lineman. He was in the hospital for six or eight months. After he came home, he suffered from horrible headaches. They seemed to torture him for the rest of his life.
    Ace Brannaman provided for his boys however he could. Here he arrives home with a poached antelope.
    For whatever reason he justified his anguish by blaming Smokie and me. Maybe he thought that if we weren’t around, Mom would still be alive. Not our mom, mind you, his wife.
    During that time, Smokie and I would talk as we walked to the bus stop for school, pondering whether or not we were going to live through the next night, let alone the school year. We lived in fear every day. We felt we had no safe place and were heading down a road with no good ending in sight.
    Dad was drinking so much he couldn’t sleep. It got to where he would keep us awake many nights running, hollering and screaming at us, beating us, and slapping us around. Our dining room table was solid oak and surrounded by oak captain’s chairs. I stared at that wood grain a lot when he made us sit there and take his