Eleven Heifers on the West Eighty

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, now.”

The calf sneezed. It shook its head. It took one ragged breath and then another one.

A heifer calf. Red as a penny, with a white spot on her forehead the size of a thumbprint.

Russ sat back on his heels in the straw with his arms wet to the shoulder. He was breathing like he had run a mile, and he was looking at that calf the way I have seen him look at very few things.

“You bought heifers,” he said. “First calvers. You never in your life did one thing the easy way.”

“No.”

“Dad would’ve liked this one.”

It was the first time either of us had said his name to the other since the cemetery.

We turned the heifer loose and she went right to licking. We stood at the fence in the dark and watched until that calf got up on four shaking legs and found what she was looking for.

“Leave that gate open tonight,” Russ said. “So she can go back when she’s ready.”

I left it open.

The third week of October, we sorted his calves.

Mom sat in the pickup with the window down and a quilt over her lap, exactly as promised. Mr. Tolliver came out and leaned on the corral to tell us what they were worth, because I had asked him to, and so nobody could ever say the number came from one brother or the other.

I picked my three. I thought I had done well.

Russ looked them over and shook his head.

“Not that one.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing you can see. She’s out of a cow that’s been late two years running. You’ll be fighting it in her daughters.” He stepped into the bunch and cut out a different calf, smooth and quiet, with one motion of the sorting stick. “Take the bald-faced one. Her mother’s the best cow I own.”

He was paying a debt, and he gave me a better calf than the one I had chosen. I did not make anything of it out loud. Neither did he.

Three down. Six to go.

It is not all the way mended. I will not tell you it is. We do not sit on each other’s porches yet, and there are things about those six years that have not been said and may never be.

But we have worked cattle together four times since that night in the corral. He brings the chains. I bring the coffee. I bought my winter hay from him and paid cash, and he counted it twice and handed me back forty dollars, because he had miscounted the bales in his own favor and caught it himself.

Cole rents the east eighty from Russ and Walt’s place across the road. He drove out in September with his little girl on his shoulders to show her the calf with the white spot.

The fence is still there. It is a good fence and I am not sorry I built it.

But the gate has been standing open since October, wired back against the post so the wind will not swing it. The cattle go through as they please, and so do we.

Dad’s envelope is back in the drawer. I read it again the other night.

The west eighty has the pond. Russ will tell you it goes dry. It don’t.

It was full to the bank all summer.