Eleven Heifers on the West Eighty

My phone rang at ten after one. I was sitting in my pickup in the sale barn lot.

“James,” my mother said.

Nobody has called me James since the day I was baptized, unless I was in trouble.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I have had four telephone calls since eleven o’clock. Four. I would like to know why I am hearing about my own sons from the women in my circle.”

“Mom, I can explain it.”

“You can explain it at six o’clock. Supper. I’ve called your brother and told him the same.” She took a breath, and I could hear that it cost her something. “Don’t bring your wives. This is not for wives.”

“Mom, your heart.”

“My heart has buried a husband and it will get through a supper. Six o’clock.”

She hung up.

I got there at ten till. Russ’s pickup was already in the yard.

The kitchen on the home place has not changed since I was a boy. The same oilcloth on the table. The same yellow telephone on the wall, with a cord long enough to reach the stove. She had made chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes, which is what she made when either of us came home from anywhere.

Russ was already in his chair. I sat down in mine, across from him.

She had set three places. Then she had set a fourth, at the head of the table. No plate. Just Dad’s coffee cup, the heavy white one from the co-op, upside down on a saucer.

“We’ll eat first,” Mom said. “I did not cook all afternoon to have it go cold over foolishness.”

So we ate. Two grown men, forty-seven and fifty-three, with our eyes on our plates, passing the pepper when asked.

When we were done she stacked the plates herself and would not let either of us get up. Then she sat back down and folded her hands on the oilcloth. Her knuckles are big with arthritis now, and her wedding band turns loose on her finger.

“I am not going to ask who did what,” she said. “I have had that from four different women today, and I expect about half of it is true.”

She turned to my brother.

“Russell. I am going to ask you one question, and I want you to answer me the way you would answer him.”

She tipped her head toward the cup.

“If your father were sitting in that chair right now, would you tell him what you told your brother in March?”

The clock over the refrigerator ticked.

Russ opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked at the white cup. He looked at his hands, which are Dad’s hands, wide and scarred across the knuckles.

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“Why not?”

“That’s two questions, Mom.”

“I’m seventy-nine. I’ll ask as many as I please.”

He almost smiled. Then it was gone, and something came up from under it that I think had been there a long time.

“Because he’d have looked at me,” Russ said. “That’s all he’d have had to do.”

He pushed back from the table a few inches.

“But I’ll tell you what I’d say to him if I could. I’d say I stayed. I was eighteen years old and I stayed. Jim went off and drove a truck and saw some country and came back to a county paycheck with insurance. I never drew a wage on this place one day in my life. I fed in the dark for the better part of thirty years. I was the one who drove Dad to Wichita every three weeks that last year and sat in that waiting room. And then the day came, and he split that grass right down the middle like we’d both been here the whole time.”