Eleven Heifers on the West Eighty

Mom made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else. She took her hand off Russ’s wrist, and she reached across with the other one and took hold of mine, so that she had us both.

“I have maybe ten falls left, if the Lord is generous,” she said. “I would like to spend every one of them with two sons at this table. Not one son and a visitor. Two.”

She squeezed, harder than you would think those hands could.

“You’ll sort those calves together. Both of you in the pen. I’ll sit in the pickup and watch, and I had better like what I see.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Russ said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Then she got up and cut the pie, and she turned Dad’s cup right side up and poured a little coffee in it, the way you would for company.

Russ and I did not hug in the yard. We are not that kind. He stood by his pickup with his keys in his hand.

“That fence straight?” he asked.

“Go look at it.”

“I will.”

He did, too. Walt told me later that Russ’s truck sat at the pasture gate for most of an hour the next evening, and that he walked the whole half mile and pushed on every brace.

The tenth of September came, and the first three heifers calved easy, at night, by themselves, the way it is supposed to go. I started to think I might know something.

The fourth one was number seven. On a Thursday evening at dusk she was off by herself under the hedge row, up and down, up and down, with two feet showing and nothing happening. I knew just enough to know the feet looked wrong.

I had the vet’s number up on my phone. He was an hour away.

I called my brother instead.

It rang twice.

“Yeah.”

“Russ. I’ve got a heifer in trouble on the west eighty and I don’t know what I’m looking at. The feet are showing with the bottoms turned up.”

He did not say I told you so.

“That’s a backwards calf,” he said. “Don’t pull on anything. Get her to the corral on my side if she’ll walk. Open your gate. I’m coming.”

He was there in fourteen minutes.

He came through the gate in the cross fence with a bucket, a set of calving chains, and the old calf puller that had hung in Dad’s barn. That gate had not been opened since the day I hung it.

We walked her through it together, one on each side, slow, into his corral and up the alley.

I held the light. He washed up to the shoulder in the bucket and went to work, talking the whole time in a low voice, half to the heifer and half to me, telling me what he felt and why he was doing each thing, and making me put my own hand on the calf’s hocks so I would know it the next time.

“When they come backwards you can’t dawdle,” he said. “Once the hips are through, the cord’s pinched and you’ve got about two minutes. So we go steady, and then we go fast. You ready?”

“No.”

“Good. You never are.”

It took the two of us, and it took everything we had. When that calf came, it came all at once, and it lay in the straw slick and still.

Russ was on his knees before I could move. He cleared its nose with his fingers, hung it over the gate rail for a few seconds to drain, laid it down, and rubbed its ribs hard with a feed sack.