The Counter That Moved Across the Highway

Emma’s sign

It was past ten when we got home. The kids were asleep at Jenna’s and Cody went to get them, carrying Lily in her blanket and walking Tyler by the hand. Emma came in on her own, rubbing her eyes.

“Mama, where were you?”

“Buying feed.”

She looked at me like that was the strangest answer in the world. Then she sat at the kitchen table, and I told her what I was going to do in the morning.

“You need a sign,” she said.

“I need a price list.”

“I can write it. I have the best handwriting in fourth grade. Mrs. Kessler said.”

So at ten-thirty at night, with her hair in a tangle and her pajamas on inside out, my nine-year-old sat at the kitchen table with a purple marker and a sheet of paper on Cody’s old clipboard. I read her the prices, and she wrote them down slowly and carefully, with her tongue between her teeth.

High-mag mineral, 50 lb, $38. Milk replacer, 50 lb, $119. Colostrum replacer, $52. Ask about a tab.

She wrote “colostrum” wrong twice and erased it so hard she almost tore the paper. Then she drew a little cow in the corner, a brown one with a white face, and a heart over its head.

“Is that okay?” she asked.

I looked at that clipboard for a long time. I could not say anything, so I nodded.

She put her arms around my neck, careful of the baby, and said into my ear, “You’re the best at the feed store, Mama. Everybody knows.”

The dock

At 5:15 the next morning it was fourteen degrees. Dad had the shed lights on and the telehandler running when I pulled in. He set the pallet on the dock like he was setting down an egg, and then he went inside and got me a folding chair and his old thermos.

“I’ll be in the shed,” he said. “You holler if you need me.”

“I won’t need you.”

“I know,” he said. “Holler anyway.”

I stood on that dock in my chore coat and my knit cap with Emma’s clipboard in my hand. The sky over the highway went from black to gray to a thin pale yellow. There was old snow in the ditches, crusted and dirty, and the wind had died down to almost nothing.

Across the highway, the lights came on at Schaefer Feed and Supply at six o’clock, like they had every morning for eleven years. I watched Ron’s pickup pull in. I watched him unlock the front door. He did not look across the highway, or if he did, I did not see him do it.

I was not there to hurt him. I want to say that clearly. I was there because I had three kids and a fourth on the way and a skill that was worth something. I had spent eleven years learning it at his counter, and now I was going to use it at mine.

At 6:30, a pickup came down the highway from the north, slow. It was a white Ford with a flatbed and a round bale on the back, and I knew it before I could see the driver.

Walt Engen was seventy-seven years old. He had bought feed from that store since before Ron Schaefer was born, back when Ron’s father ran it and it was called Schaefer Grain. He was the oldest rancher still calving his own cows in the county, and everybody knew he was the hardest man in the county to please.

His pickup slowed down at the feed store. Then it kept going, past it, and slowed again at my dad’s shed. The blinker went on.

He pulled up to the bottom of the ramp and shut off the engine and sat there for a minute. Then he got out, stiff, and came up the ramp with one hand on his bad knee.

He looked at the pallet. He looked at the clipboard. He looked at my coat, buttoned tight over the baby.