The Counter That Moved Across the Highway

Summer

Jenna started at the counter the first of May. Kassidy stayed on, too, and Jenna taught her the difference between the Engens and the Olsons. Walt Engen came back into Schaefer Feed and Supply the next Monday, bought four sacks of mineral, and spelled his name for nobody.

I took orders from my kitchen table and on my phone and in the café, where Walt saved me a chair even though I am not a man and not eighty. The checks came in from Ron every two weeks, and they were bigger than my old paychecks had ever been, and I worked fewer hours to earn them.

We bought the Suburban in May. It was green and had a hundred and forty thousand miles on it, and Cody spent two weekends fixing the transmission. The kids named it the Pickle.

I want to tell you about one night in June, because it is the one I think about most.

Three in the morning

Mark Fischer calves late, on grass, in May and June, because he says it is easier on the cows and on his back. Most years it is. That year, a first-calf heifer had a big bull calf at the end of a long hard night, and the calf would not suck.

My phone rang at 3:04 in the morning. I was eight months pregnant and sleeping on my left side with four pillows, and Cody had to shake me to wake up.

“Britt,” Mark said. His voice was thin. “I’m sorry. I know what time it is.”

“What’s going on?”

“Calf won’t suck. I’ve got no colostrum in the barn. I used my last bag last week and I keep forgetting to call you. He’s going down, Britt. He’s cold.”

“I’m coming,” I said.

Cody was already up and pulling on his jeans. “I’m driving,” he said.

“The kids.”

“I’ll call Jenna.”

Jenna came over in her pajamas and sat on our couch, and Cody drove us to the Fischer place in the Pickle, eleven miles of gravel in the dark. I had a bag of colostrum replacer, a tube feeder, a bucket, and a jug of warm water I had filled at the kitchen sink.

The barn light was on. Mark was in the pen with the calf, and his boy Caleb, who is eight, was holding the flashlight in his pajamas and his dad’s barn boots. The calf was lying flat in the straw, and he looked bad.

I mixed the colostrum in the bucket with my hands shaking. I am not too proud to say I was scared. I had tubed calves before, growing up on Dad’s place, but not in ten years, and never eight months along.

I knelt in the straw. It was hard to kneel, and Cody helped me down and held me by the shoulders. Mark held the calf’s head, and I fed the tube down slow and careful, the way Dad taught me when I was fourteen, checking and checking again that it went down the right way.

It took a long time. Nobody said anything. The only sound was the calf breathing and the heifer lowing in the next pen and the rain starting on the barn roof.

When the bag was empty, I pulled the tube out, and we waited.