The Dog Who Brought the Cows Home

My brother laughed before the lawyer finished the sentence. It was a short laugh, more air than sound, and he covered it with his hand like he knew it was wrong and could not help it.

“Well, Jilly,” Kurt said. “You got the dog.”

The lawyer was a heavy, careful man named Dale Jensen who had done my father’s papers for thirty years. He did not look up when Kurt laughed. He just turned the page and kept reading in the same flat voice.

The ranch went to Kurt. The 1,200 deeded acres west of Killdeer, the state grazing lease that ran along the north side, the hay ground on the creek, the house, the barns, the equipment, and 180 bred cows with their calves at side.

To me, my father left a pickup’s worth of hand tools, his mother’s cedar chest, and Duke.

Duke was nine years old that spring. He was a black-and-white border collie with one ear that stood up and one that folded over, and he was sitting in my truck at that very moment with his chin on the dash, watching the stairway door.

I did not say anything. I folded my hands in my lap and looked at the brown water stain on the ceiling tile above Mr. Jensen’s desk. I have been a school secretary for nineteen years, and I know how to keep a face still while somebody says something foolish.

“Is that all of it?” Kurt asked.

“That’s all of it,” Mr. Jensen said.

Kurt nodded slowly. He was forty-seven, and he had our father’s shoulders and our mother’s long hands. He had lived in Fargo since he was eighteen, adjusting insurance claims for a company that wrote crop and hail policies all over the valley.

“Well,” he said again, and stood up. He shook Mr. Jensen’s hand. Then he looked at me, and something crossed his face that I did not understand until much later.

“You can come out and see the place anytime,” he said. “You know that.”

I said, “I know where it is, Kurt.”

That was the coldest thing I said to my brother that whole spring, and I am still not proud of it.

The drive home

Duke stood up on the seat when I came down the stairs. He did not bark. Dad never let him bark at people. He just stood there with his tail going slow, and when I opened the door he put his nose against my neck and breathed.

I kept seeing my father’s handwriting. Not in the will, which was typed. In the calving book, which I still had in my glove box, because I had taken it out of his coat pocket the morning we found him.

My dad was seventy-eight. His heart quit in the calving barn on the eleventh of February, at about four in the morning, while he was checking heifers. He went down in the straw beside a pen, and Duke lay beside him until Gus Lindquist came over at seven to see why the yard light was still on.

Gus called me first. Then he called the ambulance, even though he knew.

I drove over in the dark and found Duke lying across my father’s legs. He would not get up for the ambulance men. He would not get up for Gus. He got up for me, and he walked to my truck and got in, and he did not get out again until we were home.