The Dog Who Brought the Cows Home

On the porch

Pete took Ginger home and said he would come back for me after chores. Gus and Arlene left. And then it was just Kurt and me sitting on the front porch of the ranch house, the porch where Dad used to sit with his coffee every evening watching the cattle on the hill.

Duke lay between our chairs. The sun was getting low, and the hills were turning that deep green-gold color they get at the end of a May day.

“Can I ask you something?” Kurt said.

“You can ask.”

“Why’d you come today? After what I said.”

I thought about it. “Because they were Dad’s cows,” I said. “And because you’re my brother. And because I knew you were in trouble and you would never call.”

He nodded slowly. He was quiet for a long time.

“You know why I took it?” he finally said. “The ranch. You know why I didn’t just sell it and go back to Fargo?”

“Why?”

“Because I thought he loved this place more than he loved me,” Kurt said. He was looking out at the hill, not at me. “My whole life I thought that. He’d be out with the cows at dawn and come in at dark, and I could never do it right, and he never once told me I was any good at anything.”

“Kurt.”

“So when that lawyer read it out, that he left me the ranch, I thought, there. Finally. He left me the thing he loved most. That means he loved me.” He laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “And I laughed at you because I couldn’t believe I’d won something. Isn’t that stupid? Forty-seven years old.”

I did not know what to say. I reached down and put my hand on Duke’s head instead.

Duke had a burr stuck in the fur of his neck, right up by the collar, from the brush in the ash draws. I started to work at it with my fingers, and Kurt leaned over to help.

“Hold still, buddy,” he said. He unbuckled the collar to get at the burr.

The collar was old brown leather, the same one Dad had put on him when he was a pup. There was a brass nameplate riveted on the outside with Duke’s name and Dad’s phone number stamped on it. The plate had got bent up at one corner, maybe on the brush that morning.

Kurt stopped. He held the collar up to the porch light.

“Jill,” he said. “There’s something in here.”

Behind the bent corner of the plate, tucked flat between the brass and the leather, there was a small square of folded paper. Kurt worked it out with his thumbnail. It was a page torn from one of Dad’s little calving notebooks, the kind he bought at the feed store in Killdeer by the dozen.

Kurt unfolded it. His hands were shaking again. He read it, and then he did not say anything at all. He just handed it to me.

It was in my father’s handwriting. Big blocky pencil letters, the same handwriting in the calving book in my glove box.

It said: “He goes where Jill goes. So does the ranch, if Kurt has any sense.”

I read it three times. Then I put my hand over my mouth.