Three Children and a Pot of Soup
“I know it is,” I said. “That’s why it hurts.”
The next morning at five, I went out to the barn and found the door already open and Danny in the aisle with a fork in his hands and the dog at his feet. He grinned, the first full grin I had seen on him. We fed the cows together without another word.
The heifer started calving on the ninth of March at one in the morning, and she was in trouble from the start.
She was a first-calf heifer, young and narrow, down in the straw straining, and I could see only one of the calf’s feet. The other leg was turned back. I was shrugging out of my coat when the barn door opened behind me. Danny stood there in jeans and a pajama top and unlaced boots, breathing hard.
“I saw your light from the window.”
“Get the chains, second hook by the grain bin. And the bucket with the soap. Run.”
He ran.
Anyone who has pulled a calf in the dead of night knows what it is. You soap your arm to the shoulder, and with a shoulder like mine it hurts something terrible, and you ease the turned leg forward. Danny held the light, and when I needed the chains he had them in his hand before I asked. When I said pull, he leaned back with his whole weight and did not let go even when his boots slid.
The calf came all at once in a rush of fluid and lay in the straw.
Not breathing.
“Rub him. Hard. Get straw up his nose.”
Danny dropped to his knees. He shoved a clean stalk up the nostril and rubbed the ribs with both hands while I felt for a heartbeat. Thirty seconds. A minute.
The calf sneezed.
It shook its wet head and opened its eyes, and Danny sat back on his heels and laughed out loud, a high cracking boy’s laugh that rang off the rafters. I laughed too, wet to the elbows, grinning at a wobbling black calf with a white star on its forehead.
“We did that,” Danny said. “Owen, we did that.”
We stayed out a good while. I sat on a hay bale and Danny on an overturned bucket, and we watched the heifer lick the calf clean. Somewhere in the dark an owl said the one thing owls say.
It was three in the morning, the same hour that five months before I had stood on my porch with a screaming baby.
“Owen,” Danny said. “You didn’t have to keep us.”
I looked at him. He was staring at the calf.
“That first night I knew you didn’t want us. You stood in the door with one boot on and looked like you’d rather be anywhere. I figured you’d say a week and we’d go. So I made myself useful. That’s why I got up for the cows.”
My throat closed.
“I know,” I said. “And I did say a week.”
“I heard.”
“I was wrong. Look at me.”
He did.
“I didn’t keep you, son. You kept me.”
He frowned.
“I was finished. In September I’d decided to sell every cow I owned and sit in a chair. A man is finished when nobody needs him and he has quit needing anybody, and I was both. You came through that door with your brother on a deputy’s shoulder, and you fixed both in one night. And I needed you right back.”
He was crying now without a sound, and so was I.