The Wedding Suit I Wore to the Hospital

“You can’t hold him, Walt. Not like that. You smell like the cattle.”

My daughter-in-law said it from the hospital bed with my grandson against her chest, and she said it loud enough that the nurse checking the baby monitor stopped with her hand in the air.

I was standing in the doorway in my chore coat. I had come straight from the sale barn, and I knew what I smelled like. Forty years of sale barns will tell a man that much.

My son Ben was standing by the window. He looked at me, and then he looked at the floor, and he did not say anything at all.

“That’s all right,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”

That was what came out. Thank you. I have thought about it since, and I still do not know a better thing I could have said.

The nurse was a woman about fifty with reading glasses on a beaded chain. Her name tag said Pat. She looked from Ashley to me and back again, and I could see her deciding whether this was her business.

I did not give her time to decide. I nodded to the bed, I nodded to Ben, and I backed out of that doorway and let it swing shut.

The Call at the Sale Barn

My name is Walt Kessler. I am sixty-eight years old, and I run about a hundred and forty cows on a place in the Sandhills north of North Platte, Nebraska, that my granddad homesteaded.

My wife Joanne has been gone three years this May. It was her heart, and it was quick, and I am told that is a mercy. It did not feel like one at the kitchen table that night.

That March morning I had hauled eight cull cows into the sale barn in North Platte. They were open, two of them broken-mouthed, and the market was decent, and I wanted them gone before grass.

I had been sitting up in the bleachers with a styrofoam cup of coffee, watching a set of black baldy heifers go through the ring, when my phone buzzed in my coat. It was Ben.

“Dad,” he said. “He’s here. He came. He’s early, but he’s here.”

The baby was not due until the end of April. I stood up so fast I spilled the coffee on the man next to me, a fellow from Arnold I have known since grade school, and he just waved me off.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll watch your cows sell.”

I didn’t even stay to see what they brought. I walked out through the alley past the pens, got in the pickup with the empty gooseneck still hitched behind it, and drove the six minutes to the hospital.

I did not think about my coat. I did not think about my boots. I thought about one thing, and it was that Joanne should have been in the passenger seat beside me, and she was not, so I was going to have to see him for the both of us.