The Wedding Suit I Wore to the Hospital

The Heifer

I was halfway to the pickup when I saw the light on in the calving barn.

I had not left it on. That meant Dale had already come by early and found something, or else I had forgotten it that morning. I stood there in my wedding suit in the yard with the dog looking up at me, and I knew I could not drive past it.

I went in. There was a first-calf heifer down in the second pen, straining, with one little hoof showing and the sole of it pointed up at the rafters. That is a backwards calf. If you leave a backwards calf alone, you lose it.

I said a word Joanne would not have liked. Then I took off that suit coat and hung it on a nail well away from the pens. I took off the tie and the white shirt too, and I put on the old coveralls that hang by the door, over my undershirt and my good pants rolled to the knee.

It took about twenty minutes. I got the chains on, above the fetlocks and then a half hitch below, and I pulled with her when she pushed, slow and steady and down toward her hocks the way my dad taught me.

The calf came out in a rush, a big black bull calf, and lay there not breathing. I cleared his nose with my fingers and rubbed his ribs hard with a handful of straw and stuck a piece of straw up his nostril until he sneezed and shook his head.

Then he was breathing, and the heifer was up and licking him, and I sat back on my heels in the straw and laughed again.

“Two boys born in one day,” I said to the heifer. “Don’t get any ideas about which one’s my favorite.”

The Second Shower

So I went back in the house and took my second shower of the evening, in cold water this time because the tank hadn’t caught up.

I scrubbed with the orange soap again. I checked my hands under the kitchen light like a surgeon. I put the white shirt back on and fought with that tie four more times and got it on the fifth.

I called Dale and told him about the heifer, and he said he would check her at ten when he checked the rest.

“How’s that grandbaby?” he said.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m about to go find out.”

It was a quarter after eight when I pulled out of the yard. I did not take the trailer. I took Joanne’s car, the little Buick that sits in the shed and gets driven once a month so the battery doesn’t die. It smelled like her and not like cattle, and that was the whole point.