The Night His Cattle Got Out

Gray Light

I woke up to gray light and the sound of a truck door.

For a second I didn’t know where I was. The windshield was glazed with ice on the outside and fogged on the inside.

My jacket was still soaked through. My hands ached all the way to my elbows.

I wiped a hole in the fog with my sleeve. Ray’s pickup was parked behind me, still running, with the driver’s door hanging open.

Joyce was sitting in the passenger seat with both hands over her mouth.

Ray was standing at the gate in his sheepskin coat and his old felt hat. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking down the fence at the corner.

He looked at the new T-post for a long time. Then he walked down the fence line and put his hand on the top wire and pushed on it, the way any cattleman does, to see if it would give. It didn’t give.

Then he walked back to the gate and looked out across the pasture. The cows were bunched up near the windbreak, their black backs white with frost and sleet, steam rising off them in the cold.

He started counting.

I watched him do it through the windshield. I could see his lips moving.

He counted the way my grandpa used to, pointing a little with one finger, starting over when a cow moved behind another one.

It took him a long time. I think he counted them twice. Maybe three times.

A man doesn’t trust a number like that until he has done it himself, and I understood that. I’d have done the same.

I found out later what he had expected to see. Hannah told me.

He had listened to my voicemail and hers at 4:30 that morning in the motel parking lot, and he had driven three hours expecting dead cows on Highway 2.

He told Joyce somewhere around Broken Bow that he hoped nobody was hurt. He said he hoped it was only cows.

He said that twice, Joyce told me. Then he didn’t say anything else for an hour.

When he was done counting, he stood at the gate a minute longer. Then he turned around and looked straight at my truck. Straight at me.

I got out. Dutch jumped down after me and sat at my boots in the slush, the way he always does when he doesn’t know a man.

My jacket was dripping. I was shaking a little, not all from the cold. And I did what I had done at every door for two years. I held out my hand.

Ray looked down at it.

Then he looked at my forearm. My sleeve had ridden up when I reached out, and the Rafter J was right there in the gray light, plain as anything.

He opened his mouth. Then he closed it again.

What Ray Said

“Put that down a minute,” he said.

I didn’t understand. I thought maybe that was it, that even after all of this, he still wasn’t going to shake it.

I felt my face go hot. I started to put my hand back in my pocket.

Then Ray pulled off his own glove, a big leather glove with the fingers worn shiny, and he put it in his coat pocket. And he held his hand out to me.

“I should have been the one offering,” he said. “Two years ago. I should have been the one.”

I took it. His hand was rough and cold and a lot stronger than I expected.

He didn’t let go right away. He held on and looked at me like he was seeing somebody for the first time.

“Sixty-three,” he said.

“Sixty-three.”

“I counted twice.”

“I’d have counted three times,” I said, and for the first time since I’d known him, I saw the corner of his mouth move. It wasn’t quite a smile. It was close.

Joyce had gotten out of the truck by then. She was standing by the fender in her coat, holding her purse with both hands. She didn’t say anything. She just watched us.

Ray let go of my hand. He looked out at the pasture again, at his cows, and then down at the frozen ground between us. When he talked, he didn’t look up.

“Hannah ever tell you about her sister’s husband?”

“No, sir. She said it was yours to tell.”

He nodded slowly, like that meant something to him. “That’s Hannah. She always was the fair one.”