The Calves That Topped the Fall Sale

Forty bred cows, good ones, three to five years old, ran me a little under $80,000 that spring, and I didn’t have $80,000. I had about $9,000 in savings and a paid-off pickup.

I went to the bank in town, the same one where I’d gotten my first car loan, and sat across from a loan officer named Jeff, who I’d gone to high school with. He was polite. He also asked me three times whether my father-in-law was going to co-sign.

“No,” I said. “He’s not.”

Jeff tapped his pen on the desk. “Can I ask why?”

“You can ask him,” I said. “I’m not going to.”

In the end the bank wrote the loan against the cows themselves, my wages from the shop, and Marge’s pasture lease. Kelsey and I signed it at that desk in April. My hand shook so bad my signature looked like somebody else’s.

Out in the parking lot, Kelsey held both my hands and said, “Breathe.”

“We just borrowed more than this house is worth.”

“I know,” she said. “I was there. Breathe anyway.”

Walt went with me to the bred cow sale and stood beside me at the rail. He’d tap my arm when a set came in he liked. He’d shake his head at the ones he didn’t. I bought two groups that day, black cows bred to a black bull, due to start calving the next March.

I hauled them out to Marge’s in three trips with a borrowed trailer. The last load came off the trailer just at dark, and the cows walked out onto that grass like they’d always lived there, and I stood at the gate and watched them graze and couldn’t believe they were mine. Mine and the bank’s.

Roger drove past Marge’s pasture twice that first summer. I know because Marge told me. Her kitchen window looks out over the county road, and she knew his pickup.

“Slowed way down,” she said. “Both times. Then kept going.”

He never stopped. He never called. At Sunday dinners at the ranch, he talked to me about the weather and the Huskers and once, at length, about a hydraulic leak on his tractor. He never once asked about the cows.

Kelsey asked him once, in the kitchen, while I was out on the porch. I wasn’t trying to listen, but the window was open.

“Dad, aren’t you going to ask how his cows are doing?”

“They’re his cows,” Roger said. “He’ll find out how they’re doing.”

I’ve thought about that line a lot since. At the time it made me so mad I had to walk out to the pickup and sit for a while. Now I think it might have been the most honest thing he said to me in five years.

The first calf came on the ninth of March, at two in the morning, in a wet snow.

I was working days at the shop, so I checked cows at night. I’d get off at five, eat whatever Kelsey had saved me, sleep until eleven, then drive the fifteen miles out to Marge’s and walk the calving pasture with a spotlight. Then again at three. Then home to shower and back to the shop by seven.

Kelsey came with me more nights than she should have. Her mom kept Ella. Kelsey held the flashlight while I got down in the snow, and she was the one who knew what she was looking at, not me.

That first calf came out fine, all on his own, while we sat in the pickup with the heater running and watched. The cow stood up and licked him, and he shook his head and sneezed, and Kelsey started crying.