The Calves That Topped the Fall Sale

The second year was a drought.

The grass at Marge’s quit growing by the first of July, and I spent most of what I’d made on that first calf crop buying hay at prices that made me sick. I fixed three neighbors’ balers that summer for cash on the side, nights and Sundays, so I could pay for it.

Kelsey went back to work at the clinic in town four days a week. Neither of us complained about it out loud. But one night in August I came home after midnight with hydraulic oil to my elbows and found her asleep at the kitchen table over the checkbook, and I stood in the doorway a long time.

That was the closest I came to quitting. I’ll be honest about that. I sat on the back step and figured what I could get if I sold the whole herd that fall, and it was enough to pay off the bank and walk away even.

Ella found me out there. She was almost two, and she was supposed to be asleep. She came out in her pajamas with her blanket and sat on the step beside me.

“Daddy, are the cows asleep?”

“Yeah, baby. They’re asleep.”

“Do they have blankets?”

“No. They’ve got hair. They don’t need blankets.”

She thought about that. Then she leaned against my arm and said, “Can we go see them tomorrow?”

We went to see them the next day. I didn’t sell.

The rain came back the third year. I kept back six of my best heifer calves that fall instead of selling them, which is how you grow a herd when you can’t afford to buy one. I sold a few old cows that came up open. I bought a better bull with Walt standing beside me again.

By the fourth year I was up to 44 cows, and the bank loan was down to something I could think about without my stomach turning over.

And every October I took my calves to the same sale barn where Roger sold his. I never sat by him. He never sat by me. We’d nod across the bleachers, the way you nod at a man you see in church but don’t know well.

My first year, my steers brought about 30 cents under his. The second year, the drought year, it was more like 40, because they were light. The third year, 15. The fourth year, 6 cents.

I never said a word to Roger about any of it. I don’t think he ever said a word about it either, at least not to me. But Kelsey told me her mother had started asking her, every fall, the week after the sale, “What did Tyler’s bring?”

And Kelsey said one time she caught her dad reading my line on the sale report in the county paper, at the kitchen table, with his reading glasses on.

He folded the paper up when he saw her looking.

This last year I did everything right. I mean everything I’d learned at that feed store counter in five years.

The calves were all out of the same bull, born inside of five weeks, so they were close in size. They got their first round of shots in May, at branding, with the neighbors helping and Ella sitting on the fence. They got creep feed in August, a little pelleted ration in a feeder only the calves could get into.