The Last Load Out of Delmore

I walked out with him to see.

He had a cattle pot, a good one, hitched to a Freightliner that belonged to an outfit out of Hays, the kind of outfit that pays by the load and dispatches a boy into weather that has already closed the road. Behind the slats there were sixty-two calves, and they had been standing in that trailer for fourteen hours. The sound they were making I will not describe.

“They won’t drink the snow,” he said. His teeth were chattering. “I tried. I put snow in a bucket. They won’t take it.”

“Calves don’t,” I said. “Not at that cold. Where’s your hose?”

He did not have a hose. He had been running that truck for three weeks and nobody had given him a hose.

I had one. I always carry one. We pulled the pot around to the wash bay, where the water was hot because of the boiler, and the manager, an old man named Hollis, did not say one word. He just turned on the valve and went and got every five-gallon bucket he owned. It took three hours. I kept the boy moving so he would not stop and feel it. By two in the morning the sound had changed.

Then the boy sat down on an overturned bucket and put his face in his hands.

I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would not have been in the way. I waited.

After a while, he told me, not looking up. His name was Corbin. His mother had died in September, a cancer that went through her in eight weeks. The bank had taken the house. He had taken the Hays job because it came with a truck, and he had been sleeping in the sleeper of a cattle hauler, in the winter, with calves.

He was nineteen years old and he had not been in a house since Halloween.

I brought him home that night. Luanne was up. She looked at him on the porch, at the thin coat and the red hands, and she said, “Well, don’t stand there, bring him in,” and she put him in the back room, which had been our daughter’s, and she cooked eggs at three in the morning.

I took him with me on the road that spring, first as a rider, then as a second driver. I showed him how to load a pot so the weight sits right on the axles, and how to walk a pen before you load so you know what you are about to ask the cattle to do. I turned him a thumper in March and burned his name into it, and he held it in the shop doorway and said, “I don’t think I can take this.”

“Thump your tires,” I said.

That was all. He thumped his tires, eventually, for the rest of that year, and the year after. Today he runs four trucks under his own name, Reimer Livestock, out of a yard south of Salina. He has a wife named Shay and a boy named Teddy, who is nine.

I loaded at Glenna Fenske’s bins, eleven miles from home, 850 bushels of milo as red as a brick. She came out of the house in a coat over her nightgown with a coffee for me.