The Calf That Cost One Dollar

Nobody to Call

I went out on the back step with my phone and called the sale barn.

I had bought and sold a few head there over the years, and the woman who answers the office phone has known me since I was a kid.

She looked it up while I waited. She was kind about it, which almost made it worse.

A fat black baldy steer had come in Friday evening on Rodney Platt’s consignment and sold in the morning run.

“He went to a packer buyer, Dustin,” she said quietly. “He’s already loaded out. I’m sorry, hon. If I’d known it was a 4-H steer I’d have called you myself.”

So there was no buying him back. There was no truck to chase down the highway. That was the first door, and it closed while I was still standing on my step.

The second door was the sheriff, and I knew before I touched it that it was shut too.

I have lived in that county all my life, and I know how the law sees cattle.

When Addie picked Biscuit out, Jenna was the one who wrote the check to the breeder, fourteen hundred dollars.

So the bill of sale and the papers were in Jenna’s name. And the steer stood on Jenna and Rodney’s place.

That meant the sale was legal. Rodney was married to the owner, and he had hauled an animal off his own acreage and sold it.

There was nobody to call. There was nobody to sue. There was just a girl at my counter.

I want to say something here about Jenna, because people hear a story like this and decide things about a mother.

Jenna is a nurse. That weekend she was working three twelve-hour shifts at the hospital in Topeka.

She leaves the house at half past five and gets home at eight at night, and she does not look at her phone in between unless it is an emergency. I tried her anyway. It went to voicemail.

I did not leave it in a voicemail. You do not tell a woman about her daughter’s steer in a voicemail while she is hanging a bag of fluids for somebody’s grandfather. I just asked her to call me when she could.

Later I found out Rodney had sent her a text that morning.

It said he had sold Biscuit “private, to a family that shows,” and that he would explain at supper. It did not say a word about a sale barn.

Something to Build

I went back in. Addie was still at the counter. Her cereal had gone soft. She had her hands flat on the countertop, like she was trying to keep it from moving.

“Get your boots on,” I said. “I need a hand with something.”

She looked up. Her eyes were red but she was not crying, and that was harder to look at than if she had been. “With what?”

“I’ll tell you in the truck,” I said, because I did not know yet. I only knew she was not going to sit in my kitchen all day staring at that phone.

I have worked for the electric cooperative for thirteen years. I am a lineman.

I have set more poles than I can count, in every kind of ground this county has, in the heat and in ice storms at three in the morning.

When something goes wrong in my life, I do not talk about it very well. I build something, or I fix something.

My dad was the same. My grandpa was the same. It is not the best way, but it is ours.

By the time we pulled out of my lane, I knew what we were building.

I live on five acres on a gravel road three miles from Jenna’s. Behind my little white farmhouse there was a patch of ground that just grew foxtail.

“We’re building a pen,” I told her, about halfway to the lumber yard. “A real one. Behind the house.”

She did not answer for a while. She watched the milo fields go by, all of it rust colored and waiting on the combines.

Then she said, “For what, Dad? There’s nothing to put in it.”

“You’re a cattle girl,” I said. “Cattle girls need a pen. We’ll figure out the rest.”

At the lumber yard I bought a dozen treated four by four posts, a stack of two by six boards, a roll of woven field wire, a bag of fence staples, a gate, and two sacks of concrete.

It came to a little over six hundred dollars. I did not look at the total very hard.