The Calf That Cost One Dollar

Earl climbed out in his feed cap and his tan chore coat. June got out the other side in her red flannel coat.

“Evening, Dustin,” Earl said. “Evening, Addie.” He looked over my new boards and nodded slowly, the way a man looks over another man’s work. “Posts are plumb,” he said. “That’s more than I can say for mine.”

“Addie held the level,” I said.

“I figured,” Earl said. “You never could keep a bubble straight.”

Then he walked around to the back of his pickup and let the tailgate down. There was a good bed of straw in the box.

And lying in the straw, with his legs folded under him, was a young black calf.

He was about two months old. He had a cowlick on his forehead and ears too big for his head, and when the tailgate dropped he lifted his nose and bawled at all of us, like we were late.

Addie stopped spreading straw. She did not move at all.

“He’s a twin,” Earl said. “Born the first of August. His mama took the heifer and won’t have anything to do with him. June’s been bottle feeding him in the barn, and she’s tired of getting up at five.”

“I am not tired,” June said. “I’m old. There’s a difference.”

“He needs somebody to feed him twice a day,” Earl went on. “Milk replacer out of a bucket with a nipple, warm, morning and night. Calf starter. Clean water. A dry place out of the wind. Somebody who’ll notice if he’s off his feed.”

He looked at Addie. “You know anybody like that?”

Addie looked at me. Then she looked at June. Her chin was doing the thing it does when she is trying very hard not to let it.

“How much?” she asked. Her voice came out small.

June folded her hands in front of her red coat. “Well,” she said, “Earl and I were thinking a dollar.”

Addie dug down into her sweatshirt pocket, past the fence staples that were still in there, and came out with four quarters.

She had been saving them for the pop machine at school. She held them out in her palm.

June took them one at a time and dropped them in her coat pocket, very solemn, like she was taking a collection. “Sold,” she said. “To Miss Addie Kerr.”

Earl coaxed the calf down off the tailgate and walked him into the pen.

I opened the new gate for him, and it swung right and latched right on the first try, which I am still a little proud of.

He set the calf down in the straw. The calf wobbled, braced his legs, and looked around at the boards like he was taking inventory.

Then he walked straight over to the new bucket with the tape on it and bumped it with his nose.

Addie went in after him. She knelt down in the straw in her purple hooded sweatshirt and laid her hand flat on his back, and her long braid hung down behind her, and he leaned into her the way calves do.

I leaned on the top board I had nailed up that afternoon.

Earl stood by his pickup with the tailgate still down, and June stood next to him. Nobody said anything for a while. Nobody needed to.

June wiped her eyes with her fingers and said it was the wind.

There was not a breath of wind that night. Earl did not say a thing about it, and neither did I.