The Calf That Cost One Dollar

Twice a Day

That fall Addie got up at six every school morning. She mixed milk replacer in a pitcher with warm water from the kitchen tap, a pound of powder to two quarts, stirred it with a whisk, and carried it out in the dark.

Dollar would be bawling by the time her boots hit the back step. He knew the sound of the door.

She poured it into the nipple bucket on the side of the pen, the one with the tape, and held it steady while he butted and pulled.

She learned to check his ears for droop and his nose for crust and his tail for scours. She kept a little notebook of what he ate.

In the middle of October he got scours, the way bucket calves do, and went dull and quit his bucket one evening.

Addie came in the house white as a sheet. I called Earl. He was in my driveway in eleven minutes with electrolytes and a stomach tube.

He showed her how to tube a calf, kneeling in the straw next to her, his big hands over her small ones. “Slow,” he kept saying. “Easy. He trusts you. Don’t you be in a hurry just because you’re scared.”

Dollar was back on his bucket in two days. Addie slept on the couch by the back window both of those nights, with her coat on, so she could hear him. I let her. I did not sleep much either.

By the first of November Earl helped us wean him onto starter and hay.

By Thanksgiving he was eating out of a pan, drinking from the tank, and following Addie around the pen like a big black dog.

Rodney tried, I will give him that. In November he asked Jenna to ask Addie if he could buy her another steer for the next year.

Addie said no thank you, she already had one. She said it politely. She said it once.