The Calves My Kids Sold Themselves

Ellie kept the calving book. She bought a little green notebook at the dollar store with her own money and wrote down everything. Which cow was eating. Which cow was bagging up. Which cow was lying off by herself.

And every night at supper, when we said grace, Sam added his own line at the end.

“And please help Bess have an easy calf. Amen.”

Bess was his cow. He had named her that week. He had named all three, in fact, because nobody had bothered to name them in eleven years. Mason’s was Big Mama. Ellie’s was Clover. Sam’s was Bess.

Cody told him naming cattle was a mistake. Sam said he would take his chances.

Big Mama calved first, on the twentieth of March. She did it in the middle of the night, by herself, the way an old cow will, and Mason found a wet black bull calf standing beside her at six in the morning.

He came running back to the house so fast he forgot to shut the back door. “She had it! She had it by herself! It’s a bull and he’s already sucking!”

Bess calved two days later, in the afternoon, while Sam was at school. He made us drive him straight from the bus to the pasture. He stood at the fence and stared at that little black calf for twenty minutes without saying anything.

“He’s perfect,” he finally said. And then, quieter, “Thank you, God.”

Clover was the problem.

Clover went into labor on a Thursday night, and by ten o’clock she had been pushing for over an hour with nothing to show for it but two front feet. Ellie had been out there with a flashlight since supper, writing in her green book.

I called Dr. Mike from the clinic. I have worked his front desk for nine years, and I have his cell phone number for exactly this kind of night. He asked me three questions and then said the calf was probably just big.

“Have Cody pull it,” he said. “Chains above the fetlock, pull down toward her hocks when she pushes. If it isn’t moving in twenty minutes, call me back and I’ll come.”

Cody went out with the calf chains and the handles. Ellie went with him. I stood at the fence with the flashlight because my job was light.

“Ellie, you’re going to help me,” Cody said.

“I don’t know how.”

“You don’t have to know how. You just have to pull when I tell you.”

So my twelve-year-old daughter knelt in the straw in her barn boots next to her father, and when Clover pushed, they pulled. Down and toward her hocks, the way Dr. Mike said.

It took four pushes. Then the calf came all at once, in a slippery rush, and landed in the straw, and did not move.

Cody cleared its nose with his fingers. He rubbed its ribs hard with a handful of straw. Ellie was saying “come on, come on, come on” under her breath, over and over, like a prayer.

The calf sneezed. Then it shook its head. Then it let out a bawl so loud that Clover answered from the other end of the pen.

Ellie sat back on her heels and burst into tears. Not the scared kind. The other kind. She put both hands over her face and cried, and Cody put his arm around her and pulled her against his jacket.