The Calves My Kids Sold Themselves

“You did that,” he told her. “You and Clover. I just held the chains.”

I stood at the fence with the flashlight, and I cried too, a little. I don’t mind telling you.

That heifer calf was the prettiest thing I ever saw. Ellie wrote it all down in the green book that night, every minute of it, in her best handwriting. She named the calf Hope.

Vern did not come by once that spring.

He drove past, though. The county road runs right along Donna’s pasture, and three or four times I saw his pickup slow down by the fence. He never stopped. He never waved.

We still saw him on Sundays. He sat in his same pew at the Methodist church, third from the front on the left, the pew he had sat in with Joan for forty-one years. We sat two rows behind him, where we always sat.

Cody went out to the home place a few times in April to help his dad with calving. He never said much about it when he came home. Once he said, “He asked how the kids’ calves were doing.” That was all.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him they were doing fine.” Cody hung up his jacket. “He said good.”

We branded in May. Cody had registered his own brand years ago, a quarter circle P, in both our names. Mostly it had been a piece of paper in a file drawer. Now it was going to be on three calves.

Some of the men from Cody’s road crew came out on a Saturday, and a couple of neighbors. Donna brought lemonade. Three calves is not much of a branding, but we did it right, with a fire and the iron and the vaccine guns and a good noon dinner after.

The kids worked like hired men. Mason roped. He wasn’t good at it, but he got two out of three, and the men cheered him every time like he had won the county fair. Ellie gave the shots under Cody’s eye. Sam held the tail of every calf and talked to them the whole time.

When the iron came off Hope’s hip, Ellie flinched, and then she rubbed Hope’s neck and said she was sorry, and the old men smiled at each other over their lemonade.

Vern did not come. Somebody had asked him. He had said he was busy with his own.

All summer the kids moved those cows to fresh grass, fixed fence, checked water, and watched those three calves grow. Mason built a little creep feeder out of scrap lumber in our garage, and Cody only fixed half of it.

One evening in August, Sam came in from the pasture and stood in the kitchen doorway with an odd look on his face.

“Mom. How much did Grandpa get for Bess’s calves before?”

I told him the truth, because by then he would have figured it out anyway. Nine calves. At this year’s prices, close to twenty thousand dollars. At the prices of the years they actually sold, somewhere near eleven.

He was quiet a long while. “Did he need it?”

That stopped me. I had been asking myself a lot of questions for six years, but I had never once asked that one.

“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “I think maybe you should ask him someday.”

We weaned the first week of October. The kids had been dreading it, because weaning is loud. The cows bawl for days and the calves bawl back, and nobody in the house sleeps well.