The Heifer I Gave My Daughter

Who I am, so you understand

I am not a woman who married a farmer and learned to tolerate cows.

My daddy ran forty head of commercial Angus on rented ground outside of a town you have never heard of, and I was pulling calves at midnight in a canvas coat two sizes too big before I was Hallie’s age. I showed steers in 4-H. I kept the records. When Daddy died the ground went back to the landlord because that is how rented ground works, and the cows sold, and I was nineteen and I had nothing but what I knew.

What I knew was cattle.

I met Doug at a bull sale. That is the honest truth. He was buying, I was looking, and we got to talking over a pen of yearling bulls about feet and about disposition, and six months later I had a ring, and his family had opinions.

The opinion, mostly, was that I was a hard girl. That I did not need looking after. Glenda told me once, meaning it as a compliment, that I was “more use than most men she’d hired.” Merle respected me the way he respected a good dog, which is to say a lot, and not at all as an equal.

When Doug and I married we did not move onto the home place. There was not room, and there was not welcome, not quite. We bought eighty acres of our own four miles down the county road, rough ground, and we built it up slow. Doug drove a propane truck in the winters to make the note. And I built a cow herd.

Mine. Not ours, not really, though Doug would laugh and say ours. I bought my first three heifers with the money from my daddy’s old saddle and a quarter horse I sold and a winter of cleaning other people’s houses. I kept them alive through a drought that broke bigger outfits. I built that herd one calf at a time, and by that Christmas I ran thirty-one head of as good a set of registered black Angus cows as there was anywhere, and that includes Merle’s.

I say that not to brag. I say it so you understand what I had to give, and what it cost me to give it.