The Heifer I Gave My Daughter

“For real and for keeps. That’s Duchess. She’s the best cow your mama owns, and she’s carrying a calf that comes in February, and she is yours, Hallie. Your cow. Not a picture. Not someday. Yours, this morning.”

My daughter did not whoop like the boys had. That is not her way, she is a quiet one, like me. She slid down off that rail into the pen before I could stop her, slow and careful the way I had taught her around stock, and she walked up to that thousand-pound cow in her unlaced boots and her Christmas nightgown hanging out under her coat, and Duchess dropped her big head down, and Hallie put her mittened hand flat on the cow’s nose.

“Hi,” she whispered.

And then my daughter leaned her face right up against the side of that cow’s jaw, up near her ear, and she whispered something I could not hear, something just for the cow, and Duchess stood stock still and let her, and I had to turn and look at the sunrise for a minute so Doug would not see my face.

What she named her

On the way back to the house Hallie held my hand and she was talking a mile a minute now, the quiet all gone out of her, planning.

“Can I feed her. Can I feed her every day. When the calf comes can I name the calf too. Does she like me. Mama, does she like me.”

“She likes you fine.”

“I know what I’m gonna call her.”

“She’s already got a name, baby. Duchess.”

Hallie shook her head. She had decided. “I’m gonna call her Edith.”

I stopped walking.

Edith was my grandmother. Hallie’s great-grandmother. A little dried-apple woman who had come up through the Depression on a hardscrabble place in the sandhills, who had kept forty laying hens and a milk cow all through the years when the men were off at the war, who had held that family’s ground together with her own two hands and a garden and a shotgun and never once been told she could not stay on the farm because there was no one else left to stay. She had died when Hallie was four. Hallie barely remembered her. But she remembered the stories, because I told them, because I was not going to let that woman disappear.

“Why Edith?” I asked her, and my voice did not come out right.

Hallie shrugged, eight years old, like it was obvious. “Because Grandma Edith stayed on the farm. You said. You said she was the toughest one of all of them.” She looked up at me. “And this is the toughest cow, right? You said she’s the best one.”

“She is.”

“So. Edith.”

I had to kneel down in the snow and hug my daughter then, hard, in the yard, and she let me, patient, the way children let you when they do not understand why you have gone funny but they love you anyway.