The Ten Heifers I Thanked by Name

Ten in the Back Pasture

I walked the back pasture that evening while the light went long and gold across the bluestem.

We calve in the fall, so in June the bred heifers were out there heavy and glossy on the new grass, due to drop calves come September. The vet had preg-checked them in May and every one of them had settled. A pen of bred heifers in June, confirmed in calf, is about the best thing a cattleman owns. It is next year’s whole herd walking around on four legs.

I had ten of them I thought of as mine in a way I did not think of the rest.

Most of the cows on this place are just black cattle with ear tags, and a smart man does not name what he might have to ship. But these ten I had raised up out of my best old cows, and some of them I had pulled in a cold March barn and warmed with a hair dryer, and a few I had bottled when their mamas went bad on milk.

Daisy was the oldest heifer’s name, out of a cow my granddaughter called Daisy before she could talk. Belle was Daisy’s half sister. Then Pearl, and Pearl was out of old Pearl, who was out of a cow my daddy bought at a dispersal sale in 1979 with money he did not really have.

Ruby. Clover. Dot, who had a white splash on her hip like a thrown dishrag. Hazel. Penny. June, who I had named for the month she was born in the worst ice I ever saw. And Marigold, the gentlest one, who would walk up and lean her whole head into your chest to get scratched.

I stood in the grass and let Marigold lean on me and I did the arithmetic in my head.

A rehearsal supper for a hundred and fifty at that lodge, with the prime rib and the bar and the lit-up room, was going to run better than nine thousand dollars. I had seen the kind of money that lodge charged.

Ten good bred heifers at the June sale in Emporia would cover it and then some.

It would also take ten head out of next year’s calf crop, which is the kind of cut you feel for three years running, not one. You do not get that back quick. You build a cow family up over a decade and you can tear it down in an afternoon in a sale ring.

Hope came out and found me in the dark. She had a sweater on over her nightgown and barn boots on her bare feet, and she stood at the gate and did not come through it.

“You could sell the hay ground lease instead,” she said. “You do not have to sell the girls.”

“I know it,” I said.

“Then why the girls.”

I scratched Marigold between the ears and thought about how to say it so it did not sound like spite, because it was not spite.

“Because I want to know exactly what that supper cost,” I said. “I want to be able to point at it.”

She was quiet a while. A coyote went off somewhere up the draw and the heifers all lifted their heads at once, the way they do, and then went back to grazing.

“People are going to say we are poor,” Hope said. “Her people. They are going to say the groom’s folks had to sell the cows.”

“Let them say it,” I said. “Selling cattle to pay for a thing is not poor. Poor is owing for a thing you cannot pay. I will not owe that woman one dollar or one favor, and I will know down to the dime what her party ran, and I will have a clear conscience and an empty pen. I can live with an empty pen.”

Hope finally came through the gate and stood by me and put her hand on Marigold’s neck next to mine.

“All right,” she said. “But you are not selling Button. I do not care what it costs. Button stays.”

“Button stays,” I said. Button is an old cow, past her best calving years, that Hope has fed carrots to since the girls were small. There are things you do not put in the ring. We both knew which ones.