The Ten Heifers I Thanked by Name

The Long Trailer to Emporia

I hauled them to Emporia Livestock Sales on a Wednesday, which is sale day there, in the gooseneck, five and five, two loads.

Loading them was the hard part. They loaded easy, is the thing. They trusted me up the chute because they had never had a reason not to, and that is a sorry feeling, a animal walking calm onto the trailer because you taught it you were safe.

Marigold balked once at the top of the ramp, turned her head back to look at me, and I put my hand flat on her hip and said walk on, and she walked on.

At the barn they ran through the ring in the afternoon. Bred heifers like that, black and uniform and settled in calf, with the papers from the vet, they bring a crowd of buyers leaning on the rail.

The auctioneer rattled his chant and the numbers climbed and the ten of them averaged out at a little over nineteen hundred a head. The whole bunch came to nineteen thousand six hundred dollars before the barn took its commission.

I sat up in the seats with my cap in my hands and watched Daisy go, then Belle, then all of them, and a feed buyer from up by Manhattan bought six of the ten for a outfit I knew ran good cows. That helped. I knew they would be looked after.

The office cut me the check that afternoon. A man I had bought and sold with for twenty years slid it across the counter and said, “Wendell, those were awful nice heifers. You all right?”

“Wedding,” I said, like that explained it, and he laughed because it does.

“My oldest girl’s wedding like to broke me,” he said. “They had the little bags of almonds at every plate. You know what a almond costs by the hundred-and-fifty?”

“I am fixing to find out,” I said.