The Ten Heifers I Thanked by Name

Daisy Belle and the Other Eight

“And Marigold,” I said.

I had to stop a second. Hope was looking up at me and her chin was doing the same thing mine was.

“Marigold was the gentlest cow I ever had my hands on,” I said. “She would walk up and lean her whole head into your chest just to get scratched behind the ears, and she trusted me right up the trailer ramp, and I will be a while getting over that one.”

I folded the card.

“So that is who paid for your prime rib tonight,” I said. “Ten bred heifers out of the best cows my family ever raised, sold at Emporia three weeks ago. I thanked them by name because they earned it, and because I was taught you do not take a thing without saying thank you for it. That is all. Enjoy your supper. We are awful glad to be getting Katie.”

I sat down.

For a second the room did not know what it was allowed to do. Then the branding table started it, clapping their rough hands slow and then fast, and it went through the whole lodge like fire through June grass, Kansas City and Flint Hills both, a hundred and fifty people on their feet, and I did not look at Marcie because I did not need to.

Dale stood up.

He had his water glass in his hand and his ears were red and he was not going to be able to get many words out, I could see that.

“To Daisy,” he said, and his voice cracked on it, “and Belle, and the other eight.”

The room roared it back. People who had never set foot on a ranch and never would were on their feet lifting prime-rib wine to ten dead-gone heifers they would never see, and laughing, and some of them wiping their eyes, and that is a thing I will carry to my own grave.

Then an old woman came around the end of the head table toward me, small, white-haired, in a lavender dress, leaning on a cane. It was Ada, Katie’s grandmother, Marcie’s own mother.

She took hold of my sleeve with a hand like a bird’s foot.

“Young man,” she said, and I am fifty-eight, “I was raised on a dairy in Nemaha County. I have not smelled a barn in fifty years and I have missed it every day.”

Her eyes were wet and fierce.

“Before I die,” she said, “I want you to take me out to your place and let me put my hand on a cow. Will you do that.”