The Ten Heifers I Thanked by Name

What the Old Woman Wanted

I took Ada out to the farm on a Sunday after church, two weeks after the wedding.

Katie drove her, and Dale came, and Hope made a dinner. We walked the old woman out to the lot slow, one careful step at a time across the gravel, and I brought up the gentlest cow I had left, a broad old girl named Button who would stand for anything.

Ada put her hand flat on Button’s shoulder and left it there a long time and did not say a word. Her mouth was working. Katie stood beside her with a hand on her back.

“My daddy milked forty of these by hand, morning and night,” Ada finally said. “I had forgot how warm they are. You forget the warm.”

She stayed two hours. She sat in a lawn chair in the shade and told me about Nemaha County and her father’s barn and I told her about the Flint Hills and the burning in the spring, how we light the pastures off in April and the whole county glows orange at night and the grass comes back greener for it. She wanted to know did it scare the cattle and I told her no, they have learned the burn means good grass coming, and she liked that.

“My mother used to say a thing,” Ada told me. “She said money is loud and land is quiet, and you want to end up on the quiet side of that. I do not think my Marcie ever heard her say it. Marcie was always running toward the loud.”

She said it without meanness, the way you talk about a child you love who took a wrong turn. Then she reached over and patted my arm.

“You did a kind thing at that supper,” she said. “You made it so a person could not quite tell if you were honoring those cows or shaming my daughter, and that is exactly the right amount. A cruder man would have shamed her plain. You left her a door.”

I had not thought of it in those words, but the old woman had me dead to rights, and I just nodded.

Marcie did not come that Sunday. But she called the house that evening, which she had never once done, and Hope handed me the phone with her eyebrows up.

“Wendell,” Marcie said. Her voice was not the card-table voice. “My mother has not stopped talking about your cattle. She says it was the best afternoon she has had in years.”

“She is welcome any time,” I said. “She is good company.”

There was a quiet on the line.

“I owe you an apology,” Marcie said. “For some things I said that got around. I was embarrassed about where I come from, if you want the truth, and I took it out on people who did not deserve it. My mother set me straight. She has a way of doing that.”

It was not a easy thing for her to say. I could hear that it cost her.

“It is forgot,” I told her, and I mostly meant it. “We are family now. We will have a lot of suppers ahead of us.”

“Next one is on me,” she said. “And I mean paid, not held over anybody’s head.”

“I would like that,” I said, and I found that I did.