The Day Daddy Sat at the Rail

“He’s eighty-one, Shelly. He was never going to miss two head.” Kyle said it at Daddy’s kitchen table with his cap still on, like it was a fact about the weather and not about my father.

Daddy was sitting right there. He had his reading glasses down on his nose and his coffee cup in both hands, and he did not say a word. He just looked at the oilcloth.

I had the papers spread out between the sugar bowl and the napkin holder. The sale barn’s year-end statement. Daddy’s calving book with the green cover. Four market reports I had printed off the barn’s website at the school library after everyone went home.

I am a school secretary. I have spent twenty-two years making columns of numbers agree with each other.

When they do not agree, I do not sleep until I know why. That is just how I am built.

“Two head a trip,” I said. “Two trips a fall. Two falls. That is eight calves, Kyle. Eight of Daddy’s black calves, sold under your name, and the checks went to you.”

He did not deny it. That was the part that took the air out of me.

Dennis had told me he would not, and I had still practiced for him to deny it. I had the reports in order so I could hand them across one at a time.

Instead he leaned back in Daddy’s chair, the one with the wobbly leg Daddy keeps meaning to glue, and he said, “Eleven thousand six hundred. I know what it came to.”

I want to tell you how I got to that kitchen table, because nothing about it happened fast, and none of it happened the way I would have wanted.

My father is Lloyd Ahlquist. He was eighty-one that year and he still ran thirty cow-calf pairs on a half section south of Blue Hill, in Webster County, Nebraska. He has run cattle on that ground since 1966.

He is not frail. I want that understood. He still checks his cows twice a day in calving season.

He still fixes his own water tank floats. He reads the Hastings paper front to back and argues with the editorials out loud.

What he does not do anymore is haul. Two falls ago his right shoulder finally gave out and he had it replaced in Kearney, and the surgeon told him no backing a gooseneck for six months. That was the fall after he turned seventy-nine.

So Kyle hauled, and the next fall Daddy let him keep on, because the boy knew the road and Daddy’s shoulder still ached in the cold.

Kyle Arneson is my husband’s son from his first marriage. He was eleven when I married Dennis. He is twenty-nine now.

He hauls cattle part-time for a few neighbors with a pickup and a borrowed trailer, and he works days at a feedlot out by Juniata.

When Kyle was younger he had a little cow herd of his own. Fourteen head of good black cows he bought one at a time with money from baling and from the feedlot.

He was proud of those cows the way some boys are proud of a truck.