The Day Daddy Sat at the Rail

Dennis did not talk about it much. He worked. The elevator gets busy in July with wheat and then busy again in the fall with corn and beans, and in between he fixes things.

But I would find him on the back step some nights just looking at the field.

Once in August he said, “I should have seen it. When he sold the last of those cows. I should have just put the money in his hand whether he wanted it or not.”

“He wouldn’t have taken it.”

“I know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “He’s me. That’s the trouble. He’s me at twenty-nine.”

In September I started getting Daddy’s equipment ready. I had not hauled cattle since I was in high school, when I used to back his old bumper-pull into the alley while he waved his arms at me in the mirror. I had never hitched a gooseneck.

Daddy’s rig is a twenty-foot steel stock trailer he bought used in 1998 and a 2001 Ford three-quarter ton with a bench seat and a gooseneck ball in the bed.

The pickup has two hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and it starts every single time.

I practiced on Sunday afternoons. Daddy sat on an overturned bucket by the machine shed and coached me.

Back up straight. Watch the ball in the mirror, not the trailer. Lower it slow. Latch it. Chains crossed. Plug in the lights. Check the lights.

The first Sunday I took six tries. By the end of September I could do it in one, and Daddy said, “Well,” which from him is about the same as a parade.

The sale for weaned and preconditioned calves was the third Wednesday of October. The steers had gone the week before, a small draft, and we hauled those too, but that one was quiet. The heifers were the bigger draft, the one that mattered most to him.

That Wednesday it was cold, the first real cold of the fall. There was frost on the windshield and the cottonwoods along the creek had gone yellow overnight.

I drove out at six with a thermos and a sack of egg sandwiches.

Daddy was already in the alley with the calves sorted. He had the heifers in the pen by the chute and his replacements penned off in the lot by the windbreak, and he was standing there with his breath smoking in the yard light.

He had on his good felt hat. The brown one. He wears it to funerals and to the Fourth of July and to church on Easter, and to nothing else. He had on his tan barn coat over a pressed shirt.

“You’re dressed up,” I said.

“I’m going to town,” he said. Like that explained it. Maybe it did.

I hitched the trailer in one try. Daddy watched me from the gate and did not say a thing, which meant I had done it right. Then he opened the alley gate and we loaded the heifers.

He counted them up the chute out loud, under his breath, the same way he always had. Fourteen.

Every one of them solid black, the Angus cross he has run for forty years because he says it makes the best mother cows in the county.