The Day Daddy Sat at the Rail

He latched the trailer gate himself. He pulled on it twice to be sure.

Then he walked around to the passenger side of the pickup and got in and set his hat on his knee.

It is about a forty minute drive to the sale barn in the county seat if you go the back way on the oil road, and Daddy always goes the back way.

We did not talk much. He pointed out a neighbor’s corn that was still standing and said it would be the middle of November before that came out.

I asked him if he was nervous. He said, “About what?” And then a mile later, he said, “I haven’t sat at the rail in two years. That’s all.”

The sale barn is a big metal building on the edge of town by the railroad tracks with the pens out back and the office in front.

On sale day the lot is full of pickups and trailers by eight o’clock, and the café inside is serving pie by nine.

I backed up to the unloading dock on the second try, which is not bad with a line of trucks behind you.

The yard man, a young fellow in coveralls I did not know, opened the gate and the heifers came out at a trot onto the concrete.

“Whose?” he said.

“Lloyd Ahlquist,” I said. “All fourteen. Every one of them.”

He wrote it on his tally sheet without looking up. I watched him do it. Then I went inside to the office.

The office lady at the window was Pam Schuler, who has worked at that barn as long as I can remember. She went to school with my oldest cousin.

She looked up and saw me and then looked past me and saw Daddy in his good hat, and her whole face changed.

“Lloyd,” she said. “Well, look at you.”

“Pam.”

“You bringing your own calves today?”

“My daughter’s bringing them,” he said. “I’m just riding along.”

Pam took the paperwork. Fourteen black heifers, Lloyd Ahlquist, Blue Hill. She wrote the consignment number on the ticket and slid it under the glass to me, and when I reached for it she held on to the other end a second.

“It’s good to see him,” she said quietly. That was all she said. I do not know what Pam knew.

In a town that size, people know more than you think and say less than you would expect.

We went in to the arena. If you have never been inside a sale barn on sale day, it is like a little church built for cattle.

The ring is down at the bottom, dirt floor, with a wooden gate on each side.

Off to one side, up above the ring, is the auctioneer’s booth, a little wooden box with a window, and the scale readout is up on the wall. The bleachers go up steep from the ring, old wooden boards worn smooth.

And on sale day the bleachers are full of men. Mostly older men. Farmers and ranchers and order buyers, in seed caps and feed store caps and a few in felt hats, with their arms crossed and their coffee in paper cups.