Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

Those nine cows were not a hobby.

They were four years of Kyle’s savings, every spare check from every hay crew and every fence job, and they were the start of the herd he had dreamed about since he was ten years old.

He bought them the spring before he deployed. Young black cows, three and four years old, out of a ranch north of Valentine.

He turned a neighbor’s good Angus bull in with them in June, and they were due to calve the next spring, right about when he came home.

He had named every one of them, which his brother teased him about without mercy. Big Sis. Patches. Old Faithful, who was only four. He knew them by face from a hundred yards.

When his orders came, he could not leave them with me.

I work twelve-hour shifts, some days and some nights, and in a Sandhills winter a cow needs hay every single day whether you got home at seven or not.

So he hauled them to Troy’s, four miles down the road, and he paid for their share of the hay up front. He shook his brother’s hand at the loading chute. I was standing right there.

“I’ll take care of them like they’re mine,” Troy said that day. And I believe he meant it in June. I believe a lot of things got meant in June that did not survive October.

“Okay,” I said finally, standing in his yard.

“Whit, I’m going to make it right.”

“Okay,” I said again. And I picked my keys back up and drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel the whole four miles.

I want to tell you why I did not call my husband that night, because people always ask, and it is a fair question.

Kyle was a sergeant on the other side of the world.

He was responsible for a squad of soldiers, most of them younger than he was, and he called me on a bad video connection maybe twice a week.

I have worked in an emergency room for seven years. I know what happens to a person who is far from home, carrying something heavy, and gets news he cannot do anything about.

It does not help him. It just sits on his chest.

And it was his brother. Troy is the one who taught Kyle to drive a stick shift in a feed truck. Troy is the one who stood up at our wedding.

I was not going to be the voice on a scratchy phone line telling my husband his brother sold him out for a boat.

So I made up my mind on that drive home. I was not going to send my soldier bad news in a war zone. I was going to fix it before he got home.

The first thing I did was sit on our back step with a notebook and a calculator and the sale barn’s market report that comes in the paper every week.

Bred cows that fall were bringing anywhere from about eighteen hundred to three thousand a head, depending on age and how far along they were and who was in the seats that day.

The good ones, young and due in spring, would cost more in winter than they had in October.

I figured twenty-four thousand dollars, give or take, to put nine cows back in that pasture. I looked at that number for a long time.