Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

We had a little savings, but most of it went into the land payment when we bought our quarter section south of town.

Kyle’s Guard pay was covering that payment while he was gone, and I was not going to touch it. That money was his promise to our place.

What I had was the ER schedule. And what the ER always has, in a small hospital at the edge of the Sandhills, is open shifts nobody wants.

Overtime paid me time and a half. After taxes, an extra twelve-hour shift came out to a little better than five hundred dollars. I divided the number by five hundred and got forty-eight shifts.

Forty-eight extra shifts in five months. That is more than two a week on top of a full schedule.

I closed the notebook and went to bed, and in the morning I signed my name on every open line on the board.

Angie, the charge nurse, found me at the station that afternoon. She is fifty-five, she has been in that ER since before I could drive, and she does not miss much.

“You took Thanksgiving,” she said. “And Christmas Eve. And New Year’s night. Whitney, those are the three worst shifts of the year.”

“They pay the same as the others,” I said.

She looked at me over her reading glasses. “They pay better, and you know it. What’s going on?”

I told her a short version. I did not cry, because I was at work, and I do not cry at work. She listened with her arms folded, and when I finished she nodded once.

“Then I’ll make sure you get the ones you want,” she said. “And you eat something on your breaks. I’m going to check.”

The sale barn sits at the edge of town by the tracks, with pens out back that run downhill toward the creek.

Bred cow sales run on special days through the winter, and in the Sandhills that is when a lot of the good cows change hands.

The first time I went, I drove straight from a night shift.

I still had my navy scrubs on under my brown chore coat, and my hair was in a braid because that is the only way it survives a twelve-hour shift.

I walked out along the alleys first, the way Kyle always did, looking over the pens before the sale.

Black cows stood in the cold with their breath steaming. Each pen had a card with the consignor’s name and the vet’s preg-check.

I found a pen of two young cows, five years old, checked safe in calf to an Angus bull and due the end of March.

I wrote the pen number on my hand in ink the way I write a room number when I get busy.

Inside, I sat up high on the bleachers with men in feed caps and canvas coats. A few of them looked at me twice.

A young woman in scrubs alone at a bred cow sale was not something they saw every week.

When the two came through the ring, I held up my number and kept it up. The auctioneer rolled along, and somebody across the ring bid against me twice, and then he quit.