Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

Two cows. Twenty-four hundred a head. Forty-eight hundred dollars, or about nine and a half extra shifts. I sat there with my number in my lap and my heart pounding like I had run there from Ainsworth.

When I went to the office to settle up, there was a man at the counter I knew by sight.

Gus Behrens has owned that sale barn for more than thirty years. He was sixty-four, with a gray mustache and a voice worn rough from the ring.

He looked at the name on the ticket. Then he looked at me for a while.

“You’re Kyle Sommer’s wife,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Kyle’s over in Kuwait.”

“Yes, sir. Until March.”

He looked at the ticket again, and I could see him doing arithmetic behind his eyes. Gus remembers cattle the way some people remember faces.

“Troy brought in nine head of young black cows in October,” he said slowly. “I wondered at the time. They were wearing your family’s Bar S.”

That brand belonged to Kyle’s grandpa first, then his dad. When their dad retired, the registration went to Troy as the one still running cattle.

Kyle had been saving for his own brand and had not filed it yet. That is how nine of his cows went through a brand inspection with nobody blinking.

“Weren’t those his cows Troy brought in?” Gus asked.

I thought about lying. I am bad at it. “Yes, sir,” I said.

Gus did not say anything else. He did not ask why, and he did not say what he thought of it. He just wrote something on a pad by the register and tore it off.

“Leave me your number,” he said. “When good bred cows come in, young, black, due in spring, I’ll call you before sale day.”

The next two months are mostly one long shift in my memory.

I worked days and I worked nights. I worked a Friday night when two teenagers rolled a pickup on Highway 7 and we flew one of them out to Kearney.

I worked a Sunday when an eighty-year-old rancher came in with his hand opened up by a hay knife and asked me to hurry so he could get back to his heifers.

I came home at seven in the morning, pulled my chore coat on over my scrubs and went straight out to the pasture.

Then I slept from nine until three, if I was lucky, and got up and fed again.

I bought hay from our neighbor, Dale Kuhl, who is seventy-two and has been running cows on the meadow north of us since before I was born.

He sold me big round bales at a price I am fairly sure was under what he could have gotten.

“Kyle’s cows?” he asked, the first morning he brought hay over on the bale bed.

“Kyle’s cows,” I said. It was close enough to the truth, and he did not push.

Dale took one look at the stock tank and went back to his place for a tank heater, because I had been chopping ice with an axe every morning in the dark.

He plugged it in, stood back, and nodded at it like it had done something clever.

“When you’re working, I’ll feed,” he said. “It’s on my way to my own.” It was not on his way. His place is the other direction. I never said so, and he never brought it up.