Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

Kyle called on a Tuesday night in November. The picture froze every few seconds, and the sound came a half beat behind his mouth, but it was his face, sunburned and tired and grinning.

“How are my girls?” he asked. He meant the cows. He always meant the cows first and then laughed and said he meant me too.

My chest went tight. I had two of them standing in our pasture that night, not one of them his. I had practiced what to say.

“They’re out on the hills eating everything in sight,” I said. “Fat and sassy.”

That was true about the two I had. I told myself it was true enough.

It was the only lie I told him all winter, and I told it every time he asked, and I hated it every time.

“Troy treating them right?”

“He’s got hay problems like everybody,” I said. “But they’re doing good.”

Kyle nodded. “Tell him thanks for me. Tell him I owe him.”

I did not tell Troy that.

Gus called in early December. “I’ve got three coming in Thursday out of a dispersal over by Burwell,” he said. “Young cows, all black, all due in late March. Good people. Come look at them before the sale.”

I went in my scrubs again, because I was coming off another night. All three were the kind Kyle would have stopped and stared at, deep bodied and quiet.

I bought two of them at twenty-six fifty a head. A man from Valentine outbid me on the third.

Four cows. Ten thousand one hundred dollars. I wrote it in my notebook in the truck with my hands still cold, and then I wrote the number of shifts it had cost, which seemed more honest.

At Christmas, Kyle’s mother, Marilyn, called me from her apartment in Valentine. She is seventy-six and does not get out much in winter. She asked if I would come to Troy’s for Christmas dinner.

“I’m working, Marilyn,” I said. “Christmas Eve and Christmas night both.”

“Whitney, honey, you have worked every day since Halloween. Troy says he never sees you anymore.”

“No,” I said. “I guess he doesn’t.”

There was a little quiet on the line. Marilyn raised two boys on a ranch with a husband who drank some years, and she can hear what is not said.

She did not ask. She just said she was praying for me, and I said I knew she was.

I spent Christmas Eve in the ER with a woman having chest pains, a little boy with a bean up his nose, and a farmer’s wife who had slipped on ice carrying a pan of rolls to a neighbor and was more upset about the rolls than her wrist.

At midnight, Angie came out of the break room with a plate of ham and two of those rolls the farmer’s wife had insisted we keep.

She set them in front of me and stood there until I ate.

“You’re going to fall over,” she said.

“Not before March,” I said.

The first week of January brought the kind of storm the Sandhills keeps for people who have gotten too sure of themselves.

It snowed sideways for two days, and then the wind blew it all into drifts higher than the fence posts.

I had worked the night shift, and the plows had not come through yet. I got as far as our lane and walked the last half mile in the dark with my scrubs soaked through at the knees.