Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

When I got to the pasture gate, I could hear the cows bawling.

They had drifted to the low corner by the windmill, out of the wind, and the hay I had put out the day before was buried.

I could not move a round bale without the tractor, and the tractor would not start.

I stood there in the snow and I will admit to you that I cried, the only time all winter, with my forehead against the cold gate.

Then I heard an engine. Dale came up the lane on his tractor with a bale on the spear, the cab lights cutting through the blowing snow. He was seventy-two years old and it was ten below.

He did not say a word about my face.

He just dropped the bale where the cows could get to it, cut the net wrap, and pulled it off in long strips while I forked hay to the edges.

When we were done, he sat on the tractor step for a minute, breathing hard. “Your grandpa would have liked you,” he said. He knew my grandpa from the sale barn forty years ago.

“I don’t know about that,” I said.

“I do,” he said, and he drove home.

Gus called three times in January and twice in February. I bought two cows at twenty-six fifty, two at twenty-nine hundred, and then, the third week of February, the last one.

The last one was a big black cow, five years old, with a little white mark on her flank like someone had flicked paint at her.

She was due the twentieth of March. She went for twenty-six fifty, and I bid like my life was on it.

Nine cows. Twenty-three thousand eight hundred fifty dollars. Forty-four extra shifts, and the rest out of the little savings we had left.

I sat in the bleachers after that sale and could not get my legs to stand up.

I went out back to look at her in the pen before I loaded her, and that was when I saw Troy.

He was leaning on the pipe fence at the far end of the alley in his canvas coat, looking at a pen of feeder calves.

He did not see me. I do not know what he was there for. Selling something else, maybe. Looking.

Gus came out the back door of the office. He saw me, then he saw Troy, and he walked down the alley between us at the same slow pace he walks everywhere.

I did not hear the start of it. I heard the end, because the wind carried it.

“That’s your brother’s wife back there,” Gus said, without raising his voice. “She’s been buying back your brother’s cows. One and two at a time, since November. With her overtime, I’d guess, by the way she comes in here in her scrubs.”

Troy turned his head and looked straight at me.

“That’s nine, as of today,” Gus said. “I thought you ought to know whose cows she’s been paying for.”

Then Gus went back inside, and he never said another word about it to either of us. He did not need to.

By the next sale day, half the men in those bleachers knew, because that is how a sale barn works.

Troy stood there a long time. Then he walked to his truck without coming my way, and he drove off.