Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

I loaded my last cow by myself and took her home and turned her out with the other eight.

He did not come around after that. Megan texted me once, a short message that said she was sorry and that she had not known.

I believed her. I told her it was not her fault, because it was not.

Kyle’s unit came home on the ninth of March.

I had traded for the night shift on the eighth so I could have four days off in a row.

I worked it straight through, a car wreck and a baby with a fever and a man who had fallen off a grain bin, and I clocked out at seven in the morning.

I did not go inside when I got home. I went to the pasture first.

The sun was just coming up over the hills when I got to the gate.

That light in the Sandhills in March is the softest thing God ever made, gold along the tops of the hills and the grass still winter brown underneath.

I stood at the metal gate with one hand on it, in my brown chore coat over my navy scrubs, my braid down my back.

The yellow ribbon I had tied on the wooden gate post the day he left was a little faded from the summer sun, but it was still there.

Behind me, nine black cows were grazing across the slope, heavy with calf, their breath hanging in the cold. Far off, the windmill turned slow.

I counted them. Then I counted them again, because I had been counting things all winter, shifts and dollars and bales, and I did not quite believe this number would hold still.

Nine.

Then I went inside, showered, put on the blue dress Kyle likes, and drove four hours to Lincoln.

They brought the soldiers into a hangar at the airport. There were a few hundred of us, families with signs and grandmothers in lawn chairs and babies who had been born while their daddies were gone.

When the doors opened, I could not find him at first. Everybody looked the same in uniform.

Then a man in the second row took off running, and it was Kyle, and he lifted me clean off the floor.

He smelled like the airplane and dust and himself. He held my face in both hands and looked at me like he was trying to remember it. Then he frowned.

“You’re thin, Whit,” he said. “You’ve been working too much.”

“A little,” I said. And I laughed, because it was the most true thing anybody had said to me in five months.

We drove home that night.

Kyle fell asleep against the window before Grand Island, and I drove the rest of the way in the dark with my hand on his knee, just to make sure he was really there.

He was up before me the next morning, which I should have expected. A soldier home from deployment does not sleep in, and a cattleman home from anywhere goes to check his cows.

I heard the back door. I pulled my chore coat on over my pajamas and followed him out, and I found him standing at the pasture gate in the early cold.

He had his hands on the top rail. He was looking at the cows. He was not smiling.

“Whit,” he said, without turning around. “Whose cows are these?”