Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

I came and stood next to him. I had practiced this, too, and every word I had practiced was gone.

“That one,” he said, pointing. “That’s not Big Sis. Big Sis has a split in her left ear. And that one’s not Patches. There’s no Patches out here. I don’t know any of these cows.”

Before I could answer, I heard someone walking up our lane. I turned, and it was Troy.

I found out later that Marilyn had called him the night before. She had said, “Your brother is home, and you will go over there first thing in the morning, Troy Sommer, before he finds out from anybody else.” She is seventy-six and she still means it when she says your whole name.

Troy came and stood at the gate on Kyle’s other side. He did not have his hat. He had his hands jammed in his coat pockets, and his face looked older than it had in October.

Nobody said a word for a long time. A cow bawled. The windmill creaked.

Kyle looked at the cows. Then he looked at me. Then he turned to his brother.

“Where are my cows, Troy?”

Troy told him. He did not dress it up. He told him about the hay, half a stack and seventeen head, and lying awake doing the math.

He told him about the sale barn and the sixteen thousand dollars.

“And the boat,” Troy said. “I put it down on a boat. I told myself it was for you. For when you got home. I told myself a lot of things.”

Kyle did not say anything. His jaw worked.

“Whit’s been buying them back,” Troy said. His voice cracked on it. “Gus told me. She worked every holiday, Kyle. She bought them one at a time out of that sale barn in her scrubs, and I’ve known since February and I didn’t have the guts to come over here.”

Kyle turned and looked at me. “Is that true?”

“Forty-four shifts,” I said. “And Dale fed when I couldn’t.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he did something I did not expect. He reached over and took both of my hands off the gate and turned them palms up.

They were not pretty hands that winter. They were cracked across the knuckles from cold and hand sanitizer and baling twine, and there was a healed cut on one thumb from the net wrap in January.

He held them for a long time without saying anything. Then he put them back on the gate, gently, like he was setting something down that might break.

Then he turned to his brother.

I have been married to Kyle for six years, and I have never heard him yell. He did not yell then, either.

“You’re going to walk this pasture with me,” he said. “Right now. Every cow out there. And you’re going to tell me which shift paid for which one.”

“I don’t know which,” Troy said.

“Then you’re going to ask her,” Kyle said. “You’re going to walk out there and look at every one of them and know what it cost her. Then you can talk to me about the boat.”

Kyle opened the gate. Troy looked at me, and I saw the boy who taught my husband to drive a stick shift in a feed truck, scared to death of what he had done.