Nine Bred Cows for a Soldier

I walked out with them. I could not have told you the dollar amount on every one by heart, but I could tell them the day.

“That one was Thanksgiving,” I said, pointing at a cow with a short tail. “And the two by the tank were the week after the Highway 7 rollover. I took four shifts that week.”

“That big one, with the mark on her flank,” I said, “was Christmas Eve and Christmas night and New Year’s. She was the last one.”

We walked the whole slope that way, the three of us, in the cold, with the cows lifting their heads to watch us go by.

Troy did not say a word. By the time we got to the windmill, he had his hand over his eyes.

At the stock tank, he stopped and turned to his brother.

“The boat goes on the market Monday,” he said. “Whatever it brings, it comes to you. I’ll sell the motor separate if I have to. I’ll have sixteen thousand to you before you calve.”

“Not to me,” Kyle said.

Troy looked at him.

“Not to me,” Kyle said again. “To her. They’re her cows, Troy. Every one of them. She bought them. You pay her back, not me.”

I started to say something, and Kyle put his hand on my back, and I let him finish.

“And you’re going to come over here when they calve,” he said. “Nights, too. You’re going to help pull calves in the cold until every one of them is on the ground. You owe her that more than you owe her the money.”

Troy nodded. “I’ll be here.”

Kyle looked out over the hills for a minute. Then he did the thing that made me understand why I married into that family, even with everything.

He put his arm around his brother’s neck, rough, the way boys do, and held on. “You were scared about the hay,” he said quietly. “You should have called me. I’d have told you to sell my calves next fall, or borrow from Dale, or anything but this.”

“I know,” Troy said into his shoulder. “I know it.”

“I’m still mad,” Kyle said.

“I know that too.”

Troy kept his word. The boat sold to a man from Broken Bow on the eighteenth of March for less than Troy paid, and he sold the trolling motor and the electronics separate to make up the rest.

He came up our lane on the twenty-fifth with an envelope. I was in the barnyard, filling the tank. He handed it to me, and there was a cashier’s check inside for sixteen thousand dollars.

“I’m sorry, Whitney,” he said. It was the first time all winter he had said it to me straight. “I don’t expect you to forget it.”

“I won’t,” I said. “But I’ll forgive it. That’s a different thing.”

He nodded and looked at the ground. “Megan says you’re good at that,” he said, and he almost smiled.

Kyle and I talked that night about the difference, the seventy-eight hundred and fifty dollars between what Troy got for the cows and what I paid for them. Kyle said that part was ours to carry.

“That’s what they’re worth to me,” he said. “Every one. They’re worth what you did.”

Troy came every night for three weeks during calving. He came at midnight and at three in the morning with a flashlight and a calf puller he did not end up needing.