The loading chute
I asked the next Saturday. Dad was sorting yearlings at the pens, and I went out and climbed up on the fence by the loading chute the way I had done since I was eight years old.
He was working the gate with a sorting stick, cutting steers off to the left, heifers to the right.
He didn’t look up. He never looked up when cattle were moving, and I never expected him to.
“Dad, Harper’s surgery is the end of the month,” I said. “Our part is about five thousand. We’ve got some of it. I wondered if you and Mom could help us with the rest.”
He let a heifer by and swung the gate. “We can’t spare it right now, Steph.”
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That was all. He did not say it mean. He said it the way he’d tell you the creek was up. A fact about the weather.
Mom had walked out from the house with a jug of tea for him. She heard the end of it. “I thought insurance paid for all that,” she said. “Isn’t that what Matt took the new job for?”
“Not all of it,” I said.
Neither of them asked how much was left after the insurance. Neither of them asked what we were going to do.
Dad cut off another steer, and Mom handed him the tea through the panels, and the cattle bawled.
I climbed down off the fence. I told them I’d see them at Easter. And I drove home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.
Why I didn’t ask again
People have asked me since why I didn’t go back out there and push. Why I didn’t sit them down and lay out the numbers, or call Mandy and tell her to share.
The plain answer is that it was their money to give.
They had earned every dollar of it on that place, through drought years and two-dollar wheat, and they could give it to whoever they wanted.
The other answer is that I was not going to beg twice for my daughter’s ears. Not when I had a horse in the pasture that was worth what we needed.
Matt understood that before I’d finished saying it. He was sitting on the tailgate of his pickup out by the shop when I got home, still in his welding jacket, and I told him what Dad had said.
He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “I’ve got the four-wheeler.”
“You use that every day,” I said. “You check the fence on it. You check the calves.”
“I can check fence on foot,” he said. “I’ve got two legs. Harper needs two ears.”
He put an ad in the paper and online that night. A 2016 Honda Rancher, four-wheel drive, a little rust on the rack.
A man from Hennessey came the next Saturday and paid him thirty-two hundred cash, counted out right there on the tailgate.
Matt didn’t make a speech about it. He just handed me the envelope and went to wash the grease off his hands at the hydrant.