The Cows I Brought Into the Marriage

Twenty-three

I went to the shop for a flashlight and a bucket of range cubes and walked out to the pasture gate.

It was a quarter to eleven. The cows were lying down on the high ground by the creek, a long dark line under the stars.

I had started that herd when I was sixteen. Six bred Angus heifers bought at a 4-H sale with my own savings and a loan from Dad.

He paid for the loan out of his soybean check that fall and told me I could pay him back in calves.

I did. I paid him back in three years.

I recorded my brand with the state the same summer I bought the heifers, a lazy M over a bar, on the left hip. I have renewed it every ten years since.

When I married Darwin at twenty-three, I brought thirty head with me. Some I sold over the years, when a cow got old or came up open or we needed the money for something.

But every year I kept back my best heifers and bred them, and I never let my cattle and his get mixed on paper.

Darwin used to tease me about it. My little ledger in the glove box. My tags with the M on them. His dad called them “Vera’s girls” at every branding. I think he thought it was cute.

It was not cute. It was mine.

By that July there were twenty-three of my cows on that pasture, and twenty-three of his, and the calves at their sides that we had always split by whose cow they came out of.

I knew every one of mine by her face and her tag, and most of them by the way they walked.

The last time a sale barn man had looked them over, in the spring, he said they’d bring about forty-one thousand dollars as a group. Some were good young cows.

A few were past twelve, with more teeth gone than left. Prices had been high, but you don’t get top dollar for a bunch like that.

I wasn’t going to sell them. I just needed to know that number in my head that night, because it was the number of my life before him, and it was still standing.

I rattled the bucket. Forty-six heads came up off the ground at once.

They came down the slope in the dark like they always had, mothers first, calves trotting behind.

I stood at the gate to the lot with the flashlight and let mine through and turned his back, one by one, reading tags.

Number 14, my oldest, came through first, as she always did. Number 31, who kicks. Number 8, who had twins once and raised them both.

The first-calf heifer I’d named Pepper, who still came to me for a scratch at the tailhead.

It took most of an hour. Two of his cows tried to crowd through with mine, and I had to wave my arms and send them back up the hill.

A calf got separated from its mother and bawled until I let it through.

When I was done I had twenty-three cows and their calves in the lot, standing in the dark eating cubes off the ground. I shut the gate and leaned on it.

My hands were shaking then. Not before. I let them shake.

Then I went out to the yard and backed the gooseneck up to the alley with the cab light off, and I did not care whether the engine woke anybody.