The Cows I Brought Into the Marriage

The first load

Any cattleman will tell you a twenty-four-foot gooseneck stock trailer holds about twelve grown cows if you don’t want to hurt them.

Calves at side make it tight, so I put the calves up front behind the center gate where nobody would step on them.

I loaded the first twelve cows and their calves at 3:40 in the morning. The cows went up the alley and into the trailer with no more fuss than they gave the vet.

They had done it before, for preg checks and for fresh pasture. Cows trust a routine.

I latched the center gate, then the rear, and pulled out of our lane with the lights on low.

Dad’s place is eighteen miles northeast, past the Lutheran church and the old school and across the river bridge.

I did not call him first. I don’t know why. Maybe I knew he’d already be up, and that I would rather say it to his face than to a phone.

He was up. Dad has been up at three every morning of his life, even since Mom passed and the hogs were sold and there was nothing in particular to get up for.

The yard light was on and the kitchen window was yellow.

By the time I turned in his lane he had the pasture gate swung wide and was standing beside it in his barn coat with his hands in his pockets.

He must have seen my lights from the road a mile off.

I pulled through and stopped.

I got out and went around to the back and opened the rear gate, and the cows stepped down onto his grass and lowered their heads and started grazing like they had lived there all their lives.

Dad watched them unload. He looked at the brand on the last cow’s hip as she went past him in the headlights. Then he looked at me.

He didn’t ask me one single question.

He walked over and put his hand on the back of my neck, the way he did when I was little and had fallen off something. His hand was rough and warm. He just held it there.

I put my forehead against his shoulder for a minute. He smelled like coffee and diesel. That is when I cried, there, in his lane, with the trailer ticking as it cooled.

“Go get the rest,” he said. “I’ll make coffee.”

“Dad.”

“I know,” he said. “Go get the rest of your cows, Vera. Then we’ll talk if you want, and we won’t if you don’t.”