The Cows I Brought Into the Marriage

The winter

I moved into the old house on Dad’s place, the one my grandparents had lived in, a quarter mile down his lane.

It had been empty for nine years and needed a furnace, a water heater, and about forty mouse traps.

Dad and I fixed it up over September. He did the plumbing, slow and stubborn and right. I did the paint and the floors.

Winnie picked her own room, the little one under the eaves with the window that looks out on the pasture.

We split her time. Weeknights with me, weekends with Darwin, more or less. Some weekends she didn’t want to go, and I made her go anyway. He was trying. I could see him trying.

Darwin signed the divorce papers in November without a fight. My lawyer had told me to expect a fight over the cows, over the farm, over everything, because that is what people do.

He didn’t fight. He initialed the page about the cattle without asking a single question.

He never asked for one cent of the forty-one thousand. He never asked for the calves out of my cows, either, though some men would have.

He kept the farm, the ground, his half of the herd, and the note at the bank, which was not a small thing to keep.

I heard later, from the same woman at the gas station, that the coffees with Amanda had stopped by Labor Day.

I don’t know why, and I didn’t ask. I saw her at the grocery store once in October. She saw me and turned her cart around. I let her.

I will not pretend I didn’t feel anything about that. But I had told myself in Dad’s lane that I would not make anybody pay more than the truth already charged them, and I meant it.

She had two boys at home. That was enough to carry.

My cows wintered on Dad’s stalks. I fed hay every morning before the clinic and every evening after, in the dark both times, the way Winnie had fed Biscuit.

I bought a used bale bed for the pickup in December from a man near Oskaloosa. Dad said it was the best money I had spent all year.

Doc Henning gave me a raise in January without my asking. He said it was because I’d finally caught up the billing from two years of mess, but I think he knew. Everybody knew.

The calf

In March, Number 8 calved a heifer in a sleet storm.

I found her at four in the morning in the corner of the windbreak, still wet, with ice on her eyelashes and her mother licking her as fast as she could.

I carried her to the barn in my arms, the cow following right behind me, bellowing.

Winnie came out in her pajamas and boots and a coat over the top.

She knelt in the straw next to me and rubbed that calf with a feed sack until she shivered herself awake and tried to stand.

“Can I have her?” Winnie said. “For next year. To show.”

I looked at the calf, a black heifer with a little white on her flank. Out of Number 8, who had raised twins once.

Out of the herd I started at sixteen with six heifers and a loan from my dad.

“She’s yours,” I said. “But you’ll pay me back in calves.”

Winnie laughed. “That’s what Grandpa told you.”

“It was a good deal,” I said. “I took it.”

She named the heifer Tilly. She had her haltered by May.