The Heifer She Showed Half Clipped

Hugh and his dad run about a hundred and forty cow-calf pairs on the home place and some rented grass north of town.

Hugh showed cattle when he was a kid and won a fair share. His brother Kent showed too, and never placed much above the middle.

That is the part I knew and had not let myself think about. Kent works the scale at the co-op elevator now.

He rents a little ground, runs a few cows, and has a boy named Jethro who is eleven and shows in the same intermediate class as Geneva.

Jethro has shown against Geneva three summers running. He has never once placed above her. Jethro took it fine.

He is a sweet, quiet kid who would rather fish than do almost anything. It was his dad who could not take it.

People have asked me since why I did not march to the fair office, or call the sheriff, or at least lay into Kent right there at the wash rack where everybody could hear.

I understand the question. I asked myself the same thing standing there.

But hair does not grow back overnight. No phone call was going to put the hair back on that heifer, and the beef show started at eight the next morning.

Whatever was going to happen, Geneva was going to have to walk into that ring with what she had.

And Jethro was standing twenty feet away by the hose reel, watching his dad, with his face gone white.

I was not going to teach two kids that the answer to a grown man doing something mean is a grown woman screaming at him.

So I took out my phone and texted Hugh one line. He was home thirty miles away, because a bull had gone through the fence on the north quarter and was walking the blacktop, and somebody had to be there to get him in before he met a semi.

He called me back in about ten seconds.

“How bad,” he said.

“Her whole right side,” I said. “Down to the hide.”

He did not say anything for a long moment. I could hear the bull bawling somewhere behind him and the wind across the phone.

When he talked again his voice was very low and very even, which is how Hugh sounds when he is the angriest he gets.

“I’ll be there before the show,” he said. “Don’t you take this on, Estelle. He’s my brother. I’ll handle my brother.”

I hung up. Kent had already wound the cord around the clippers and was walking off toward the campers, not fast, with his shoulders a little higher than they should have been.

Jethro stood by the hose reel a moment longer and then followed him.

Geneva had not moved her hand off that heifer.

“We could clip the other side to match,” I said to her quietly. “Slick shear her. Some of the big shows do that in the heat. Nobody would know it was not on purpose.”

She thought about it. I watched her think about it, the way she does, with her lip pulled in. Then she shook her head.

“Then she’d be bald on both sides,” Geneva said. “And he’d have done it twice.”

I did not have an answer for that. I still don’t. She untied Pepper, and the heifer swung her head around and sniffed at the bare side of herself like she wanted to know what had happened to it, and Geneva laughed a little, which nearly undid me.