Sixty Cows Down the County Road

“Business is business, Jolene,” Rich said, and I could hear him chewing something on the other end of the line, like this was any other Tuesday call about any other thing.

I was standing in the kitchen with the phone in one hand and a stack of mail in the other. The top envelope said Monument Health in blue letters, and I had not opened it yet.

“Two hundred a day,” he went on. “For the trailer and my time. Cash. I can do two loads in the morning before my own work, so call it three days. That’s fair, and you know it.”

I set the mail down on the counter very slowly, the way you set down something you are afraid you will throw.

Then I looked out the window at the empty corral where Kyle’s saddle horse stood waiting for a man who was not coming home.

“Rich,” I said, “your brother is lying in a hospital bed in Rapid City with a broken pelvis. I am asking you to help us move his cows three miles.”

“And I’m telling you what it costs,” he said. “Lisa and I have talked about this. I can’t keep doing everything for free. You’ll figure it out. Call me back when you’ve got it.”

Then he hung up, and I stood there in my kitchen listening to the dial tone, which is a sound I had not heard in a long while, because people do not usually hang up on me.

I should tell you how we got there, because it did not start with that phone call. It started six days before, on a cold bright afternoon, with a round baler that would not stop plugging.

Kyle had been baling cornstalks for Ron Kessler down the road, the way he did every fall for a little extra money and a few bales for our own cows.

The baler kept choking on wet stalks, and he got down to clear it.

He did everything right except one thing, and that one thing was enough. He left the tractor running to save a minute, and when the last wad of stalks pulled free, the baler grabbed him and threw him. The next clear thing he remembered was the helicopter.

Ron found him. Ron is past sixty and has a bad knee, and he ran across that whole field anyway.

I will never in my life be able to thank that man enough, and I have quit trying, because he does not like it.

The doctors in Rapid City said it was a broken pelvis in two places, and some bruising on the inside they wanted to watch.

They put pins in. They said he would walk fine again, but not this fall, and not without a lot of work.

Kyle is forty-five. He has run cattle his whole life, first with his dad and then on his own.

He has never been sick a day that I can remember, and now he could not roll over in bed without a nurse.

I am forty-two. I work three days a week as a vet tech at the clinic in town, pulling blood on calves and holding dogs for shots.

I know cattle. I know horses. I did not know how to run the whole place alone.

We have two daughters. Addie is sixteen, tall and quiet, the kind of girl who notices a cow limping from a quarter mile off.