Sixty Cows Down the County Road

Brynn is thirteen and talks every minute she is awake, and she can whistle louder than any man in the county.

That first week, the girls and I did what you do. We fed the horses and checked water and drove the hour and a half to Rapid City every evening, and the girls did their homework in the back seat while the prairie went by.

The cows were not on our place. Every summer we lease grass from a man named Harlan Ruhland, three miles down the county road.

Sixty cow-calf pairs go out there in May and come home at the end of October.

Harlan is a fair man. He had been patient with us after the accident. But the lease said off by October 31, and he had his own heifers coming home to that grass the first of November, and he needed us out by Friday so he could fix fence.

“I hate to push you, Jolene,” Harlan said when he called. “If it was just me, I’d let them stay till Christmas. But my boy’s hauling heifers in Saturday morning and I don’t have anywhere else to put them.”

I told him he would have the pasture empty by Friday. I said it without knowing how, which is a thing I have done a few times in my life, and every time I have had to find out afterward how I meant it.

Every other fall, Kyle and Rich moved our pairs with Rich’s gooseneck. Rich has a big stock trailer, twenty-four feet.

It holds about ten pairs at a time if you load it right, so it is six trips, and two men can do it in a day.

The trailer was the easy answer. I had thought about it the whole week, and I had told myself Rich would offer before I ever had to ask.

He did not offer. So on the Tuesday, I picked up the phone and asked.

You already know what he said.

I sat down at the kitchen table after he hung up and did the arithmetic on the back of the hospital envelope.

Six hundred dollars. Cash. I had eighty-one dollars in my purse and a checking account that was waiting on my next paycheck.

The bills had started coming before Kyle was even out of surgery. The helicopter alone was a number I could not say out loud.

We had insurance, but insurance on a ranch is a thin blanket, and we were already finding the holes in it.

I could have called around for another trailer. I did call around. But it was the last week of October, and every man in the county with a stock trailer was hauling calves to the sale barn or hauling them home to wean. Nobody had a free day.

Then there was the question I kept asking myself and did not want to answer. Why would my husband’s own brother, who lives a mile and a half from us and has eaten Thanksgiving dinner at our table for twenty years, charge us like strangers?

I found out the answer later, and I will tell you now so you understand that Rich is not a monster.

He is a man who got tired of being the older brother, and he picked the worst possible week to say so.