Sixty Cows Down the County Road

About a mile in, things were going so well that I let myself breathe. I pulled my phone out of my coat pocket and called Kyle.

It took a while to ring through, out where we were, and then I heard his voice, thin and tired.

“Jolene? You all right?”

“I want you to hear something,” I said. I held the phone up high over my head, out toward the herd, with the screen to the sky.

I held it there a long time, maybe a whole minute, while the cows bawled and the calves answered and Brynn whistled up front.

When I put it back to my ear, Kyle did not say anything at first. I could hear the beeping of something in his room, and somebody talking in the hall.

Then I heard him breathe in, and I knew before he spoke that he was crying.

“Is that Brynn whistling?” he said.

“That’s Brynn,” I said. “She’s out ahead at the corners, like you said. Addie’s on the side. They’re doing better than you and Rich ever did.”

He laughed, and then he made a sound like it hurt to laugh. “You tell those girls their dad is proud of them,” he said, and his voice broke right in the middle of it. “You tell them I’m lying here listening to my cows come home.”

I said I would. I hung up and put the phone away and rode a while without looking at anybody, because I did not want Addie to see my face.

Rusty kept walking. Good horses do not need you to see clearly. They see for you.

The first place on the road is the Kessler place. Their house sits close to the gravel, and their yard gate opens right onto it.

That gate is where cows like to turn, because Patty grows flowers, and a cow will walk a long way for somebody’s petunias.

But when we came up on it, Ron and Patty were both standing in the open gap of their yard gate, side by side.

Ron had his cane, and Patty had her arms folded against the cold. They were not saying anything. They were just standing there.

The leaders came up even with them, and old Grandma looked at Patty’s flower beds and looked at Patty and kept walking.

The rest went right on past. Ron lifted his cane about two inches as I rode by. Patty gave me a little nod.

That was all. Nobody made a speech. Nobody said they were sorry about Kyle or asked me how we were holding up.

They had heard what they needed to hear, and they came out and stood at their gate, and that said all of it.

The next place up the road belongs to an older couple, the Jorgensens. I barely know them. They moved out from Pierre a few years ago and keep to themselves.

I had called them Thursday and left a message on their machine, and I did not know if they ever heard it.

But Mrs. Jorgensen was out at the end of her drive in a long wool coat, with a dish towel in her hand like she had come straight from the dishes.

When the leaders started to look at her driveway, she flapped that towel at them, not hard, just enough.

They went on past. She stood there till the last calf was by, and then she raised the towel to me, and I raised my hand back.