Sixty Cows Down the County Road

“Tell him that,” Elden said. “Tell him old Elden Moe said it heals. Slow, but it heals.” Then he looked over at me sideways from under that hat. “And tell him his girls can ride.”

It was right about then that I saw the pickup.

It was coming toward us down the gravel from the west, pulling a stock trailer. I knew that trailer the way you know a neighbor’s dog.

I had seen it at our place every fall for twenty years. It was Rich.

I do not know what he thought he was going to do. I found out later that Ron Kessler had called him that morning, while we were gathering, and told him in about three sentences what he thought of him. Rich had hitched up the trailer and come anyway.

Maybe he thought he would meet us at Harlan’s and load the cattle and make it right. Maybe he did not think at all.

But he was a good two hours late, and the cows were not in Harlan’s pasture anymore. They were in the road.

He came over the little rise in front of us and saw sixty pairs filling that road from fence to fence.

There is no turning a herd like that around, and there is no getting a pickup and a twenty-four-foot trailer through the middle of it.

So he did the only thing a cattleman can do. He slowed down, and he pulled off onto the shoulder, and he eased that whole outfit over into the ditch as far as it would go, with the trailer tipped a little on the slope. Then he stopped and turned the engine off.

The herd walked past him. Every single one. Grandma first, and then the big cows, and then the young ones with their calves, sixty pairs strolling by his window one at a time while their calves bawled and the dust sifted down on his windshield.

Brynn rode right by him, ahead of the herd. She did not look at him. She just kept whistling, loud and high, the way her dad taught her.

Addie rode by on the side, and she looked at him once, straight on, and then went back to watching her cows.

Elden and I rode past him first, out in front of the herd. Elden went by that pickup close enough to touch the mirror, and he never turned his head, never said one word.

I think that was the hardest thing anybody did to Rich all day.

I looked at him when I went by. I did not mean to, but I did. He was sitting with both hands on the steering wheel, looking at the steering wheel.

His face was red, and not from the cold. He is forty-nine years old, and he looked about fourteen.

I did not stop. I did not say anything. There was nothing I could have said that the cows had not already said for me.

We rode on, and I heard the pickup start up again behind us after a while, and then I did not hear it anymore.

The last mile was the easiest. The cows knew where they were by then. They could smell home, the water tank and the hay, and they picked up their pace without anybody asking them to. Brynn quit whistling. She did not need to.