Twenty Bales Down Beaver Creek

The Trips

I went back for the second load. When I came back, Kent had cleared a path from the lot to the gate with his shovel, and set up a couple of old panels to make a feeding pen out of the wind.

I went back for the third load. When I came back with it, he was sitting on his loader at the gate, waiting. He’d gotten the old tractor started in the cold, which is no small thing.

He took the bales off my trailer with the spear, one at a time, careful, and set them in a row along the panels. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t either. We just worked.

Aunt Vi came out on the porch with her walker on the third trip and stood there wrapped in a quilt, watching us. She didn’t call out. She just stood there with her hand over her mouth.

On the fourth trip, I brought the last two on the flatbed. Kent took them off with the loader and set them down. Then he shut the tractor off and climbed down and walked over to my door, and stood there.

I rolled the window down.

He looked at the calves. Then he looked out past the windbreak, down toward the creek bottom, where you could just see the high strip, white under the snow. Then he looked at me.

“You want to know why I did it,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I just waited. Clara was at the fence with the calves, out of earshot, petting one through the panels.

Kent’s Reason

“Fall weaning,” he said. “I weaned these calves the second week of November. You remember that rain we had right before? Three days of it.”

I remembered.

“I had them in the creek lot. Where Dad always put them. And it was mud, Anne. It was mud to their knees. I couldn’t keep them dry. I couldn’t keep hay in front of them without it getting tromped in.”

He stopped and rubbed his face with his glove.

“I had three of them go down with pneumonia that week. The vet came out twice. I lost one. Clara’s calf.”

I felt that go right through me. Clara had a bucket calf every year, just like I had when I was her age. Grandpa started that with both of us.

“She named it Ames,” Kent said. “After Grandpa. She found it dead in the mud on a Tuesday morning before school.”

He looked over at his daughter at the fence.

“That was the morning I did it. I came out and found her sitting next to that calf in the mud, crying, and I had to pick her up and carry her to the bus. And I came back, and I looked at the lot, and I looked up at that high ground on the creek, the only dry ground on the whole place.”

“With my bales sitting on it,” I said.

“With your bales sitting on it.”

“You could have asked me, Kent. I’d have moved them. You know I’d have moved them.”

“I know it.” His voice cracked on that, and he stopped and waited until it didn’t. “That’s the thing. I knew you would.”

I didn’t understand, and he could see it.