The Heifers She Bought in the Sandhills

“That one’s Rosalie,” she said, and pointed. “That one’s Sissy.”

“Those are pretty names.”

“They’re Mrs. Lund’s daughters’ names. Sissy died a long time ago, in a car wreck.”

Troy didn’t say anything for a while after that.

Then Kinley said the thing I’ll be proud of until the day I die.

“You can come see them, Dad,” she said. “When they calve. You can come help if you want. But you have to come as my dad. Not to win something.”

She told me he looked at her like he didn’t know who she was. Like the little girl he’d carried around the barn on his shoulders had turned into somebody he’d have to meet all over again.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Kinley.”

Then he walked back across the pasture and climbed back through the fence and got in his pickup and drove on out to his mother’s.

Kinley stood there with her bucket until the pickup was gone. Then she gave each of the heifers a handful of cake out of her palm and came back in the house.

I was still standing by the door with my coat in my hand.

“Mom,” she said, “you were watching the whole time.”

“Every second,” I said.

She laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh since that Wednesday in Sterling.

Here’s the rest of it, the part the women at church always want to hear when I tell this story.

Troy had paid four seventy a hundred for a heifer calf he had nowhere to keep. He’d had to board her at a buddy’s feedlot outside town for two weeks, paying by the day for feed and pen.

Two Wednesdays after the sale he ran her back through the Sterling ring.

Hap told me about it the next time I hauled out of there. He said the whole barn went quiet again when that little black heifer came through. Every man in those bleachers knew whose heifer she was and how she’d gotten to be his.

She’d shrunk a little in the feedlot, the way calves do. The market had dropped a few dollars that week. And nobody in that ring, Hap said, was in any hurry to bid her up.

She brought four forty. Less than Kinley had offered for her in the first place. After commission and the two weeks of board, Troy was out more than two hundred dollars, and the whole Wednesday crowd had watched him lose it.

Hap told me Troy sat there and took it. Didn’t make excuses. Didn’t leave early. Just sat and watched it happen, and then got up and went to the window and settled up like a man.

I’ll give him that. He came out in March, too. The morning Rosalie calved, he was standing in our barn before he’d had his coffee, and he had the sense to stand back and let Kinley do it. Sissy calved three days later, on a bright, still afternoon, a big bull calf, no help needed.

Kinley called Ivo Kucera both times. The second time, he put Dorcas Lund on the phone, because she was sitting at his kitchen table having coffee. I don’t know how that came about and I didn’t ask.

My daughter has four head now. She’s saving for a bull.

And Troy sold his heifer for less than he paid.