The Heifers She Bought in the Sandhills

“What?” she said. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Go count your money again. We’re going to Nebraska a week from Saturday.”

The Lund place sat about two hundred miles from our driveway, up past Ogallala and north into the Sandhills, where the hills roll on like the ocean somebody forgot to fill.

We hooked up the silver gooseneck Friday afternoon and checked the lights and the floor and the tires. It’s the same trailer I use for small loads and the ones too far out for the semi. I bedded it with straw, which I don’t usually bother with.

“You don’t put straw in it for other people’s cattle,” Kinley said, watching me from the fence.

“These aren’t other people’s cattle,” I said. “These are yours. If we’re lucky.”

The next Saturday we pulled out at first light, the sky going from gray to pale yellow behind us. Kinley wore her turquoise hoodie and her good jeans. She’d braided her hair the night before so it would be out of her way, one long blond braid down her back.

She had the envelope zipped into the front pocket of her hoodie. Every few miles, her hand went to it, just to make sure.

I had on my old tan barn coat and my black hat, the one I wear to sales. My dad always said a person ought to look like they mean business at a cattle sale.

We stopped for coffee and a cinnamon roll at a café in Ogallala. Kinley didn’t eat hers. She wrapped it in a napkin and put it in the cup holder.

“What if somebody else wants them more?” she asked, about halfway across the hills.

“Then somebody else will bid more,” I said. “And we’ll go home and try again. But you’ll have tried.”

She nodded and looked out at the hills. Windmills. Black cattle strung out along a fence. A hawk sitting on a post like he owned it.

“Dad wouldn’t come all the way up here,” she said. “Would he?”

“No, honey,” I said. “He wouldn’t. And it’s kids only on those two heifers.”

She was quiet for a while after that. Then she said, “Good,” very softly, and I didn’t say anything back.

We got to the Lund place a little after ten. The yard was already full of pickups and trailers, parked every which way along the lane and out into the pasture. It was a bright, cold November day, the sky that hard clean blue you only get up there.

The sale was set up the way a lot of ranch dispersals are. Portable pipe panels made a sale ring next to the barn, and the auctioneer stood on a flatbed hay trailer with a microphone and a little speaker. The clerk had a folding table under the lean-to.

There must have been two hundred people there. Ranchers in hats and insulated coveralls, wives with thermoses, little kids running between the trailers. Somebody from the church had set up a table selling sloppy joes and pie, with a coffee can for the money.

Ivo was waiting at the pens, right where he said he’d be.

He’s not a tall man and never was. He’s gotten smaller with the years, but he still stands straight, in the same brown canvas coat he’s worn every time I’ve ever seen him. He shook my hand, then held out his hand to Kinley.