The Heifers She Bought in the Sandhills

The neighbor woman, the one who’d had her arm around her earlier, pulled a folding chair over, and Dorcas sat down in it. She sat there a minute with her hand flat on the table.

“Rosalie,” she said finally. “My oldest was Rosalie. And the little one we just called Sissy. Her whole life, nobody ever called her anything else.”

“Are they here?” Kinley asked.

“Rosalie’s in Oregon,” Dorcas said. “She called this morning. Sissy.” She stopped. “We lost Sissy when she was nineteen. A car wreck, on the highway to Thedford. That was a long time ago.”

Kinley didn’t say anything for a second. Then she said, “Then the big one is Rosalie. And the little deep one is Sissy. If that’s all right.”

Dorcas reached across the table and put her chapped red hand over Kinley’s.

“That’s all right,” she said. “That’s more than all right.”

Nobody in that line said a word. Big men in insulated coveralls looked at the ground and at their checkbooks. Ivo took his hat off again and held it.

I turned around and looked out across the hills for a while, because I didn’t want to be the one crying at a cattle sale.

Then the clerk handed Kinley her receipts, and the brand inspector came around with his clipboard, and the vet’s health papers had to be signed for crossing the state line, and the world went back to being a sale day.

We loaded them that afternoon, still bright and cold, the sun low but nowhere near down. I backed the silver gooseneck up to the loading chute and Ivo helped me run them in.

They went in easy. Lund cattle. Quiet as Dorcas said.

Kinley climbed up on the side of the trailer and looked through the slats at her two heifers standing in the straw. Then she climbed down and stood by the pipe pen next to the chute, with the halter I’d brought her looped over her arm, and she just grinned.

I hadn’t seen her grin like that in a year. Not since before the divorce. Maybe not since before the trouble started.

I leaned on the rail beside her in my old barn coat, and a man I’d never met took our picture with his phone, and sent it to me later. I’ve got it on my refrigerator.

Ivo walked us to the truck.

“You call me when they calve,” he said to Kinley. “End of March. I want to hear about it.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Mr. Kucera. Thank you.”

He waved it off. “Thank Dorcas. I didn’t do anything but stand there.”

“You stood there,” Kinley said. “That’s a lot.”

He looked at her a long time. Then he patted her shoulder and walked off toward his own truck without saying anything else, and I saw him take out his handkerchief before he got there.

We drove the two hundred miles home with the sun going down on our right and the heifers shifting in the trailer behind us. Kinley ate her cinnamon roll from that morning, cold, out of the napkin.

We got home late, so we left them in the pen by the barn with hay and water for the night, and Kinley was out checking on them again before breakfast.

The next morning, Sunday, we turned them out.