The Heifers She Bought in the Sandhills

Our place sits on the county road, about six miles out of town. The pasture along the road is the best grass we have, and it’s the first thing anybody sees driving by.

It’s also the road Troy drives every day. His rental’s in town, but his mother still lives out past us, and he goes out to check on her most days and every Sunday after church without fail.

I’m not going to pretend I didn’t think about that. I thought about it plenty.

But I’ll tell you the honest truth: that pasture has the best water, and the heifers needed it after a trip like that. And Kinley wanted to be able to see them from the kitchen window.

We went to the early service and came straight home. Kinley changed out of her church clothes into her jeans and her turquoise hoodie again and went out to the pasture with a bucket of range cake.

She called them. I stood at the kitchen window and watched those two Sandhills heifers lift their heads and walk to her across our grass, like they’d known her all their lives.

That’s when I saw Troy’s pickup come down the county road.

I saw it slow down. I saw it stop by our fence, right across from where Kinley stood with her bucket.

I took my coat off the hook. Then I stopped with my hand on the door.

It was her story. Not mine.

Troy got out of the pickup and stood there a minute. Then he climbed through the fence, the way he used to when he lived there and didn’t want to drive around to the gate, and he walked across the grass toward his daughter.

I could see them talking, but I couldn’t hear them. I found out later what was said, from Kinley, that night at supper.

He stopped about ten feet from her. He looked at the heifers for a while. The heifers looked back at him.

“Those aren’t from around here,” he said.

“No,” Kinley said. “They’re from Nebraska. The Lund place, up in the Sandhills.”

“Lund cattle,” Troy said. He’d know. Everybody in the cattle business up and down that country knows Lund cattle. “Where’d you get the money for Lund cattle?”

“Same place as last time,” Kinley said. “My money. I bought them with my money.”

He stood there. She told me he put his hands in his coat pockets, and took them out, and put them back in.

“Both of them?”

“Both of them. They’re bred. They’ll calve the end of March.”

Troy looked at the heifers a long time, Kinley said. Then he looked at her.

“Kinley,” he said. “That deal at the sale barn.”

She waited. She told me she didn’t want to make it easy for him, and she didn’t want to make it hard, either. She just waited.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“No,” Kinley said. “You shouldn’t have.”

That’s all she said. She didn’t yell at him. She didn’t tell him he’d embarrassed himself in front of the whole county, which he had. She didn’t tell him about crying in my pickup.

She just told him the truth, and let it sit there between them in the cold.

He nodded. He nodded like a man who’d been hit and was trying to stay standing.

“What’d you name them?” he asked.