A heifer bred to Cecil’s bull is a different animal on paper. That bull was a big crossbred, part Charolais, with no papers and no numbers anybody had ever written down.
The calves could not be registered. The heifers could not be sold as what Mom raised them to be. And a big bull on a first-calf heifer is how you lose a heifer and a calf both.
“What will you get for them?” I asked.
“Sale barn,” she said. “Commercial bred heifers. About a thousand dollars a head less than I would have gotten.” She shrugged. “If they calve all right.”
Six thousand dollars, give or take, plus whatever came in the spring. For a 71-year-old woman on a farm income, that is not a rounding error. That is her winter.
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You might ask where my father was in all this. Dad is 76, and he had a knee replaced in the middle of July.
He was on the front porch that morning with his leg up on a kitchen chair and a walker parked beside him, and I could see from the barn lot how much it ate at him.
When I walked up to the house, he did not wait for me to sit down.
“I’d have had that fence fixed in June,” he said. “I’d have had it fixed in a day. And now I can’t get to the mailbox.”
“I know, Dad.”
“Your mother won’t let me try.”
“She’s right,” I said, and he looked at me like I was a traitor, and then he looked at his knee and let it go.
The fence between Mom’s pasture and Cecil’s place is old woven wire with two strands of barbed wire on top, strung on cedar posts my grandfather set. Dad and the man who owned Cecil’s farm before him had split it for 40 years, each one keeping up his own half.
Cecil bought that farm six years ago, the year he married my sister. He had let his half go. The cedar posts were rotted off at the ground in places, and the woven wire laid down in a long belly where the bull had learned to lean on it.
My sister Twila lives over there with him and their two kids. I love her, and for the most part I have always liked Cecil fine.
He is not a mean man. I want to say that plainly. He coaches the kids’ ball teams. He came and cut wood for Dad the winter after Dad’s first knee went.
But his hours got cut at the plant in the spring, and his fence was falling down, and his hay was short. A man in that spot can either say so or he can make a joke.