Thirty Cows Across the Slough

“Mom should have sold them years ago, Rae,” Curt said. “I’ve got one pot, two trips, and the river’s coming up. I’m taking mine.”

He said it through the window of his truck, out on the county road above the bottoms, with the wipers going and his second load of cattle bawling behind him.

I was standing in the ditch in my yellow slicker with rain running off the bill of my cap. It was a little after seven on a Saturday morning in April, and full light, the gray kind.

Below us, on the river side of the road, my mother in law’s thirty black cows were bunched against the high corner of her pasture. The water was already over their knees.

“There’s room for six on that pot,” I said. “There’s always room for six.”

“There’s not,” Curt said. “I’m loaded tight. You overload a pot in this and you’ll have cows down and stepped on before you get to town. You know that.”

I did know that. That was the worst part. Curt knew cattle. He had hauled for the sale barn on the side for fifteen years, and he was good at it.

“Then come back,” I said.

He looked down the road toward the low crossing, where the slough ran under the road through a big steel culvert. The water was running across the blacktop there, brown and smooth and fast.

“I’ll be lucky to get this load through,” he said. “Nobody’s coming back down here today, Rae. Not me, not anybody.”

Then he rolled up his window and eased that big truck down into the water. I watched the tires go under to the hubs. He made it across, and climbed out the far side, and his taillights went up the hill toward town.

And there I stood, on the wrong side of the river from any help, with thirty cows that belonged to a 73 year old widow who had called her own son at four in the morning and asked him for one thing.

The Phone Call at Four

I should back up and tell you who everybody is, because out here it matters.

My name is Rae Lindahl. I am 44 years old. I drive a school bus for our district, Route 6, the long gravel one, and I married into the Lindahl family twenty two years ago.

My husband is the younger Lindahl boy. Curt is the older one, five years ahead of him. Their mother is Lorraine, and I have called her Mom since the week I got engaged, because she told me to and because she earned it.

Mom was widowed six years ago. Dad Lindahl had a heart attack in the machine shed with a grease gun in his hand. He was 71. She found him.

After that, the boys split the farming. Curt took over the cash rent on the river bottoms next to Mom’s place. My husband took the hill ground and the hay. And Mom kept her thirty cows on her own bottom pasture, because she said she was not ready to be a woman with nothing to check on in the morning.

They are fall calvers. Dad switched the herd years ago so he wouldn’t be pulling calves in a March blizzard. So in April, Mom’s cows were bred and heavy and slow, with no babies at their sides yet.

Curt’s cows, eighty head, were the same. He ran them right next door, on the lease ground, with a wire fence between his and hers.

That spring it had rained for eleven days. The ground was full. Then a storm sat on top of the river upstream on Friday night and dumped four inches, and by morning the Platte was coming out of its banks all along our stretch.

Mom called Curt first. Of course she did. He was closest. He had the pot trailer. He was her son.

She told me later exactly what she said, because she had gone over it in her head a hundred times. She said, “Curt, the water’s in the lane. Can you get my girls out when you get yours?”

And Curt said, “I’ll see what I can do, Mom.”

She called us at five, after his first load went out and he didn’t stop. My husband answered.