Thirty Cows Across the Slough

Afterward

The water went down in four days. It left a line of mud and sticks and dead cornstalks along every fence in the bottoms, and a sandbar in Mom’s pasture where there had never been one.

Curt came out on the fifth day with his skid loader and cleared the lane. He didn’t call ahead. He just showed up.

He fixed Mom’s fence, all of it, every strand from the corner to the slough. Abel came down and helped him, and the two of them worked side by side for three days without saying much of anything. Florine brought them dinner both days.

In June, Curt brought his pot trailer down and hauled Mom’s thirty cows back to the bottom pasture, all thirty in one load because the road was dry and he took his time. He wouldn’t take a dime for the diesel.

Mom tried to pay him. He handed the check back.

“I owed you six spots on a trailer,” he said. “Call it even when I’ve paid you the other twenty-four.”

Biscuit

Biscuit calved in September. A heifer calf, black with a white splash on her face.

Mom named her Slough.

My husband laughed so hard at that, he had to hold his back. He was walking by then, and driving again, and he’d heard the whole story from the girls about forty times.

Brooke asked if she could bottle-feed the calf, even though the calf didn’t need it. Mom let her give it one bottle anyway, just so she could say she had.

What I Think About

I still drive Route 6. Every morning in the fall I go past the bottoms, and I look across at Grandpa’s hill, and I think about that morning.

I don’t think about Curt in the truck so much anymore. People do what they do when they’re scared and the water’s coming up. He’s not a bad man. He’s a man who made a bad choice at five in the morning and spent the rest of the summer making it right.

What I think about is Kenzie leaning over that gray horse’s neck in the middle of the slough with her hand full of mane.

I think about Brooke holding the line on the near bank, fourteen years old, doing the job she was given without one word of complaint.

I think about Abel splicing wire in the rain at eighty, and Florine handing Curt that last towel.

And I think about Mom standing at the top of the hill, calling an old cow’s name across a hundred yards of floodwater, and that old cow lifting her head and coming.

The Last Thing

There’s one more thing I should tell you.

The next spring, the river came up again. Not as bad. A foot over the bottoms, not four. But enough.

At five in the morning, before Mom had even picked up the phone, Curt’s pot trailer came down the county road and turned into her lane.

He loaded her thirty first. Then he went back for his.

He called me when he was done. I was making the girls’ lunches.

“Mom’s girls are on the hill,” he said. “All thirty. Biscuit rode in the front.”

“Thank you, Curt,” I said.

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “Just tell Kenzie I didn’t need the gray this time.”

I told her. She grinned and said, “Tell him I would’ve come anyway.”

That’s the thing about out here. You would have come anyway. That’s what family is supposed to mean.

Sometimes it takes a flood to remind a man. And sometimes the best thing he ever does is the moment he quits sitting in the truck and pulls on his waders to help.