Thirty Cows Across the Slough

Where My Husband Was

I want to be fair about the men in this story, so I will tell you where mine was.

He was in the recliner in our front room with a brace on his back and a walker beside him. He’d had two discs fused in Omaha nineteen days before. The surgeon said no lifting, no bending, no driving for six weeks, and absolutely no horses.

He tried anyway. He got as far as the back step in his sock feet before he had to sit down on the porch swing, white in the face.

“I can drive the truck,” he said. “I can at least drive the truck.”

“You can’t,” I said. “And if you fall on that back, I’ll have two problems instead of one.”

He looked at me a long time. He is not a man who likes being told to sit. Nobody out here is.

“Call Curt,” he said.

“Mom already did.”

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Call him again.”

So I did, from the kitchen, while I pulled my boots on. Curt answered on the fourth ring. I could hear his diesel in the background.

“I’m on my second load,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”

He didn’t call back. So I went down there myself, and that is how I ended up in the ditch.

The Sheriff, and Why Nobody Was Coming

People ask me why I didn’t call somebody. I did. I called everybody.

I called the sheriff’s office from the road. The dispatcher was a girl I’d had on my bus ten years before, and she sounded like she hadn’t sat down since midnight.

“Rae, I’ve got people on roofs on the east side,” she said. “I’ve got a family in a car in the water by the grain elevator. I can’t send anybody for cows. I’m so sorry.”

She was right, too. You don’t send a deputy for cattle when there are children on a roof.

I called the two neighbors with stock trailers. One was already hauling his own. The other said the same thing Curt said, only kinder: “Rae, nobody’s pulling a trailer into that. The road’s going under. You’ll lose the truck and the trailer both.”

I called the feed store, the vet, and the man who runs the sale barn. Every one of them said the same thing in a different voice. Nobody hauls cattle in a flood. Not on a road that’s going under.

So the roads were gone, and the trucks were gone, and the help was busy with people, which is what help should be busy with.

And Mom’s cows were standing in water up to their bellies by then, bawling, bunched into that one high corner where the fence met the slough.