Thirty Cows Across the Slough

At the Top of the Hill

I stood in the water a minute after that. I couldn’t do anything else. My legs were shaking and I couldn’t feel my feet.

Curt stood beside me. Neither of us said anything.

Then he climbed out, and reached back, and gave me his hand, and pulled me up the bank.

Up the hill, Brooke was already riding toward the gate, and Kenzie was coming up behind Biscuit, letting the old cow take her time. The other twenty-nine cows had spread out across the hill and were grazing. Just like that. As if nothing had happened.

Abel was standing at the top gate holding it open. Florine was beside him with her arms full of towels.

And Mom was walking down the hill.

She walked straight past all of us. Straight past me and Curt and the girls. She walked to Biscuit and took that old cow’s wet face in both her hands and put her forehead against it.

I don’t know what she said. I didn’t try to hear it. Some things belong to the people they belong to.

Florine came down with the towels. She wrapped one around Brooke’s shoulders first, because Brooke was the smallest, and then one around Kenzie, and then she handed one to me.

Then she stood there holding the last one, looking at Curt.

He was standing in his waders on the hillside with water running off him, and he didn’t look at anybody. He looked at the ground.

Florine walked over and handed him the towel anyway.

He held it for a long time without using it.

What Curt Said

Mom finally let go of Biscuit and turned around.

She looked at her oldest son. She didn’t raise her voice. She has never raised her voice at either of her boys that I have seen, not once in twenty-two years.

“You had room for six,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

Curt opened his mouth, and then he shut it. I watched him try to find the reason. The one trailer. The two trips. The water coming up. The pot being full. All of it was true. None of it was the answer.

“I had room for six,” he said.

“I asked you,” Mom said. “At four in the morning. I asked you for one thing.”

“I know you did.”

“I’ve never asked you for anything, Curt. Not since your father.”

“I know, Mom.”

Abel was standing by the gate. He didn’t say a word. But he looked at Curt the way an old man looks at a younger one he’s known since baptism, and Curt felt it. You could see him feel it.

Florine didn’t say anything either. She just went and poured coffee from her thermos into the lid and handed it to Brooke.

That was the whole consequence. There was no yelling. Nobody said anything ugly. But Curt Lindahl stood on that hill in front of his mother, his neighbors, and his nieces, soaking wet, and every one of them knew what he had done and what three riders on three horses had done instead.

Out here, that’s worse than anything a court could do. Everybody at church would know by noon on Sunday. Everybody at the sale barn would know by Monday.