Thirty Cows Across the Slough

The Reason

He did try to explain, later. I’ll give him that.

We were all up at Mom’s kitchen table by then, wrapped in blankets, with the horses dried off and fed in her barn, and Florine’s bars on a plate in the middle of the table.

Curt sat at the end with his hands around a cup of coffee.

“I’d been up since two,” he said. “I was watching the gauge on my phone. When the river hit flood stage I called the man who runs the sale barn and asked if he’d take eighty head on short notice. He said if I could get them there by eight.”

He turned the cup in his hands.

“First load went fine. Second load, I was loading in water. The road was starting to go. I kept thinking if I lose the truck in that culvert, I lose the truck and forty head of cows. And I’m still paying on that truck.”

He looked at Mom.

“I told myself your cows would stand in the corner. I told myself they’d be fine. I told myself somebody else would come.”

Nobody said anything.

“I’m the one who was supposed to come,” he said. “And I knew it. I just picked mine.”

That was the most honest thing I had ever heard him say.

What Mom Said Back

Mom sat there a long time with her hands folded on the table. The clock over the stove ticked. Outside, the rain was finally starting to let up.

Then she said, “Your father would have taken mine and left his.”

Curt nodded. He didn’t argue it.

“I don’t say that to shame you,” she said. “I say it because I know you know it. And because I want you to remember it next time.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Curt said.

“There’s always a next time,” Mom said. “It’s the Platte.”

And then she did something I didn’t expect. She reached down the table and put her hand on top of his hand, right there on the oilcloth.

“You came down that bank,” she said. “At the end. You came down.”

Curt’s face broke. Just for a second. He put his other hand over his eyes and his shoulders shook, and nobody at that table said a single word or looked anywhere else.

Brooke slid her plate of bars across the table toward him. That was all. She just slid the plate over.