Twenty Three Marks on the Barn Wall

“Fifty dollars a pull,” my nephew said on the phone. “Cash. He said cash, so there’s no confusion.”

I was sitting in my truck at a fuel island in Ogallala with a load of frozen beef behind me, and for a second I could not make my mouth work.

Kyler was 15. His voice had mostly finished changing that winter, but it cracked on the word cash, and I heard the little boy I used to pull around the yard in a sled.

“Say it again,” I told him. “Slow. Start with your dad.”

He started with his dad. Lane had been feeding hay that Sunday morning, on the hill behind the hay yard where the ground slopes toward the creek.

The snow had melted off the south side and frozen again overnight. The tractor slid sideways on the slick, and the front tires caught a rut and it went over.

Lane had the sense to stay in the seat. The cab held. But when it came to rest he could not move his legs right, and he could not get the door open from where he lay.

Kyler found him an hour later, when his dad did not come in for dinner. He ran the half mile out there in his rubber boots and called for help from the hill.

They flew Lane to Kearney. Broken pelvis in two places. The doctor said he was lucky, and Delia, Kyler’s mom, said she would decide later whether she agreed.

“Mom’s down there with him,” Kyler said. “She wanted to come home. Dad told her to stay.”

“Good,” I said. “She should stay.”

“Aunt Shawna, we have 90 heifers.”

I knew that. Everybody in my family knew that. Lane had kept back the best heifers from three years of calves and bred them all to a new bull, and he had been talking about that bull since Thanksgiving.

They were due starting the second week of March. It was the second week of March.

“Some of them have started,” Kyler said. “Two since noon. I got them both. One was easy. One I had to help.”

“You did that by yourself?”

“Dad was already in the helicopter. Mom was on the phone with the hospital. There was nobody else.”

I closed my eyes. I could see it plain: a 15-year-old boy alone in a heifer barn on the same day his father went off a hill in a tractor.

“So I walked over to Uncle Boyd’s,” he said.

Boyd Kettering is my father’s younger brother. He runs cows on the place across the county road, the place where my father grew up, and he has calved there every spring of my life.

He is 63. He knows more about a cow in trouble than most vets I have met.

“And he said he’d come,” Kyler went on. “When we need him. Fifty dollars a pull.”

“To you.”

“To us. To Dad, I guess. He said he’d keep a list and Dad could settle up after.”

“He said that to your face.”

“He said it’s only business, and business is business, even in a family.” There was a little quiet on the line. A truck pulled in beside me with its engine knocking.