Twenty Three Marks on the Barn Wall

Boyd came to supper Sunday.

It was the first time he had sat at that table in two years. He did not say much. He asked Kyler about the backwards calf, and Kyler told him the whole thing, start to finish, and Boyd listened like it was the evening news.

When we said grace, Boyd bowed his head with the rest of us.

On Monday morning, Boyd’s white pickup came across the road at seven, in good daylight, and Boyd got out with a pair of coveralls and a bucket.

“I can’t go in like I used to,” he said to me at the gate. “But I can hold a tail. And I can watch so you two can sleep.”

I let him.

He came every morning for the rest of that calving season. He never mentioned money again. Neither did we.

I went back on the road the following Wednesday. My dispatcher had a load of seed corn going to Sioux Falls, and the truck payment does not care about calves.

Before I left, I went into the barn one more time and looked at that wall.

There were 26 marks on it by then. Twenty-three were ours, Kyler’s and mine. The twenty-fourth was Boyd’s black baldy. The last two Kyler had pulled with Boyd holding the tail and Virgil leaning on the gate saying “Good.”

Kyler came in behind me. He had his green hoodie on and his boots were caked to the ankle.

“You’re leaving,” he said.

“I’m leaving. You’re fine. You were fine on day one.”

“I wasn’t fine on day one.”

“You were fine,” I said. “You just didn’t know it yet.”

He hugged me again, the way he had in the lot that first noon. Then he went back out to check the heifers, because that is what you do.

Lane sold the black bull that June to a man in Thedford with mature cows. Virgil was right. The bull did fine on cows. Lane used an easier calving bull on his heifers the next year, and Kyler only pulled four.

Lane is walking now. He limps a little in the cold. He says it tells him when weather is coming, which is more than the radio does.

Boyd and Lane went together on the river lease when it came up again. They run their cows on it side by side, with a gate between, and Boyd leaves the gate open more than he closes it.

Nobody ever painted over the marks on that barn wall. Lane says nobody ever will.

I still drive. I still eat my supper at fuel islands and sleep in a bunk the width of an ironing board. But every March, I take two weeks off, and I park my semi behind that little silver camper, and I go home and calve.

The feed tag is on Lane’s kitchen wall now. Boyd brought it over that Christmas in a plain wooden frame and hung it himself, right by the back door, where everybody who comes in from the lot can see it.

Kyler sent Boyd a bill for zero dollars, written on the back of a feed tag.