Twenty Three Marks on the Barn Wall

“Is that wrong?” Kyler asked. “I didn’t know if that was wrong.”

That is the part that stayed with me. Not the money. The boy standing in his uncle’s yard, with his father in a hospital bed, wondering if he was the one who had asked for too much.

I knew why Boyd said it. Two years before, the river pasture lease next to both places came up, and Lane bid on it, and Lane’s bid was higher. Boyd had run his cows on that ground for twenty years.

He never said a word about it at Christmas. He just stopped coming to Christmas.

That is a reason. I understand a man being sore. But a reason is not the same as an excuse, and there is no reason good enough for charging a scared boy by the calf.

“It isn’t your fault,” I told Kyler. “Not one bit of it. Can you hold on till tomorrow noon?”

“What happens tomorrow noon?”

“I get there.”

I thought about calling Boyd. I had his number in my phone. I could have called him and told him what I thought, and it would have felt good for about four minutes.

But I grew up calving. A heifer in trouble does not have time for an argument, and neither did I. Every hour I spent on the phone with Boyd was an hour I was not driving north.

I am an owner operator. I lease on with a carrier out of North Platte, and the truck is mine, payments and all. That meant I could stop when I needed to. It also meant I would not get paid while I did.

I called my dispatcher. She is a farm girl from Burwell, with a boy of her own. “How long?” she asked.

“Two weeks. Maybe more.”

“Go,” she said. “I’ll find somebody for your loads. Go pull calves.”

I delivered the beef in North Platte that afternoon, dropped the empty trailer at the yard, and drove my tractor north on Highway 83 with nothing behind me but the wind.

I got to the place a little before noon on Monday. The sun was out. The Sandhills were that tired winter tan, with old snow lying in the low spots and on the north side of every hill.

Kyler was standing at the calving lot gate in his green hoodie and his rubber boots. He looked like he had not slept, because he had not.

I got down out of the cab and he walked straight into me and held on. He is taller than me now. He put his face down on top of my cap and did not say anything for a while.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Show me what we’ve got.”

What we had was a good set up, because Lane is a careful man. A pole barn with six pens and a headcatch at the end of the alley. A heat lamp. A calf puller hanging on the wall, and two sets of chains in a bucket of disinfectant.

The heifers were in a lot of maybe ten acres right off the barn, so you could see every one from the gate. Red Angus heifers, ninety of them, bred to a black bull.