Twenty Three Marks on the Barn Wall

He poked a piece of straw in the calf’s nostril. The calf sneezed and shook his head and took a breath like an old man coming up from a nap.

Kyler sat back on his heels in the straw and laughed out loud.

He got an old towel off the fence and rubbed that calf hard all over, the way you do to get the blood moving. The heifer turned her head and made the low sound a new mother makes.

We let her out of the headcatch into a clean pen and watched until she was licking him. Then Kyler went over to the barn wall by the door.

There was a piece of white chalk sitting on the ledge where Lane kept his pocketknife and his notebook. Kyler picked it up and made one mark on the boards.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

He shrugged. “That’s one we didn’t pay for.”

I did not say anything. I did not trust myself to. The next morning I walked across the county road to Boyd’s.

I did not go to argue. I went because I was raised to tell people to their face what I meant to do.

He was in his shop, working on a gate hinge. He looked older than I remembered. His right shoulder sat a little lower than his left, the one he hurt pitching bales when I was in grade school.

“Shawna,” he said. “Heard you were here.”

“I’m here for the two weeks. We won’t need you.”

He set down his wrench. “Lane’s boy came over and asked.”

“I know he did.”

“I told him I’d come.”

“For fifty dollars a calf.”

He looked at me then. “That’s what a man pays a neighbor to come pull calves. That’s a fair price.”

“It is,” I said. “From a neighbor.” He did not have anything to say to that. I did not wait for him to find something.

“If you ever need us,” I said, “we’re right across the road. And we won’t charge you.”

I walked home. I did not slam anything. I did not look back. My mother used to say that the quietest thing in a room usually wins, and I believed her more the older I got.

By the end of that first week there were nine marks on the barn wall.

Nine pulls. Some were easy, just a big calf and a heifer who needed a little help. Some were not.

One was backwards. I knew it the second I saw the feet, because the soles were pointing up instead of down. Back feet.

“This one has to come fast,” I told Kyler. “Once the cord pinches, he’s breathing in there, and he can’t breathe in there.”

We put both of us on the chains, and when that was not enough, we put the calf puller on her. Kyler set the breech bar against the heifer’s hindquarters and cranked when I told him to crank and stopped when I told him to stop.

That calf came out limp. Kyler held him up by the back legs over the gate for a few seconds to drain his lungs, the way his dad showed him, and then laid him down and rubbed him so hard I thought he would take the hair off.