Twenty Three Marks on the Barn Wall

The calf coughed. Then he coughed again. Then he lifted his head.

Kyler made the mark on the wall without saying a word. His hand was shaking so bad the line came out crooked. It is still crooked. You can go look.

Most afternoons, about two o’clock, an old blue pickup came up the lane and parked by the gate.

That was Virgil Haas.

Virgil is 80. He practiced as a large animal vet out of Valentine for more than forty years, and he had his hands inside half the cows in Cherry County at one time or another, including the ones my father raised.

He did not come to work. He came to watch. He would get out slow and lean on the gate with his arms folded on the top rail and his hat pushed back.

He hardly said anything. If we were doing something right, he said, “Good.” If we were about to do something too soon, he said, “Wait.”

Once, when a heifer had been working a long time and Kyler was itching to go in, Virgil said, “Wait,” and we waited, and twenty minutes later she had her calf on her own without anybody touching her.

Kyler looked over at him like he had done a magic trick.

She had calved out in the lot, not in the barn, on the clean straw we had spread along the south side of the windbreak. It was a sunny March afternoon, and the snow was down to patches in the grass.

I went out and knelt in the straw beside that wet black calf in my tan work coat, with my black hair in a ponytail under my old tan cap, just to check his navel and make sure he was breathing easy.

Kyler, his sandy hair sticking up, came and knelt across from me in his green hoodie and rubber boots and rubbed him down with an old towel. The calf shook his ears at us. His mama, a red heifer, stood a few steps off and watched us like she was deciding whether to allow it.

Behind the fence sat the little silver camper, and behind that my maroon semi tractor, shining in the sun. I remember thinking that was the strangest yard I had ever lived in, and the best.

“She just needed to think about it,” Virgil said. “They’re like the rest of us.”

Another day he watched Kyler set the chains on a big heifer calf and nodded to himself.

“Who taught you that double loop?”

“My dad.”

“Who taught him?” Kyler looked at me. I pointed at Virgil.

“You taught my dad?”

“I taught your grandpa,” Virgil said. “Your grandpa taught your dad. It’s all the same loop. It just keeps going around.”

That first Saturday, the ranch to the south sent their boy over.

His name was Orvil. He was sixteen and quiet and he had big red hands, and his dad had told him to stay as long as we needed him.

“Dad said Lane pulled our heifer out of the creek that time,” Orvil said. “He said we owed him.”

“Nobody owes anybody,” I said.

“Dad said you’d say that. He said to stay anyway.”