The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

The cows were ours. Every one. We had bought them a few at a time, starting with fourteen head from a sale barn in Loyal the spring after we married, and built up from there.

We had the bank note on them to prove it.

We lived in a rented house on the county highway halfway between Arnold’s place and Elmer Kuehn’s.

Nate had wanted his own ground since he was nineteen. That winter, the farm credit office had finally told us yes.

There was a place near Greenwood, a hundred and twenty acres with a barn that needed a new roof.

We had an accepted offer and a closing date in October. We drove over to Arnold’s Sunday evening after supper to tell him, the way you are supposed to.

He sat at his kitchen table in his chore coat and listened. Nate’s mother had been gone two winters. Her rooster clock still hung over the sink. It ticked through the whole conversation.

“October,” Arnold said when Nate was done.

“We’ll pay the rent through October, Dad. Every month. And we’ll leave the barn cleaner than we found it.”

Arnold turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the oilcloth. “The lease runs through next June.”

“We never had a lease,” Nate said. “We had a handshake.”

“Then the handshake runs through June. I turned down another renter for you two.” He had not. I knew he had not. But he said it. “Eight more months at fourteen hundred. Eleven thousand two hundred dollars. You can pay it before you go.”

Nate was quiet for a while. My husband is a quiet man, and he takes his time, and I have learned to let him.

“No, Dad,” he said finally. “I won’t pay rent on a barn I’m not in.”

Arnold stood up and put his cup in the sink. He did not turn around. “Then you’ll pay it one way or another,” he said to the window.

We drove home without talking. I lay awake a while that night. I thought he was blowing off steam.

I thought a man of sixty-three who had sat in the front pew every Sunday of his life did not mean things like that.

At seven the next morning I walked Alma down to the end of the drive for the bus.

At seven ten I was back in the kitchen making Nate’s eggs. At seven forty I walked out to the milk house to get the hose ready for Rolf.

So that is how it happened. Somewhere in that half hour, while I was frying eggs, my husband’s father let himself into our milk house, opened the valve, and walked back home.

Rolf’s truck came up the drive at eight on the dot. You could set a clock by him.

He backed up to the milk house wall, swung down from the cab with his sample case, and stopped in the doorway the same way Nate had.

He looked at the floor. He looked at the tank. He walked over and read the temperature chart on the recorder, because that is his job, and then he looked at Nate.

“I’ve hauled milk twenty-six years,” he said quietly. “I have never seen that.”

Nate did not say anything. Rolf did not ask. He was a careful man. He had been hauling Arnold’s milk off that farm since before Nate got his driver’s license.