The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

“I’ll mark it no pickup,” Rolf said. “Wash it up and I’ll be back Wednesday.” He paused at the door. “You want me to say anything to anybody?”

“No,” Nate said. “Thank you, Rolf.”

He drove off down the gravel. Nate went and sat on the overturned pail by the milk house door. I stood beside him. Across the yard, the curtain in Arnold’s kitchen moved once and fell still.

I know what you are thinking. I thought it too. Call the sheriff. Walk across that yard and say the plain sentence. Make him pay for it.

But I was standing in a dairy barn at eight in the morning, and a sheriff cannot milk 64 cows by evening.

Those cows would need milking at four whether anybody was in jail or not. That is the first thing.

The second thing was my husband, sitting on a pail with his elbows on his knees.

Nate would not see his father in handcuffs. Not for two thousand dollars, not for twenty. I knew that without asking him.

And the third thing was simpler than either. That valve was in his father’s milk house, and his father had a key.

If we stayed, we would be standing guard over our own milk every other day until October.

“We can’t stay here,” I said.

Nate looked up at me.

“Not till October,” I said. “Not one more milking.”

“Marissa, where are we going to put sixty-four cows by four o’clock?”

I was already thinking about it. I had been thinking about it since I closed the valve.

There was exactly one empty dairy barn within walking distance of where we sat, and it was a mile down the gravel road.

“Elmer,” I said.

Elmer Kuehn was seventy-one years old. He and his wife had milked seventy cows in a red tie-stall barn at the end of our road for close to forty years.

When she got sick, he sold the herd so he could sit with her.

She had been gone six years now. Elmer still lived in the farmhouse alone, still mowed the ditches along his road frontage, still sat in the third pew on the left every Sunday morning. The barn had stood empty the whole time.

Nate’s face changed a little. Not much. “He won’t want the bother.”

“I’m going to ask him,” I said.

I called from the kitchen phone with the eggs gone cold in the pan. It rang five times. Elmer was not a man who ran to a telephone.

“Kuehn,” he said.

“Elmer, it’s Marissa Vogel.” I did not know how to start, so I just said it. “Arnold drained our bulk tank this morning. Two days of milk. We can’t stay in his barn. I need to know if we can rent yours. Starting today.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear his kitchen radio playing low and a screen door creaking somewhere behind him.

“How many head?” he said.

“Sixty-four milking. The heifers are pastured over at my uncle’s.”

“I’ve got sixty-eight stalls,” he said. “Water cups all work. I checked them in March.” Another pause. “I run the vacuum pump the first of every month. Just in case.”

I had to sit down on the kitchen chair. “Just in case of what, Elmer?”