The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

Tuesday morning there was the usual crowd at the co-op counter, the men who come in for mineral and stay for the coffee. Arnold was one of them. He had been one of them for forty years.

Rolf came in to drop off his paperwork. He saw Arnold at the counter and stopped. The whole room got quiet the way a room does when everybody already knows.

Rolf did not raise his voice. He never did. He just said, “Arnold, I hauled your milk twenty-six years. Yesterday your kids moved sixty-four head a mile down the road and were milking by four. I have never seen a family move a herd that fast. I hope you’re proud of them.”

Then he put his papers on the counter and walked out. Nobody said anything. After a while Arnold paid for his mineral and left too.

The feed mill woman said nobody looked at him. That was worse, she said, than if they had.

I want to be fair to my father-in-law, because he is my husband’s father, and because I have to live with what I say about him.

He was not a cruel man. He was a proud one, and a lonely one, and he had milked in that barn since he was nine years old.

His father built it. His wife carried coffee out to it every morning for thirty-eight years.

When his son told him he was leaving it, he could not stand it. That is the truth. He could not stand watching that barn go quiet.

So he did a terrible thing, the worst thing a dairyman can do to another one, and he did it to his own boy and his own grandchild.

That is his reason. It is not an excuse. Two thousand dollars of our daughter’s groceries went down a drain because a grown man could not stand to be left. I will not pretend it was anything else.

And he paid for it. Not in court. In his own barn, and his own porch, and his own church.

That Sunday he sat in the front pew, where he had always sat. The pew behind him stayed empty all through the service.

Nobody planned it. People just did not sit there. After the benediction, the pastor shook his hand at the door and did not say a word.

Elmer sat in the third pew on the left, same as always. Nate and Alma and I sat beside him. When we stood for the last hymn, Elmer sang every verse without the book.

That afternoon, about three o’clock, Nate and I were in Elmer’s barn getting ready for evening chores.

Alma was in the haymow with a litter of kittens she had found. The radio was on. It was warm and bright, the barn doors propped open to the lane.

Nate saw him first. He set down the bucket he was carrying and went still.

Arnold was walking down the gravel road. Not driving. Walking. The same mile we had walked the cows, in his church clothes and his good shoes, with his hands at his sides.

It took him almost twenty minutes. Nobody went to meet him.

He came up Elmer’s lane and stopped at the gate by the barnyard. He put his hand on the top board and stood there.

He did not come in. He looked at the barn for a long time before he looked at us.