The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

Nate walked out to the gate. I came behind him and stopped a few steps back. That conversation was not mine. But I was not going to leave my husband alone in it either.

Arnold took an envelope out of his inside coat pocket and held it out over the gate. Nate did not take it right away.

“It’s the milk,” Arnold said. “I called the co-op and asked what it came to. Two thousand sixty-one dollars. I rounded it up.”

Nate took the envelope then. He did not open it.

“Dad,” he said.

“I know.” Arnold’s voice was very low. “I know what I did. I’ve known since I heard the valve open. I stood there and let it run anyway.”

He looked past us into the barn, at the cows standing in Elmer’s stalls, at number nine with her white face, at the radio on the shelf.

“Monday at four I went out on the porch,” he said. “Like always. I waited for the lights.” He stopped. “There wasn’t anything. That barn’s never once been quiet at milking time. Not since 1972. Not even the day your mother died.”

Nobody said anything for a while. A barn swallow went in and out over our heads.

“Then the wind came around,” Arnold said, “and I heard Elmer’s pump. And I heard her radio.” He looked at Elmer, who had come to the barn door and was standing there, listening. “I stood out there till the music quit. I’m sorry, Elmer. For bringing it to your place like this.”

“It’s a good place for it,” Elmer said.

Arnold turned back to his son. He had his hand on that gate the whole time. I do not think he would have let go of it for anything.

“I won’t ask you to come back,” he said. “I wouldn’t, if I was you. I’ll sell the stanchions or I won’t, it don’t matter.” His jaw worked. “But I’d like to help with the morning milking. If you’ll let me. Just the mornings. I won’t be any trouble.”

I looked at my husband. I did not know what he would say. I am not sure he knew.

Nate looked at the envelope in his hand. Then he looked at his father’s hand on the gate, the same big square hand as his own, with the same white scar across the back from a silo unloader in 1997.

“Five o’clock,” Nate said. “Elmer likes to start on time.”

Arnold nodded once. He did not cry, and he did not say thank you. He took his hand off the gate, turned around, and walked the mile back up the gravel road toward his own empty barn.

I did not gloat. I want to say that plainly. There was nothing to gloat about.

I stood at that gate and watched a sixty-three year old man walk home alone, and all I could think was that he would be back at five in the morning, and that Alma would want to be up for it.

She was. Every morning that summer, all through school vacation, she was up at a quarter to five and down to Elmer’s barn with her grandpa.

He showed her how to strip a cow by hand. He showed her how to tell a sick cow from across the barn by the way she held her ears.