The Heifers an Old Man Fed for Free

Sigrid counted them off out loud, the way she had all week, carrying on from where she had left off.

“Forty-five,” she said. “Forty-six. Forty-seven. Forty-eight.”

One of the heifers bawled as she stepped down, and the ones already out on the grass lifted their heads and answered her.

That is a sound I have heard all my life. It still gets me.

“Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Fifty-four.”

Her voice was getting thick. I did not turn around. I just held the gate and watched the heifers come down.

“Fifty-six,” she said. “Fifty-seven.” The last heifer stood in the trailer a minute, looking out at the grass. Then she came down, slow and careful, the sun warm on her black back.

“Fifty-eight,” Sigrid said, and her voice broke right in the middle of it.

I let go of the gate and turned around. She had the tally book pressed against her chest with both hands, and there were tears on her face, and she was smiling.

“All of them,” she said. “Every one of them, Leif. And every one of theirs.”

I knew what she meant. Fifty-eight heifers, and fifty-eight calves inside them, due in March.

One hundred sixteen lives in that book, if you counted it the way Sigrid counted it. And she always did.

I put my arms around her, there at the back of the trailer, with the low sun on our backs and the heifers spreading out across the grass.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. I don’t think we needed to.

The envelope

We were too worn out to drive, so we slept at the lease that night, in the pickup, and in the morning we started home.

The road home runs back through Gillette, and we got there a little after eight, with the sun up and the air cold and still.

I stopped at the bank first. When it opened at nine I went in and took out $3,600 in hundred dollar bills, and the teller counted them out twice and put them in a bank envelope for me.

Sigrid watched me do it and did not ask why. She knew. She had known since the first night, I think, when Merle told me to put my wallet away.

We drove out to the sale barn. The yard was quiet. A couple of trucks were parked by the office, and somebody was unloading a gooseneck of calves at the front chute. Bev waved to us through the office window.

Merle’s pickup was parked by his stack, the way it always was, with the driver’s door unlocked, the way it always was.

Nobody locks a pickup at a sale barn in Gillette. Merle was out at the far end of the yard with his horses, and he did not see us pull in.

I looked at the stack. Rusty’s truck was gone. But somebody had been there before us that morning, because there was a fresh round bale sitting on the end of the stack, a good one, still with the net wrap on it, pushed in tight where Merle’s bales had come out.

I stood there a while and looked at it. Then I took a pencil out of my coat and wrote “for the hay” on the front of the envelope.

I left $3,600 in an envelope on Merle’s truck seat, exactly what I had paid Rusty.