The Heifers an Old Man Fed for Free

Rusty comes to the yard

Wednesday morning broke clear and cold and still. The wind had blown itself out sometime in the night, and the sky over Gillette was that pale washed blue you get after a big wind, with not a cloud in it.

We were at the yard by seven. Merle had already fed. The last fourteen heifers were bunched in the near end of the back pen, eating, and my eyes went over them out of habit to make sure they were all right. They were all right.

We were getting the trailer backed up to the chute when I heard a big diesel gearing down out on the road.

I looked up and saw a red semi pulling a cattle pot swing into the yard and roll slow across the gravel toward us.

I knew that truck. I had stood by it at four in the morning on Sunday and watched it go up our county road with 58 heifers in the back.

Rusty parked it by the scale house and shut it off and sat there a while. Then he climbed down and walked across the yard toward us.

He was not walking fast. He had his hands in his coat pockets and his head down, and he looked like he had not slept in a while.

He did not come to me. He walked to Merle’s stack, behind the barn, and stood by it with his hands still in his pockets.

He looked at the long gap in the end of the stack where seven bales had been pulled out since Sunday.

Merle was in the alley with his sorting stick. He saw Rusty, and he did not stop what he was doing.

He just kept easing the heifers up toward the chute, a few at a time, talking to them under his breath.

I walked over to the stack. Sigrid stayed at the trailer gate with her tally book.

I stopped a few feet from my cousin and waited, and after a while he looked up at me.

“I lost three loads,” he said. “Since Sunday. Two ranchers north of town called me off, and the barn here gave a consignment to Thane that was supposed to be mine. Nobody said why. They didn’t have to.”

I did not say anything.

“My truck payment’s two months behind, Leif,” he said. “The bank sent me a letter last week. They’re going to take the truck. That load out of Belle Fourche paid five thousand, and I needed it. I thought you’d be all right. I thought somebody at the yard would take care of them till you got here.”

“Somebody did,” I said, and I looked at the stack.

Rusty looked at it too. He was quiet a long time. Then he said, “I’ll pay for the hay.”

“It isn’t for sale,” Merle said from the alley. He did not raise his voice. He did not even look over. “I already told your cousin that.”