The Heifers an Old Man Fed for Free

What I said to him

I want to tell this part honestly, because I have thought about it a good deal since.

I was angry. I had been angry since the church steps on Sunday, and I had driven better than fifteen hundred miles angry.

I had had three days of wind and snow and no sleep to think up things to say to my cousin, and some of them were not very Christian.

But standing there in the cold by that old man’s hay stack, looking at Rusty with his hands in his pockets and his face gone gray, I found that I did not want to say any of them.

“You could have told me,” I said. “If you had called me Saturday night and said, Leif, I’m two months behind and I need that other load, I would have said go. I’d have waited a week. I’d have found somebody else. I’d have helped you with the payment, if I could.”

He did not say anything to that. His jaw worked.

“You didn’t do that,” I said. “You took our check, and you took our heifers, and you dropped them in a strange pen with no hay and drove off. Fifty-eight of them, carrying calves. And a man who is seventy-one years old fed them out of his own stack for three days so they wouldn’t go without.”

“I know it,” Rusty said. His voice was rough. “I’ll pay you back the $3,600. By spring, Leif. I swear it.”

“It isn’t me you owe,” I said.

Then I turned and walked back to the trailer, because there were fourteen heifers to load and the morning was not getting any longer.

I did not look back at him for a while. When I did, he was still standing by the stack.

Then, after a minute, he walked over to the alley, picked up the spare sorting stick that was leaning on the fence, and went in behind the last of the heifers.

Nobody told him to. Merle did not say anything to him, and he did not say anything to Merle.

The two of them just worked those last heifers up the alley together, slow and quiet, the way it ought to be done.

Sigrid counted them on. “Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.” I swung the gate shut and pinned it.

When I turned around, Rusty had gone back to the stack, and he stood there by it with the sorting stick still in his hand while we pulled out.

The last count

It was a good drive, that last one. The wind was gone, and the sky was clear out to the edge of the world, and the snow in the bar ditches was starting to go soft and gray at the edges where the sun hit it.

I drove sixty most of the way and the trailer rode easy.

Sigrid did not talk much. She had the tally book open on her knee, and every so often she would look at the numbers in it and then look out the window.

Somewhere around Broadus she reached over and put her hand on my arm and left it there.

We turned up the river road a little before noon. The sun was already low in the southern sky, the way it is in November up there, and it laid long shadows out across the grass from every fence post and every sagebrush and every cottonwood along the river.

I backed the trailer up to the corral one last time. The pale winter grass ran away from that corral as far as I could see, rolling up toward the hills, and over it all there was nothing but that wide pale sky.

Sigrid climbed out in her red barn coat, her gray-blond braid down her back, with her tally book and her pencil, and stood just behind me at the back of the trailer.

I had on my tan felt hat and my brown canvas coat, the same ones I had worn all week, and I took hold of the gate and swung it wide, and the heifers started down, one at a time, past me and onto the grass.