The Herd Dad Built Came Home

The auctioneer was already at eighteen hundred dollars on my father’s number nine cow when I came through the side door with the folder in my hand, and my stepmother was sitting in the second row with her purse on her knees, watching her husband’s life’s work go across the ring one animal at a time.

Number nine is a stout black cow with a white scar on her left hip where she once went through a wire gate. She wears a yellow ear tag. My father put that tag in himself, six springs ago, with me holding her head in the squeeze chute and Dad cussing the tag gun like it owed him money.

Now she stood in the middle of a sawdust ring at the Lindell Livestock Auction with a ringman clapping his hands behind her, and she looked confused, the way a cow does when the world changes shape around her.

“Eighteen, now nineteen, will ya give me nineteen,” the auctioneer sang. “Nineteen hundred dollars on a registered bred Angus cow, she’s safe in calf for March.”

A man in a feed cap lifted two fingers. Nineteen hundred.

I didn’t move. I stood in that doorway with three hundred people between me and my father’s cattle and I looked at the back of Sharla’s head. Her hair was freshly set. She had gone to the beauty shop for this.

That detail is the one I still can’t put down. Not the money. The hair.

I should back up and tell you how I got to that door.

My name is Clint Brandt. I’m forty-one years old, and I’m a journeyman lineman for a rural electric co-op in southeastern Oklahoma. When the lights go out in a storm, I’m the fellow forty feet up a pole in the wind with a hot stick and a headlamp. When a hurricane tears up another state’s lines, the co-ops send crews, and I go.

I went on the twenty-eighth of September. Louisiana. They told us ten days. It was thirty-four.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. If it had been ten, none of this happens. But the lines were down across half the parish, and people sat in the heat with no power and no ice, and you don’t pack up and leave a job like that because your own business is waiting at home.

Dad was fine when I left. That’s what I told myself. He wasn’t fine, and I knew it, but he was manageable. That’s the word Sharla used.

My father is Eldon Brandt. He’s seventy-six. He ran cattle on a hundred and sixty acres of red dirt and bermuda grass outside Lindell for fifty years, and for the last twenty-five of them he built a registered Angus herd that people in three counties knew by sight. Not big. Thirty-eight cows.

But every one of them had a registration number and a pedigree and a name in Dad’s careful handwriting in the barn ledger.

I helped him build it. I was sixteen when he bought the first six bred heifers, out of a dispersal sale in Ardmore, using money he’d saved for a new truck and never spent. I fed those heifers before school.

I pulled my first calf out of a heifer at two in the morning with my arm in her to the shoulder and my father reading the instructions off a vet pamphlet by flashlight.