The Herd Dad Built Came Home

My mother died when I was twenty-two. Cancer, the slow kind. Dad kept the cattle going, partly because the cattle needed him and partly because they gave him something to do with his hands.

He married Sharla nine years ago. She was a cook at the elementary school, a widow herself, sharp and quick and a little tight with a dollar. I didn’t love her and I didn’t hate her. She kept the house clean and the pot roast hot and Dad wasn’t alone. I took that as enough.

The memory trouble started three years back. First it was words. Then it was where he’d parked the truck. Then it was whether he’d fed that morning. Sharla handled it as long as she could, and I’ll say that for her, because it’s true. She did handle it, for a good while.

But by this fall he was wandering the pasture at night in his work boots and nothing else warm. Twice the neighbor, Norbert Gaylord, found him at the county road with the cows following along behind him like he was leading them to water.

So on the twenty-sixth of October, a Monday, Sharla moved him into a place called Willow Bend Memory Care in Ardmore. I was in Louisiana. She called me that night while I was eating a sandwich on a tailgate beside a downed transformer.

“It’s done,” she said. “He’s settled. It’s a nice place.”

“Sharla, you said we’d do it together. You said when I got back.”

“You weren’t getting back,” she said. “I couldn’t wait, Clint. I just couldn’t.”

I let it go. I was angry, and I let it go, because I was five hundred miles away and she had been carrying him for three years and I hadn’t. I told her thank you. I said I’d come see him the day I got home.

She never mentioned the cows.

I got in late Sunday night, the first of November, close to eleven. The truck smelled like a month of road. Kristi was waiting up in the kitchen in her robe, and our daughter Peyton, who is twelve, had fallen asleep on the couch with her boots still on, trying to stay awake for me.

I carried her to bed. I held my wife a long time. I did not think about cattle.

Tuesday morning I got up at five, same as always, and drove the twenty-two miles out to Dad’s to feed. I had a sack of range cubes in the truck bed and a thermos of coffee and I was almost happy.

The gate was shut. The hay ring by the pond was full of hay, nobody eating it. The pasture lay out flat and empty in the gray light, and across the whole hundred and sixty acres there was not one black cow.

I stood there a full minute. I want to say I had some thought. I didn’t. My body just stopped.

“Clint.”

Norbert Gaylord was coming across the fence line in his coveralls, a coffee cup in one hand. He’s eighty, Norbert, with a bad hip and a worse temper, and Dad’s best friend for fifty years.

“Where are they, Norbert?”

He looked at his boots. “Hauler came yesterday at four. Lyman Harlow, with the big pot trailer. Took the whole bunch. I walked over and asked, and Sharla said you knew about it. Said you’d agreed.”