The Herd Dad Built Came Home

What I did was walk down the center aisle of the Lindell Livestock Auction with three hundred people watching, and I heard it begin behind me: the scrape of one chair, then another, then the whole barn, a long low rustle, as men took off their hats.

I didn’t understand it at first. Then I did. They weren’t taking them off for me.

I walked to the rail and put my hand on the top board and looked at number nine. She was standing in the sawdust with her head up, and she’d found me. Cows know.

Eight years she’d been in Dad’s pasture, and I’d fed her every day I wasn’t working, and she knew my truck and my voice. She walked right across the ring and put her nose against my hand.

Behind me, Emmett’s voice came soft. “Take her home, son.”

“Emmett, I owe the barn. For the yardage. For the hauling.”

“You owe the barn nothing.”

“I’m going to pay the yardage,” I said. “I won’t take your charity and I won’t leave a bill on Dad’s name. Thirty-eight head. Eight dollars each.”

He looked at me a while. Then he nodded once, the way his old friend would have.

“Three hundred and four dollars,” he said. “Carlene’ll write you a receipt.”

So that’s what I did. Right there, in front of the whole sale, I took out my wallet and counted out three hundred and four dollars to the barn that had almost sold my father’s herd.

I handed it to Carlene at the end of the rail, and she cried a little while she wrote the receipt, and nobody in that barn laughed or clapped or said a thing. It was very quiet. I think it was the quietest I’ve ever heard a place full of men.

That was the whole of my act. I didn’t shout and I didn’t make a scene. I paid the fee, I took the receipt, and I took my father’s cattle home.

I’ll tell you about Sharla now, because I owe her that.

She was waiting in the lot beside the livestock scales when I came out to back the trailer. Lyman Harlow had already agreed to haul the cows home at no charge, and he was out there with his big pot trailer, a good man looking at his boots.

Sharla stood by her Oldsmobile with her purse strap wound around her hand. She’d taken off her good coat. Her face was gray.

“Clint.”

“Sharla.”

“I suppose you want to say something.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t believe I do.”

That surprised her. She’d braced for something, and I hadn’t brought it.

“I want you to know,” she said, and her voice shook, “I did not do this to hurt Eldon. I did it to save us. Do you know what that place costs? Sixty-four hundred dollars a month. Sixty-four hundred. I called four of them. They all said the same. And Eldon’s check is nineteen hundred.”

“I know what it costs.”

“You don’t know. You’re up a pole. I’m the one at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the checkbook.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ve been sitting by that man for three years, and he asks me every night who I am. Every night.”