The Herd Dad Built Came Home

We got the herd home that afternoon. Thirty-eight cows, including four who’d been through the ring and looked it, nervous and sore-footed. Lyman backed the trailer up to the loading chute and swung the gate wide, and they came out one at a time into their own grass and just stood there, heads high, smelling it.

Then number nine walked to the hay ring by the pond, the one nobody had touched, and put her head down and started to eat. The others followed. The whole herd drifted across that red hill like a black cloud settling.

Norbert Gaylord was standing at the fence with his hat in his hand. He didn’t say a word either. He just clapped me on the back, once, hard enough to move me.

Kristi came out that evening with Peyton. They’d driven out from town after school, and Peyton jumped out of the truck before it stopped and ran along the fence, counting out loud.

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight,” she called. She’s twelve. She’d fed those cows with me since she could carry a bucket. “Thirty-eight! Dad, they’re all here! Number nine’s here!”

“I know, baby.”

“Does Grandpa know?”

“Not yet,” I said. “We’ll go tell him tomorrow.”

Kristi slipped her arm through mine. She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “You didn’t yell at her.”

“No.”

“I’d have yelled at her.”

“I know you would’ve.”

“I’m proud of you anyway,” she said, and leaned her head against my shoulder, and we stood there and watched thirty-eight black cows eat hay in the last warm light of the afternoon.

That night I sat at my own kitchen table with a legal pad and did the math I should have done a long time ago.

Dad’s Social Security was nineteen hundred a month. The memory care ran sixty-four hundred. That left forty-five hundred a month, fifty-four thousand a year, and nobody in his family had ever once sat down and written the number out.

Sharla had written it out, apparently. She’d written it out alone, at three in the morning, and she’d been so scared of it that she tried to sell my father’s life to be rid of the fear.

I’m not saying she was right. I’m saying I understood the number, and the number was my job.

The herd was worth ninety-six thousand dollars. But it was also the calf crop. Thirty-eight cows, every one bred for March, would give us thirty-some calves next fall, and registered Angus calves bring a good price. Heifers more. We could sell the oldest, the cows past their best years, one or two at a time.

We could cut back to thirty, then to twenty-five. We could keep the herd and pay for Dad too, if we planned it right.

I made two columns. By midnight I had a plan, and by morning I’d called Emmett Tolbert.

“Emmett, I’d like to set up an account,” I said. “At the barn. Next fall’s calves all go through Lindell, same as always. But I want the check split. Sixty percent goes straight to Willow Bend, every year, until Dad doesn’t need it. I’ll make up the monthly difference out of my own paycheck till then.”

There was a long pause on the line.

“Eldon would be mighty proud of you,” Emmett said. “You know that.”