The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

Ferris Lindahl counted the cows through his gate one at a time, out loud, with my husband’s check already folded in his shirt pocket.

He did not look at either of us while he counted. He looked at the cows.

“Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty,” he said, and swung the gate shut behind the last old black baldy. “Sixty head. Forty dollars a head. That’s the month of August, and we’re square.”

“We’re square,” Gage said. He was standing beside me in the dust with his hands in his back pockets, the way he stands when he has decided not to say something.

It was the first day of August, and it had not rained on our place in fifty-one days.

I know because I wrote it on the calendar by the phone every morning, the way my mother did, a little number in the corner of each square.

Our stock dam had gone from a pond to a puddle to a cracked brown plate in about three weeks.

The cows stood around the edge of it bawling in the mornings. You do not forget that sound once you have heard it.

Ferris has the only spring-fed pond on this end of the township.

His father found the spring back in the sixties, and Ferris paid to have it dug out deep and wide about twelve years ago. It has never gone dry. Not once.

So when Gage drove over there in July and asked, man to man, cousin to cousin, whether our cows could drink there until the weather broke, Ferris thought about it for one whole day. Then he called back with a price.

Forty dollars a head for the month, paid up front. Sixty head. Twenty-four hundred dollars.

I want to be fair to him, because I have had a long time to think about it.

Hauling water would have cost us more than that in diesel and in Gage’s sleep. People in other counties were paying thirty, forty, fifty a head that summer.

But other people were not family. Other people had not stood up at our wedding. Ferris had.

My name is Tamsin Huebner. I was thirty-nine that summer. Gage and I run sixty cows on a quarter section and some rented grass in Lincoln County, down in the southeast corner of South Dakota, not far from where the Big Sioux bends.

Gage runs a road grader for the county. Has for nineteen years.

He knows every gravel road in the north half of the county by its washboards, and every farmer on those roads knows his orange cap.

The cows are mostly mine to look after during the day. I check water, I check fence, I keep the calving book in the spring.

That summer, checking water meant standing beside a dry dam and doing arithmetic in my head that never came out right.

We did not have twenty-four hundred dollars sitting around. Nobody we know does.

We had it in the account for the fall property taxes, and we used it, and we told ourselves the calves would make it back in October.

But the next Sunday, out in the church parking lot after the late service, I heard Ferris talking to three or four men by the tailgate of his truck.

He had his back to me. He did not know I was behind the van.

“Anybody with sense sold down in June,” he was saying. “I’m not running a charity. If a man can’t water his cows, he’s got too many cows. Simple as that.”