The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

She is down to a small herd now. Her calves are most of her money for the year.

She ships them every fall, the first or second week of November, and she sells them at the sale barn about forty miles away.

Her lane runs a quarter mile from the county road to the house and the pens. It is gravel, and it is narrow.

On the west side there is an old cedar windbreak, planted by her husband’s father, so thick and tall you cannot see through it.

On the east side, near the bottom where the lane opens up to the corrals, there is a big round stock tank.

Between the cedars and that tank, there is barely enough room for a trailer, and there is no room to turn a semi around.

So a truck has to back the whole way in. A quarter mile, in reverse, with a cedar windbreak on one side and a steel tank on the other, and then set the trailer gate square against the loading chute at the end.

Two years before, Curtis had come to haul Hazel’s calves. He had done it for years with a shorter trailer.

That fall he had a new fifty-three-footer, and he came in fast, the way he does everything.

About three-quarters of the way down, he cut too hard. The trailer swung and the truck came around beside it, and he jackknifed right there between the cedars and the tank. He broke two of the cedars off at the trunk.

It took a neighbor, Lowell, with his big tractor and a log chain, most of half a day to pull him straight.

The calves stood in the pens bawling the whole time, and they shrank, and Hazel lost money at the sale because of it.

Nobody said much about it afterward. That was the family way. But Curtis did not haul Hazel’s calves the next year, and he did not offer.

That next fall, Bertram hauled them himself. He did it slow and careful, and it took him a long time, but he got in.

Hazel paid him and sent him home with a loaf of bread.

This year, in October, Bertram hurt his shoulder throwing a trailer gate. The doctor told him no driving for six weeks.

He called me into the shop and told me Hazel’s calves were mine.

“It’s a bad lane,” he said. “Narrowest one I go into. But you can do it. You walk it first and you take your time.”

“Curtis is going to be there,” I said.

Bertram looked at me a long while. “Then he’ll get to see how it’s done,” he said, and that was all he said about it.

I found out how Curtis took the news on the Sunday before shipping.

He stood in the church parking lot with Emmett after the service and said, “She’ll put it in the stock tank. You watch.”

Emmett told me that night. I asked him what he said back.

“I said, ‘I’ll be watching,'” Emmett said. “That’s all.”

I lay awake a long time that night. Not because I was scared of the lane, though I was, a little.

Because I could not understand why it mattered so much to Curtis that I fail.

On Thursday night, two days before shipping, Hazel called me. She did not say hello. She said, “I’ve got some family coming Saturday to help sort. More than usual.”