The Lane My Brother in Law Could Not Back

The trailer gate came square against the chute. Not crooked, not a foot off. Square. I felt it touch, the way you feel a cake pan settle on the oven rack.

I set the brakes. The air let out in a long hiss, and in that cold air it sounded like the whole county breathing out at once.

For a second, nobody moved at all.

Then, down at the chute, Curtis pushed his ball cap back on his head with one finger.

He stood there a moment. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and started walking toward my trailer.

I climbed down out of the cab. My legs were shaking a little, the way they had after the road test, and I held the grab handle until they quit.

I walked back along the trailer. Curtis met me at the rear gate.

We stood there looking at each other, and the whole porch was watching us, and I could not have told you what he was going to do.

He looked at the trailer gate against the chute. He bent down and looked at the gap underneath, which was exactly where it should be.

He stood up and looked back up the lane, all the way to the county road.

“Not one pull-up,” he said.

“No,” I said.

He nodded slowly. Then he said, low, so only I could hear, “I couldn’t do that. I tried twice when I was a kid and once when I was grown, and I couldn’t do it.”

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that would not have sounded like gloating, and I did not want to gloat. I just wanted to load the calves.

Then Curtis did something I will remember the rest of my life.

He turned around and looked up at the porch, at all 22 of them, and he lifted his hand and took off his ball cap.

“She did that clean,” he said, loud enough for the porch. “Cleaner than I ever did. Cleaner than anybody’s done this lane.”

Up on the porch, somebody started to clap. I think it was Aunt Vida. Then the grandkids joined in, and one of Emmett’s buddies from the elevator whistled through his fingers.

It was not a big noise. It was a small family noise, out in the cold, and it lasted about as long as it takes to say grace. But I felt it in my chest.

Lowell, the neighbor who had pulled Curtis out with his tractor two years ago, had come over too, and was standing by the pens.

He did not clap. He just touched the brim of his hat to me, and that meant as much as all the rest.

Curtis put his cap back on and turned to me. “Well,” he said. “Let’s load them.”

We loaded Hazel’s 64 calves. Curtis worked the chute, and I worked the gates inside the trailer, counting them into the compartments the way Bertram taught me. The nephews pushed them up the alley with sorting sticks.

They were good calves, around five hundred pounds, black and black baldy mostly, and they went up the chute easy for once, like even they knew they were not supposed to make a fuss today.

Sixty-four calves in a pot that holds near ninety at that weight means room to ride comfortably. I spread them out, front and back, and gated each compartment and counted twice.