The Cows That Still Knew Her Horn

I was out with a cup of coffee. Gus was in the yard working on a bike chain. He stood up when he saw his daddy, and they nodded at each other.

“Hanna,” Curtis said. “Can I sit down?”

I moved over on the porch step. He sat down beside me, a good space between us, with his hat in his hands.

“I can’t run them,” he said, after a minute. “I can sell them. I’m good at selling them. But I can’t run them like they need run. I never could. You know that. I think I always knew it too.”

“You did fine for a long time,” I said. “You picked good cows.”

“I picked them,” he said. “You raised them.” He turned his hat in his hands. “I said things last year that weren’t true, at the café and other places. I couldn’t stand for it to be true that I didn’t build it by myself. I knew it was a lie when I said it.”

I didn’t say anything. I let him finish.

“After the storm,” he said, “I kept thinking about my dad. About the cows going through the ring. I said I would never be a man who lost his cows. And I almost lost every one of them on that fence, because I was too proud to call the person they would follow.”

He looked out at the pasture across the road, green now with spring wheat coming.

“I want to sell them back to you,” he said. “All of them. At the divorce price. Two thousand a head. You can take what I still owe you off the top, and I’ll carry the rest on a note if the bank won’t, so you can pay it out over the calf checks the same way I’ve been paying you.”

I sat there with the coffee going cold in my hands. I did not trust myself to talk for a while.

Gus had stopped working on the bike and was standing in the yard watching us, very still.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I’ll keep driving for the elevator,” he said. “If you want, I’ll sell your calves for the regular commission. That part was always mine.”

I thought about Granny eating cake under the cedars, and Gus with snow in his eyelashes, and Edith at her gate.

Then I put out my hand, and Curtis shook it, the way you shake on a cattle deal in this country.

“Two short taps,” he said, with a small smile, almost to himself.

“Two short taps,” I said.

Gus got the cake feeder on the old white flatbed running that May, with a new switch and help from Tanner.

He wouldn’t let me pay for the part. He said it was his truck too now.

Edith leased me the windbreak quarter at a fair price and would not take a dollar more.

She says she likes seeing my truck go by her kitchen window in the morning, with Granny right up against the tailgate where she belongs.

Curtis sold me the herd back that spring, at the divorce price.