People have asked me since why I didn’t just hang up on him. I think about that question more than I thought I would.
The answer is plain. You do not argue about whose cows they are while cows are drifting into a fence in a blizzard.
They die first. The lawyers come later, and the lawyers had already come and gone for us anyway.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said. “Don’t push them anymore. You’re just teaching them the machines mean trouble.”
He hung up without answering. I stood there with the phone in my hand and the snow blowing across the porch boards, and I thought about fourteen winters of mornings.
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Curtis and I married when I was twenty-five. We ran a few cows on his uncle’s grass and both worked other jobs to make the payments.
The herd started with eleven heifers we bought on a note the spring I turned thirty.
Curtis picked them out at the sale. He had a good eye for a cow, I will give him that.
But from that first winter on, I fed them. Curtis drove a truck for the elevator and was gone before light most days.
Somebody had to put cake on the ground every morning, break ice on the tanks and check heifers at night in calving season. That was me.
I bought the white flatbed used that second fall. It had a cake feeder bolted on the bed behind the headache rack, a steel hopper with a little motor, and a toggle switch in the cab so you could dribble cubes on the ground while you drove.
The first week, I figured out what every rancher figures out. If you honk the same way every time before the cake comes out, the cows learn it faster than a dog learns its name. I chose two short taps. It just felt friendly.
Inside a month, those heifers came at a trot from half a mile off when they heard it. Their calves learned it from their mothers, standing at their sides in the feed line.
By the time we had 140 cows, most of them had been born on our place to mothers who knew that horn.
One sleet-storm March, I bottle-fed a heifer calf in a laundry basket by our kitchen stove because her mother wouldn’t take her.
Her granddaughter became the boss of the herd. Every herd has one, the cow the others wait on.
When she started toward the truck, they came. We had called her Granny since she was a calf, after her grandmother in the basket.
Curtis handled the selling. He talked to the order buyers and set the price on the calves every fall, and he was good at it.
He came home from the sale barn with a check and a story, and the story was never about the cows.
When our marriage came apart, it came apart slow and then all at once, the way a fence post rots under the ground. It was nobody’s fault but ours, and we both knew it.