The Cows That Still Knew Her Horn

But when it came time to split things, Curtis wanted the cows. All of them.

He said the herd was his operation and always had been. He said I had been doing chores, and chores were not ownership.

The cows were valued at two thousand dollars a head, bred and sound, which put the herd at two hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

Curtis kept them and agreed to pay me my half over five years, out of each fall’s calf check.

I kept the old flatbed, because he didn’t want it. Gus came with me, because Gus wanted to.

And I rented Edith’s old farmhouse, close enough that Gus could still see the river wheat from his window.

What I could not get used to was what Curtis said after. He said it at the sale barn café, at the elevator, at the parts counter.

He said I had been the help, a good hand for fourteen years, and now he’d have to hire one.

Hired men do not get half of anything. That was the point. If I was the help, then wanting half the cows was greedy, and the divorce was something I had done to him.

I knew why. When Curtis was eleven, in the fall of 1990, the bank sold his daddy out.

They ran the whole herd through the sale ring in an afternoon, and Curtis stood on the catwalk and watched every cow go.

He told me about it on our third date, crying a little in the pickup and pretending he wasn’t. He said he would never be a man who lost his cows.

Those 140 cows were the proof he was not his father. If he hadn’t built them alone, the boy on the catwalk was still standing there. I understood that.

It still did not make me the help.

I went in the house and Gus was at the back door pulling on his red coat. He is fifteen, taller than me since August, with his daddy’s eyes and my stubbornness.

“I’m coming,” he said.

“It’s bad out there, bud. It’s a real one.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m coming. The cake feeder’s still froze. Somebody has to shake it out by hand, and you can’t drive and shake at the same time.”

He was right. The feeder motor had seized the last winter I used it, and with no cows to feed there had been no reason to fix it.

I looked at him with his gloves already on, and I did not argue.

He had ridden with me every morning before he could see over the dash.

At four, he sat in my lap and pushed the horn himself, two short taps, and laughed every time the cows came running.

The old white flatbed sat in the shed where I had parked it last spring.

I had kept the battery on a trickle charger out of habit. Some habits you keep even when you have no reason to.