The Cows That Still Knew Her Horn

It took two tries to start. On the second it caught and settled into that rough idle I had listened to on a thousand dark mornings, and I put my hand flat on the dash like you would on a horse’s neck.

I had twelve sacks of range cubes in the shed, bought in October for Edith’s few heifers.

Twenty percent cake, fifty pounds a sack, about four hundred and sixty dollars a ton that fall. Six hundred pounds. I told myself I’d pay her back.

Gus threw the sacks on the flatbed and climbed up after them. I made him sit low against the headache rack with one arm hooked through it.

I pulled on my brown knit cap and the tan canvas chore coat I’d calved in for ten winters, and got in.

“You sit low,” I told him through the back window. “You hold on. If I tell you to get in the cab, you get in the cab.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and pulled his hood up over his ears.

We drove out the section road with the wipers losing. Some stretches I could only see the next fence post. I knew that road the way you know your own hallway in the dark.

The river wheat is a long flat half section along the creek that Curtis rents.

It had come up thick after a good September rain, and good wheat pasture puts weight on a bred cow cheaper than anything in this country. But there is no draw, no tree, no hill to get behind.

I came through the gate on the north side and drove slow along the fence.

It was full daylight, but the kind that comes from everywhere at once, white and flat, with no shadows in it.

Then I saw them, and my stomach dropped.

They were a black wall against the south fence, tails to the wind, packed so tight they looked like one animal.

A few young cows were bawling. Most just stood with their heads down, waiting the storm out the only way a cow knows how.

The wire was holding, for now. I could see two posts leaning out from the weight.

Three four-wheelers idled along the fence a ways off. Tanner Pope sat on one, Lonnie on another, and a young fellow I didn’t know on the third.

Curtis stood beside his new pickup with his hood cinched down tight.

Tanner is twenty-three. He started with Curtis out of high school, back when I was still on the place, and I taught him how to tube a weak calf.

He is a good hand. He was soaked to the knees and his voice was gone from hollering.

Curtis walked over to my window. I rolled it down about two inches. The wind came through the crack like a knife.

“They won’t know that truck anymore,” he said. “It’s been a year, Hanna.”

One of the men laughed a little. It wasn’t mean. It was the laugh of a cold, tired man who did not believe anything was going to work.