The Cows That Still Knew Her Horn

I saw it in the mirror and stopped the truck. The line stacked up behind them. If they turned off into the ditch there, I would lose half the herd.

That was when Tanner did the right thing. He shut his machine off and walked up the ditch on foot, slow, arms out low.

He didn’t holler. He just walked up on her off side, quiet.

She looked at him, and at the line going on toward my horn, and she went. She jumped the low spot and trotted to catch up, and the line moved again.

I waved at Tanner out the window. He waved back. That boy had learned more than I ever gave him credit for.

I counted when I could, in tens, the way you count in a sale ring.

I got to a hundred and thirty and lost it in a gust. They were coming. That was all I could do anything about.

Near the end of the road mile, I looked back at Gus. He was slitting open a new sack, snow piled on his shoulders and his red coat crusted white.

He saw me and grinned through the window. His eyelashes were white and his nose was running, and he looked about four years old to me, sitting in my lap pushing the horn.

I cried at that, out there with the wipers going. I had spent a year being told I was the help.

And there was my son, doing the work with me, because he knew whose work it had been.

He knocked on the glass with his knuckle. I slid the little back window open a few inches.

“You okay back there?” I said.

“I’m good,” he said. “Mom, I remember when Granny was a calf. You let me name her.”

“You named her Granny, after her grandma,” I said. “You were six.”

“It was a good name,” he said, and slid the window shut again, and went back to shaking cake.

At Edith’s gate, I turned north up her lane. The wind came onto the front of the truck at an angle and the snow came straight in my face.

This was the mile where they would want to quit on me.

Edith stood at her gate in her late husband’s old brown coverall coat, a scarf over her mouth and nose, holding the gate open herself against the wind.

She didn’t wave. She just stood there holding the gate while my truck went through, and then while Granny went through, and then while the line went through behind her, one black cow at a time.

I tapped the horn. Two short taps. “Come on, girls.”

The cows put their heads down and leaned into it, snow hitting them full in the face. Not one turned off.

They walked north into the wind because the cow ahead of them was walking, and the cow at the front was following a horn she had known her whole life.