The Cows That Still Knew Her Horn

Far ahead I could see the windbreak now, a long gray line of cedars standing up out of the white. They had been breaking north winds for eighty years.

As soon as the herd got into the lee of those cedars, the wind just stopped.

The snow came down soft instead of sideways. The cows’ heads came up, and a few shook themselves like dogs.

I stopped by the old pens and the hay Edith had put out that morning.

Gus shook the last bucket out in a long line, and Granny walked up and started eating like it was any other morning.

The rest came in behind her, nosing in shoulder to shoulder along the cake and the hay. I sat with my hands on the wheel and did not move for a while.

Curtis and the boys came in last. They shut down the four-wheelers along the windbreak and walked up. Edith came up in her old side-by-side from the gate, slow, with the snow on her scarf.

“Count them,” Edith said to Curtis.

He looked at her.

“I said count them,” she said. “You count your cows when you get them in. You know that.”

So Curtis walked down the line along the cedars and counted in tens, his lips moving. The rest of us waited in the quiet under the trees.

When he came back, he stopped about ten feet from my window. He took his cap off and knocked the snow off of it against his leg.

“A hundred and forty,” he said.

Nobody said anything for a second. Lonnie let his breath out loud. Tanner just nodded, like he had known it all along.

Then Edith spoke up, in front of everybody. She was standing right beside Curtis, with her scarf pulled down now, and she was not loud about it.

“Curtis Riegel,” she said, “you have told everybody from here to Kansas that this girl was your hired help. I just watched 140 cows walk three miles into a blizzard behind her pickup. I never in my life saw anybody’s cows walk three miles behind the hired help.”

Curtis didn’t say anything. He looked at the ground.

“I’m not saying it to shame you,” Edith said. “I’m saying it because somebody ought to say it out loud, and I’m too old to wait on you to do it.”

Tanner was the one who said the next thing. I will never forget it, because Tanner is not a talker.

He stood there with his hands in his coat pockets and the snow melting off his hat.

“They’re her cows, Curtis,” he said. “They always were. Everybody out here watched it. I’m not going to tell anybody different.”

The new fellow looked at his boots. Lonnie nodded once, slow.

I did not say anything. I want to be clear about that. I did not gloat and I did not explain.

There was nothing I could have said that was louder than 140 cows eating cake under the cedars.