The Cows That Still Knew Her Horn

Curtis finally looked up at me. His face was raw from the wind and his eyes were wet, and I don’t think all of it was the cold.

“Thank you, Hanna,” he said. It was the first time he’d said my name and meant it in more than a year.

“They needed in,” I said. “That’s all. Keep them in the shelter till this blows out. Edith’s got hay. Feed them in the morning with the horn, two short taps, and they’ll come to you too, sooner or later. You just have to be the one who’s there every morning.”

I drove Gus home. He fell asleep against the door with the heater going full blast and his wet gloves still on.

At the house I made him a grilled cheese and cocoa, and he ate it in a blanket by the stove like he used to. He went to bed at six and slept until morning.

I sat up in the dark kitchen watching the snow. I thought about the calf in the laundry basket, and Gus at four with his hand on the horn, and the boy on the catwalk watching his daddy’s cows go.

I said a little prayer for all of them, Curtis included. Then I went to bed.

The blizzard blew out the next afternoon. It left four-foot drifts on every fence in the county and killed a good many cattle caught in the open. Every one of Curtis’s 140 came through it.

The story was around the county by the next noon. Tanner told it at the sale barn café, at the same counter where Curtis had called me the help, and the men who had nodded along a year before sat and listened.

Nobody said anything to me directly. That is not how it goes here.

But the next Saturday at the sale barn, three ranchers I’d known twenty years asked if I’d take day work, and one asked me to help him calve out his heifers in February.

Curtis fed the cows himself the rest of that winter. He bought a cake feeder for his new truck and honked two short taps every morning.

The cows came to him, mostly, eventually. But a few of the old ones would stand off and look down the road.

Tanner quit Curtis in January, not mean about it. He came and asked me who needed help calving, and I sent him to the rancher with the heifers, and we worked that calving together.

Curtis lost three calves in a February cold snap that I think would have lived if somebody had been checking at two in the morning.

I don’t say it to blame him. One person cannot run 140 cows and go to the sales and also sleep.

In April, on a warm still Sunday, Curtis drove up to the rent house and sat in his truck a long while before he got out. He came to the porch steps and stopped at the bottom.