The Joke Calf That Topped the Sale

Harlan Voss waited until everybody at the Thanksgiving table had a fork in their hand. He liked an audience the way some men like a good saddle.

“Gave Tatum a bull today,” he said, and he lifted his coffee cup toward my daughter like he was making a toast. Tatum was twelve.

She smiled, because she was twelve and nobody had told her yet what the joke was.

“He won’t bring four hundred dollars at the sale barn,” Harlan went on. “But maybe she’ll learn something about cattle her mother never did.”

Eleven people laughed. Harlan’s brothers laughed, and their wives, and a couple of cousins down at the end of the table who had driven in from Sturgis.

Even Noreen, Harlan’s wife, gave a little laugh, though she looked at her plate while she did it.

I didn’t laugh. I set my fork down and folded my hands in my lap, the way my mother taught me when I had something to say and knew better.

That was the first Thanksgiving after the divorce papers were signed.

Clay had asked me to come for Tatum’s sake, one table for one more year, and I believed him because I wanted to.

The bull Harlan was talking about was out in his calving barn, in a pen by himself under a heat lamp.

He was a twin, born the first week of November in Harlan’s fall calving herd.

He had come into the world at forty-eight pounds, and his mama had taken one sniff of him and walked away.

His twin sister got all the milk and all the mothering.

Any cattleman will tell you a heifer born twin to a bull is usually the one that’s ruined, because nine times out of ten she’ll never breed. The bull calf is generally sound.

Nobody at that table said so.

Harlan’s hired man had been bottle feeding the little bull when he remembered to.

By Thanksgiving he was three weeks old and looked like a folding chair with a black blanket thrown over it.

His hip bones stood up. His ears were cold to the touch. He had stopped bawling, which is the worst sign a calf can give you.

Harlan had walked Tatum out to that pen before dinner and put a halter rope in her hand.

Then he came back inside, washed up, and saved the punch line for the table.

Later that evening he signed the registration over to her name with a big flourish.

He said it was part of the gift. Everybody understood it was part of the joke.

Harlan Voss runs the biggest registered Angus operation in our part of South Dakota, out west of Faith where the grass is short and the wind never quits.

He has held a spring production bull sale on his place for thirty-one years.

Ranchers come from three states to buy his bulls, and he is a good cattleman. I won’t pretend otherwise.

I married his son Clay when I was twenty-five.

I grew up on a little cow outfit north of Newell, and I thought I knew what I was marrying into. I knew the cattle part.

For sixteen years Harlan let me pull calves and sort pairs and run the chute, and for sixteen years he told people I didn’t know cattle.