The Joke Calf That Topped the Sale

Harlan came down last, after most of the buyers had gone up to the house for the meal.

He came without his ring of buyers, and he stood in front of the pen a while in his good black hat.

“Becca,” he said. “Harlan,” I said. He looked at Pocket a long time. Then he looked at Tatum, and for a second I saw how old he was. Seventy-two.

He was a man who had sold bulls for thirty-one years and had just been beaten in his own ring by a calf he’d given away as a joke.

In front of everybody he’d ever sold to.

“He’s a good bull,” Harlan said finally. “He was a good calf,” I said. “You just never looked at him.”

Harlan took that. He didn’t argue. He nodded once, slowly, and something settled in his face that might have been the start of an apology, or only the end of a joke.

“You did a fine job with him, Tatum,” he said. “A fine job.” He put out his hand, and she shook it, and he held on a second longer than he needed to.

Then he went back up the alley. He never again said that her mother didn’t know cattle, as far as I know, not that day and not since.

The sale charged its usual eight percent commission on consignment bulls.

That came to nine hundred and twenty dollars, and it went to Harlan. I don’t think it made him happy.

Tatum’s share came to ten thousand five hundred and eighty dollars. She tried to give me half for the hay.

I told her no, and in the end we settled on the twenty orange P bales at the going price.

She paid me eleven hundred dollars in cash, counted out on the kitchen table, one bill at a time. Then she put the rest in the bank.

That summer she bought four bred heifers of her own from my folks.

She runs them with my cows now, and she has opinions about bulls that she shares with everyone.

Clay called that night from North Dakota. Half the county had already called him.

He talked to Tatum for an hour, and to me for five minutes, and mostly he said he was sorry about that Thanksgiving.

At Easter, Harlan called the house and asked for Tatum. He offered her a bred registered heifer out of his best cow family. “Not a joke this time,” he told her.

She said yes, thank you, Grandpa. It was the first time she’d called him that in a while, and I heard him clear his throat on the other end of the line.

I don’t know if Harlan and I will ever be friends. I don’t think it matters.

Men I’ve known since I was a girl stop me in the feed store now to ask what I’m feeding, and how.

Pocket is out on Lorraine’s place north of Faith with forty of her best cows.

She sent Tatum a photograph of him in August, standing in tall grass, holding his flesh like a bull twice his age.

Lorraine asked me for first look at every bull I raised after that.