The Joke Calf That Topped the Sale

She nodded like that was a perfectly good answer. I suppose it was. It’s the only honest answer anybody has ever given about a sick calf.

I stayed up with him until midnight, then checked him again at three. He was up.

Wobbling, but up, with his nose in the corner hunting for something that wasn’t there.

I gave him a little more milk and went back to the house and cried at the kitchen table for ten minutes, for no reason I could name.

Tatum set her alarm for five thirty every morning after that.

Before the school bus, every single day that winter, she was out in that barn with a two quart bottle.

She warmed it to the temperature of her wrist, and she did it again the minute she got off the bus in the afternoon.

Two bottles a day, and she never once missed.

I bought the replacer at the feed store in fifty pound bags, a hundred and forty dollars a bag, about one bag a month.

That came out of my cow money, and I never said a word about it.

She named him Pocket, because he was small enough to fit in one.

She showed me, holding her coat pocket open next to his ear. It was a silly name for a bull. I loved it immediately.

The first real scare came the week before Christmas.

Pocket went off his bottle one morning, and by noon he was standing hunched with his back up and his tail wet.

Scours. In a calf that small and that far behind, scours can kill you in a day and a half. I didn’t panic, because panic never fed a calf.

I pulled him off milk replacer and put him on electrolytes every four hours, around the clock.

I put a quilted calf jacket on him that I’d been saving for one of my own.

I sat in the straw with his head across my knees through most of a cold blue afternoon. I’ll admit I talked to him. I told him about my grandfather.

My grandfather used to say the best cattle in the world are made twice, once by their breeding and once by their raising, and most people only pay attention to the first one.

On the third day, Pocket stood up straight and bawled at me for milk.

I have heard a lot of calves bawl in my life. I don’t believe I ever heard one that sounded better.

When Tatum got home from school, I met her at the barn door and said, “Go see.” She ran. She had both arms around his neck when I came in, and he was nosing her pocket for the bottle.

He grew slow that winter. I want to be honest about that, because it matters to what came later.

He was a runt, and for a while he stayed a runt.

By the time we weaned him off the bottle in February, he weighed maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. Harlan’s fall calves were well over three hundred by then.

Pocket was a little black barrel with big ears. People talked. Our town is small, and Harlan’s word was big in it.