The Joke Calf That Topped the Sale

“I’d like to consign a bull to your sale,” I said. “Open consignment. He’s registered, he’s passed his exam, and he’s in Tatum’s name.”

Another silence. Then Harlan laughed, low and pleased. “The joke calf?” I told him he was a bull now.

“Well, sure,” Harlan said. “Open consignment. Last lot. Don’t expect much, Becca. These folks know cattle.” I told him so did I, and he laughed again and hung up.

The catalog came in the mail two weeks before the sale.

Sixty Voss bulls, each with a photograph, a pedigree and a paragraph Harlan wrote himself. Then four consignment bulls in the back.

Pocket was lot 64, the last bull in the book. Under his name, Harlan had written one line. A little bull with a big story.

Clay called from North Dakota that night. He was on a fourteen day hitch and couldn’t get home for the sale.

He asked Tatum if she was nervous, and she said no.

He said good, because Pocket would know if she was. Then he asked for me. “I’m sorry I won’t be there,” he said. “He’s a good bull, isn’t he? I can tell from the weight.”

“He’s a good bull, Clay.” There was a pause, and I heard a diesel engine somewhere behind him. “Dad won’t say so,” he said. “But he knows. He’s driven past your place twice to look.”

Sale day came up bright and clear and cold, with frost on the fence wire that burned off by nine.

I’d washed Pocket the day before and blown him dry. He looked like a black stone in the sun.

We hauled him to the Voss place at seven.

The sale barn is a big pole building with a sawdust ring, steep wooden bleachers on three sides, and high windows along the top that let in the whole sky.

The consignment bulls were penned at the far end of the alley.

We put Pocket in his pen with fresh straw and a flake from the orange P bale. Tatum stayed with him. I didn’t have to ask.

By nine, the yard was full of pickups and stock trailers from four states.

Men walked the alleys with catalogs rolled in their back pockets, looking at bulls, making notes, saying nothing.

Most of them walked right past the consignment pens.

A few stopped and looked at Pocket, and then looked again, the way you check a road sign you think you misread.

Around ten, Lorraine Thiel came down the alley. Everybody in western South Dakota knows Lorraine.

She runs nine hundred mother cows north of Faith, on ground her family has ranched since before statehood.

She buys eight or ten bulls every spring, more than anybody in that barn, and she does not buy them on looks. She was sixty-six that spring, small and straight-backed.

She folded her arms on the top board of Pocket’s pen and looked at him a long time. “Turn him around for me, honey,” she said to Tatum.

Tatum walked him in a slow circle. Lorraine watched his feet, every step, the way a jeweler watches a stone. Then she watched him stand. Then she looked at me.