“What did you feed him?” she asked. “Hay,” I said. “Mine. And a little barley.” She nodded once, made a mark in her catalog next to lot 64, and walked on down the alley.
Harlan came by about eleven, in his good black hat and sport coat, with a ring of buyers trailing him the way gulls follow a tractor. He stopped at Pocket’s pen and looked.
For one second I saw something cross his face. Then it was gone, and he was grinning again. “Well, Tatum,” he said, loud enough for the buyers. “You fed him. I’ll give you that.”
“Good thing he’s last lot,” he went on. “Folks will have spent their money by then.” A couple of the men laughed politely. Tatum put her hand on Pocket’s neck and kept it there.
Noreen came by a few minutes later, by herself, with two cups of coffee.
She handed one to me and one to Tatum, and she stood a minute looking at Pocket.
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“He’s beautiful, Tatum,” she said quietly. Then she looked at me. “I should have said something that day. At the table.” She squeezed my arm and went back up toward the house.
The sale started at one o’clock sharp. Harlan opened with a prayer and a word about the cattle market, then climbed up into the auction box beside Rod Kessler, the auctioneer.
Rod has been selling cattle in western South Dakota since he was twenty.
He was fifty-eight that spring, with a voice like gravel in a coffee can, and everybody in the barn trusted him.
Harlan’s job in the box was to read out each lot and say a word about the bull.
When Rod dropped the hammer, Harlan read out the price and the buyer for the clerks, so the whole barn heard it.
I stood down at the ring rail where consignors stand, in my gray felt hat and my tan wool coat.
Daylight came down through the high windows in long gold bars full of sawdust.
Harlan’s lot 1 came through the gate at a trot, a big, slick, heavy bull, fat as butter. He was a beautiful bull. The bidding was quick and loud.
Rod dropped the hammer at ten thousand two hundred and fifty dollars, and Harlan read it out like a man reading his own name in the paper.
The rest of his bulls went through steady. Eight thousand. Seven thousand five hundred. Nine thousand.
They were good bulls and they brought good money. Lorraine bought two of them early.
By lot 60, the sale was averaging a little over seven thousand four hundred a head.
Harlan was pleased. You could hear it in his voice. Some buyers had already started drifting toward the doors.
The consignment bulls came next. Lot 61 brought four thousand. Lot 62 brought forty-five hundred. Lot 63 brought thirty-eight hundred. Respectable bulls from good neighbors.
Tatum waited in the alley behind the gate.
I couldn’t see her, but I knew what she looked like: fourteen years old, in her blue barn coat, with the halter rope coiled in her right hand.
Most production sales run their bulls in loose.
Harlan had said Pocket could be led in by halter, because he figured it would get a laugh. A little girl and her little bull.