The Yearling Bull at His Gate

“No,” Werner said, and he set his coffee cup down on the oilcloth like that was the end of a sentence nobody else got to finish.

Clay had his hat in his hands. I had the sale bill folded in my coat pocket, the one with the registered Angus bulls on it, and I had done the math four times.

“Eight thousand,” Clay said again, like maybe his father had not heard the number right. “We’d pay you back in two years. Out of the calf checks. With interest, Dad, whatever the bank would charge.”

“Then go to the bank,” Werner said.

We had been to the bank. The bank had looked at thirty cows on rented ground, an ag teacher’s paycheck and a parts counter paycheck, and said maybe next year. Werner knew that. Everybody in Gage County knew everybody’s business with the bank.

His wife, Edda, stood at the stove with her back to us. She was frying something that did not need watching that hard. I remember the smell of onions and the way her shoulders did not move at all.

“You’ve got a good job at the dealer,” Werner told his son. “You’ve got a wife with a college degree. You don’t need to be messing with cows on the Schuster place. That ground floods every third year.”

“It’s our money we’d be risking,” Clay said.

“It’s my money you’re asking for.”

That was true, and it was fair as far as it went. A man can say no to a loan. I would have walked out of that kitchen sore but not bitter if that had been the whole of it.

It was not the whole of it.

The next Saturday, Werner went to the cafe on the square in Beatrice the way he had gone every Saturday since before Clay was born. He sat at the round table in the back with the same five or six men, and he told them.

I know exactly what he said, because by Sunday afternoon three different women had told me in the church parking lot, and every one of them used the same words.

“My boy married off the farm. She’ll quit the first winter it gets hard, and he’ll be stuck with thirty cows and a note. They’ll never be cattlemen. I told them so, and I’m not paying for the lesson.”

Maisie was six that fall. She asked me in the car what married off the farm meant. I told her it meant Grandpa thought I did not grow up on one.

“But you did,” she said.

“I did,” I said. “Just not his.”

Where I come from

I grew up on a dairy outside Seward, the oldest of four girls. My dad milked ninety Holsteins twice a day until his knees gave out, and then he sold the herd and cried in the barn where he thought nobody could see him.

I learned to pull a calf at eleven. I learned to clean a milking unit before I learned to drive. I learned that a cow does not care about your feelings, your plans, or what anybody said about you at the cafe.

My dad had one rule he said more than any other. You do not let a cow go open over pride. If your neighbor’s bull is sound and yours is not, you swallow it and ask. Every empty cow is a year of feed with nothing to show.

I went to Lincoln for school and came out with a degree in agricultural education. I took the job at the high school in Gage County because it was the first one that called, and I met Clay at a 4-H fair board meeting that ran two hours long.

He was the one who fixed the ice machine at the fairgrounds. He did it without being asked, while the rest of us argued about the pie auction, and I married him a year and a half later in the Lutheran church his family had gone to for four generations.

Werner was polite at the wedding. He shook my father’s hand. They talked about corn prices for ten minutes, and on the way home my dad said, “That man has been scared of something for a long time.”

I did not understand what he meant until later.