The Yearling Bull at His Gate

September

The calves came the next September.

Werner’s calves came first, because his cows had been bred first. He called us on a Tuesday morning before school and said, “You’d better come look at these,” and hung up before I could ask him anything.

Clay and I drove over after work with Maisie in the back seat. Werner and Edda were standing at the same pipe gate where Maisie had swung it open ten months before. Werner had his arms on the top rail.

Out on the pasture, under the September sun, the new calves were scattered among the cows. Some were lying flat in the grass, some were nursing, some were bucking around in little gangs the way calves do in the evening.

Most of them were black and thick, square and not very tall, with wide deep bodies and calm faces. They looked up at the truck with the same quiet way of paying attention that a good dog has.

“Look at them,” Werner said. “Just look at them.”

Maisie climbed up on the bottom rail beside her grandpa and looked.

“They look like Biscuit,” she said.

“Every one he sired does,” Werner said. He put his big hand on top of her red braids. “You can tell them from across the road. The Kansas bull’s will come in a few weeks, and they’ll be fine. But these ones here, these are the good ones.”

Edda leaned against me and put her arm through mine, which she had never done before the pie and has done every time since.

The quiet part

I want to be honest about one more thing, because it matters.

I did not haul Biscuit over to win anything. I did not do it to shame Werner in front of the round table or to make him eat his words. If I had, I think he would have known, and I think it would have gone a different way.

I did it because sixty cows needed a bull and I had one. That is the whole of it. My dad would have done the same, and so would Werner, if it had been the other way around and he had not been so scared for so long.

Biscuit is five now. He has sired calves on two places in Gage County, and the men at the round table know him by name. Werner tells them about him. I hear about it from Vance at the parts counter, who has given up pretending he does not repeat everything.

Maisie is twelve. She shows Biscuit’s daughters at the county fair every August in her pink barn boots, which she has finally outgrown in color but not in spirit. She says she is going to be an ag teacher like me, or a cattleman like her grandpa. She has not decided.

Every Sunday after church, we go to Werner and Edda’s for dinner, and after dinner, Werner and Maisie walk out to the pasture gate and stand there with their arms on the top rail, looking at the cows.

They do not say much. They do not need to.

The Kansas bull went to the sale barn after two seasons. Werner runs a Biscuit son now, raised on our ground and hauled over on the same gray trailer, and he will not hear of any other bull.

Werner’s calves still come every September, and every one of them looks like ours.