The Yearling Bull at His Gate

The bull at the dispersal

We could have given up. We talked about it at the kitchen table that night after church, with Maisie asleep and the furnace ticking. Clay said maybe his dad was right, maybe the ground was too wet, maybe we were in over our heads.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe we just need a different bull.”

There was a dispersal sale that month down near Wymore. An old couple was selling out, the husband had a bad heart, and their kids lived in Omaha and Denver. They had run straight Angus for thirty years and never bought a bull with a fancy name.

Clay and I drove down on a gray Saturday and stood at the pens with our hands in our pockets. Most of the crowd was there for the cows. The yearling bulls were penned at the end, three of them, and nobody was paying them much mind.

One of them stood a little apart from the others. He was black and square and not very tall, with a calm eye and a wide, deep body. He watched us the way a good dog watches you, not worried, just paying attention.

The old man came over on his cane. He told us the bull’s mother had calved unassisted eleven years running and never missed. He told us the bull was a little small for a show ring and a lot of bull for a pasture.

“He’s a commercial bull,” the old man said. “No papers worth bragging on. But I’d put him on my own heifers, and I don’t say that to everybody.”

We had a ceiling of four thousand. We had saved it out of my summer pay and Clay’s overtime, and if we went past it, the propane bill in January was going to be a problem.

The bidding stopped at thirty-four hundred. Clay raised his card at thirty-four and nobody came back. The auctioneer said “Sold” and pointed at us, and I let out a breath I had been holding since the first bid.

We hauled him home in a borrowed trailer. Maisie was waiting on the porch in her pajamas and her pink barn boots, which was how she wore everything that year. She walked right up to the pen and looked at him through the boards.

“He looks like a biscuit,” she said. “A big burnt biscuit.”

So that was his name.