The Yearling Bull at His Gate

The first year

A yearling bull can cover maybe fifteen to twenty-five cows in his first season if he is sound and the cows are cycling. We had thirty. I was nervous the whole time, and I checked him every morning before school and every evening after.

Hardly anybody came back.

When the vet came out in the spring to preg check, Clay and I ran the cows through the chute on a raw March morning, and the vet called out “bred” twenty-nine times in a row and then “bred” on the last one too.

“Thirty for thirty,” the vet said, pulling off his sleeve. “On a yearling. I’d hang onto that bull.”

The calves came the next September in a tight, even bunch, almost all of them in the first three weeks. They were black, thick and quiet, and they nursed on their own and got up fast. We sold the steer calves the next spring at a good weight and paid every bill we owed.

Werner never said a word about them. He drove past our pasture on the county road every Sunday on his way to church. He had to see them. He just never said.

The years in between

I would like to tell you that I did not care what Werner thought. That is not true, and I was raised not to lie, even in a story.

I cared. I cared every holiday at his table when he asked Clay about the dealer and never asked about the cows. I cared when he talked about his own bull at Easter dinner, a big registered bull he had paid nine thousand for, and how a man gets what he pays for.

I did not argue with him. Not once in three years. Clay would get a look on his face, and I would put my hand on his knee under the table, and he would let it go.

There was nothing to win in a fight. Werner was sixty-something, set in his ways, and he loved his son. A fight would not change his mind. It would only give the round table something new to talk about on Saturday.

Edda was the one who surprised me. She never said anything against Werner, not in front of anyone. But she started sending things home with me. A jar of her apple butter. A bag of Maisie’s outgrown jeans from the cousins. A pan of bars after the calf sale.

Once, at the Fourth of July, she found me alone at the sink and said, very quietly, “His dad lost the home place in 1984. Did Clay ever tell you that?”

Clay had, a little. He did not like to talk about it.

“They had borrowed against everything,” Edda said. “The land, the cows, the machinery. Interest went to eighteen percent. Werner was twenty-four, and he stood in the yard while the auctioneer sold his dad’s tractor. He has never borrowed a dollar since. And he doesn’t lend them either.”

“He could have just said that,” I said.

“I know.” She dried a plate that was already dry. “He doesn’t know how to say things like that. He only knows how to say the other kind.”

I thought about my dad crying in the empty dairy barn. I thought about what he had said at our wedding, that Werner had been scared of something for a long time.

It did not make what Werner said at the cafe all right. A man can be scared and still be wrong to say a thing like that about his son’s wife in front of the whole town. But it made it a man’s wrong and not a monster’s, and I could live next to that.