The Yearling Bull at His Gate

Why I did not call

I have thought a lot since then about why I did not pick up the phone and offer.

Part of it was that I knew he would never say yes on the phone. A man like Werner cannot say yes to a thing like that out loud. It costs too much. If I asked, I would be making him choose between his pride and his cows, and I was afraid of which one he would pick.

But mostly it was my dad’s rule. You do not let a cow go open over pride. Not your pride, and not anybody else’s either. Those sixty cows did not know who said what at the cafe. They only knew they needed a bull this week.

So I decided I would not ask. I would just bring him.

Clay was working that Saturday. The dealer had three combines in the shop that farmers needed back before the last of the corn, and he could not get away. He called me from under one of them at about eleven in the morning.

“You’re really going to do it,” he said.

“I’m really going to do it.”

“He might run you off.”

“He might,” I said. “Then I’ll load Biscuit back up and drive home, and nobody’s out anything but diesel.”

He was quiet on the line. I could hear an air wrench going somewhere behind him.

“Take him, Jo,” he said. “And take Maisie. Dad won’t be ugly in front of Maisie.”

Saturday afternoon

We ate dinner at noon, the way we always do on Saturday. Maisie was nine that fall, and she had braided her own red hair that morning, two braids, a little crooked in the back. I did not fix them.

She put on her purple coat and her pink barn boots, which were the third pair of pink barn boots since the first pair, because she had never once let me buy any other color. She went out to the pen before I did.

I found her on the bottom board with her arms through the slats. Biscuit had his big black head down by hers. She was talking to him in a low voice, the way she talks to the barn cats.

“You have to be good,” she was telling him. “They’re sad over there. Their bull died. You have to be really nice to them.”

I stood behind the corner of the barn and did not let her see me for a minute. Then I wiped my face with my glove and went to back up the trailer.

We have a gray stock trailer now, our own, bought used two years ago from a man who quit hogs. I backed it to the loading chute and Biscuit walked right on. He has always loaded easy. The old man at the dispersal said his mother was the same.

It was a bright, cold afternoon. The sky was hard blue the way it gets in November after a front goes through. The pastures along the county road had all gone brown, and the wind came across them out of the northwest and found every gap in my coat.

I wore my green canvas coat, the one with the torn pocket, and my brown hair in a ponytail. I did not dress up. I did not want it to look like I had come to make a point.

It is two miles from our place to Werner’s, a mile north and a mile west on gravel. I drove it slow. The trailer rocked a little when Biscuit shifted his weight, and Maisie turned around in her seat belt every few seconds to look at him through the front slats.

“Does Grandpa know we’re coming?” she asked.

“No.”

“Is he going to be mad?”

I thought about it honestly, because she would know if I did not.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But that’s all right. Sometimes you do the right thing and people are mad for a while, and then they’re not.”

She thought about that for a mile.

“Is it the right thing?”

“Those cows need a bull, honey. Biscuit is a good bull. We have one and Grandpa doesn’t. That’s about all there is to it.”