The Yearling Bull at His Gate

The gate

When I turned in at Werner’s pasture gate, he was already there.

I do not know how long he had been standing at the fence. He was in his tan chore jacket and his brown felt hat, the old one with the sweat stain, and he had his arms folded on the top rail of the pipe fence like he had been leaning there an hour.

Behind him the black cows were spread out on the brown hill, grazing with their heads down. A few of them lifted their heads at the sound of the trailer. The sun was on their backs and it made them shine.

I stopped the truck with the trailer gate lined up even with the pasture gate, the way you do. I got out. Werner did not move. He watched me walk back along the trailer, and he did not take his arms off the rail.

“Afternoon,” I said.

“What’s this,” he said. It did not come out like a question.

“Your cows need a bull,” I said.

He looked at me. Then he looked at the trailer. Biscuit chose that moment to shift his feet, and the whole trailer rocked on its springs, and you could see his black side through the slats.

Werner looked at him a long time. I did not say anything. My dad used to say the man who talks first in a cattle deal loses money, and I figured it held for this too.

“I didn’t ask you,” Werner said finally.

“I know you didn’t.”

“I didn’t ask anybody.”

“I know that too.”

His jaw worked under the gray mustache. I could see him thinking about the round table, about three years of Saturdays, about every word he had said about me and every word he had heard come back.

“Our cows were bred AI on Halloween weekend,” I said, plain and quiet, the way you say a thing to a man about his own business. “Biscuit’s just our cleanup. He can stay three weeks. That gives you time to find a second bull for the rest of the season.”

“He’s not big enough for sixty.”

“Not for the whole season. For three weeks, if you watch his feet and pull him if he gets thin. He’s two now. He settled thirty out of thirty his first year.” I did not say it to brag. I said it because it was a fact he needed.

Werner did not answer that.

Maisie had climbed out of the truck by then. She came around the back of the trailer in her pink boots and her purple coat with her red braids swinging. She walked right past me to the pipe gate and put both hands on the latch.

Then she looked at me.

I looked at Werner. He was looking at her.

I nodded to Maisie.

She lifted the chain and pulled, and the gate was heavier than she was, so she put her shoulder into it and walked it open. It swung wide on its hinges with that long squeak a pipe gate makes in the cold, and she held it there against the fence post.

I pulled the pin on the trailer’s back gate and swung it open.

Biscuit stood in the doorway for a second. He looked out at the pasture, at the brown grass and the sixty black cows, and then he lowered his head and stepped down off the trailer, one front foot and then the other, onto Werner’s ground.

He stood there and bawled once, long and low.

Every cow on that hill lifted her head.