The Yearling Bull at His Gate

The cafe

Vance from the parts counter sits at that round table every Saturday. He told Clay, and Clay told me that night, standing in the kitchen with his coat still on just like the night he told me about the broken leg.

Werner walked in at his usual time, he said. He hung his brown hat on the hook by the door, sat down in his usual chair at the round table, and ordered his usual coffee and a caramel roll.

And then, before anybody could get going on the weather or the price of corn, he said it.

“Some of you heard my bull broke his leg,” Werner said. “Some of you heard I didn’t have another one. You might as well hear the rest of it from me.”

Vance said the table went quiet.

“There’s a bull with my cows right now,” Werner said. “He’s black, and he’s two years old, and he isn’t registered, and he’s the best-built bull I’ve seen in ten years. He belongs to my son and his wife. She hauled him over on her own on Saturday without my asking.”

One of the old men started to say something. Werner put up his hand.

“Three years ago I sat at this table and said that girl would never be a cattleman,” he said. “I said it loud so you’d all remember. So you remember this too. I was wrong. Clay married a better cattleman than I raised.”

Then he drank his coffee and asked about the price of corn.

Clay stood in the kitchen and told it to me with his eyes wet, and when he finished, neither one of us said anything for a while. Maisie was asleep. The furnace was ticking. I went to the window and looked out at the empty pen where Biscuit had been.

“Better cattleman than he raised,” Clay said finally, and laughed a little through his nose. “He’s never going to let me forget that one.”

“Good,” I said, and went over and put my arms around him.

The pie

On Monday afternoon I came home from school and there was a pie on our kitchen table.

It was an apple pie in one of Edda’s old glass pans, the ones with the fluted edge, still a little warm. It had been covered in foil and set inside a dish towel in a box, the way women around here carry pies in the truck so they will not slide.

There was a note taped to the foil. It was on a piece of lined paper torn out of a church bulletin notebook, folded once, and the handwriting was Edda’s, small and slanted and careful.

It said: For Biscuit.

And under that, smaller: And for the ones who raised him. We are proud of you. Werner says so too, he just can’t write it. Love, Mom.

She had never signed anything to me that way before. Not on a birthday card, not on a Christmas card. Always Edda and Werner, or Werner and Edda, in his blocky printing.

I sat down at the table in my school clothes and read that note until Maisie came in off the bus and found me.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Your grandma made a pie,” I said.

She read the note over my shoulder, sounding out the words she did not know. When she got to Biscuit, she grinned. When she got to the end, she put her arm around my neck and did not say anything for once.

We ate that pie for supper. All three of us, before the meat loaf, because Clay said life is short and you eat pie first when your mother makes it for your wife. I kept the note. It is in my Bible now, in Ruth, where it belongs.