The Yearling Bull at His Gate

The rest of the season

Biscuit stayed at Werner’s three weeks, just like I said.

Werner checked him every day, morning and evening. He called me twice a week to tell me how the bull was doing, which was more phone calls than I had gotten from him in eight years of marriage. He told me which cows Biscuit had bred and when.

On the twentieth of November, Werner drove to Kansas and bought the two-year-old bull from the man who wanted eleven thousand. He got him for ninety-five hundred because he paid cash and hauled him himself. He told me that too, like he wanted me to know he could still drive a bargain.

He did not borrow a dollar of it. I would not have expected him to.

On the twenty-third, I drove over with the gray trailer to bring Biscuit home. Werner had him in the pen by the barn already, with hay and water, and he had brushed him. A grown man had stood in his own pen and brushed my bull.

“He’s lost a little weight,” Werner said. “Not much. I grained him the last week.”

“He looks good,” I said.

“He’s a good bull.” Werner opened the pen gate and Biscuit walked right onto the trailer, easy, the way he always does. Werner watched him go. “Your dad would have liked him.”

I stopped with my hand on the trailer gate.

“I know your dad,” Werner said. “From the wedding. We talked about corn. He told me you could pull a calf at eleven. I didn’t believe him.” He looked at the ground. “I should have believed him.”

I closed the trailer gate and dropped the pin. I did not trust myself to say anything, so I just nodded, and he nodded back, and that was a whole conversation between us.

Biscuit came home and went in with our cows for cleanup. The AI had taken on twenty-four of our thirty. He caught the other six by Christmas.

Thanksgiving

We had Thanksgiving at Werner and Edda’s that year, the way we always do. It was the same table and the same oilcloth and the same smell of onions frying, except this time Edda had the radio on to the hymn station, and she was humming.

Werner said grace. He always says the same one, the short Lutheran one, and he says it fast because the food is getting cold. That year he stopped at the end and added a line.

“And thank you for good neighbors,” he said. “And good family. And for the ones who show up when they’re not asked.”

Then he said amen and passed the potatoes to me first.

After dinner, Werner and Clay went out to look at the new Kansas bull, and they were gone an hour. When they came back in, Clay told me his dad had asked him how much it would cost to rent the Schuster place outright, all of it, for the two of us to run more cows.

“He wants to go in on it with us,” Clay said. “Fifty-fifty on the rent. He said we could use the Kansas bull and Biscuit both, and he’d sell us some of his older bred cows at the sale barn price.”

“Is he lending us money?” I asked.

“No,” Clay said, and grinned. “He says he doesn’t lend money. He says this is a partnership. There’s a difference, apparently.”

I laughed so hard Edda came in from the dining room to see what was the matter.