The Calves I Raised Alone

Thorvald Odegaard stood in my kitchen in his overshoes on the third day of February and told me what it would cost for him to feed my husband’s cows.

Pell was in a hospital bed in Billings with a stent in his heart, more than two hundred miles away.

I had driven home that morning to check heifers, and I had not slept in two days.

“I’ll feed for you,” Thorvald said. “Morning and night, right through calving. I’ll look in on your heifers too, the way Pell’s dad would have wanted.”

For about three seconds I nearly cried from relief. Then he set a folded sheet of paper on the table, next to the coffee cups nobody had washed since Pell went down in the barn lot.

“But the rent on the farm ground comes down to ten dollars an acre,” he said. “Five years. I’d like it signed this week, while it’s fresh on everybody’s mind.”

He had rented our six hundred acres of wheat ground for eleven years at thirty-five dollars an acre.

Ten dollars was not a discount. It was fifteen thousand dollars a year, every year, for five years, walking out our door.

“Thorvald,” I said. “Pell is in the hospital.”

“I know where he is,” he said. “That’s why I’m asking now. You need me today, and I have needed a fair rent for eleven years.”

I want to be honest about that sentence, because I have thought about it many times since. He did believe the rent was too high.

He had grumbled about it at every Christmas dinner since the price of wheat fell, and he was not wrong that wheat was poor.

But there is a difference between asking a fair question in a fair season and waiting until your nephew is lying in a cardiac unit to ask it.

One is business. The other is something I do not have a polite word for.

My name is Larkin Odegaard. I was thirty-six that winter.

I clean teeth for a living, four days a week at a dental office in Glendive, and the rest of the time I am married to a rancher, which means I am a rancher too, whether my license says so or not.

Pell and I run one hundred and forty mother cows north of town in Dawson County, Montana.

It is open country, mostly grass and wheat, with the Yellowstone River off to the east and nothing much between us and the Dakotas but wind.

I grew up on my grandfather’s place near Circle, so I am not a town girl who married into cattle.

I could drive a feed truck before I could drive a car, and I pulled my first calf at twelve with Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder.

But I had never run a calving season by myself. Nobody does, if they can help it. Calving is a two-person job on a good year and a four-person job on a bad one.

Pell’s heart attack came on the first of February, a Sunday. We had come home from church and he went out to start the tractor to feed.

I was at the sink when I saw him through the window, sitting down in the snow beside the bale bed with his hand on his chest.

He was forty years old. He did not drink, he had quit chewing when we married, and he could still throw a bale over a fence.