The Calves I Raised Alone

Pell looked at him across the table. “That’s it?”

“That’s the rent,” Thorvald said. “That’s a fair rent. You’ll get no better.”

“I’m not asking about the rent,” Pell said. “I’m asking if there’s anything else you want to say. About February. To me, or to my wife.”

It was quiet in the kitchen. I could hear the clock. I could hear the cows bawling out in the lot for their morning hay.

I believe Pell gave him every chance a man can give another man. I believe if Thorvald had said one honest word, even “I was wrong,” Pell would have signed the lease that morning, and I would have let him.

Thorvald looked at his coffee. “I made a business offer,” he said. “She turned it down. That’s all there is to it.”

Pell nodded slowly. He did not raise his voice. He has never raised his voice to his uncle and he did not start then.

“All right,” he said. “Then I’ll think on it, and I’ll let you know.”

Thorvald finished his coffee and put on his hat and went out. Pell walked him to his pickup and shook his hand, and stood in the yard and watched him drive away.

Then Pell came back in and stood in the kitchen doorway with the cold coming off his coat.

“The Brannigans have been asking about that ground for years,” he said. They farm the place right next to Thorvald’s, and they always have.

That spring, the Brannigan boys planted our six hundred acres in winter wheat and spring wheat, and they paid thirty-eight dollars an acre, because that was the going rate, and they paid it on time.

Thorvald still runs his own cows on his own quarters a mile over. He goes to the same church we do.

He sits on the other side, and I nod to him every Sunday, and some Sundays he nods back.

I have prayed about him more than once. I have asked to forgive him, and I think I have, mostly. Forgiving a man is not the same as handing him the keys to your ground.

Pell is forty-one now, and his heart is good. He walks every morning out to the pasture and back.

He does not lift as much as he used to, and he lets me drive the bale bed when it is very cold, and he does not argue about it anymore.

I still clean teeth four days a week. I still keep the spiral notebook on the shelf in the shed, and every February I write down every cow that calves, and every one I have to help.

Last February it was nine. We sold that bull.

Socks, the first heifer I pulled that year, is a cow now with two more calves behind her.

Her first calf, the bull calf who coughed in my lap in the straw, went through the ring that October with the others. I could not tell you which one he was.

But some mornings in calving season, when the sun comes in bright through the open side of the shed and a new calf is steaming in the straw, I think about that first one.

I think about the sound of a whole barn standing up.

And I think about Pell, sitting up in the dark at three in the morning, waiting to unbutton my coat.

Thorvald’s lease came up in December, and we rented it to his neighbor.