The Calves I Raised Alone

His father had died at fifty-one the same way, and Pell had always said that would not be him.

The ambulance from Glendive took twenty-six minutes to reach our yard.

I knelt beside him in the snow the whole time and held his hand inside my coat, and I prayed the plainest prayer I have ever prayed, which was just his name, over and over.

They flew him from Glendive to Billings that night. By Monday morning a doctor with very clean hands was showing me a picture of a blocked artery on a screen and telling me my husband was lucky.

“No lifting over ten pounds for six weeks,” the doctor said. “No shoveling. No working out in the cold. No stress, if you can manage it. Cardiac rehab three times a week once he’s home.”

No stress. I almost laughed. It was the first week of calving, and we had forty-five first-calf heifers due in the next twenty days.

So that was where we stood on the Tuesday when Thorvald came to my kitchen with his folded paper.

I did not sign it. I want to say I was brave about it, but mostly I was tired.

I told him I would have to talk to Pell, and Thorvald said that was fine, he would wait, but the cows would not.

“They eat every day, Larkin,” he said, buttoning his coat. “Five bales a day this time of year, and those heifers won’t wait on a phone call.”

He was right about that, at least. A hundred and forty cows in a Montana February will go through four or five round bales a day, more when it is twenty below and the wind is up.

I called Pell that night from the kitchen. I had planned to tell him everything. I had the words ready, and I was angry enough that my hand shook on the phone.

Then I heard his voice. It was thin and careful, the way a man talks when every breath is something he has to think about.

He asked how the heifers looked. He asked if the water tank heater was holding.

And I understood, sitting at that table, that if I told him what his uncle had done, he would get out of that hospital bed.

He would drive home against orders and stand in the yard and fight his father’s brother, and his heart would not take it.

His heart could not take a fight. So I did not give him one.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Thorvald came by. I’m going to handle the feeding myself for a while.”

“Larkin, that’s a hundred and forty head.”

“I know how many cows we have,” I said, and I made it sound like a joke, and he laughed a little, and that laugh was worth fifteen thousand dollars a year to me right then.

Before I went to bed I called Nell, who runs the dental office where I work.

She has been a hygienist for thirty years, and she knew before I finished the first sentence what I was going to ask.

“Take the leave,” she said. “Your chair will be there in April. I’ll cover your Tuesdays myself.”

It was unpaid leave. I knew what that meant for our checkbook, with a hospital bill already coming that I did not want to think about.

But there was no other way to be in two places at once.

I also called around for hired help. I called every name I could think of.