The Calves I Raised Alone

Socks turned around in the pen and put her nose down to him and started licking.

I sat there with him in my lap and the sun coming in bright through the open side of the shed, and for a minute I did not think about Thorvald at all.

That was one. I did not know yet there would be fifty-one more.

We had bought a new bull the spring before, a good-looking black bull from a sale over by Miles City.

His papers said he was a calving-ease bull, which is what you want on heifers. Pell paid more than we could afford for him because of that.

Whatever his papers said, his calves were big. Not every one, but enough. By the end of the first week I had pulled nine calves, seven of them out of heifers.

Then, on the twelfth of February, a storm came down out of Canada and sat on us for three days.

It was twenty-eight below on the thermometer by the back door on the second morning, and the wind took it lower than that.

The snow did not fall so much as move sideways. You could not see the shed from the house.

In a storm like that, cows calve. I do not know why, but every rancher will tell you the same. The barometer drops and the cows go into labor like they have been waiting for it.

I pulled eleven calves in those three days. I lost one, a heifer calf that came backwards and was dead before I got to her.

I sat with the mother for a while afterward in the shed, my hand on her neck, because it seemed wrong to leave her alone.

The other ten lived. I brought four of them into the house and warmed them in the bathtub in warm water, one at a time, the way my grandmother used to do.

I fed them colostrum from a bottle at the kitchen table and dried them with my good bath towels.

Pell called on the second night of the storm, worried sick because he had seen the weather in Billings. I was sitting on the bathroom floor with a calf in the tub when he called.

“Is that a calf?” he said, because the calf was bawling.

“That’s the radio,” I said, and he laughed so hard he had to stop and breathe, and the nurse took the phone away from him for a minute.

Thorvald drove by twice during the storm. I saw his pickup on the county road both times, slowing down at our approach and then going on.

He did not stop. He did not call. I have wondered what he was thinking, sitting in his warm cab looking at our yard light through the snow.

Maybe he thought I would call him. Maybe he was waiting for that.

I did not call. I had made up my mind about it by then.

If I called him, I would have to sign that paper, and I was not going to sign away fifteen thousand dollars a year for five years because my husband had a heart attack.

There is one more thing I should say about Thorvald, so you do not think he was a monster. He was not.

He was a hard man and a careful one, and he had worked his whole life and had less to show for it than his older brother.