The Calves I Raised Alone

Pell’s dad had gotten the home place. Thorvald got the quarter sections nobody wanted, and he made them pay, and he never forgot whose name was on the good ground.

I think he had been waiting a long time for the shoe to be on the other foot.

That is a reason. It is not an excuse. A sick nephew is not leverage. A man who would use one as leverage has stopped doing business and started doing something else.

Pell came home on the eighth of February, before the storm, in the passenger seat of our pickup with a pillow against his chest for the seat belt.

He walked into the house slowly, holding the doorframe, and he cried when he saw the kitchen, though he said it was the cold.

He was not allowed to work. He knew it, and I knew it, and every day of that month it was a fight between us, a quiet one.

He would put his coat on and stand at the back door, and I would take his coat off him and hang it back up.

“I can drive the feed truck,” he said one morning. “I don’t have to lift anything. I’ll just sit in the cab.”

“You’ll get out to cut strings,” I said. “I know you. And then you’ll pick up a calf, and then I’ll be a widow at thirty-six, and I won’t have it.”

He sat back down. He was not used to being told no in his own house, and it was hard for him.

I could see it in his face every morning when the tractor would not start and he could hear me out there trying.

He asked me about Thorvald twice that month. Both times I said we had worked it out, and both times he looked at me a long moment and let it go.

Pell is not a fool. I think he knew something was wrong, and I think he decided to trust me with it.

So he did what he could. He kept the house warm. He made coffee and soup and had it ready when I came in.

He took over the bottle calves in the kitchen, sitting on a chair, holding the bottle, because a bottle weighs less than ten pounds.

And at night, when I came in at three in the morning with my hands so cold I could not unbutton my coat, he would be awake, sitting up in the dark, and he would unbutton it for me.

I will remember that longer than I will remember the storm.

By the twentieth of February I had pulled forty-one calves. By the end of the month it was fifty-two.

Most were heifers. Forty-five first-calf heifers to that bull, and I pulled from thirty-eight of them.

The rest were older cows, a few with calves turned wrong, one with twins, and one old cow named Grandma who simply got tired and needed a hand.

Fifty-two calves pulled out of a hundred and forty cows is a lot, and anyone who ranches will tell you so. In a normal year we pull maybe a dozen.

But it was a big-calf bull and a hard storm, and I was not about to stand back and wait on any of them.

I lost three calves that month in all. The backwards heifer calf in the storm, a bull calf that was dead before it started, and one little steer that got chilled on the second night of the storm before I found him.