The Calves I Raised Alone

Three out of a hundred and nineteen born in February.

My grandfather used to say that a rancher who has never lost one is a rancher who has never calved.

I thought about that a lot. I thought about him a lot, out in the shed in the dark.

My hands cracked open across the knuckles from the cold and the iodine.

My back hurt in a way I did not know a back could hurt. I lost eleven pounds that I did not have to lose.

And I went to church on two Sundays out of four, in the back pew with straw still on my boots, and nobody said one word about it.

A neighbor woman left a pan of scalloped potatoes in our mudroom with no note, and I knew from the dish whose it was and never said a word either.

Around the first of March Thorvald came back.

It was a clear morning, still and blue and bitter cold, and I was out in the lot with a heifer who had calved in the night on her own.

He walked over from his pickup through the snow, and he stood at the gate.

“I hear you’ve been doing it yourself,” he said.

“I have.”

“That’s a lot of cattle for one woman.”

“It’s a lot of cattle for anybody,” I said.

He looked at the calves in the lot. There were a lot of them by then, black calves bucking in the sun with their tails up.

I saw him counting, the way cattlemen do without meaning to.

“The offer stands,” he said. “Ten dollars. I’ll take over the feeding tomorrow.”

“We’re past the worst of it,” I said. “We’ll be all right.”

He nodded slowly. “And the rent?”

“The rent is what it says on the lease,” I said. “Thirty-five. Through December, like always.”

He stood there a while longer. I want to say he looked sorry, but I do not think he did.

I think he looked surprised. I do not think anyone had told him no in a long time.

“Pell know about this?” he asked.

“Pell had a heart attack,” I said. “Pell knows what he needs to know.”

He went back to his truck. I watched him go, and then I turned back to my heifer and her calf, and I did not let myself think about it again until October.

Pell was cleared to work light in April and full work in June.

His doctor in Billings, the one with the clean hands, said his heart looked like a much younger man’s, and told him to keep walking every day, which he did, out to the pasture and back.

I went back to the dental office in April. Nell had kept my chair, as she said she would.

On my first morning back she had a coffee cake on the counter in the break room and the whole office signed a card with a cartoon cow on it.

The calves grew. They grew the way calves do on good grass in a wet spring, which is fast.

By June they were fat and slick and mean, the way you want them. By August the steer calves were pushing five hundred pounds.

We weaned the first of September, which is earlier than some, and we kept them in the lot on hay and a little grain for forty-five days.