The Calves I Raised Alone

Gus Ramsdell was calling the sale that day. He has called the Glendive sale for most of thirty years, and he knows every family in three counties and what their grandfathers ran.

He is fifty-nine, with a voice like gravel in a bucket and a laugh you can hear across the parking lot.

He came by our pens before the sale started, the way he does, and leaned on the rail and looked at our steers a long time.

“Pell,” he said. “These are good calves.”

“Thank Larkin,” Pell said. “She calved them.”

Gus looked at me. He had heard. Everyone in that county had heard by then, the way things get around. “All of them?” he said.

“Most of them,” I said. “The cows did a lot of the work.”

He laughed and slapped the rail and went back up to his box.

Our steers sold in the middle of the afternoon, after lunch, when the barn was fullest.

Bright October sun was coming in through the big doors at the back where the trucks unload, and the dust hung in it.

Gus had seen to it that we sold at the right time.

A good auctioneer knows when the buyers are warm, and he had saved our calves for when the seats were packed and the order buyers had full books.

Pell and I went down to the ring. Gus waved us in at the gate, the way he does for older families who have sold there for generations, and we stood inside the ring by the rail while the ring men brought our steers in.

Pell stood beside me. It was the first time he had stood in that ring since his father died, and his hand found mine and held it so tight I could feel his heartbeat in his palm, steady and strong.

I looked up into the bleachers. Thorvald was sitting three rows up on the south side, with his hat in his lap.

His own calves had sold an hour before, and I had heard the price. Three seventy-eight.

The ring men walked our steers around once so the buyers could see them, black and even and slick, all of a size. Then Gus started the bid.

He started at three-sixty, and it went up the way a good bid goes up, fast at first and then slower, two buyers in the front row going back and forth with their fingers.

Three-ninety. Three-ninety-five. Four even. Four-oh-five.

The barn got quiet. You could hear the calves shuffling in the sawdust. You could hear a baby fussing somewhere in the back.

Four-ten.

Gus held his hand up. He looked at both buyers, and the second one shook his head, and Gus brought his hand down on the board.

Then he leaned into his microphone.

“Folks,” he said. “That’s four dollars and ten cents a pound on five-fifty steers. That is the top of the day, and I believe it’s the top of the year in this barn.”

People started to murmur. Gus held up his hand again.

“And I’ll tell you something about these calves,” he said. “These calves were born the month Pell Odegaard was in the hospital in Billings with his heart. And every one of them that needed a hand came out of their mamas into the hands of his wife. Larkin Odegaard pulled fifty-two calves by herself in the worst February we’ve had in ten years.”