The Service We Held at the Sale Barn

The Call That Came Late

I found out my father was dead eleven days after they put him in the ground. The man who told me was Dewey Prater.

Dewey had sold cattle through our barn since before I was born. He caught me in the parking lot of the Orscheln’s in Sedalia with a sack of mineral tubs in my arms.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said he was sorry about Harlan. I set the mineral down on the tailgate.

I asked him what he meant. I had talked to my father three weeks back, and he had sounded tired but fine.

“Troy,” Dewey said. His face changed when he saw that I did not know. “Your dad passed. Better part of two weeks ago. I figured you boys buried him.”

I stood there in the cold with my ears ringing. I am thirty-four years old. I have buried a grandmother and a good dog and a neighbor I loved.

I had never once felt the ground go soft under me the way it did in that gravel lot. The mineral sack slid off the tailgate and I did not pick it up.

My father was Harlan Dean Beckett. He had worked the alleys at the Pettis County Livestock Auction for thirty years.

He sorted and penned cattle every Tuesday. He never missed a sale day in his life that I knew of.

And nobody had called me. Nobody had called my brothers.

“Who buried him, Dewey,” I said. It did not come out like a question. It came out flat, like a man reading a sign.

Dewey looked at his boots. “I heard it was small. Just the church. I’m sorry, son. I truly thought you knew.”

I drove the forty minutes home with the radio off. I do not remember a single mile of that road.

I called Lonnie first, because he is the oldest and the steadiest. He did not believe me either.

I heard him sit down hard in a kitchen chair. I heard his wife ask him what was wrong.

Then I called Keith, the baby of us. Keith did not say anything for a long time.

Then he said one word I will not write down, and he hung up, and he called me back thirty seconds later crying.