Page 12 of Devoted

Owen picked up his change and his bag and went out to the truck, and sat in it a minute in the cold with his jaw set, doing arithmetic he’d already done twice that morning.

A dead man’s line, and the eleven years his daughter had kept it going alone, sold by the pound to a packer because nobody ran them through a chute with a set of papers.

He started the truck.

His father caught him at the scale house that afternoon, which was not an accident.

"Walk with me," Clay said, and they walked, down the alley of the home place with the feed truck groaning somewhere behind the barns and the cold coming down early. His father talked about the rain that hadn’t come and the heifers that had, and then he arrived where he’d been going the whole time, the way he always did, without hurrying.

"I called Nathan Greene this morning," Clay said. "About the Bateman place. Told him when the offers open, ours is on the top of the stack."

Owen kept walking. "Ours."

"It’s the first ground on that side to come up in twenty years, and it won’t come up again in my lifetime." His father said it the way he said everything about land, patient, certain, a man reading off numbers only he could see. "Good grass. Good water under it. It runs against your four sections the whole west line, and a place that size folds into this operation like it was drawn for it." He glanced over. "Your program could carry another sixty cows tomorrow if it had the country. Now it’ll have the country."

"And the herd?"

"Sale barn. We run our own genetics, we’re not buying a dead man’s guesswork." Clay said it without malice, a man pricing cattle, which is all it was. "Pens’ll come out. That pipe’s worth more as pipe."

The alley went on being an alley. The feed truck groaned up the far side and somebody whistled at a dog, and Owen walked beside his father with his hands in his coat and said nothing, because everything in him that wanted to talk had no business existing, and he knew exactly what it was, and he was not going to hand it to his father in a cattle alley.

Her kitchen window would look out at Wainwright iron. Her daddy’s pens would go down the road on a gooseneck as scrap, and his own cows would walk that grass the rest of his life, and every April for the next thirty years he’d be a man running a bull on country a woman used to stand on, and he’d have bought it.

"Something wrong with it?" Clay said.

"It’s a clean buy."

"That’s what I said." His father looked at him a moment longer than the answer had earned, and let it go, and turned back up the alley. At the scale house he stopped. "Your cousin’s home end of the month, they’re saying. Burchall’s bringing him stateside." A beat. "John’s already killed the fatted calf twice."

Owen nodded, and his father went in, and Owen stood in the alley a minute with that one too.

Seven years. He’d be glad to have him home, and he’d shake his hand and mean it. The part of him that wasn’t glad was nobody’s business, and he’d been keeping it nobody’s business since he was seventeen.

He had cattle to feed. He fed them.

Saturday he loaded the trailer with panels he didn’t need and drove the nine miles east, because she was never going to ask, and he’d quit waiting for things that were never going to happen sometime around Thursday.

He heard the Bateman pens before he saw them. A cow bawling, steady and put-upon. When he came around the barn there was the cow, a big roan-sided matron of Mick’s breeding with her head through a gap in the panels she’d made herself, and there was Olivia, in coveralls and a wool cap, alone, trying to be three people.

She had a green heifer where she wanted her and no way to hold her there. She had a gate that needed a man on it, a flank that needed another one, and two hands total, and she was working all three jobs in rotation, fast, competent, furious, losing ground to a system her daddy had built for three people, back when the place had three people on it.

Owen stood by his truck and made himself watch for one minute so he’d say it right.

"Morning," he said then.

She got the gate chained before she turned around. Her face was red from the work and the cold, a piece of hair stuck to her jaw where it had come out from under the cap, and she looked at him, then at the trailer full of panels he had no explanation for, and got there ahead of him the way she got everywhere.

"No," she said.

"You haven’t heard it."

"I’ve known you thirty years, Owen. You’ve got a trailer full of no reason to be here. I can hear it from here." She pulled her glove off with her teeth and pushed the hair back under the cap. "Say it anyway, so I can say no to the whole of it."

So he said it, flat, front to back, the way he’d built it on the drive over.

"You’ve got a hundred and sixty head to sell by the end of May, and right now they’re worth kill price, because no buyer pays real money for cattle nobody’s looked at. Wes Fewell said so at Earl’s yesterday to anybody who’d stand still, and for once in his life Wes is right. To get their worth, every cow on this place goes through a chute between now and then. Preg-checked. Mouthed for age. Sorted into lots that make sense, papers pulled together, hauled in batches. That’s ten working days if the weather holds, and it’s a three-man job, and this outfit has got one schoolteacher and a cane." He let that sit exactly one second. "My pens are nine miles west. Good chute, good alley, scale. I’ve got the trailer, and Tuesdays after four, and Saturdays. We haul them over in batches and work them and haul them back, and come May you sell a papered herd in sorted lots for what your daddy’s breeding is worth, instead of handing your daddy’s line, and the eleven years you kept it going by yourself, to a packer by the pound."

The cow bawled again, into the quiet.