Theresa and I live on seven acres on the Elba road. A house, a barn, and two lots we bought the year we got married.
I parked the truck beside the barn.
She came out in her coat and stood looking at it.
“Well,” she said. “It’s paid for.”
“It’s the only thing out there that is, probably.”
I meant it as a joke.
I didn’t know yet that I’d just said my father’s exact sentence.
The harder part came the next morning.
I had forty cows of my own. I’d built that herd from six bred heifers Dad sold me at cost when I was twenty-nine. They’d always run on his creek pasture in the summer and his cornstalks in the winter. That was the deal between us. I drew a wage. I ran my cows on his grass. And I never once asked to see the books.
Now it was Phil’s grass. Phil’s stalks.
I hooked up the stock trailer and started hauling my cows home. Eight at a time.
It was the middle of calving season. You do not move cows in the middle of calving unless you absolutely have to.
Phil drove out from Omaha that Saturday and found me loading the fourth trip.
He stood at the lot gate in a brand-new canvas coat.
“You don’t have to do this. Leave them where they are.”
“They’re not yours to feed, Phil.”
“I’m not asking you to pay.”
“I know you’re not. That’s the trouble with it.”
He put both his hands on the top rail of the gate. He has our mother’s hands. Long in the fingers.
“What are you going to do for grass?”
“Rent some.”
“Wade.”
“I’ll rent some.”
I latched the trailer gate and drove out past him.
In the mirror, he was still standing at the rail. Behind him was the house. And in the kitchen window was the yellow curtain our mother hung in 1988.
I rented a half section of hill pasture north of Elba from a widow named Mrs. Nielsen. I’d helped her husband work calves for years before he passed.
Sixty-five dollars a pair, per month, for five months. Thirteen thousand dollars.
I shook her hand at her kitchen table. She made me take home a loaf of rye bread.
“Your dad was hard,” she said. “But he was honest.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “He was both.”
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