Part 4
“If we keep Knight and keep his daughters, yes.”
Sadie put the list down. Selling Knight, Lydia explained, would cover the bank’s demand and much of what remained on the line. Keeping him meant selling seven productive cows and paying for a collection attempt that might earn nothing.
“Fewer cows will help with the feed bill,” Lydia said. “But we have to pay Prairie Bend before we can sell semen.”
“What if nobody orders?”
“Then we stop spending on it. We keep a smaller herd. And if we can’t afford Knight, we find him a proper place.”
Sadie pressed her lips together. Lydia knew she wanted a promise the bull would stay forever; she wanted to make it herself.
“Warren’s place would be proper,” Sadie said at last.
“Yes.”
“You know that.”
Lydia turned the agreement so she could read it instead of looking at his name. “I know.”
They sat with that for a while. Outside the window, the yard light illuminated the repaired gate Lydia still lifted with her knee out of habit.
“I wanted him to come back and see what I’d done,” she said. “At the start. I thought about that more than I should have.”
Sadie looked toward the window. “I wanted that, too.”
Lydia moved the collection estimate between them. One corner caught beneath Sadie’s sleeve, and she waited for her daughter to free it before asking about the visit to Prairie Bend.
“Saturday?” Sadie asked.
“If it works. I haven’t confirmed.”
The girl checked her phone. She had promised to help Mrs. Webb with the younger chess club until eleven.
Lydia wrote AFTER ELEVEN beside the appointment. Sadie took off her coat and hung it on the back of the chair.
At Prairie Bend, they walked the visitor side of the pens with the manager. A handler stopped at a change in flooring and let a bull examine it before asking him forward again. Lydia watched until the animal had crossed.
She asked about fees and insurance. Sadie asked whether Knight could come home if he failed to settle in, and the manager showed them which charges would still apply.
Before they left, Sadie brought up a photograph on her phone. Knight’s muzzle filled most of the frame, with one ear and a strip of sky behind it.
“He comes over before I can get the picture,” she said. “And he likes the scratch brush. But not right on that split in his ear.”
The manager pulled an intake sheet from the rack. “Put that under handling. The feeding crew needs to know it, too.”
Sadie rested the form on the counter and began to write. Lydia stood beside her while she added the measured ration and the sound of the red can against the feed bin.
On the way home, Lydia stopped at a gas station where they could spread the papers across a booth. They ate hot sandwiches out of wrappers while Sadie checked the collection estimate. She found an annual storage fee Lydia had counted only once; Lydia corrected it and worked out the smaller reserve.
Lydia went back to the cow list. She knew which ones needed watching at calving, which would try a weak latch, which were likely to raise a good calf on poor grass. She would have to learn all that about Knight’s four heifers, and she couldn’t keep both groups on the grass she had.
“I think it’s worth trying,” she told Sadie. “With the spending limit we wrote down.”
Sadie traced Nell’s number with the capped end of her pen. “I don’t like this part.”
“Neither do I.”
“I’m still going to be upset when she goes. You know that, right?”
Lydia nodded. She folded the list only after Sadie had finished looking at it.
The next morning, Lydia called Warren. She thanked him for leaving the offer open and told him she was declining it. Her voice stayed ordinary, which surprised her more than his answer did.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“I’ve gone through it now.”
“All right. If you get him collected, send me the particulars.”
After hanging up, she paid the deposit to reserve Knight’s place, booked the required testing, and entered seven cows in the December sale.
On sale morning, Nell stood at the rear of the holding pen with her head over the back of another cow. She was carrying a calf from Knight’s second season. Lydia had kept her first heifer, who was waiting at home with the other three young females they’d selected.
Sadie stood beside Lydia at the rail. Neither had wanted to wait in the café, though Lydia had suggested it because she wanted coffee and because she knew exactly how the next hour would feel.
Their first three cows sold within the range Lydia had expected. Sadie wrote down the amounts as they went through. She used the same clipboard she’d carried into the calving shed the morning Nell’s heifer was born.
When Nell entered the ring, she paused near the auctioneer’s stand and lifted her head. Lydia knew the shape of her face better than she knew some of her neighbors’ faces. There was a gray patch beneath the jaw that had grown a little larger every winter.
The bidding started. A man across the ring raised two fingers, and a woman below Lydia’s section answered with a small movement of her card.
Sadie’s pencil stopped. Lydia could feel her daughter beside her, close enough that their coat sleeves touched.
She wanted to say they could pull the cow from the sale. Instead she stayed, watching, while the bidders made their decisions. When the auctioneer named the final amount, it was a fair price, better than the estimate Lydia had written beside Nell’s number.
The gate opened, and Nell followed the handler out at the same deliberate walk she’d used on the morning they put her with Knight. Sadie wrote down the price. The pencil point broke before she finished the last zero.
Lydia took a pen from her pocket and laid it on the clipboard. She didn’t offer anything else, and Sadie finished the number with it.
They remained until the last of their cows had sold. Later, the clerk passed the settlement across the counter and Lydia checked the deductions while Sadie held their gloves. After expenses, the proceeds would meet the bank’s requirement and leave enough for the collection costs they’d committed to, with a small reserve.
Outside, Lydia stopped beside the truck. She had left the engine running too many times that autumn while Sadie hurried to finish a chore.
“Do you want to go home?” she asked.
Sadie shook her head. “Not yet.”
They ate lunch in town. Lydia left the settlement in the glove compartment and let Sadie talk about the woman who had bought Nell, how she’d watched the cow’s feet before bidding, how she’d stayed near the exit to see her again afterward. Neither could know what Nell’s next years would be, but they had seen her leave sound and well cared for.
When they got home, Knight heard the truck and came up from his shelter. He bumped the feeder with his nose while Sadie fetched the red can. She stood holding it a moment before opening the feed bin.
“Wait,” she told him. “Just wait.”
She gave him his ration and went to check the heifers. Lydia carried the sale papers inside and made the bank payment herself, then brought the printed balance to the barn and put it where they both kept their records.
Two springs later, Nell’s daughter calved beside the same worn post her mother had rubbed almost white. The calf was a heifer by an unrelated sire Lydia had chosen for the young females. Sadie found them first and called from the lot, with the wind filling half the message.
Lydia came out carrying the scale sling. Knight stood beyond the double fence in his own paddock, watching without leaving his hay. He’d been home from Prairie Bend since the previous spring; his frozen semen had brought enough orders to cover the collection costs and leave some useful income, though less than Lydia had hoped. Warren paid the same price as the smaller producers.
The farm was still small. There were repairs on the kitchen calendar, and Lydia sometimes opened the account twice in an evening, hoping for a more comfortable balance the second time. Sadie, seventeen now, recognized the habit and no longer had to ask what was on the screen.
They secured the young cow behind the handling gate and checked her calf. The heifer objected to the sling, kicked one narrow leg free, and had to be settled again before the scale held steady.
“Seventy-one,” Lydia said.
Sadie wrote it down, smiling at the damp smudge the calf had left on her sleeve. After they released her, she stood beside her mother and watched the heifer find the udder.
A horn sounded from the house. Sadie’s ride to a chess meet had arrived, and her tournament bag was waiting by the back door.
“I can finish here,” she said.
“You’re going to be late.”
Lydia took the clipboard and waited until Sadie had put the gate chain through its keeper. Then she watched her daughter jog toward the house, pulling off her barn coat as she went.
The calf lost her hold on the teat and bumped along her mother’s belly, searching. Lydia rested the clipboard on the post and stayed until she found it again.