Part 5
“Come see,” Nell said. “I’ll show you the records. Then you decide.”
Ida Harlan came on a Saturday, in a dusty sedan with a cattle-guard rattle in the muffler. She was sixty-three, with a braid gone the color of fence wire and hands that had obviously pulled calves. She didn’t say anything about the bull at first. She had Nell rattle a bucket in the far corner of the pen so she could watch him travel, and she watched his hind feet land in the tracks of his front ones, all the way across and all the way back.
Then she sat at the kitchen table for two hours.
Nell laid everything out. The bill of sale in its freezer bag, with CULL, NO VALUE and $2.40 in Carter Ambrose’s hand. Annie’s three phone pictures from the ditch in December, and her notes from the night of the coffee can.
Wes brought out his spreadsheet, every Sunday since the second week, and the photographs from the same gatepost lined up in a grid so you could watch the calf fill in. Then Marisol’s burn plan, and his clip plots. Last, Hollis’s tally book from 1987, open to the page with KEEP on it.
Ida went through all of it in order, asking only short questions. She asked Wes how he dried the clippings, and when he told her, she nodded as if that settled something.
“The breeding put the bone in him,” Ida said finally. “Bone’s cheap. Grass isn’t.” She laid her finger on Wes’s graph and looked over at him. “What would you want for a copy of this?”
Wes glanced at his mother. “It’s not for sale.”
Ida nodded once, as if he’d passed something.
“Then why are you here and not at his sale?” Nell asked.
“I’m going to his sale,” Ida said. “I want to see who buys those six cows.”
That night Nell couldn’t sleep. At four in the morning she was at the kitchen table with the catalog, the account balance, and the transmission estimate from the shop in Council Grove. She had thirty-one hundred dollars set aside for the transmission. At by-the-pound prices, aged cull cows of that size would bring something like nine hundred to twelve hundred a head, depending on who was bidding.
She could buy two. Maybe three, if the packer buyers weren’t hungry.
Wes found her there at six. He read the catalog upside down the way he always did and then read her face.
“You’re going to buy them,” he said.
“I’m thinking about it.”
He went to his room and came back with the envelope from his 4-H savings account, the statement folded inside. Four hundred and twelve dollars, years of birthday money and two summers of mowing the church lot.
“No,” Nell said.
“It’s my project too.” He didn’t raise his voice. “You told me what I did with the coffee can, and I fixed it. This is the other half. They’re his family.”
She sat there looking at her son, who had grown two inches since December while she was busy measuring the bull. Then she took the envelope.
The week before the sale, she drove to the Ambrose headquarters after her route and found Tucker at the working pens, alone, fixing a hinge. She told him she was going to bid on the cull lots, and she asked him whether, if anyone asked him straight out, he would say who had written up the calf as cull.
Tucker kept working on the hinge. “I’ve got a mortgage and two girls in braces, Nell.”
“I know.”
“He’d fire me by Monday.”
“I know that too.” She didn’t push him any further. She had come to ask, not to make him do it. “I’m not asking you to stand up and say anything. I’m asking what you’d say if somebody asked.”
He didn’t answer. She left him there.
The Ambrose Prairie fall production sale was held the third Saturday in October at the Alder Creek Livestock Auction, and the sale barn was fuller than Nell had seen it since the drought sell-off in 2011. There were trucks from Nebraska and Oklahoma and Colorado parked on both sides of the highway. Carter had catered barbecue. There was a projector screen above the auctioneer’s block, and when Nell came in with Wes and Annie, it was showing Two-Forty grazing on her burned ground, under the Ambrose logo.
Ida Harlan was in the third row. She didn’t look at Nell.
Carter opened the sale himself from the block, standing beside the auctioneer, and he was very good. He talked about stewardship and heritage, about the old Cedar Bluff blood and its toughness, about a young bull already turning heads in the county. He never said Nell’s name. He gestured once at the screen.
The good bulls sold first and sold high. On every lot the auctioneer glanced down at Tucker at the out gate, and Tucker read the consignor’s notes off his tablet in the same flat voice: birth date, sire, weaning weight. The yearling heifers sold the same way. Toward the end of the afternoon, when half the crowd had gone out for barbecue or was loading trailers, the ringman ran in the first of the cull cows.
She was huge and plain and twelve years old if she was a day, with a broken horn and a shaggy winter coat coming in, and she walked into the ring and stood there like a fencepost, unbothered by the noise. Tucker read the note without looking up: aged cow, Kessler line, selling by the pound.
The packer buyer from Hutchinson opened the bidding.
Nell raised her card.
There was a small stir in the seats. People knew who she was. She heard her name passed down a row behind her, and somebody said “dead letter,” and somebody else told him to shut up. The packer buyer went up. Nell went up. The packer buyer looked at her the way you’d look at a dog standing in the road, then went up again, and she stayed with him, and he dropped out. The auctioneer knocked the cow down to her at a price almost two hundred dollars more than she should have paid.
When the second cow came in, the auctioneer turned to the gate the way he had all afternoon. “Tucker, anything from the consignor?”
Tucker had the tablet in his hand. He looked at it, then at Carter in the consignor’s box, then up at the screen where Two-Forty was still grazing under the Ambrose logo.
“Aged cow, Kessler line,” he read. Then he lowered the tablet. “She’s a full sister to that bull’s mother. I sorted him off as a cull last November. I wrote it on him myself.”
Carter didn’t reach for the microphone. Nobody on the bleachers was looking at the screen anymore. They were looking at the woman in the fourth row with her card still up.
Nell bid on the second cow and got her. The packer buyer bid harder on the third, and she got that one too, but by then she had spent the transmission money and most of Wes’s envelope, and when the fourth cow came in she had nothing left. She sat with the card on her knee and watched it go to Hutchinson. She watched the fifth go the same way.
The sixth cow came in, and Nell didn’t raise her card, because there was nothing behind it.
Ida Harlan raised hers.
Ida didn’t look over. She bid the cow up past the packer’s limit, bought it, and then, as the auctioneer was knocking it down, turned to the man beside her and said, loud enough to carry two rows, “Put her in with the Varga cows. I’m told that’s where this line actually gets fed.”
In the wagon, Nell found she couldn’t get the key into the ignition. Wes dug the route sheet out from under the seat and started reading her Monday’s box count out loud, road by road, the way she used to read it to him when he couldn’t sleep, until her hands lay still on the wheel.
Carter Ambrose came across the gravel then. He didn’t hurry. He set his palm flat on her door and leaned down to the open window. “You bought three cows today,” he said, “and you sold my whole sale. Somebody’s going to pay for that…”
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