When We Walked the Farm Together

My first love was red and white Hereford splotch. Her mother dead in the lot, she was all legs and bellow that blustery summer night Pa lugged her into the porch. My older sister, Shanda, and I named her with our nine- and six-year-old hearts: Lovey. We vowed to be her family now.

Twice a day we mixed powdery milk replacer with hot water and poured it into a bottle with a large, orange nipple. Mom held our hands tight around the jug, her legs pillars against our backs, as Lovey sucked and yanked at the teat, tossing us off balance with a jerk of her head. It broke our hearts to hear her bawl afterward, crying for more. Crying for company.

One day she’d outgrown the porch, so we moved her out to the cattle lot just east of the house. Shanda and I missed her, missed her being so close – a bond our parents embraced with long detours into the muddy lot, which kept us from the turkey shed and the completion of our chores. They would let her loose in the yard, us kids walking through the grass with her trailing just behind, butting her nose into a leg. The salt on our skin was a prized treat. If I held my hand out straight, she’d suck my fingers, her purple tongue scraping my palm, saliva oozing between my knuckles and dribbling onto the ground.

We never had horses, and that didn’t matter. Lovey accepted the role. Mom and Pa would hoist us one at a time onto her back as Lovey walked around the house. She never bolted or bucked, simply followed the parents around hedge trees and tractor attachments, our fingers gripping the short, coarse hair of her neck.

A few months old, Lovey was Shanda’s partner at the county 4-H fair. Together they won top prize in the bucket calf showing and Mom tied the huge purple ribbon to Lovey’s stall in the cattle barn. Their friendship was evident as they circled the inside of the show barn: when Shanda stepped forward, Lovey followed. She never needed the harness looped behind her ears and around her nose. She followed her girls everywhere.

Two years passed, and one summer day while we bounced along to the Doug cartoon theme song, the folks fetched Shanda and me from the living room couch.

“Come out and say goodbye to the cows.”

It was that time of year: Pa was taking cattle to the sale. Shanda and I ran to the paneled trailer, granted final waves and pets to the soggy noses.

We stumbled to a stop, confused. There at the back, a familiar pink nose, not the Angus black of the others.

At our touch, her wailing began. Like she knew what was happening, like she knew she was about to leave her family behind.

“Pa, no! You can’t take Lovey away!” Shanda shook the trailer door hitch, tried to rattle its rusty hinges loose while I yanked Pa’s arm to stay put, don’t get in the driver’s seat.

No nonsense, The Farmer lectured over our tears: “She’s a good heifer, she’ll give us good money.”

Lovey’s bellows shook the trailer walls. I yanked harder – dragged Pa’s hand to the ground with me, my core heavy with grief. Shanda cradled Lovey’s head through the panels. Bovine mucus and human saline.

Mom turned to Pa, and I watched her composure fissure.

“Craig. Don’t sell her.”

And so Lovey remained on the farm. She was there while my sister flourished in her teenage athleticism – waiting at the pasture gate for a passing pet as Shanda logged miles on dusty back roads. She was there as I whirled through dance lessons – watching me from behind the fence as I rehearsed in the driveway, her eyes following sliding feet and waving arms. She was there for my eighteenth birthday party – calmly accepting the hands of the town kids who’d never felt the tight curls between a cow’s ears. She was there in the pasture when Shanda and I came back from college on the weekends – hollering an answer to Pa’s dinner call, “Here girls!” as she led the herd toward food and us.

My first year away from home, living in Minneapolis, I got the call from Pa.

“I’m taking Lovey to the sale next month.”

A pause. I asked him why. He said she’s old. Got eighteen years on her. She hadn’t calved the past few years and her eyes are going bad.

“Why you gotta sell her? Can’t she just stay on the farm until she dies?”

Yes, but that requires money. Over a thousand dollars for the Dead Wagon, the rendering service, to come pick her up after the fact. Not to mention the money he’d lose buying feed to support a cow already on the way out.

Though the impulse was there, I couldn’t find the words to retaliate. Poor Pa. He always buries our pets – that’s part of the job when you’re a parent – and I knew he couldn’t face this one. I could hear the truth slipping through his words.

I also knew a heifer, no matter how long she’d been with the family, was still livestock. And we didn’t have the luxury to keep livestock that wasn’t profitable.

So we finished the conversation. I curled into bed and clutched a pillow to my chest, buried my face in it; imagined my sister doing the same in her bedroom in Atlanta, Georgia.

For almost twenty years, Lovey lived with us on the farm. Always there for hello’s come feeding time. Always a calf between her legs, ready for introduction. Leader of the herd, the heifers followed her trot from lot to pasture, creek to barn, water hole to Pa’s dinner time holler.Home radiating red and white, staccato bellow, head twist and ear flap. Coarse hair between wide brown eyes.

Shanda and I were there to save her those long years ago. Then, when Pa took her from the pasture that final time, her womb tired and vacant too long, we weren’t there. We did nothing.

How painful it is to know her now as a dead thing.

How painful it is to know our betrayal: choosing to abandon the farm, the land grown stifling and mundane; choosing to forget its importance.