He came out every three weeks

The church lot takes me an hour and ten if the grass is dry. It's a Cub Cadet I bought used off a fella down at Cairo, and it burns oil now. The board puts forty dollars in an envelope for me every month and I've told them twice to quit doing that.

We're sixty miles west of Grand Island. You go out past where the Bohemian hall stood and it's another eleven miles after that. Dad had this quarter and the one north of it. The ground along the road was Schuett ground before any of us.

Corn was two forty in the fall of '79. Two thirty-five. It come up later in the winter. I was second man on the scale at the elevator then and you write a number on a ticket four hundred times in a day.

I ran forty-one head of Holsteins out here besides the job. Carol and I had been married three years by then.

I'll tell you how the breeding goes, because people don't know it anymore. A cow comes back into heat every twenty-one days. Some of them's nineteen and some is twenty-three. You set your mind on twenty-one and you're close enough. What you're watching for is the one that'll stand still when another one rides her. That's your sign, and you've got about eighteen hours off of it, and the book says breed her twelve hours on. So you catch it early and you call it in before eight, and she's bred that same afternoon. With forty-one head there was always one coming due.

The co-op out of Hastings ran the technicians, and they laid the routes out by the roads instead of by the towns, which is the sensible way to do it. The fella that had our end started Tuesdays at Ostermann's at seven, because Wendell milked early and would raise hell otherwise. Then he came down the Rock Creek road to Pavelka, then Hruby, then he jogged east for the two Kroeger brothers, then us at about a quarter to eleven. Fridays he ran the whole thing backwards, so we'd be a little after nine. If you called in late he'd work you in on the end of the day, and he'd be sitting out in the yard at four in the afternoon with the engine still running.

He drove a Scout, white over red, with the tank strapped in the back of it. Liquid nitrogen tank, about so high. He'd get the lid up and there'd be fog come up out of it. He had a green Stanley thermos on the seat. He wouldn't take a cup in the house, and I quit asking him after a while. Two counties over is where he was from. Little town, I won't say it. He'd say the name of it like he was apologizing for it. There's not much left up there now either.

We were on a party line then, five families. Four. The two Kroeger places was on the one line between them. You did not say a thing on it you didn't want repeated at the Farmers Union, and you'd hear the click when Elda Kroeger picked up. There was a payphone bolted on the outside wall of the Sinclair in town, up by the air hose, and I hauled tickets in most afternoons anyway.

The second spring he was coming out here he kissed me in the milk house with the compressor running, and after a while we did more than that. Then he washed his hands in the sink and said they were supposed to get rain out in the Sandhills.

That's about all I'm going to say on that end of it.

He'd let me pick the bull myself out of the catalog instead of putting in whatever the co-op was pushing that year, and we'd stand at the tailgate with the book open on it. His right thumb was flat. He done that in a hay elevator when he was a boy. He had a brother down by Ravenna that went broke in '82 and he talked about that a good deal, and the brother went out to Colorado after that and I believe he done all right out there. You'd notice the thumb on him when he was turning pages. When he laughed he didn't make any noise.

Carol come down the one time while we were at the tailgate. She wanted the scissors we kept in the milk house. She asked him did he want a cup and he said no, same as always.

I'd be up on the scale house steps on a Tuesday morning with a ticket in my hand and I'd know.

Four years of it. Seventy-nine on through the end of eighty-three.

Then the co-op reorganized. That was the winter going into '84, and they merged with the outfit at Ord and redrew everything on the county line to cut windshield time, which on paper is money. His end went north. We got a kid named Terry, who was fine at the job, no complaint. Terry drove a Ranger and he didn't carry a thermos, he'd stop at the Sinclair and get a pop.

I thought about that payphone a fair amount. I'll tell you I stood at it one time with the quarters already in my hand.

The next thing I've got is Carol's mother coming to us, and that's four years on. She came in '88 and stayed eleven. She died in the home at Aurora in '98 and I was the one that took the call. Our boy went to Kearney. The girl didn't go anywhere and she's the one that calls. The elevator got bought twice and I stayed on through both and took the retirement in 2003. The hip started up around '06. I've got the hearing aid now and I turn it down at family dinners, and I've told them I do it.

In March of 2011 Carol had the Hastings paper open on the table when I came in from chores. She'd been reading on the school bond and she wanted to tell me the number. Then she got up for the pot, and I turned the page over and read down the obituaries, which is most of what I read now.

He was seventy-one. Thirty-one years with the breeding service, it said, and twenty-some with the volunteer fire. Survived by his wife and by four kids, and they ran the grandkids by name the way they do, which took up half of it. There was the little photograph with it and it was him, only gone heavy through the face. The name on it was Duane Novotny.

I knew him.

Carol set the pot down and said the bond thing again, and I said they'd never pass it out here. The visitation was Thursday at the funeral home in Hastings. I didn't go to it. It snowed on that Wednesday and I had Lenore Spilker's drive to open and then Bernice's, and between the two that's a morning gone.

Twenty-one days is what she comes back on. I said that already. Some of them's nineteen.

I put that section on the seat of the pickup and it rode around out there a good while. Then I don't know. Burn barrel, probably.

The deck belt on the Cub Cadet is slipping. I ordered one off the same fella at Cairo and he's got to bring it up from Grand Island.