Pen Fourteen
Part One: The Parking Lot
I found out in a parking lot.
It was a Thursday in late October, a little after four in the afternoon. I was at the MFA feed store in Clinton, Missouri, loading two sacks of mineral into the back of my truck. The wind was coming hard out of the northwest, the first real cold of the year, and the sky had that low gray look that means sleet by morning.
I had one sack on my shoulder and one in my arms when somebody said my name.
“Troy? Troy Teague?”
I turned around.
It was Glen Paxton. Seventy-something, bowlegged, with a white mustache and a Stetson older than me. He runs about eighty head of black cows south of Deepwater. I’d known him my whole life. He used to buy my dad coffee at the sale barn every Tuesday.
He walked up to me slow. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Sorry about Harlan,” he said.
I set the sack down slow.
I didn’t understand. I thought maybe Dad had gotten hurt. A cow had stepped on him, or he’d taken a fall in the alley. He was seventy-one. It happens.
“What do you mean, Glen?” I asked him.
Glen’s face changed.
He looked at me for a long time. Then he took his hand off my shoulder and took off his hat.
“Son,” he said. “Your dad passed. Better part of two weeks ago.”
I stood there in the parking lot of the MFA with the wind blowing grit in my eyes.
“That’s not right,” I said. “Somebody would’ve called me.”
Glen didn’t say anything.
“Somebody would’ve called,” I said again.
He told me what he knew. Heart attack. In his recliner. On a Sunday night. Charlene found him in the morning.
The funeral had been the following Saturday. At a little Baptist church over in Lincoln, Missouri, where Charlene’s people are from. Small service. Family only. He was buried in the cemetery behind the church, next to her first husband’s plot.
“I figured you boys knew,” Glen said. “I figured you were there.”
My father had been in the ground eleven days.
Nobody called me.
Nobody called my two brothers.
Part Two: Harlan
My dad was Harlan Teague.
He worked at the Clinton Livestock Auction for thirty years. Started there in 1994, when he was forty, after the dairy he’d been managing outside Windsor sold out to a big outfit from Kansas. He sorted cattle. That was his whole job. Thirty years of it.
Every Tuesday was sale day. He’d be at the barn by four in the morning, in the dark, in all weather. Ice storms. Hundred-degree heat. Didn’t matter.
Sorting is the hardest job at a sale barn and the one nobody notices.
Trucks and trailers back up to the loading chutes from three in the morning on. Cattle come off by the hundreds. Calves, yearlings, cull cows, bulls, pairs. Somebody has to sort them. Steers from heifers. Black from red. Light from heavy. Every consignor’s cattle kept straight so the checks go to the right people.
That was Dad. Down in the alleys between the pens, in a brown Carhartt coat and a feed-store cap, with a white fiberglass sorting stick in one hand. Opening gates. Closing gates. Calling numbers to the kid with the chalk.
Pen fourteen was his. The one by the scale house. He’d stand at that gate all day.
He was quiet. That’s what everybody said about him. Quiet and steady. He didn’t talk much and he didn’t need to. He could look at a pen of sixty calves and tell you which three were going to give you trouble.
He was good with cattle. Better than he was with people, maybe.
Better than he was with his sons.
There are three of us.
Lonnie’s the oldest. He’s forty-eight. He did twelve years in the Marines, two tours in Iraq, and came home and took a job in maintenance at Whiteman Air Force Base. He’s got a wife named Kris and two teenage boys. He’s the one who doesn’t say much. Like Dad.
I’m in the middle. I’m forty-four. I have a welding shop on the edge of Clinton. Trailer hitches, cattle gates, pipe fence. I run sixty cows on rented ground on the side. My wife’s name is Becca.
Keith’s the baby. Forty-one. He teaches agriculture at the high school in Warsaw and coaches FFA. He’s the one who talks. The one who cries at movies. Mom used to say Keith got all the feelings that were supposed to go to the rest of us.
Our mother died in 2006. Ovarian cancer. She was fifty-four.
Dad didn’t know what to do without her. None of us did.
Three years later, he married Charlene.
Part Three: Charlene
Charlene Hobbs was a widow from Lincoln, Missouri. She’d lost her husband to a farming accident in 2005. She had two grown daughters, Tammy and Rhonda, and a house in town with a white picket fence and a yard full of ceramic geese.
She met Dad at a church potluck. He told us about her on a Tuesday at the sale barn. He didn’t ask what we thought. He just said, “I’m getting married in June.”
She was nice enough at first. Polite. Brought a pie to Christmas.
But she didn’t want us around. Not really. You could feel it.
She’d answer the phone when we called and say Dad was busy. She’d say he was resting. She’d say they had plans that weekend. When we came by the house in Lincoln, she’d stand in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed until we left.
Dad never said anything about it. Dad never said anything about anything.
So we stopped coming by as much.
I’m not proud of that. None of us are.
We’d see him at the sale barn instead. On Tuesdays. If we had cattle to sell or we were buying, we’d stop by pen fourteen and talk to him over the gate for a few minutes. He’d tell us what heifers were bringing. We’d tell him about our kids.
That was about it.
The last time I saw him was the first Tuesday of October.
I’d brought in eight cull cows. Dad sorted them into pen fourteen. He looked at them over the gate.
“That old brockle-face is going to bring a dollar ten,” he said. “She’s fleshy.”
“Think so?”
“Know so,” he said.
She brought a dollar twelve.
I waved at him from the sale ring bleachers. He nodded once.
That was the last thing that passed between us. A nod across a sale ring. 