Cattle Rows: The Farmer’s Son by John Connell

My father and I would wake up in the middle of the cold western Nebraska winter night. Swaddle ourselves in sweatshirts and coveralls and work boots. Drive out to the snow-covered corn stalks, spotlighting the black Angus shapes, looking for a circling cow pawing at the ground to make a bed, a raised tail before the calf comes, or, if we were lucky, a baby wobbling on shaky legs that wasn’t there during the day.

When we weren’t lucky the mother couldn’t calve on her own. We’d herd her back to the corral and reach in to hook up straps or the calf puller and help her best we could. Failing our own efforts, we’d take her into the vet for more serious procedures. By the time we reached that point we usually were in a rage of frustration and stress and desperation over the time running out to save the life.

My relationship with my own father was never more strained than when we ran a cow-calf operation on his farm, specifically during calving season. Perhaps the sleep deprivation from checking the cows to see if they were in labor in the middle of the night during the thick of winter didn’t help. That I was a willful, reluctant farmhand surely did not.

When I read The Farmer’s Son I learned this wasn’t a unique experience. We read to learn about the world, but sometimes we have the rare fortune to read something that…