PART 1: The Funeral Nobody Called Us About
I found out my father was dead while standing in the parking lot of a tractor supply store in Salina, Kansas. It was a gray Thursday afternoon in late October, and I was lifting a bag of cattle mineral into the bed of my truck when an old rancher named Dwight Colby walked up to me wearing an expression I couldn’t read.
Dwight had known my family for forty years, and he was normally the kind of man who greeted everybody with a wisecrack about the weather or the cattle market. That day, though, he didn’t joke at all. He set a hand on my shoulder and spoke quietly, as if he were afraid the words might break something.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Cole. Everett was one of the good ones.”
I set the bag down and stared at him. My first thought was that Dad had been hurt, because at seventy-two he still spent his Tuesdays around cattle, and I pictured a kicking cow or a slick alley at the sale barn. I asked Dwight which hospital they had taken him to.
Dwight took off his hat and turned it slowly in his hands. The look on his face changed from sympathy to something closer to alarm, and I felt the ground shift under my boots before he said another word.
“Son, your father passed away almost two weeks ago. I figured you boys already knew.”
He told me what he had heard. Dad had suffered a heart attack at home, and his second wife, Darlene, had found him the next morning. She had arranged a small service at a Methodist church in Abilene, and he had been buried in the cemetery beside it the previous Saturday. It had been called a private family gathering, which was why so few people from the livestock world had been there.
“That can’t be right. Somebody would have called me.”
Dwight said nothing, and his silence told me he had only now realized something was terribly wrong. My father had been in the ground for eleven days, and neither I nor either of my brothers had received so much as a text message.
My name is Cole Whitaker, and I’m forty-five years old. I run a diesel repair shop on the edge of Salina, where I fix grain trucks, rebuild trailer axles, and keep half the county’s farm equipment running. On the side I keep a small herd of cows on rented grass north of town.
My older brother, Ross, is forty-nine. He did eleven years in the Army National Guard and now works for the county road department. Our younger brother, Micah, is forty-one and teaches agriculture and shop at a high school in Minneapolis, Kansas, where he coaches the livestock judging team.
We grew up on a small dairy farm outside Assaria, raised by Everett and Ruth Whitaker. Mom died of breast cancer in 2007 after twenty-seven years of marriage, and it flattened Dad in a way none of us knew how to help with. He just went quiet, then quieter.
Two years later he married Darlene Pruitt, a widow from Abilene with two grown daughters, Brenda and Shelly. She was polite to us at first, but little by little she made it harder to reach our father. When we called, he was always resting, or busy, or out. When we drove over, nobody seemed to be home.
Eventually we stopped trying so hard. We settled for a few minutes with Dad each Tuesday at the Smoky Hill Livestock Exchange, where he had worked for thirty-one years. He wasn’t a talker, but he was steady, and nobody on earth could sort cattle like he could. Every Tuesday he was there before sunrise at gate nine, wearing his brown canvas work coat and carrying a white fiberglass sorting stick.
The last time I saw him was the first Tuesday in October. I had brought seven old cows to sell, and without a word Dad guessed the price one of them would bring, then gave me a single nod across the sale ring. I thought nothing of it. I never imagined that nod would be our goodbye.
That night I called Micah, who looked up the obituary online. He began reading it out loud in a steady voice, but the steadiness drained away as he reached the paragraph about survivors. It listed Darlene, her two daughters, and her grandchildren. There was no mention of Ross, Micah, or me, and no mention of our mother or Dad’s own grandchildren.
In under a hundred words, everything our father had been before Darlene had been wiped away. I called Ross next, expecting him to be as stunned as I was, but his voice was flat and hard when he answered.
“Cole, this wasn’t an oversight. She knew exactly what she was doing, and I think I can prove it.”
