The Boy Who Bid on Her Steer

The vote

In March, my husband Ben had cast the only vote on the co-op board against buying eighty acres on the south edge of town for a new fertilizer plant. The eighty acres belonged to the family of the co-op manager, Curt Lange, and the price on it was close to double what ground had sold for in our county that winter.

Ben had sat on that board for six years. He is not a talker. He fixes things, he farms 640 acres of wheat and milo with his brother, and he does not get up in front of people unless something is wrong enough that it would bother him to sit still.

This bothered him. He read the appraisal at our kitchen table three nights running. Then he went to the meeting and said, in front of everybody, that he could not vote to pay the manager’s family twice what their ground was worth with the members’ money.

The vote was six to one. The deal went through anyway. Ben came home that night, sat on the edge of the bed with his boots still on, and wrote out his resignation on the back of a seed invoice.

“I won’t put my name next to it,” he told me. “If they want to do it, they can do it without me sitting there nodding.”

After that, things got cold in the small ways a town gets cold. The coffee crowd at the café quit saving him a chair. Our fuel bill at the co-op, which had always been carried to the end of the month like everybody else’s, suddenly came due on delivery.

Nobody said a word to his face. That is how it is done where we live. You do not argue. You just stop seeing a person.

I told myself it would wear off by summer. I told myself grown men would not take it out on a twelve-year-old girl with her first steer.

I was wrong about that, and I was sitting on the fourth row watching it.

Why I stayed in my seat

People have asked me since why I did not stand up. I have thought about it more than I would like to admit.

I could have stood up and said something to Dale, or to the top row. I had the words. I had been saying them in my head since the café chair went away in April.

But a mother hollering at an auctioneer in the middle of the 4-H sale is the only thing that barn would have remembered. Not the steer. Not the snub. Just Kristen Haas making a scene, and Maddie standing in the ring while I did it.

She would have carried that into seventh grade. Kids remember whose mother lost her temper at the fair. They remember it longer than they remember who won.

And the sale does not stop because a parent is upset. Once an animal is in the ring, it sells. Those are the rules, and they are good rules most years, because they keep the sale fair for everybody else.

So I sat on my hands. I am not proud of how hard that was. I watched my daughter’s chin start to shake, and I watched her grip that rope halter with both hands, and I did not move.

Ben was no help to me, and that was not his fault. He was down in the alley behind the ring with a sorting stick, the way every 4-H dad is during the sale. The fathers move the steers up the alley and through the gate, one after another.

If he had left that gate, a steer would have come loose into a crowd of children. He knew it and I knew it. I could see the top of his straw hat over the pipe rail, perfectly still.

I found out later he had heard every word of it. He told me he had his hand on the gate latch the whole time, and he kept telling himself that if he came into that ring, it would only prove to the top row that they had gotten to him.