The Boy Who Bid on Her Steer

The boy on the bus

Twenty minutes before Maddie’s turn, Tyler Jessup had sold the grand champion steer.

I had watched that sale with everybody else. His steer was a big smoky crossbred that weighed 1,340 pounds and moved like he was on a string. When Dale said sold at sixteen dollars a pound, the barn came to its feet. It was the most a steer had ever brought at our fair.

Sixteen dollars on 1,340 pounds is $21,440. Tyler was fourteen. That money was meant for college, the way most of it is meant for college at a 4-H sale, and the whole county had bid it up partly because of who his father was.

His father was Rod Jessup. Rod is married to Curt Lange’s sister, and his feed and trucking business is the biggest buyer at our sale every single year. He sat on the top row with the co-op men, in the middle, in the same seat he always sat in.

I have to say something about Tyler here, because it matters.

Tyler rode my school bus from the time he was five. I drive the north route, forty-one miles every morning, and the Jessup place is the eleventh stop.

The first day of kindergarten he cried so hard that his mother almost took him back inside. I told her to let him sit in the seat right behind me, the one I keep empty for kids who need it. He sat there for most of a year, telling me about his grandpa’s cows.

By the time he was in fourth grade he had moved to the back with the bigger boys and stopped talking to me, which is the way of it. By junior high he was taller than me and said “morning, Mrs. Haas” and not one word more.

I still knew him, though. You know a child you drove for nine years. You know which ones help the little ones off the step when it is icy, and Tyler always did.