The Steer Money Was Always Hers

What That Money Was

You have to understand what that twelve thousand dollars was, or none of the rest makes any sense.

Kenzie started in 4-H when she was nine, the spring after her mother, Jill, was diagnosed.

Jill had shown cattle herself as a girl in Lyon County, and she wanted to see Kenzie lead one into the ring before she couldn’t.

She did see it. That first steer was a black baldy Kenzie named Pickles, and he weighed about thirteen hundred pounds on fair day and dragged my nine year old across the show ring like a kite.

Jill sat in a lawn chair by the wash rack with a blanket over her knees in July.

She cried the whole time and told everybody in the barn it was the allergies. Jill passed that November.

So the steers were never just steers. Every spring Kenzie bought a calf, mostly from a man named Roger out by Sanborn who gave her a fair price because he had known Jill since high school.

Every morning before school she was out in the barn at five thirty. She walked them, washed them, blew them dry, and set their hair.

Every summer she took one to the O’Brien County Fair in Primghar and sold it at the market sale on the last night.

Those steers brought anywhere from about twenty six hundred to just under four thousand dollars, depending on the year and on which businesses in town were bidding.

One year the co-op and the implement dealer got into it over her and pushed it way up.

Out of every check, Kenzie paid me back for the calf and the feed and the vet. She insisted on it from the first year.

She wrote it all down in a green spiral notebook that still sits on the shelf above the barn sink.

The first two checks, the summers she was nine and ten, went to the hospital in Sioux Falls. That was her idea. I tried to talk her out of it and lost.

The year she turned eleven, she started keeping what was left. She put it in savings. It came to about two thousand dollars a year, six years running.

Twelve thousand and some change, with the little bit of interest that a small-town savings account pays.

That was six years of five thirty mornings. It was six years of selling an animal she had raised and named and cried over in the trailer on the way home.

It was the money for her first year at Iowa State, where she wanted to study animal science.

And it was, in a way nobody else at that table knew how to see, the last thing she and her mother had started together.

How the Account Was Set Up

Here is the part I have to own. When Kenzie was little, I opened the savings account at our bank on Main Street in my own name, with a note on file that it was for her. It was simpler. She was nine.

When Tonya and I got married the September before, we did what people do.

We sat down with the bank and added her to my accounts so she could pay bills if I was out on the road delivering seed in April.

I did not think about that one account. I should have.

It meant that, on paper, Tonya could have walked in and taken that money out with her own signature, and no one at the bank would have stopped her.

I do not believe she ever would have done that. I want to be fair to her.

But I also understood, lying awake that night, that I had left my daughter’s six years sitting where a hard week could reach it.