Dad studied me across the table. He studied me the way he used to study a tobacco leaf in the stripping room, holding it to the light, deciding what grade it was.
“Stubborn,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
He shook his head and looked down at the table, and I saw the corner of his mouth go up under the white stubble.
Then he turned to Jasper.
“Tuesday’s the cattle sale over at the stockyards,” Dad said. “I’ve got four steers going. You want to ride with me?”
Jasper’s face did a thing I will remember for the rest of my life. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Can I?”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“Ask your daddy.”
Jasper looked at me. I nodded.
“Seven o’clock,” Dad said. “Wear boots. Not them tennis shoes. And bring a hat. You’ll be standing in the sun.”
“I don’t have a hat,” Jasper said.
Dad reached over to the table beside him and picked up his new straw hat. He looked at it a second, and he turned it around in his hands.
“Well,” he said, “I reckon we’ll have to go find you one at the farm store. I know a good one. Brown band.”
The Sale
Jasper was up at five-thirty Tuesday morning. I heard him in the kitchen pouring cereal in the dark. He had his boots on before I had my coffee.
I drove him out to the farm on my way to the co-op barn. Dad was already out in the lot with the stock trailer hooked to his old Ford, in his new straw hat, with a thermos of coffee on the dash.
“Morning, Grandpa.”
“Morning, son. You ready?”
They loaded the four steers together. Jasper worked the gate and Dad worked the cattle, and I stood back by my truck and did not help, because nobody needed me to.
I watched the truck and trailer go down the gravel drive and turn onto the blacktop. I could see the two of them through the back glass, Dad’s straw hat and Jasper’s head beside it. They were already talking.
Jasper came home that night sunburned for the third time that summer and talking a mile a minute. He told us about the auctioneer and the ring and the man in the next seat who chewed tobacco and spit in a coffee can.
And he told us that on the way home, Grandpa pulled into the farm store in Cynthiana and walked him straight back to the wall of straw hats.
“He bought me the same one as his,” Jasper said. “Brown band. He said that way people would know we go together.”
Andrea had to get up from the table to stir something on the stove that did not need stirring.