The Steer Box on Every Porch

The shot came from the fence corner at twenty minutes to eight on a Saturday morning in October, and I knew before I set my coffee cup down on the porch rail what it was.

There is only one thing out in that corner worth a rifle shot. There was a bale feeder, a stock tank with a heater I hadn’t plugged in yet, and a steer named Domino.

I went down the porch steps in my barn coat with the dog ahead of me. The grass was brown and stiff with frost, and the sky over the section line was the flat gray color it gets before a long week of drizzle.

Domino was down against the wire in the northeast corner. He was on our side. His legs were out straight and his white face was turned toward the house, like he’d been looking for us when it happened.

On the other side of the fence, at the edge of a corn field that should have been picked two weeks earlier, my husband’s brother stood with a deer rifle in the crook of his arm.

“He was in my corn again,” Vern said.

I didn’t say anything right away. I’m not built to say things right away. I carry mail for a living, and you learn on a rural route that whatever you say first is usually the thing you wish you hadn’t.

I looked at the fence. Four strands of barbed wire, steel posts every rod, a braced wood corner Dale and I set ourselves the spring we were married. I had walked that fence on the first of the month. Every wire was tight.

“Through what, Vern?” I said.

He looked at the fence like it had lied to him. Then he looked at me. He’s fifty-two, six years older than me, with the same jaw as my husband and none of the ease in it.

“He’s been leaning on it all week,” he said. “Reaching over. I’ve lost two rows on this end.”

“So you shot him.”

“I’m done losing things on this fence,” he said, and he turned and walked back up along his corn rows toward his yard without another word.

I knelt down in the frost beside that steer and put my hand on his neck. He was still warm. I’d helped butcher enough animals growing up near Arlington to know what came next, and I knew I had maybe a few minutes to do it right.

I took the knife off my belt, the one I use for twine and feed sacks, and I stuck him the way my father taught me, low in the throat toward the heart. I held his head while he bled out onto the brown grass.

I am telling you that plainly because I want you to understand I did not stand there and cry. There would be time for that. That morning there was a job, and the job was to not waste him.

My name is Jill Brekke. I was forty-six that fall. My husband Dale drives truck for the farmers co-op out of town, and my daughter Kinley was fourteen and in the ninth grade, and the three of us live on the home quarter of the Brekke place in east-central South Dakota.

Dale’s brother Vern farms the quarter right across the fence from us. Their dad split the ground before he passed. Dale got the home quarter with the house and the yard and the old barn. Vern got the quarter to the east, the better soil, some would say, but not the house he grew up in.