The Steer Box on Every Porch

That fence corner was where those two quarters met. It was also where Kinley’s steer liked to stand in the mornings, because that was where the sun hit first.

When I had him bled, I stood up and took my phone out of my coat pocket and called Arnold Fogle at the locker plant in town.

Arnold has run the locker for thirty-some years. He is sixty-one, a careful, quiet man who does custom work for every farm family within twenty miles. He answered on the second ring because he always answers on the second ring.

“Arnold, it’s Jill Brekke,” I said. “I’ve got a steer down in the pasture. Head shot, maybe ten minutes ago. I’ve bled him already. He was on your schedule for the twenty-second.”

There was a pause. Arnold doesn’t ask questions he doesn’t need answered.

“How big is he?” he asked.

“Twelve hundred, give or take. Nineteen months. Corn and hay since spring.”

“I’ll bring the truck,” he said. “Keep the dog off him. I’ll be out within the hour.”

I hung up and that was when I heard the screen door slam up at the house.

Kinley had heard the shot. Of course she had. Her bedroom window looks right out on that pasture, and she had been sleeping with it cracked open all fall because she liked to hear him bawl for his breakfast.

She came across the pasture at a run, her hair down and loose, wearing a sweatshirt and a pair of her dad’s chore boots that flapped on her feet. She was halfway to me before I got my legs moving.

I met her in the middle of that pasture. I didn’t let her get any closer. I took her by both shoulders and then I just pulled her against me and held on while she looked past me at the corner.

“Mom,” she said. “Mom, is that Domino?”

“It is, honey,” I said. “He’s gone. It was quick. He didn’t know anything about it.”

“Who,” she said, and then she saw the standing corn behind the fence and the way the rifle had left a track in the frost, and she knew. She had grown up across that fence from her uncle.

I walked her back to the porch steps with my arm around her. She didn’t cry until she sat down on the second step. Then she cried the way she hadn’t since she was small, with her whole body, and I sat beside her with my hand flat on her back.

Domino came to us as a bottle calf in March of the year before. A neighbor three miles south had a heifer lose interest in her twin, and he called me on my route and asked did I know anybody who wanted a calf for free.

Kinley was thirteen. She said she wanted him before I had even finished telling her about him. She named him Domino the first night because he was black all over with a white face, the way a baldy is, and she said he looked like one of the black dominoes in her grandma’s old set.

She mixed his milk replacer and fed him at five every morning before the school bus, and again at night after supper. For eight weeks, she never missed once. Not on cold mornings, not on the morning she had strep throat.