The Steer Box on Every Porch

When he was weaned, she moved him to the pasture and taught him to come when she rattled a coffee can of grain. When he was a yearling, she could lead him on a halter around the yard with the dog trotting alongside.

We all knew he was for the freezer. That was the deal from the first night. Kinley knew it as well as anybody. Farm kids know the difference between a pet and a steer, even when they love the steer.

“He’s for us,” she said that first spring, when a girl from town asked her how she could stand it. “He’ll feed our family all winter. That’s what he’s for. That’s a good thing.”

Dale and I figured that steer, by the time he was done, was about eighteen hundred dollars worth of beef. That is what a side and a half would cost you from someone else, cut and wrapped, at that fall’s prices. For us it was a winter of supper.

Arnold Fogle’s truck came up the gravel at ten minutes to nine. It’s an old flatbed with a hoist and a winch on the back, the same truck he’s driven to farm kills since I was in high school.

He backed into the pasture through our gate and climbed out and looked at the steer for a long minute. He looked at the wound. He looked at where I’d stuck him. Then he looked over at the fence.

“Clean head shot,” he said. “You bled him quick. He’ll eat fine, Jill.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“That corner’s tight,” Arnold said. He didn’t make it a question. He just reached out and plucked the top wire the way you’d test a guitar string, and it sang.

“It is,” I said.

He nodded slowly and said nothing more about it. He got the winch cable around the steer’s back legs and we hoisted him onto the flatbed together, and by ten o’clock Domino was hanging in the cooler at the Fogle Locker in town.

Dale was two hundred miles away that day, hauling corn to the ethanol plant for the co-op. Harvest runs seven days a week in October around here, and the co-op drivers go when the grain goes.

I called him after Arnold left. I sat on the tailgate of my pickup in the yard and told him everything, start to finish, in order, the way I’d want to hear it.

He didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear his truck’s engine and the turn signal clicking.

“Is Kinley all right?” he asked first.

“No,” I said. “But she will be.”

“I’ll call him,” Dale said.

He called his brother twice from a truck stop outside of Mitchell. Vern didn’t pick up either time. Dale left one message. He told me later what it said: “Vern. Call me back. This is Dale.”

Dale got home at a quarter to ten that night. He didn’t come in the house. I heard his truck stop in the yard and then I saw the beam of a flashlight going down the pasture toward the corner.

I put my coat on and went out after him. I found him standing in the corner with the light on the wire, running his hand along the top strand from the corner post to the first steel post and back.

“It’s tight,” he said. “Every staple’s in. He didn’t come through this.”

“No,” I said.

“He might have reached over,” Dale said, because Dale is fair even when it costs him. “Steers reach. Maybe he got a mouthful of Vern’s stalks over the wire. I’d believe that.”