The Steer Box on Every Porch

“I’d believe it too,” I said. “Nobody shoots a steer over a mouthful.”

He turned the flashlight off and we stood there in the dark. You could see the yard light at Vern’s place a half mile east, and the lights of the elevator in town off to the south.

“I could call the sheriff,” Dale said finally. “You want me to?”

I had thought about that all day. I had thought about it while I hosed the corner down and while I sat with Kinley on the steps and while I listened to her finally fall asleep.

“I could call him too,” I said. “Vern would get a ticket, or a court date, or something. And then he’d be your brother across this fence for the next thirty years with a sheriff’s report between you.”

Dale was quiet.

“The whole road would take a side,” I said. “Every family on this road has known you two since you were in diapers. They’d have to pick. Kinley would have to grow up across from an uncle who was in the paper.”

“So what do you want to do?” he asked.

“I want to settle it my way,” I said. “If you’ll let me.”

He turned the flashlight back on and pointed it at the ground between us, so we could see each other’s faces by the bounce of it.

“He’s my brother, Jill,” he said. “But it was your steer. And Kinley’s. It’s your call.”

I loved him a great deal for that sentence. Not every man would have said it. Some would have gone over there that night with their fists, and some would have said let it go, he’s family. Dale did neither.

I did not sleep much that night. I lay there and thought about Vern, which is not something I’d done much in twenty years of being married to his brother.

Vern never married. He farms his quarter and rents another one north of the highway and lives alone in the house their aunt left him. He comes to Christmas when Dale’s mother makes him, and he leaves before pie.

When their dad passed four years ago and the will was read, Vern sat in the lawyer’s office in town and heard that the home quarter, the house, and the barn where he and Dale had both been raised were going to his younger brother.

His dad’s reason, as near as anybody knew, was that Dale had a wife and a child and Vern did not, and the house needed a family. That was all. It wasn’t a punishment. But I don’t think Vern ever heard it as anything else.

He didn’t fight it. He didn’t say a word against it in that office or after. He just stopped coming over for coffee. He stopped waving from the tractor. He built his life on the far side of that fence and kept it there.

And this year his corn was short. Everybody’s was. It had been dry since July, and Vern’s ground had taken it worse than most. I’d seen it from the mail route. His stalks on that east end were barely shoulder high.

I lay in bed and I thought about a man standing out in a short crop on a cold morning, looking across a fence at a fat steer on the ground he’d grown up on, and I thought I could almost understand it.

Almost. Not enough to let it go.