The Steer Box on Every Porch

Arnold called on Monday. Domino hung six hundred and forty pounds. He’d age him the full two weeks and then cut and wrap him, and did I want him the usual way.

“Mostly,” I said. “Arnold, I want to ask you something different.”

I told him what I wanted to do with part of the beef. I told him there were six families on our road besides us, Vern included, and I wanted six boxes made up, each one a fair share. Not scraps. A real box.

“Roasts, steaks, and ground,” I said. “Like you’d give somebody you liked.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “I can do that, Jill. I’ll put the boxes together special. No extra charge for the boxing.”

“I’ll pay the boxing,” I said.

“No,” Arnold said. “You won’t.”

The locker fees came to a little over seven hundred dollars for the kill, the cutting, and the wrapping. That was about what we’d budgeted for the twenty-second anyway. Domino had just come in early.

When I told Kinley what I was planning, she was sitting on the porch steps after school with her backpack still on, looking out at the empty corner.

“You’re giving him away?” she said.

“Some of him,” I said. “We’ll keep plenty for our freezer. Enough for the winter. But some of him is going down the road.”

“To Uncle Vern too?”

“To Uncle Vern too.”

She looked at me for a long time. She has Dale’s eyes, gray and patient, and when she looks at you with them you feel like you are being weighed.

“Why?” she said.

“Because everybody on this road is going to hear what happened,” I said. “And I’d rather they hear it from a box of good beef than from somebody talking at the elevator. And because he’s your uncle.”

“He shot my steer,” she said.

“He did,” I said. “And he’s going to have to look at a box with Domino in it and decide what kind of man he is. That’s not something I can do for him.”

She thought about that a while. Then she said, “Can I do something too?”

On the Friday the beef was ready, I picked Kinley up after school and we drove to town and backed my pickup up to the loading dock behind the Fogle Locker. It’s a dark red half-ton with a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it. It’s what I deliver the mail in.

Arnold had the six boxes stacked inside the door. White butcher paper around each one, taped neat at the ends, the way he does a gift box. Our own share was boxed the same way in white paper, eight more boxes on a separate cart, and Arnold kept all of it in his freezer overnight so we could load the whole thing first thing Saturday.

Kinley climbed up and sat on the tailgate. She had a black marker in her coat pocket that she’d brought from home.

Arnold set the gift boxes on the tailgate beside her one at a time, and before he carried each one back to his freezer, she turned it over and wrote on the bottom of it in her best handwriting.

Domino.

She wrote it six times. Arnold stood on the dock with his hands in his apron and watched her do it and didn’t say a word, and when she was done he had to turn and look at the coolers for a minute.

“Why on the bottom, honey?” I asked her.