The Steer Box on Every Porch

They worked all day. They pulled the old braced corner Dale and I had set twenty years ago and set a new one, deeper, with heavier posts. They restrung the first forty rods of wire on both directions out from the corner. Five strands this time, not four.

Kinley came out at noon and stood next to me in the yard. She watched for a while.

“Is that Uncle Vern?” she asked.

“It is,” I said.

“Is he fixing the fence?”

“He is.”

“The fence wasn’t broken,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”

She thought about that. Then she went in and made two sandwiches and filled a thermos with coffee and walked them down the pasture herself.

I watched her go. I watched her stop at the edge of the work and hold out the sandwiches. I watched Vern take his gloves off and take one, and say something to her, and I watched her nod.

She came back up to the yard a while later with the empty thermos.

“What did he say?” I asked her.

“He said thank you,” Kinley said. “And he said Domino was the best looking steer on the road. He said he used to watch him in the mornings.”

Dale told me the rest that night on the porch steps, after Vern had gone home and it was dark and cold.

They had worked most of the morning without talking. Around ten, Vern had stopped tamping a post and stood there with the bar in his hands.

“Dad left you everything,” Vern had said. “The house. The barn. The ground we both grew up on. And every morning I look across this fence and there it is.”

Dale said he hadn’t said anything back. He’d just waited.

“My corn’s short,” Vern had said. “Shortest it’s been since I took it over. And that morning I came out and that steer was leaning across the wire reaching for my stalks, fat and happy, standing right on Dad’s ground, and I thought, that’s one more thing. One more thing on that side of the fence that’s doing fine.”

“So I shot him,” Vern had said. “And I knew it was wrong before he hit the ground.”

Dale said he’d told him the truth, which was that he’d never asked for the house, and he’d have split it fair if Dad had let him. And that Dad hadn’t done it to hurt anybody.

“I know that,” Vern had said. “I’ve known it four years. Knowing it didn’t help.”

Then he had looked at Dale and said, “Your girl wrote his name on the box.”

“She did,” Dale said.

“I almost couldn’t eat that beef,” Vern had said. “I took a roast out to thaw and put it back twice. Then I cooked it. I’m going to eat every bit of him, slow. Wasting him would be one more wrong thing.”

Then they’d gone back to stringing wire.

I didn’t say anything for a long time after Dale told me that. I sat on the steps and looked down toward the corner. You couldn’t see it in the dark, but I knew the new posts were there, and the five tight strands.

“Is that enough?” Dale asked me finally. “For you?”

“It’s not mine to say,” I said. “That’s for Kinley.”

Winter came. Vern came to Christmas that year without his mother having to make him, and he stayed for pie. He didn’t say much. He sat at the end of the table and listened to Kinley tell about her basketball games.

When he left that night, he shook Dale’s hand in the yard. He’d never done that before, not in my memory.