Mike Kastner held the money out across the top board of the steer pen like he was paying for seed corn. Nine one-hundred-dollar bills, folded once, pinched between two fingers.
“Nine hundred, cash,” he said. “Logan can finish him out at our place. No man was left to feed it right, Jamie. You know that.”
It was the first day of July. My husband had been gone eight weeks and two days. He was buried at the cemetery north of Sheldon.
I knew the number because I counted it every morning before I put my feet on the floor.
Cooper was standing three feet from his uncle with a full bucket of feed in one hand. He was thirteen. He had his dad’s shoulders already and his dad’s habit of going very quiet when something hurt.
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He didn’t say a word. He just bent down and set that bucket on the ground, slow and careful, the way you set down something that might spill if your hands shook.
The steer put his nose over the board and blew at the money. He was a red-and-white Hereford, a little over 1,300 pounds that week, and he had no idea he was being priced.
I looked at the bills. I looked at Mike. Then I looked at my son, who was staring at the ground like it had said something to him.
You have to understand who Mike was to us before you decide anything about him.
Mike was Brent’s older brother by four years. They grew up on the same quarter section west of town, fed the same calves, broke the same windows with the same baseballs.
When Brent and I got married, Mike stood up beside him in a rented gray vest and cried before I even got down the aisle.
When Cooper was born, Mike drove sixty-five miles to Sioux City in a snowstorm to bring Brent a clean shirt and a sack of hamburgers. He held Cooper before my own father did. He was the one who taught Cooper to drive the four-wheeler, and the one who taught him to say “yes sir” to the judge.
And on the fourth of May, it was Mike who found Brent.
They were planting beans on the rented ground south of the blacktop. Brent was in the tractor and Mike was running the tender truck.
When the planter stopped at the end of a row and didn’t turn around, Mike walked out to see why.
Brent was forty-one. The doctor said his heart had been bad for years and none of us knew it. He went the way men like him go, in the cab, with the radio on and a job half done.
Mike rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital in Sheldon. I got there eleven minutes later.
Mike was sitting on a plastic chair in the hallway with his seed cap in his hands, and when he looked up at me I knew before anybody said it.
So when Mike came across our yard that July morning with nine hundred dollars and those words, I didn’t see a villain.
I saw a man who had found his brother dead in a field and had not stopped moving since.
He had finished planting Brent’s rented ground. He had sprayed it. He had come over to fix our yard hydrant without being asked.