The Steer My Son and I Fed Alone

He had mowed the ditches along our road twice before I could even find the key to the mower.

Somewhere in all that, he had decided the steer was one more of Brent’s jobs to pick up. And he had looked right past the boy standing beside it.

The steer’s name was Moose. Brent named him the day they brought him home, because he was the biggest calf in the pen and he walked like he owned the place.

They picked him out together the October before, at a neighbor’s farm over by Hospers. Cooper had shown heifers for two years.

This was his first market steer, and Brent had been as excited about it as the boy was.

I still have the picture on my phone. Brent and Cooper leaning on a gate, both of them in seed caps, both of them pointing at the same calf. Cooper is grinning so wide his eyes are shut.

Moose came home weighing about 560 pounds. Brent worked out the ration on the back of a co-op receipt. Cracked corn, a pelleted grower, a little alfalfa hay, mineral, and a lot of patience.

Every morning before work and every night after, the two of them went out to the pen.

They halter broke him in November, when he dragged Cooper halfway across the lot before Cooper learned to set his feet and hold.

In January they hauled him in to the county weigh day, and Moose was tagged and entered in Cooper’s name. That was Cooper’s steer on paper and in every other way that counted.

They walked him every day all winter, up and down the gravel lane between our place and the road.

Brent taught Cooper to use the show stick, to scratch Moose’s belly until he settled, to touch a hind foot and move it back an inch without the steer getting cranky.

They rinsed him and brushed him and trained his hair, even in March when the hose froze.

Brent bought a used blower off a man in Rock Valley and fixed the motor himself on our back step, while I complained about the grease.

I would give anything to complain about that grease again.

After the funeral, the house filled up with casseroles and then emptied out, the way houses do.

The church ladies came with ham balls and scalloped potatoes. Brent’s cousins came and moved round bales. Then everybody went back to their own fields.

I am a school cook at the elementary in town. I can feed three hundred kids a hot lunch by eleven o’clock and have the trays washed by one.

I know how to scale a recipe from forty servings to four hundred without a calculator.

I did not know the first thing about feeding a steer to finish.

Cooper did. The second week after the funeral, he came to the back step with his dad’s notebook and the co-op receipt, and he sat down beside me.

“Dad wrote it all down,” he said. “I can do it. But I can’t do it alone, Mom. He’s too big for me to rinse and hold at the same time.”

So I put on a pair of old jeans, and I went out to the pen with him. That was the middle of May. We had not missed a single day since.