The Steer My Son and I Fed Alone

Six in the morning and six at night, we fed. Cooper weighed the feed in a bucket on a hanging scale.

I learned how many coffee cans of corn were in a pound, because it turns out a school cook thinks in measuring cups whether she wants to or not.

When it got hot, we rinsed Moose at the wash rack out by the hydrant, morning and late afternoon.

Cooper held the halter and I ran the hose, and then we switched, and the steer stood there like a gentleman while the water ran pink with dust.

Some nights I was so tired I sat on an overturned bucket in the yard and cried where Cooper couldn’t see. Then I got up and went to bed and got up at five and did it again.

So when Mike stood at that pen fence and said no man was left to feed it right, it landed on something already bruised.

“Nine hundred,” Mike said again, gentler, like I hadn’t heard. “It’s fair, Jamie. He’ll go to the sale anyway. This way Logan gets a good steer and Cooper doesn’t have to carry it. I’ll square the paperwork with the extension office.”

I doubted there was any squaring to be done. Moose had been in Cooper’s name since January, and the county does not hand a tagged steer to a different kid in July because a grown man asks nice.

But Mike wasn’t thinking about rules. Mike wasn’t thinking at all. He was doing what he had done since May, which was reach for the next thing Brent would have done and grab it with both hands.

I could have told him off. I could have said it in front of God and the cattle. It was right there in my mouth, everything I’d been holding since the hospital hallway.

But Mike was Cooper’s only uncle. Brent’s dad passed when the boys were teenagers, and my own father lives in Arizona.

Cooper had already lost the one man who mattered most. He did not need to lose the next one in the same summer because I couldn’t hold my tongue.

So I didn’t say any of it. I said the one thing that needed saying, and I let the rest wait for the show ring.

“Thank you, Mike,” I said. “We’re going to keep him. Cooper’s going to show him.”

Mike looked at the boy, then at me. For a second I thought he’d argue. He rubbed his jaw with the hand that held the money.

“He’s going to fall off in this heat,” he said. “That steer needs more than the two of you.”

“Then we’ll give him more,” I said.

Mike folded the bills into his shirt pocket. “Suit yourself, Jamie.” He walked back across the yard and didn’t look back once.

Cooper picked the bucket up again. He dumped the feed in the bunk, very neat, and stood there watching Moose eat.

“Was he right, Mom?” he asked, without turning around. “Is Moose off?”

I looked at the steer. His hair was a little dull. He had lost the bloom he had in April. Mike wasn’t wrong about that part, and that was the part that stung.

“We’ll find out,” I said. “We’ve got sixteen days.”