The Steer My Son and I Fed Alone

That night I went to see Rollie Vander Woude.

Rollie is eighty-one and lives a mile west of us. He fed cattle for fifty years and quit when his knees did.

He sits on his porch steps most evenings with a cup of coffee and watches the road like it owes him money.

I sat down two steps below him in the dusk and told him everything. The money, the words, the dull hair.

He listened the whole way through without saying anything, which is a thing old farmers can do that the rest of us have forgotten.

“Your boy’s steer is hot,” he said finally. “Not sick. Just hot. They go off feed a little when the nights don’t cool. You’ve got to get him through the heat of the day and feed him when he wants it.”

“How?”

“Feed later at night. Feed earlier in the morning. Get a fan on him at midday. Rinse him twice, three times. And quit changing anything else. Steers hate surprises worse than preachers do.”

I laughed for the first time in a week. Rollie smiled down at his coffee.

“Brent knew what he was doing with that calf,” he said. “I watched them walking him past my place all winter. That boy can handle him. You just keep him cool and keep showing up.”

Then he said the thing I carried with me the rest of that summer.

“Jamie. Feeding cattle isn’t a man’s job or a woman’s job. It’s an every-single-day job. That’s all it ever was.”

We changed everything the next morning, and then we changed nothing ever again.

We moved the night feeding to ten o’clock, when the air finally broke. We fed in the morning at five-thirty, before the sun was over the grove.

I set my alarm on my phone and put it across the room so I’d have to stand up to turn it off.

Cooper rigged a box fan on a post in the shade of the windbreak and ran an orange extension cord from the yard light pole.

We moved Moose to the cool side of the pen in the heat of the afternoon and rinsed him at noon, three, and six.

Hair is a whole education. Cooper taught me to rinse with the grain, blow it dry against the grain, and brush it up so it stands.

He did it the way Brent had shown him, his lips moving a little, like he could hear his dad saying it.

Every evening we walked Moose up the lane and back, a half mile each way. The gravel crunched under his feet and under ours.

The corn on either side was getting close to tasseling and the whole world smelled green and hot.

Cooper walked at Moose’s head with the halter and the show stick. I walked behind on the steer’s off side, the way Rollie told me, ready to block if he spooked at a pheasant out of the ditch.

On the fourth night, Moose stopped in the lane, dropped his head, and set his feet square without Cooper touching him. Cooper looked back at me with his mouth open.

“Did you see that?” he said. “Dad worked on that all winter. He never did it for Dad.”

“He did it for you,” I said.