The Steer My Son and I Fed Alone

Brent’s work boots had sat on the back step since the funeral. Brown leather, size twelve, broken down at the heel, with a patch on the left toe where he’d caught it on a disk blade years ago.

I couldn’t bring myself to move them. I couldn’t bring myself to give them to the church sale either. So they sat there, and every time I came in from the pen I stepped around them.

One morning in the second week, I was running late for the five-thirty feeding. My own boots were soaked from the night rinse. Without thinking, I stuck my feet in Brent’s.

I wear a nine. My feet slid around in there like two kittens in a laundry basket. I shuffled out to the pen anyway and fed the steer in my dead husband’s boots, and I didn’t cry once.

When I came back to the step, Cooper was sitting there in his pajama pants looking at my feet.

“You look ridiculous,” he said.

“I know.”

“Dad would think it was funny.”

“I know that too.”

He didn’t laugh, though. He went in the house and came back with two pairs of Brent’s thick wool socks. “Put these in the toes,” he said. “You’ll trip.”

After that I wore them every day. Socks stuffed in the toes, laces wrapped twice around my ankles.

They were too big and they were heavy and they made me walk like a duck. They also made me walk like I knew where I was going.

Mike didn’t come back to the pen. But he didn’t disappear either.

Twice that week, I saw his pickup slow down on the gravel road and idle past our place.

Once I saw him stop at the end of our lane and just sit there with his arm out the window, looking at the windbreak where the box fan was going.

His wife, Shawna, brought over a pan of bars on a Sunday afternoon.

She stood in the yard with it while I came out to meet her, and she looked at the boots on my feet and then looked away.

“He doesn’t sleep,” she said quietly. “He gets up at three and goes out to the shop and just stands there. He keeps saying he should have known about Brent’s heart. Like a brother could know that.”

“I know,” I said.

“He didn’t mean it the way it sounded, Jamie. About the steer.”

“I know that too,” I said. “But Cooper heard it the way it sounded.”

Shawna nodded. She handed me the bars. Before she got back in her car she said, “Logan’s been asking about Moose. He wants to know how he’s doing. Mike won’t let him come over and ask.”

“Tell Logan to come over any time,” I said. “Tell him Cooper misses him.”

Logan came the next evening on his bicycle. He was fourteen and gangly and he stood by the pen with his hands in his pockets until Cooper handed him a brush.

Then the two of them worked on Moose’s legs for an hour without saying much of anything.

It was the first time I’d heard Cooper laugh since May.

There was one night I almost quit.

It was the Saturday before fair, ninety-six degrees at five o’clock, with no wind at all. The box fan quit at suppertime.