The Steer My Son and I Fed Alone

Moose stood in the shade with his head low and his sides going in and out and did not touch his feed.

I ran the hose on him until the well pump started to rattle. Cooper drove to town on the four-wheeler along the ditch to buy another fan, because I was afraid to leave the steer.

I stood in that pen alone, in Brent’s boots, with the water running and the sun going down red, and I thought maybe Mike was right.

Maybe I was a school cook playing farmer. Maybe I was going to get this animal sick out of pride.

I sat down on the edge of the water tank and said out loud, “Brent, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Nobody answered. Moose turned his head, though, and pushed his wet nose into my shoulder, hard enough to knock me a little sideways. Then he walked to the bunk and started to eat.

I sat there and watched him clean up every bit of it. My hands were shaking. I wasn’t sure whether I was laughing or crying, and I didn’t care.

Cooper came back with a new fan bungeed to the four-wheeler rack and found me still sitting on the tank. He looked at the empty bunk and then at me.

“He ate?”

“He ate.”

Cooper didn’t say anything. He just came over and leaned his head against my shoulder, the way he used to when he was four.

We stayed like that while the new fan hummed and the steer chewed his cud in the dark.

The O’Brien County Fair runs the middle of July at the fairgrounds in Primghar. Every summer of my married life, the Kastners lived there for five days.

Brent was a 4-H leader. Mike was on the fair board. Our boys grew up in those barns.

We hauled Moose in on Tuesday in the stock trailer that Brent and Mike bought together twenty years ago.

Rollie came along to ride shotgun, because he said he hadn’t missed a steer show since 1961 and he wasn’t starting now.

At weigh-in, Moose went 1,342 pounds on the scale. Cooper read the slip three times and then handed it to me without a word.

Brent had guessed thirteen hundred and forty back in April. He had written it in the notebook.

Mike was at the weigh scale too, since the fair board runs it.

He wrote Moose’s weight on the clipboard and looked at the steer for a long minute. He nodded once at Cooper. He didn’t look at me at all.

That week Cooper slept on a cot in the cattle barn next to the stall, like every 4-H kid in the county.

I drove home at night to feed the dog and drove back before five. The barn smelled like shavings and sweat and the pork burgers from the cattlemen’s stand.

The beef show was Thursday at one o’clock, in the outdoor ring on the west side of the barns. By noon it was ninety-three degrees and the sky was white with heat.

I put on a plain white button-up shirt and my good jeans. I braided nothing, fussed with nothing, just pulled my hair back in a ponytail.

Then I sat on the tailgate of Rollie’s pickup and laced up Brent’s boots, socks in the toes, laces twice around.