The Feed Bucket at the Sale Barn Door

She let him come out every evening after school to brush him and lead him around the yard and teach him to set his feet. That was the sister I knew.

Then came May, and the second scan, and a week in the hospital in Kansas City with a fever that would not break.

The fair entry for the market steer show was due that same week, and I forgot it. I forgot everything that week except the numbers on the monitor.

Shawna remembered. She drove into the extension office in town with the paperwork and filled it out herself.

She put Toby down as the showman and she put the steer down as owned by Ohlde Cattle, because the steer was on her place and she had the premises number.

I did not think about it at the time. I was grateful. I hugged her in the hospital hallway when she told me and said, “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

I meant that. I still mean it, in a way that is hard to explain.

By July Toby was in his second round. Dr. Hughes looked at his counts the Monday of fair week and said he could show if he kept his hands clean, wore a mask in the crowded places, and went home the minute he felt tired. He hugged her. She let him.

He showed Rooster on a Tuesday afternoon in the beef barn. He was thin as a fence post in his white show shirt, his jeans held up by the belt buckle Ray had won roping years ago, and he set that steer’s feet like he had been doing it his whole life.

Rooster placed fourth in his class. Toby did not care. He came out of the ring grinning under his mask and said, “He didn’t kick anybody, Mom. Not once.” That was what he had been worried about for a month.

The premium sale was that night in the sale barn. In our county, the kids sell their market animals through the ring, and local businesses and farmers bid a premium on top of what the packer pays. Most steers bring two or three thousand dollars all told.

What I did not know was that the whole county had already decided what it was going to do. Word travels fast in a place like ours.

Half the people in that sale barn had a casserole in our freezer or a name on the prayer list at First Baptist.

When Toby led Rooster into the sawdust ring, the auctioneer, a big man named Lyman who has called that sale for thirty years, took off his hat.

He said, “Folks, I think you all know this young man.” And then he started the bidding.

It went past two thousand in about a minute. Then three. Then I lost track because men were standing up in the bleachers and calling out that they wanted to add on, and the bank president’s wife, Noreen Kline, was waving her sale card over her head like she was flagging down a train.

When the gavel came down, Lyman said, “Ninety-four hundred dollars, and twenty-three buyers,” and the whole barn stood up and clapped.

Toby stood in the middle of that ring holding Rooster’s halter with tears running into his mask, and he did not know what to do with his hands.

Ray was not there. The storm two nights before had washed out a culvert on a county road south of town, and his crew was out with the loader and the pipe.