The Lamb Check She Gave Away

So I sat. I sat with my hands flat on my knees and I watched the bidding go to twelve hundred, then fifteen, then sixteen fifty.

Gerald from the feed mill and the man from the implement dealer went back and forth. Gerald took it at eighteen hundred.

“Sold, eighteen hundred dollars, to the mill,” the auctioneer said. “Thank you, Garth.”

Thank you, Garth. Not thank you, Juanita. The microphone squealed when he said it.

Somebody behind me clapped Garth on the shoulder when he came back out the gate, and he grinned like it was nineteen eighty-five.

My husband was not there. Finn runs a line at the axle plant over in Lima, and he had traded two shifts to be off for Juanita’s show on Wednesday, when she placed fourth in her class and seventh in junior showmanship. Sale day was Friday. There were no more shifts to trade.

He had kissed her on the forehead at five that morning and said, “Make them pay for that lamb, Nita.” She had told him she would.

I had a text from him on my phone that said, “How did she do?” and I could not make my thumbs answer it.

I went down out of the bleachers and around the end of the ring to the gate where the lambs come out.

Juanita was standing next to Biscuit at the tie rail, scratching him behind the ear, and Garth was talking to Gerald about the price of corn.

“You did good, sweetheart,” I said. I knelt down in the sawdust so we were eye to eye. “Biscuit looked real good out there.”

“Grandpa walked him,” she said. She said it like a fact on a worksheet.

Then she said, “I didn’t get to set his feet for the buyers,” and that was the only time her voice moved.

The Tie Rail

I want to tell you about the feet, because I did not understand them until that summer.

When you show a market lamb, you set his feet. You place each leg square under him, front legs straight down from the shoulder and back legs a little behind, so he stands like a table.

Then you brace him, your knee to his chest, so he pushes against you and tightens up.

Juanita had worked on setting Biscuit’s feet in our side yard every night from the first week of summer on.

She would take her hand off his leg and he would move it, and she would put it back.

Sometimes forty times. I would sit on the porch steps and count out loud for her.

She had a plan for the sale ring. Her 4-H advisor had told the kids that you walk your lamb in, you set him once in front of the buyers, and you look up at them and smile.

“Buyers buy the kid as much as the lamb,” the advisor told them. Juanita had practiced the smile too.

She never got to do any of it. Garth had walked Biscuit in, turned him twice, and walked him out.