The Steers My Uncle Took Credit For

The trailer was still rocking on its springs when I lifted the latch and swung the back gate open. Six black Angus steers stood blinking at the bright light of the fairgrounds.

They came down the way good cattle do when they trust the person behind them.

One at a time, heads low, hooves knocking on the aluminum floor, then the soft thump of dirt in the pipe pens.

I counted them out loud, the way my granddaddy taught me. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Every one of them was sound, every one of them was fat, and every one of them was mine.

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, drop-off day for the Lawrence County beef drive.

The air had that thin November bite, and the bare trees along the creek behind the barns were gray against a hard blue sky.

There must have been forty people at the pens. Parents from the after-school program, church volunteers in work gloves, a couple of men from the locker with their stock trailer backed up and waiting, and Henny Lusk with her clipboard.

And there was a young man I didn’t know, maybe twenty-seven, in a jacket too thin for the weather, with a notebook in one hand and a camera hanging around his neck.

“That’s Teodor Vance,” a woman beside me said. “From the paper. He’s doing a front page on the drive this year.”

I nodded and latched the trailer gate open so the steers wouldn’t wander back up into it.

I was thinking about the hay I still had to put out at home, and whether my mail truck needed oil before Wednesday.

That’s when my uncle Royce walked past me without a word and put out his hand to the reporter.

“Royce Caudle,” he said. “I chair the committee. Glad you could make it out, son. You picked a pretty day for it.”

The reporter shook his hand and flipped his notebook open. “Thank you, sir. I was told the beef this year came from one family. Is that right?”

Royce turned and looked at my steers in the pen like a man looking over his own garden. He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and smiled.

“Six head off my place this year,” he said. “Finished them on grass and a little grain. That’s about twenty-four hundred pounds of beef for this county’s families.”

I heard every word. I was standing four feet from him with my hand still on the trailer gate.

The reporter wrote it down. I watched his pencil move, and I watched him underline something, and I knew what it was.

My uncle’s name, under a photo, on the one front page everybody in Lawrence County reads.

“Mr. Caudle, would you mind standing by the trailer for a picture? With the steers behind you, if we can get them.”

“Be glad to,” Royce said.

I want to tell you right here why I didn’t say anything, because people have asked me since, and it’s a fair thing to ask.

I was not going to argue with my daddy’s brother in front of a reporter at a charity drop-off, with two hundred families’ Thanksgiving standing in those pens.

That was the whole of it. It wasn’t my day to make it about me.

And there was something else, though I didn’t know yet how much it mattered.

The people who knew the truth were already standing there, every one of them, and some of them were holding a bedsheet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.