The Steers My Uncle Took Credit For

“You’re my family,” I said. “And you did chair the committee.”

He laughed, but it wasn’t much of a laugh. “I’ve pulled my name off the commission race,” he said.

“I told the party fellows last week. I don’t reckon a man who’d do that ought to be asking folks for their vote.”

I hadn’t expected that. I don’t know if it was the right thing or not. I’m not sure it was mine to say. I just nodded.

“I’d like to keep doing the committee,” he said. “If you’ll have me. I’m good at the paperwork part. I can do the freezer count and the volunteers. You can do the cattle.”

“I’ve always done the cattle,” I said.

“I know you have.”

We stood there a while longer. Then I said, “Henny wants to buy a bigger chest freezer for next year, and the church can’t cover it. If you want to be useful, you could go talk to some of those people at the fish fries.”

He nodded slowly. “I could do that.”

“And next spring,” I said, “when the kids start coming back, you could come out one Saturday. Mabry’s going to want to know where you went.”

He looked at me then, really looked, for the first time since the fairgrounds. His eyes were wet.

He nodded once and tapped the gate twice with his flat hand, the way Granddaddy used to before he left, and walked back to his truck.

The Sheet in the Barn

Henny brought me the sheet the week before Christmas. She’d washed it on gentle, she said, and some of the red had run a little at the edges, but the steer and the bow and the letters were all still there.

“The kids voted,” she said. “They want you to have it. Mabry made a speech about it. Said it ought to hang where the Thanksgiving steer can see it, which I told her didn’t make much sense, and she told me I didn’t understand cattle.”

I took it out to the barn that afternoon. I got the stepladder down off the wall and tacked the sheet up along the long side of the hay loft, where you see it the second you walk in the big door.

It’s still there. The red has faded some in the light from the high window, and a barn swallow built a nest on the rafter right above the T in Thank You. I haven’t had the heart to knock it down.

I’m keeping six steer calves back again this year from the spring crop. One of them is a deep-bodied black one with a calm eye.

Mabry hasn’t met him yet. I already know what she’s going to call him.

Every morning before my route, I walk into that barn in the dark with my feed buckets and flip on the light, and there’s that lopsided steer with a red bow around his neck looking back at me.

The next week’s paper ran the right photo, and I hung the bedsheet in my barn.