The Steers My Uncle Took Credit For

My Granddaddy’s Place

My name is Brynn Caudle. I’m thirty-one years old, and I carry rural mail out of the post office in our county, a route of a little over a hundred miles of blacktop and gravel, five days a week.

On the side, which is really most of my life, I run forty mama cows on my late granddaddy’s place off a county road south of Lawrenceburg.

It’s rolling ground, good grass, a spring that has never gone dry in my memory.

Granddaddy left me the cattle and the right to run them there when he passed.

Daddy had died four years before him, from a heart that quit at fifty-three in the hay field, and I was the one who had been out there every morning.

Royce is Daddy’s younger brother. He has a nice brick house closer to town and about a dozen cows on a rented place, and he sells insurance.

He is good at talking to people. Daddy used to say Royce could sell a fur coat in August.

I don’t say that to run him down. Royce came to Daddy’s funeral and carried the casket. He sent a ham.

When Granddaddy got sick, Royce sat with him some evenings so I could sleep. He isn’t a monster. He’s a man who wanted something.

Three years ago, the pantry was in a bind. Beef prices had gone up so high that the Thanksgiving boxes were going out with a can of chili and a box of stuffing and not much else. Henny Lusk told the whole church about it one Sunday.

I went home that afternoon and walked my pasture and looked at my steer calves.

I did a little arithmetic in my head and then a little more on the back of a feed receipt. Then I called Henny.

“How many families?” I asked.

“Close to two hundred,” she said. “Some years more. Why, honey?”

“If the locker will process, I’ll give you the steers,” I told her.

She was quiet a long time on the phone. Then she said, “Brynn, you can’t afford that.”

And I said, “Henny, I can’t afford not to,” which sounds nicer than it was. Mostly I couldn’t stand thinking about those boxes.