The Steers My Uncle Took Credit For

How the Beef Drive Works

Hoyt, who runs the locker in town, said yes before I finished asking.

He donates the cutting and wrapping every year, and his men haul the steers from the fairgrounds pens to his place the same afternoon. The pantry pays for nothing.

A finished steer around thirteen hundred and fifty pounds would bring close to three thousand dollars at the sale barn this fall.

The pantry books each one at fifteen hundred, the value of the beef after the locker’s work, for their records and the county’s.

So six steers comes to nine thousand dollars of beef on the pantry’s books.

It comes out to roughly twenty-four hundred pounds of ground beef, roasts and steaks, wrapped in white paper, frozen hard, and stacked in the pantry’s walk-in freezer.

The first year I gave four. The second year five. This year I kept back six of my best steer calves from last spring’s crop and grew them out on my own grass and my own feed, because the line at the pantry had gotten longer.

That first year, the committee formed around it. A drive like that needs somebody to keep track of the freezer space, the paperwork, the church volunteers who pack the boxes. Royce said he’d chair it. I was glad. I don’t like meetings.

The first two years, the paper ran a small story on page six with a photo of the boxes.

Nobody’s name was on it but the pantry’s. That suited me fine. I didn’t do it for the paper.

This year was different, and I should have seen it coming. Royce had told half the county he was running for commission next time around.

He’d been at every ribbon cutting and every ball game since summer, shaking hands.

I think he wanted his name on the one story everybody in the county reads every year. I understand wanting a thing.

But wanting a thing doesn’t make it yours, and taking your niece’s work never turns right because there’s an election coming.

The Saturdays

Back in April, Henny called me with an idea. The pantry runs an after-school program in the church fellowship hall for kids whose families use the pantry, and she wanted those kids to see where their food came from.

“Just once,” she said. “Let them see the cows. Some of these kids have never touched a live animal bigger than a dog.”

So one Saturday morning a church van pulled up my drive with eleven kids inside, ages six to twelve, and two mothers who looked nervous about the whole thing.

Coralee, one of the moms, kept saying “Stay by the fence” like a prayer.

I took them out to the steer lot. I showed them how to hold out a flake of hay so a steer can take it without nipping fingers.

I showed them where the water tank was and how I break the ice on it in winter with the back of an axe.

One little girl with red braids walked right up to the biggest steer in the lot, a deep-bodied black one, and scratched him behind the ears like he was a barn cat. He leaned into her hand and closed his eyes.

That was Mabry Lusk, Henny’s granddaughter. She was ten. She had a purple coat that she wore even when it was too warm for it, because, she told me later, her mama had bought it for her new and nothing else she owned was new.