The Steers My Uncle Took Credit For

“What’s his name?” she asked me.

“I don’t name the steers,” I said, as gently as I could. “These are the ones going to the pantry at Thanksgiving. It’s easier on everybody if we don’t name them.”

She thought about that for a while, scratching his ear. Then she said, “Then he’s the Thanksgiving steer,” and that was what she called him, every Saturday after.

That was supposed to be the only visit. It wasn’t. The kids asked to come back the next Saturday, and the next.

By June it was a regular thing. The church van at nine, feed buckets, the hose, and a cooler of popsicles after.

I’ll tell you plainly, those Saturdays were the best part of my week.

I’d been working cattle alone since Daddy and Granddaddy died, and I hadn’t known how quiet my place had gotten until it was full of kids yelling about a calf.

The kids learned to tell my cows apart. They learned which mama kicked and which one would follow you for a cube.

They learned that you never walk behind a horse, and why a cow chews cud, and what it means when she goes off alone.

And all summer, and all fall, they fed those six steers. They carried the buckets, they scrubbed the water tank, they watched them grow from leggy calves into big square steers with a shine on their backs.

They knew exactly what those steers were for. I never hid it. Mabry would put her face right up close to the Thanksgiving steer and tell him, “You’re going to feed a whole lot of people. That’s a good job.”

One Saturday in October, I saw Mabry standing at the fence, very quiet, holding her hand flat on the steer’s forehead with her eyes closed.

When I asked her what she was doing, she said, “Telling him thank you.”

I had to go into the barn for a minute after that.

Drop-Off Day

So there I was at the fairgrounds, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, watching my uncle stand by my trailer and tell a newspaper reporter those were his steers.

The reporter, Teodor, was young and polite and didn’t know any better. He had no reason to doubt a committee chairman.

He moved around looking for the right angle, the barns in the back and the steers in the pen.

I was standing at the trailer gate in my brown canvas vest over a gray hoodie, my dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.

My hands smelled like cattle. I looked exactly like what I was, which was the hired help.

Henny was ten feet away with her clipboard. She had heard every word.

She turned and looked straight at me, and her mouth was a thin line, and I knew she was about to say something.

I shook my head at her, just a little. Not here. Not like this.

Henny held my eyes for a long second. Then she did something I didn’t understand at the time.