The Boy Who Bid on Her Steer
“I’ve got a dollar ten. Who’ll give me a dollar and a quarter? Dollar and a quarter, now a quarter, now a quarter.”
Dale Frey had been selling cattle at our county fair for thirty-one years, and I had never once heard his voice go soft like that. It went soft because there was nothing to push against. Nobody in that barn was bidding.
My daughter Maddie stood in the middle of the sale ring with her steer on a rope halter. She was twelve years old and wearing the white western shirt I had ironed on the hood of the pickup that morning, because the camper had no outlet that worked.
Her steer was named Boone. He was a black Angus cross, 1,280 pounds at weigh-in, and she had brushed him until the string lights in the rafters made his back shine like a church pew. She had fed him twice a day since the first week of November.
Every market steer that came through the ring ahead of her had sold for better than three dollars a pound. I had written them down on the sale bill in my lap, the way I always do. Three ten. Three twenty-five. Three forty for the Kessler girl’s red steer.
Then Boone came in, and the top row of the bleachers turned to stone.
I knew every man up there. I had driven most of their children to school at one time or another. They were the co-op men, the ones who bought steers every year because the co-op and their businesses lived off the same farm families whose kids were showing.
They sat with their white buyer cards in their laps. Not one card moved.
Dale started Boone at three dollars, the way he started everything. He got nothing. He dropped to two and a half, then to two, then lower. His eyes kept going to the top row and coming back empty.
At a dollar ten, an order buyer from the sale barn in Salina finally lifted one finger, the way those men do when they are buying weight and not a child’s year. Fat cattle had brought two thirty-five at Salina that same week. My daughter’s steer was sitting at less than half of what he would have brought as plain beef.
I knew exactly why.