The Calf That Cost One Dollar

Addie called her mom’s house a little after ten on a Saturday morning in late September. I was at the stove making us a late breakfast. She put it on speaker so she could pour her cereal.

She only wanted one thing. She wanted Rodney to check the water tank in Biscuit’s pen, because the float had been sticking all week and she worried about it the way other girls worry about their hair.

“Hey, kiddo,” Rodney said. His voice had that bright, hurried sound a man uses when he is about to say something he has already decided not to feel bad about.

“Can you look at Biscuit’s float?” Addie asked. “It sticks if you don’t jiggle it. You have to jiggle it twice.”

There was a little pause on the line. I could hear a television in the background, and a screen door, and I think a dog.

“He’s gone, kiddo,” Rodney said. “I hauled him to the sale barn last night. He sold this morning. He was eating us out of house and home.”

Then he said he had to run, the pool guy was coming about the filter, and he hung up before she could say anything at all.

Addie set the phone down on the counter very carefully, the way you set down a glass that already has a crack in it. She did not pick up her spoon.

I turned off the burner. I did not say anything for a minute, because everything I wanted to say was not something a twelve-year-old should hear her father say about the man who lives with her mother.

“Dad,” she said. “He’s going to Hutchinson in two weeks.”

“I know, sweetheart,” I said. “I know he is.”

She had fed that steer every morning before the school bus for eleven months.

In the dark in November, and in the snow in February, and in the mud all spring with her boots sucking down at every step.

Biscuit was a black baldy she picked out herself the fall before, at a breeder’s place over by Onaga.

He was a long, easy-going calf with one white sock, and she said he looked like he had stepped in a biscuit.

She showed him at our county fair in Holton that July and took a purple ribbon in her class.

Her 4-H leader told her he had the frame to do well at the junior livestock show in Hutchinson, so she kept him out of the July sale and kept feeding.

By the last week of September he weighed right around seven hundred pounds, a yearling with all winter still ahead of him before the July fair. He would lead on a loose halter.

He would stand for her while she combed his legs. He would put his big head under her arm.

And now he was gone, on a Saturday morning, while she was at my house for the weekend, eating cereal she was not going to finish.