7:40 on a Saturday

The shot came from the fence corner at 7:40 on a Saturday morning.

I was in the kitchen with my hands in a bowl of pancake batter. The radio was on. KMA out of Shenandoah, the farm report, a man reading off the price of corn in a flat voice. Kinley was still upstairs asleep. It was the first Saturday in weeks she didn’t have to be up for anything.

Then the shot.

One crack, flat and hard across the pasture. It rattled the window over the sink.

You hear gunshots in the country. That’s normal. Somebody after a coyote. Somebody sighting in a deer rifle for November.

But not that close. Not from the fence corner. Not on a Saturday morning in October with the cattle out.

I set the bowl down. I didn’t wipe my hands. I went out the back door in my slippers and my barn coat and ran.

Domino was down against the wire.

On our side.

He was lying on his side in the brown grass at the northwest corner of our pasture, where our fence meets Vern’s. His legs were stretched out stiff. His big black-and-white head was pressed up against the bottom strand of barbed wire, like he’d fallen into it.

There was blood in the grass. A lot of it.

His eyes were open.

Our daughter Kinley raised him from a bottle calf.

He was born in a snowstorm in February two years ago, on the Petersen place three miles south. His mother died having him. Old Ray Petersen called me on the mail route and asked if Kinley wanted a calf to raise. She was nine.

Dale brought him home in the back seat of the pickup wrapped in a horse blanket. He was so small. Black and white, with one white patch over his left eye and three more on his side. Kinley took one look at him and said, “Domino.”

She fed him at five every morning for eight weeks, before the school bus.

A big plastic bottle with a red rubber nipple, full of warm milk replacer. She’d mix it in the kitchen sink in her pajamas and her boots and walk out to the barn in the dark with a flashlight. Every morning. Snow, rain, twenty below.

Then again at five at night, after school.

He followed her around the pasture like a dog. He’d come running when she called his name. He’d put his big head against her chest and push until she scratched behind his ears.

He was going to be our freezer beef this winter. Kinley knew that. She’d always known. That’s how it is on a farm. You raise an animal for food and you love it anyway. She’d made her peace with it in August. She’d cried. And then she’d picked the date with me, at the kitchen table, on the calendar from the co-op.

Two weeks from that Saturday. He was scheduled at the locker on the twenty-sixth.