Vern stood at the edge of his standing corn with a rifle.

Twenty yards away. On his side of the fence. In his canvas coat and his DeKalb cap, with a deer rifle held loose in his right hand, barrel pointed at the ground.

He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the steer.

“He was in my corn again,” he said.

I looked at the fence.

Four strands of barbed wire. Tight. Every strand pulled taut between the steel posts. Every staple where my husband put it.

Dale rebuilt that whole corner in April. I helped him. I held the wire stretcher while he cranked. I remember because I cut my thumb on a barb and bled all over my jeans. We went down the line together and checked every post and every staple, and when we were done, he plucked the top wire with his finger and it sang.

That fence was tight. Domino couldn’t have gotten through it. A rabbit couldn’t have gotten through it.

“Through what, Vern?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

He looked at me for a second. His face was gray and closed, like a barn door shut against the wind.

Then he turned and walked back toward his yard. Through the end rows of his corn. With his rifle in his hand.

He didn’t look back.

Chapter Two: Across That Fence

I could have called the sheriff.

I had my phone in my barn coat pocket. I could have pulled it out right there and dialed 911. Shooting somebody else’s livestock is a crime in Iowa. I know that much. Criminal mischief. Maybe more, depending on what it was worth.

I didn’t.

Vern is Dale’s brother.

Older brother. By four years. Vern is fifty-three. Dale is forty-nine. They grew up on the same farm, the one we live on now, the one their father, Harold Nyquist, farmed for fifty years. They shared a bedroom until Vern was fifteen. They played on the same Little League team. Vern taught Dale to drive a stick shift in the very pasture where Domino was lying dead.

When their father died nine years ago, he split the land. Dale got the home place. The house and the barns and two hundred and forty acres. Vern got the north half. Two hundred and forty acres of the best corn ground in the township, and the old Lindgren house their dad bought in 1988.

The fence between them is the line their father drew.