And Vern would be Dale’s brother across that fence for thirty more years.

That’s what I was thinking, standing there in my slippers in the wet grass. Thirty more years. Thanksgiving dinners. Funerals. Kinley’s graduation. Her wedding, someday.

A sheriff’s report would split the family. And it would split the road.

Everybody on Hollow Creek Road would take a side. They’d have to. Six families on a gravel road, and every one of them knew both brothers since they were boys. A report would sit in the paper in the sheriff’s log, and everybody would read it, and everybody would talk at the café and the co-op and the Lutheran church.

I’ve seen it happen. Over less. Over a cow. Over a ditch. Over a dog.

So I didn’t call.

I knelt in the wet grass beside Domino.

His big black-and-white side wasn’t moving. But I knew what I had to do. I’ve lived on a farm for nineteen years. I grew up on one before that.

I knelt and bled the steer with the knife off my belt.

You don’t waste an animal. Not ever.

My grandpa taught me that. When I was ten, on his farm in Kossuth County, a heifer broke her leg in a gopher hole, and he had to put her down. He did it quick and clean with a .22. And then he handed me a knife.

“You don’t waste her,” he said. “She gave her life. You make it count.”

I didn’t understand what he meant then. I do now.

I did it fast. The way you’re supposed to. So the meat would be good. So it would count.

My hands were shaking. I made them stop.

When it was done, I sat back on my heels in the bloody grass. My slippers were ruined. My barn coat was stained to the elbows. I looked at Domino’s open eye. The one with the white patch around it.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Then I stood up and took out my phone.

Then I called Arnold Fogle at the locker in town.

The Plainview Locker. On Main Street, next to the Casey’s. Arnold’s family has run it since 1951. He butchers and processes beef and hogs for every farm in the county.

He answered on the second ring. “Locker.”

“Arnold,” I said. “It’s Jill Nyquist. I’ve got a steer down in my pasture. I need you to come get him. Now.”

There was a pause.

“The Domino steer?” Arnold said. “Kinley’s? He’s not scheduled till the twenty-sixth.”

“He’s down, Arnold.”

Another pause. Longer.

“I’ll be out inside the hour,” he said.

Chapter Three: The Top Wire

He was out inside the hour.

He came up our gravel lane in his white truck with the hoist on the back, the one he uses for on-farm kills. He’s sixty-eight, with a white crew cut and forearms like fence posts. He’s butchered our beef for nineteen years.

He parked by the pasture gate. He got out and walked across the grass to where Domino was lying. He looked at the steer for a long time.

He didn’t say anything about the bullet hole. He didn’t have to.