He didn’t say anything for a long time. I could hear his diesel idling. I could hear other semis around him. Somebody’s air brakes hissing.
“He shot her steer,” he said finally. “Kinley’s steer.”
“Yes.”
“In our pasture.”
“Yes.”
“Is Kinley okay?”
I looked at her. Sitting on the porch step next to me with her knees pulled up, staring at the pasture.
“No,” I said.
He called his brother twice. No answer.
He told me later. He called from the terminal line in Dubuque. Vern didn’t pick up. He called again an hour later from the road. Vern didn’t pick up.
Dale got home at eleven that night. He’d driven straight through from Dubuque without stopping. He came in the back door and went straight up to Kinley’s room. She was asleep. He sat on the edge of her bed in the dark for a long time.
Then he came back downstairs and took a flashlight off the hook by the door.
That night he walked the fence with a flashlight.
The whole line. Every post. From the road all the way to the creek. Half a mile. I watched him from the kitchen window. A little circle of light moving along the fence line in the dark. Stopping at every post.
He was gone an hour and a half.
When he came back in, he set the flashlight on the kitchen counter. He sat down at the table across from me. He looked tired. Older than forty-nine.
“It’s tight,” he said. “Every strand. Every staple. The corner’s tight as a drum. There’s not a hair on a barb anywhere.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He’s my brother, Jill,” Dale said. “I’ve known him my whole life. I don’t know why he did it.”
“I know.”
“But it was your steer,” Dale said. “Yours and Kinley’s. You raised him. You paid for his feed.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “So it’s your call. Whatever you want to do. Call the sheriff. Don’t call the sheriff. I’ll back you either way.”
I thought about it for a long time. Sitting at that kitchen table at one in the morning.
“There’s something you should know,” Dale said. “Something I didn’t tell you.”
I looked at him.
“Vern had the line surveyed,” Dale said. “In August. He hired a surveyor out of Waterloo. The guy came out and walked it with a GPS. I saw him out there. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“And?”
“And Vern called me,” Dale said. “Right after Labor Day. He said the survey shows the fence is eighteen feet onto his side. The whole length. Eighteen feet by half a mile.” He looked down at the table. “He said Dad put it in the wrong place in 1972, and we’ve been grazing on his land for fifty years. He wanted me to move it.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said no,” Dale said. “I said Dad put that fence there, and it’s been there fifty years, and it’s not moving.” He shook his head. “He hung up on me. We haven’t talked since.”
I sat there with that for a long time.
So that’s what he meant. He was in my corn again. Not corn. Grass. Eighteen feet of pasture that Vern believed was his.
Domino had been grazing on our side of a fence. On ground Vern thought he owned.
“That doesn’t make it right,” I said.
“No,” Dale said. “It doesn’t make it right.”
Chapter Five: Domino
Domino hung six hundred and forty pounds.
That’s hanging weight. The weight of the carcass after Arnold skinned it and cleaned it and hung it on a hook in his cooler. He called me on Monday to tell me.
“Six-forty,” he said. “Nice steer, Jill. Real nice marbling. Kinley did a good job with him.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“I’ll let him hang fourteen days,” Arnold said. “Same as I would’ve. Then we’ll cut him. You know how you want it?”
“I’ll call you,” I said.
About eighteen hundred dollars of beef.
That’s what Domino was worth. At the price of beef that fall. Steaks and roasts and ground beef. Enough to feed our family of three all winter. Into spring, if we were careful.
That was the plan. Eighteen hundred dollars we didn’t have to spend at the Fareway in town. Eighteen hundred dollars of meat that Kinley raised herself, with her own two hands, at five in the morning in the snow.
I thought about it all week. On the mail route. In the car.
I carry the mail on Hollow Creek Road five days a week. Rural Route 2 out of the Plainview post office. A hundred and twelve miles of gravel. Three hundred and eighty mailboxes. I’ve done it for eleven years.
I know every mailbox on it. I know who gets the Farm Journal and who gets the Successful Farming and who gets their medicine from the VA in Des Moines. I know who’s behind on their electric bill because the envelopes from MidAmerican Energy turn pink. I know whose kids are away at college because of the care packages going out.
I know Marge Hansen, who’s eighty-four and gets a letter from her sister in Norway every two weeks. I know Pete Larson, who farmed next to Harold Nyquist for forty years. I know the Brennans, who just had a baby. I know the Molinas, who moved up from Texas to work at the hog plant. I know old Mr. Thorson, who’s blind and listens to books on tape from the state library.
And I know Vern Nyquist. Whose mailbox sits on a post at the end of his lane.
On Thursday night, I sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad.
Dale was gone again. Hauling corn to Shell Rock. Kinley was in her room. She’d barely come out since Saturday. She went to school and came home and went to her room and shut the door. She didn’t eat much. She didn’t go out to the barn.
I wrote down the names of every family on Hollow Creek Road.
There were six of them. Six families. Six porches.
Including Vern’s.
I called Arnold the next morning from the post office.
“Here’s how I want him cut,” I said.
I told him. Steaks. Ribeyes and T-bones and sirloins. Roasts. Chuck and arm and rump. A few packages of short ribs. And the rest in ground beef. One-pound packages. Wrapped in white butcher paper and labeled.
“And then,” I said, “I want you to divide it up.”
“Divide it?”
“Into seven,” I said. “Our share. And six boxes.”
Arnold was quiet on the phone for a long time.
“Six boxes,” he said.
“Six,” I said. “Roasts, steaks, and ground in each one. As even as you can make them.”
“Who are they for, Jill?”
“Everybody on our road,” I said.
Another long silence.
“Everybody,” Arnold said.
“Everybody,” I said.
I heard him breathe out. Slowly.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll have them ready a week from Saturday. In waxed boxes. On the dock.”
Chapter Six: Six Times
We kept our share.
That was the first box. Bigger than the others. A family of three needs more than a widow. Arnold packed it full. Ribeyes and a chuck roast and twenty pounds of ground. Enough for the winter, if we stretched it.
The rest went into six boxes.
Roasts, steaks, and ground in each one.
Arnold packed them himself. In white waxed cardboard boxes with lids, the kind he uses for half beefs. Each one with a chuck roast and an arm roast. Two T-bones and two sirloins. Six pounds of ground beef. All wrapped in white butcher paper and labeled in Arnold’s square handwriting. GROUND. SIRLOIN. CHUCK RST.
About eighty dollars of beef in each box. Maybe more.
