Kinley came across the pasture at a run.
I didn’t hear her coming. I was helping Arnold with the chains. I looked up and there she was. Running across the brown grass from the house in her pajama pants and her sweatshirt and her rubber boots. Her hair still messy from her pillow.
She’d heard the shot. Or she’d heard Arnold’s truck. Or she’d just looked out her bedroom window and seen the locker truck in the pasture and known.
I met her halfway and held on.
I dropped the chain and ran to her. I caught her in the middle of the pasture, about fifty yards from the fence corner, before she could get close enough to see. I wrapped both my bloody arms around her and held on.
She fought me. She tried to pull away. “Mom, let me go. Mom. Is that Domino? Mom!”
“Don’t look, baby,” I said. “Don’t look. Come back to the house.”
“Is it him?”
“Yes.”
She stopped fighting. She went limp against me. She was eleven years old and she was almost as tall as me now, and she sagged against me like she was three.
She didn’t cry until we reached the porch steps.
We walked back across the pasture together. My arm around her shoulders. Her face pressed against my shoulder so she couldn’t look back. She didn’t make a sound the whole way.
Then we got to the porch steps. And she sat down on the bottom one. And she looked at her rubber boots. The same ones she wore every morning to feed him.
And she broke.
I sat down next to her on the step. I held her while she cried. Big, gasping sobs. The kind that shake your whole body.
Behind us, in the kitchen, the radio was still playing. The pancake batter was still sitting in the bowl on the counter.
Out in the pasture, Arnold was working. I could hear the hoist.
“Who did it?” Kinley finally asked. Into my shoulder. “Mom. Who shot him?”
I didn’t want to tell her.
But I’ve never lied to my daughter. Not once. Not about Santa Claus, not about where babies come from, not about where hamburger comes from.
“Uncle Vern,” I said.
Chapter Four: Two Hundred Miles
Dale was two hundred miles away hauling corn for the co-op.
He drives a semi for the Plainview Farmers Cooperative during harvest. Runs corn from the elevator to the ethanol plant in Shell Rock and the river terminals in Dubuque. Twelve, fourteen hours a day. He was in Dubuque that Saturday, waiting in a line of semis at the terminal on the Mississippi.
I called him from the porch. He picked up on the first ring.
“Jill? What’s wrong?”
I told him.
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.
At the locker dock, Kinley sat on the tailgate with a marker.
It was Saturday morning. Two weeks after the shot. The day Domino was supposed to go to the locker in the first place. October twenty-sixth.
She hadn’t wanted to come. I hadn’t made her. But at the last minute, when I was going out the door with my car keys, she came down the stairs in her jeans and her barn coat.
“I want to come,” she said.
The dock behind Arnold’s locker is a concrete loading platform with a steel roller door. Arnold had the boxes stacked on a hand cart. Seven of them. White and clean.
We backed the pickup up to the dock. Kinley got out and sat on the open tailgate. She had a black Sharpie marker in her hand. She’d brought it from home in her pocket.
Arnold wheeled the boxes out one by one and set them in the truck bed.
As each one came, Kinley turned it over.
She wrote his name on the bottom of every box.
DOMINO.
In her careful sixth-grade handwriting. Big capital letters. Black marker on white wax.
Domino. Six times.
She didn’t write it on ours. Just the six.
I stood there on the dock and watched her do it. One box. Then the next. Then the next. Her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth the way it always does when she concentrates.
Arnold stood beside me with his arms crossed. He didn’t say anything.
When she finished the last one, she capped the marker and put it back in her pocket.
“So they know who he was,” she said.
Arnold made a sound. Like something got caught in his throat.
He turned around and went back into the locker. He didn’t come back out for a while. When he did, his eyes were red.
He didn’t charge me for the processing. I tried to pay. I had the checkbook out. He wouldn’t take it.
“Not for this one, Jill,” he said. “Not for Domino.”
Chapter Seven: The Route
Saturday I drove it with the boxes stacked in my pickup.
Hollow Creek Road. Six miles of gravel running north out of Plainview, past cornfields and bean stubble and pasture, to where it dead-ends at the creek. The road I drive five days a week with three hundred and eighty pieces of mail.
Not mail today. Beef.
Our own share rode in the bed behind them.
Our box was in the back, against the cab. The six boxes were stacked in front of it, closest to the tailgate, so I could reach them.
Kinley rode in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap.
A box on each porch.
A note in my route-book handwriting.
I’d written them the night before. On index cards. Six of them. The same words on each one.
From Kinley’s steer, Domino. Enjoy him.
I tucked each card under the lid of each box.
The Brennans were first. The young couple with the new baby. Nobody was home. I set the box on their porch next to the stroller and the pumpkins.
The Molinas were second. Rosa Molina came to the door holding a dish towel. I handed her the box. She read the card. She looked at me. Then past me at Kinley in the pickup.
“Domino?” she said. “The cow your girl raised?”
I nodded.
She put her hand on her chest. She didn’t say anything else. She just held the box against her hip and stood in her doorway and watched us drive away.
Old Mr. Thorson was third. He’s blind. I put the box in his hands so he could feel the weight of it. I read him the card out loud.
He held the box for a long time.
“Harold’s granddaughter,” he said. “Raised a steer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Harold always said that girl had a way with animals.” He smiled. “Tell her I said thank you. Tell her I’ll think of him.”
Marge Hansen opened her door and just lifted her hand.
She’s eighty-four. She’s lived on Hollow Creek Road for sixty-one years. She was standing at her storm door in a housecoat when we pulled up. She’d seen us coming.
I carried the box up her porch steps. I set it down by the door.
She looked at the box. Then at the card. Then out at the pickup, where Kinley was sitting.
She didn’t say anything. She just lifted her hand. Toward the pickup. Toward Kinley. And held it there, up in the air, like a blessing.
Kinley lifted her hand back.
Pete Larson met us by his shed.
He’s seventy-eight. He farmed the quarter across the creek from Harold Nyquist for forty years. He was Harold’s best friend. He was a pallbearer at his funeral. He knows Dale and Vern better than anybody alive.
He was in his machine shed working on a grain auger when we pulled up. He came out wiping his hands on a rag.
He saw the box in my arms. He saw the name on the bottom. DOMINO, in black marker.
He stood there for a long time.
“That steer left his corner two weeks early,” he said.
I looked at him.
He knew. Of course he knew. Everybody on Hollow Creek Road knew. The shot carried. Arnold’s truck was seen. Somebody talked at the café.
“He did,” I said.
Pete took the box from me. He held it against his chest with both arms.
He held that box like it weighed a hundred pounds.
He didn’t ask whose fence.
He didn’t have to.
He just stood there in front of his machine shed, holding that box, looking past me. Up the road. Toward the end. Toward the last mailbox.
“You going up there?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Harold put that fence in in ‘72,” he said. “I helped him. I held the posts.” He shook his head. “He knew right where the line was. He put it there on purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
But Pete just shook his head again and turned and walked into his shed with Domino against his chest.
Chapter Eight: The Last Mailbox
Five porches.
Kinley stayed in the cab for the last one.
We pulled up at the end of Vern’s lane. The last mailbox on Hollow Creek Road before it dead-ends at the creek.
I put the pickup in park. I looked over at my daughter. She was looking straight ahead through the windshield. Not at Vern’s house. At nothing.
“You want to come?” I asked.
She shook her head.
I opened my door. I started to get out.
“Mom,” she said.
I stopped.
“Tell him his name,” she said as I got out. “Domino. Make sure he knows his name.”
Vern’s mailbox sits on a post at the end of his lane.
A big black rural box on a cedar post. NYQUIST in white reflective letters on the side. The flag’s been broken for two years. It hangs down crooked.
I’ve put mail in it for eleven years.
I know what comes. The Farm Journal. A seed catalog from Pioneer. Bills from MidAmerican Energy and the co-op. A statement from the Farm Credit office in Ames. A letter every month from the Social Security Administration, for Vern’s mother, Lorraine, who lived with him until she died last winter. He never stopped the letters. They kept coming. I kept delivering them.
And for the last eight months, letters from Farm Credit with FINAL NOTICE stamped on the front in red.
I stopped my dark red pickup beside it and dropped the tailgate.
Gray October sky. Low clouds coming in from the west. The wind out of the northwest, cold and wet, smelling like rain. Brown grass in the ditch. The corn on Vern’s side of the road still standing, dry and rattling. He hadn’t combined it yet. It was the end of October and he hadn’t combined.
I turned around and looked south, back down Hollow Creek Road.
Our farmhouse small and far back down the road. A little white house with a red barn, a mile and a half away, at the end of the gravel.
I took Vern’s box out of the bed of the pickup.
The last one. DOMINO written on the bottom in black marker. The card tucked under the lid. From Kinley’s steer, Domino. Enjoy him.
I stood there in my barn coat with his box against my hip.
