Nine Hundred Dollars

Nine hundred-dollar bills came across the top board of the steer pen.

It was the third Saturday in June. Six-thirty in the evening. The sun was low over the cornfield west of the barn, and the light came in sideways through the gaps in the boards, gold and full of dust.

My brother-in-law stood on the outside of the pen with his forearms on the top board. He was holding the money out in one hand. Folded once down the middle. Fanned a little, so you could see it was hundreds.

He held them out like he was paying for seed corn.

“Nine hundred,” Mike said. “Cash.”

He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Cooper.

My son was standing in the middle of the pen with a full bucket of feed in his hand. Five gallons. Rolled corn and pellets and a scoop of the supplement Brent always added. He’d mixed it himself, from the notebook, the way he’d done every evening for six weeks.

Moose was standing at the bunk, waiting. Twelve hundred pounds of red-and-white Hereford, with his white face turned toward the bucket and his ears forward.

“Logan can finish him out,” Mike said. “Take him over to our place this week. Feed him with ours. Show him at the county fair in his name.”

He glanced at me. Finally.

“No man was left to feed it right, Jamie,” he said.

Cooper was standing right there with a full bucket.

He didn’t say a word.

He just set the bucket down. Slow and careful. On the packed dirt by the bunk. Like it was full of eggs.

Then he stood there with his hands at his sides. Thirteen years old. In a feed-store cap that used to be his dad’s, too big, the brim pushed down over his eyes.

Moose put his nose in the bucket and started eating. Loud. Nobody else moved.