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.
Mike is Cooper’s only uncle.
He’s Brent’s older brother. Forty-four. He farms the other half of the Olson ground, four miles north, with his wife, Deb, and their two boys. Logan is fifteen. Tyler is twelve.
Mike taught Cooper to drive a four-wheeler. Mike took him fishing at Johnson Lake every Fourth of July. Mike stood in the cemetery in May with his hand on Cooper’s shoulder while they lowered his brother into the ground.
That boy had already lost enough men for one year.
I wasn’t going to make him lose another one in a steer pen over nine hundred dollars.
I said no to the money and let the show ring answer for me.
“We’re keeping him,” I said. “Cooper’s showing him.”
Mike looked at me for a long time. Then at Cooper. Then at the money in his hand.
He folded the bills back up. He put them in the chest pocket of his work shirt. He snapped it shut.
He took his forearms off the top board. And he walked off. Back to his pickup in the yard. He didn’t say goodbye.…
