7:40 on a Saturday
The shot came from the fence corner at 7:40 on a Saturday morning.
I was in the kitchen with my hands in a bowl of pancake batter. The radio was on. KMA out of Shenandoah, the farm report, a man reading off the price of corn in a flat voice. Kinley was still upstairs asleep. It was the first Saturday in weeks she didn’t have to be up for anything.
Then the shot.
One crack, flat and hard across the pasture. It rattled the window over the sink.
You hear gunshots in the country. That’s normal. Somebody after a coyote. Somebody sighting in a deer rifle for November.
But not that close. Not from the fence corner. Not on a Saturday morning in October with the cattle out.
I set the bowl down. I didn’t wipe my hands. I went out the back door in my slippers and my barn coat and ran.
Domino was down against the wire.
On our side.
He was lying on his side in the brown grass at the northwest corner of our pasture, where our fence meets Vern’s. His legs were stretched out stiff. His big black-and-white head was pressed up against the bottom strand of barbed wire, like he’d fallen into it.
There was blood in the grass. A lot of it.
His eyes were open.
Our daughter Kinley raised him from a bottle calf.
He was born in a snowstorm in February two years ago, on the Petersen place three miles south. His mother died having him. Old Ray Petersen called me on the mail route and asked if Kinley wanted a calf to raise. She was nine.
Dale brought him home in the back seat of the pickup wrapped in a horse blanket. He was so small. Black and white, with one white patch over his left eye and three more on his side. Kinley took one look at him and said, “Domino.”
She fed him at five every morning for eight weeks, before the school bus.
A big plastic bottle with a red rubber nipple, full of warm milk replacer. She’d mix it in the kitchen sink in her pajamas and her boots and walk out to the barn in the dark with a flashlight. Every morning. Snow, rain, twenty below.
Then again at five at night, after school.
He followed her around the pasture like a dog. He’d come running when she called his name. He’d put his big head against her chest and push until she scratched behind his ears.
He was going to be our freezer beef this winter. Kinley knew that. She’d always known. That’s how it is on a farm. You raise an animal for food and you love it anyway. She’d made her peace with it in August. She’d cried. And then she’d picked the date with me, at the kitchen table, on the calendar from the co-op.
Two weeks from that Saturday. He was scheduled at the locker on the twenty-sixth.
Vern stood at the edge of his standing corn with a rifle.
Twenty yards away. On his side of the fence. In his canvas coat and his DeKalb cap, with a deer rifle held loose in his right hand, barrel pointed at the ground.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the steer.
“He was in my corn again,” he said.
I looked at the fence.
Four strands of barbed wire. Tight. Every strand pulled taut between the steel posts. Every staple where my husband put it.
Dale rebuilt that whole corner in April. I helped him. I held the wire stretcher while he cranked. I remember because I cut my thumb on a barb and bled all over my jeans. We went down the line together and checked every post and every staple, and when we were done, he plucked the top wire with his finger and it sang.
That fence was tight. Domino couldn’t have gotten through it. A rabbit couldn’t have gotten through it.
“Through what, Vern?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
He looked at me for a second. His face was gray and closed, like a barn door shut against the wind.
Then he turned and walked back toward his yard. Through the end rows of his corn. With his rifle in his hand.
He didn’t look back.
Chapter Two: Across That Fence
I could have called the sheriff.
I had my phone in my barn coat pocket. I could have pulled it out right there and dialed 911. Shooting somebody else’s livestock is a crime in Iowa. I know that much. Criminal mischief. Maybe more, depending on what it was worth.
I didn’t.
Vern is Dale’s brother.
Older brother. By four years. Vern is fifty-three. Dale is forty-nine. They grew up on the same farm, the one we live on now, the one their father, Harold Nyquist, farmed for fifty years. They shared a bedroom until Vern was fifteen. They played on the same Little League team. Vern taught Dale to drive a stick shift in the very pasture where Domino was lying dead.
When their father died nine years ago, he split the land. Dale got the home place. The house and the barns and two hundred and forty acres. Vern got the north half. Two hundred and forty acres of the best corn ground in the township, and the old Lindgren house their dad bought in 1988.
The fence between them is the line their father drew.
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. 