Cooper watched him go.
He stood in the pen with his hands at his sides until Mike’s pickup was all the way down the lane and out onto the county road. Until the dust settled.
Then he picked up Brent’s notebook off the fence post where he’d set it. A green spiral notebook from the Dollar General, with feed amounts and weights and dates written in Brent’s square handwriting.
He opened it to the evening’s page. He wrote down how much Moose ate. In his own handwriting, under his dad’s.
He didn’t say anything about his uncle. Not that night. Not for a long time.
Chapter Two: Moose
Brent and Cooper had picked that calf out at weaning, the October before.
We run about sixty cows on our half of the Olson place, outside Cedar Bend, Nebraska. Commercial cattle, mostly black. But Brent kept eight registered Hereford cows because his dad did, and his granddad did, and because he liked the way they looked standing in a green pasture.
Every October, when the calves came off the cows, Brent and Cooper would walk the weaning pen together. Looking for the one.
Last October, they found him.
A red-and-white bull calf, with a white face and a white blaze running up between his eyes. Big-boned. Long through the middle. Calm. Brent said he had the best disposition of any calf he’d ever raised.
“Look at him, Coop,” Brent said. They were leaning on the pen together, the two of them, same lean, same boots on the bottom board. “He’s not scared of anything. He’s just standing there taking it all in. Like a big old moose.”
Cooper laughed. “Moose.”
That was his name.
They fed him and walked him all winter.
Every morning at five-thirty, before Brent went out to do chores and before Cooper caught the school bus. Every evening at six, after supper. They’d mix his feed in the barn from Brent’s notebook. They’d brush him. They’d halter him and walk him up and down the lane in the dark with a flashlight.
In January it was eighteen below. They walked him anyway.
“Steer doesn’t know it’s cold,” Brent said. “He just knows if you show up.”
Brent kept everything in that green notebook.
The ration was on a co-op receipt, stapled to the inside cover. Pounds of corn, pounds of pellets, pounds of supplement. How much to feed at what weight. When to step up.
And every week, Moose’s weight. Brent ran him across the livestock scale at the co-op in town every Saturday morning. He wrote it down.
In April, at the bottom of the page, Brent wrote: Guess for fair: 1,340. Then he underlined it twice.
Then Brent’s heart quit at forty-one, in the middle of planting.
May the ninth. A Thursday. He was planting corn on the south quarter. Mike was supposed to be there, helping. Running the tender truck, keeping the planter full of seed.
He wasn’t. He’d gone to the sale barn in Kearney that morning to look at a pen of feeder calves.
Brent planted alone.
Mike was the one who found him.
He came back from Kearney at two in the afternoon. He drove out to the south quarter to check on the planting. The tractor was sitting in the middle of the field, idling, with the planter down.
Brent was slumped over the steering wheel.
Mike pulled him out of the cab. He did CPR in the dirt between the rows for twenty-two minutes until the ambulance came out from Cedar Bend. The paramedics told me he never stopped. They told me they had to pull him off.
It didn’t matter. The coroner said Brent was gone before he hit the steering wheel. An arrhythmia. A heart defect nobody ever knew he had.
Forty-one years old.
The planter was still half full of seed when they hauled the tractor home. Nobody finished that field for nine days.
Then the neighbors came. Twelve of them, with their own tractors and their own seed. They planted the south quarter and the north quarter and everything else in one Saturday, while I sat in my kitchen with a casserole dish somebody brought and didn’t eat it.
Mike ran the tender truck. All day. He didn’t stop for lunch. He didn’t come in the house.
Chapter Three: Every Single Day
I am a school cook.
I’m the head cook at Cedar Bend Public Schools. Kindergarten through twelfth grade, all in one building. Three hundred and eleven kids. I’ve been doing it for fourteen years.
I can feed three hundred kids a hot lunch by eleven. Chicken and noodles. Taco salad. Sloppy joes and tater tots. I know how much flour makes how many rolls. I know which kids need seconds and which kids take food home in their pockets on Fridays.
I did not know how to feed a steer to finish.
I grew up in Lincoln. My dad was a mail carrier. My mom was a bank teller. We had a cat.
I met Brent at the state fair when I was twenty-two. He was showing a heifer. I was eating a corn dog. He walked his heifer past me and she sneezed on my corn dog, and he was so embarrassed he bought me another one, and that was that.
I learned a lot about cattle in fourteen years of marriage. I can pull a calf. I can doctor pinkeye. I can read a feed tag.
But feeding a show steer is something else. It’s a science and an art and a religion. Brent knew it. His dad knew it. I’d always just watched.
Cooper did.
That’s what I found out. Two weeks after the funeral. When I came out to the barn at five-thirty in the morning, because I couldn’t sleep, and found my son already there.
In the dark, with the shop light on. Mixing feed. From the notebook. Weighing every scoop on the old hanging scale.
He had his dad’s notebook open on the fence post and the ration on the co-op receipt.
He looked up when I came in.
“I can do it, Mom,” he said. Before I could say anything. “I know the ration. Dad showed me all winter. I know when to step him up. I know how to weigh it.”
He poured the feed into the bunk. Moose came over and started eating.
“I can do it,” Cooper said again. Then his voice cracked. “I just can’t rinse him and hold him at the same time.”
So I learned.
That’s all. I just learned. The way I learned to make chicken and noodles for three hundred, the way I learned to pull a calf. One day at a time.
Cooper taught me. Thirteen years old, standing in the barn in his dad’s cap, telling me what to do.
Feed at five-thirty and ten.
Five-thirty in the morning, before I left for the school kitchen. Ten at night, after I got home and made supper and checked homework. Weighed out on the hanging scale. Every scoop.
Rinse at noon, three and six.
You rinse a show steer to keep him cool and to train his hair. Cold water from the hose, all over, every inch. In the summer you do it three times a day. Noon, when it gets hot. Three, when it’s hottest. Six, when it starts to cool.
I drove home from the school at noon on my lunch break, every day, all summer, to rinse that steer. Twelve minutes each way. I ate a sandwich in the truck.
Brush the hair up, blow it dry, walk him down the lane.
That’s the evening. After the six o’clock rinse. You brush the hair against the grain with a stiff brush, so it stands up. Then you blow it dry with a big blower that sounds like a jet engine. So the hair trains to grow up and out, so he looks fuller.
Then you put the halter on and walk him. Down the lane to the mailbox and back. Twice. To keep his legs strong. To teach him to walk slow and set his feet square when you stop.
Cooper led. I walked behind with the show stick, the way he showed me.
An old neighbor told me one thing that summer.
Elmer Pruss. Eighty-four. He farmed the quarter across the road from us for sixty years. He showed steers at the Platte Valley County Fair from 1952 to 1958. He still had his purple ribbons in a frame in his living room.
He came over in June, in his old Ford pickup, and leaned on the steer pen and watched me rinse Moose. He didn’t say anything for twenty minutes.
Then he said, “You’re doing it right.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Elmer.”
He spit tobacco juice in the dirt.
“Feeding cattle isn’t a man’s job or a woman’s job,” he said. “It’s an every-single-day job.”
He got back in his pickup and drove home.
I wrote it on a piece of masking tape and stuck it to the inside of the barn door.
Chapter Four: The Boots
Brent’s work boots sat on the back step after the funeral.
Brown leather. Red Wing. The pair he wore every day for six years. Creased across the toes and worn down at the heels. Scuffed white on the right toe where he always kicked the tractor tire.
He’d left them there on the morning of May ninth. He’d put on his other boots, the rubber ones, because it rained the night before and the field was muddy. These were sitting right where he left them, on the back step, side by side.
Nobody moved them. Not for weeks.
Size twelve. I wear a nine.
I’d walk past them every morning, going out to the barn. Every night, coming back in. Sitting there on the step. Waiting.
People from church kept asking if I wanted help going through his things. His clothes. His tools. Mike’s wife, Deb, offered twice.
I said not yet.
One day I put them on and stuffed the toes so they’d stay on.
It was the second week of June. Raining. My own boots were soaked through from the noon rinse. I came back in the house to change my socks, and I walked past his boots on the step.
I don’t know why I did it. I just did.
I sat down on the step and pulled them on. They were huge. My feet swam in them. I stood up and they nearly fell off.
So I went in the house and got two of his old wool socks out of his drawer. And I balled them up and stuffed them in the toes. And I put the boots back on.
They stayed.
Cooper came out of the barn. He looked at my feet.
He didn’t laugh.
He looked at those boots for a long time. Brown leather. Scuffed white on the right toe.
“Dad would think that was funny,” he said.
I wore them every day after that.
To the barn. To the pen. To the rinse rack. Down the lane with Moose. Every single day.
I’d clomp across the yard in them like a little kid in her daddy’s shoes. I tripped a few times. Once I fell flat on my face in the mud by the water tank.
Cooper helped me up. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. The first time I’d heard him laugh since May.
“Mom,” he gasped. “You look like a clown.”
“Your dad would think so too,” I said.
“He’d take a picture,” Cooper said. “And put it on Facebook.”
Then we both stopped laughing, at the same time. And stood there in the mud.
Mike saw me in them once.
He drove in on a Tuesday in late June to drop off a part for the swather. I was in the pen, rinsing Moose. In my school cook clothes, black pants and a white polo, and Brent’s brown boots.
He stopped at the edge of the yard. He looked at the boots.
His face did something. I couldn’t read it.
He set the part on the porch and drove away without saying a word.
Chapter Five: The Fan
One day in July, the fan quit and Moose wouldn’t eat.
We keep a big box fan hanging in the corner of his pen. Show steers get hot. Their hair is long and thick and they’re carrying a lot of weight. When it’s ninety-five degrees in Nebraska in July, they need air moving or they quit eating.
I came out for the ten o’clock feeding on a Wednesday night. Ninety-one degrees at ten at night. The air was like a wet blanket.
The fan wasn’t running. The motor had burned out. I could smell it.
Moose was standing in the corner of the pen with his head down. Breathing hard. The bunk was still half full from the afternoon. He hadn’t touched it.
I didn’t know what to do.
I called Cooper’s name. He didn’t come. He was asleep. He’d been up since five.
I stood in that pen in Brent’s boots and stared at that steer. Breathing hard. Not eating. Two weeks before the county fair.
If he went off feed now, he’d lose weight. Maybe fifty pounds. Maybe more. All the work. All summer. Every rinse.
I sat on the water tank and told my husband I didn’t know what I was doing.
Out loud. In the dark. With the barn light buzzing over my head and the bugs going crazy around it.
“Brent,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Nobody answered. Of course nobody answered.
“I don’t know how to fix a fan,” I said. “I don’t know what to do when he won’t eat. I don’t know if he’s sick. I don’t know if I’m feeding him wrong. I don’t know anything.”
I started crying.
“You were supposed to be here,” I said. “You were supposed to do this part. I was supposed to bring lemonade to the fair and sit in the bleachers and clap.”
I sat there on the edge of that water tank in Brent’s boots and cried. Really cried. The way I hadn’t let myself cry at the funeral, because Cooper was watching.
Then something wet pushed into my shoulder.
That steer pushed his wet nose into my shoulder.
Moose. Twelve hundred pounds of him. He’d come over from the corner of the pen without me hearing. He stood there next to the water tank and pushed his big white face into my shoulder.
Not hard. Gentle. The way he used to push Brent when Brent was scratching his neck.
I put my arm around his face. I held on.
He stood there and let me.
Then he walked to the bunk and cleaned it up.
Every bite. All the afternoon feed and the night feed together. He ate it all. Standing in the hot pen with no fan, at ten-thirty at night.
I sat on the water tank and watched him. Wiping my face on my sleeve.
When he was done, he licked the bottom of the bunk. Then he walked back over to the corner and lay down.
The next morning, before I went to work, a new fan was hanging in the corner of the pen.
A big one. A sixty-inch barn fan, the kind they use in dairy barns. Running. Blowing cool air across the whole pen.
I didn’t buy it. Cooper didn’t buy it. We didn’t have the money.
There was a receipt from the Cedar Bend Co-op stuck to the fence post with a piece of baling wire.
Sold to: Mike Olson. 60-inch barn fan. $389.00. PAID.
Chapter Six: The Weigh-In
He weighed in at the county fair at 1,342 pounds.
The Platte Valley County Fair. The last week of July. At the fairgrounds on the east edge of Cedar Bend, with the big white livestock barn and the show arena with the pipe rails and the grandstand where they have the tractor pull on Saturday night.
We hauled Moose in on Wednesday morning. In Brent’s stock trailer, behind my pickup. Cooper rode in the back with him, so he wouldn’t be scared.
Weigh-in was at nine. A long line of kids and steers waiting to cross the big scale at the end of the barn.
Cooper led him on. Moose stood perfectly still.
The man at the scale, a retired banker named Herb, looked at the readout.
“Thirteen forty-two,” he said.
Cooper turned around and looked at me.
I had Brent’s green notebook in my back pocket. I took it out. I opened it to the page from April. Brent’s handwriting at the bottom.
Guess for fair: 1,340.
Brent had guessed 1,340 in April.
Two pounds.
Cooper looked at the notebook. Then at me. Then at the scale.
“Two pounds,” he said. “He was off by two pounds.”
“Your dad was good at guessing,” I said.
Cooper took the notebook out of my hand. He took a pen out of his pocket. And under his dad’s guess, he wrote:
Actual: 1,342. You were right, Dad.
The steer show was Friday afternoon.
Three o’clock. In the big arena. Nine steers in the market steer class. Then the champions from each class would come back for the Grand Champion drive.
Cooper was up early. Five a.m. In the barn, at the fairgrounds, with Moose. Rinsing. Brushing. Blowing. Fitting. Trimming the hair on his legs with Brent’s clippers.
I helped. In Brent’s boots. Holding the halter while he worked.
Mike was in the barn too.
His son Logan had a steer in the same class. A black crossbred named Tank. Logan’s pen was three down from ours.
Mike and Logan were fitting Tank. Mike was working on the legs with his own clippers. He didn’t look over at us. Not once all morning.
But I saw him look at Moose. When he thought nobody was watching. Standing in the aisle, holding a can of adhesive spray, just looking.