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.
I did it fast. The way you’re supposed to. So the meat would be good. So it would count.
My hands were shaking. I made them stop.
When it was done, I sat back on my heels in the bloody grass. My slippers were ruined. My barn coat was stained to the elbows. I looked at Domino’s open eye. The one with the white patch around it.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Then I stood up and took out my phone.
Then I called Arnold Fogle at the locker in town.
The Plainview Locker. On Main Street, next to the Casey’s. Arnold’s family has run it since 1951. He butchers and processes beef and hogs for every farm in the county.
He answered on the second ring. “Locker.”
“Arnold,” I said. “It’s Jill Nyquist. I’ve got a steer down in my pasture. I need you to come get him. Now.”
There was a pause.
“The Domino steer?” Arnold said. “Kinley’s? He’s not scheduled till the twenty-sixth.”
“He’s down, Arnold.”
Another pause. Longer.
“I’ll be out inside the hour,” he said.
Chapter Three: The Top Wire
He was out inside the hour.
He came up our gravel lane in his white truck with the hoist on the back, the one he uses for on-farm kills. He’s sixty-eight, with a white crew cut and forearms like fence posts. He’s butchered our beef for nineteen years.
He parked by the pasture gate. He got out and walked across the grass to where Domino was lying. He looked at the steer for a long time.
He didn’t say anything about the bullet hole. He didn’t have to.
He walked over to the fence corner.
He looked at the posts. He looked at the wire. Four strands, tight.
Then he reached up and plucked the top wire with his thumb. Like a guitar string.
It sang. A high, clear twang that went down the whole line.
“That corner’s tight,” he said.
He didn’t say anything else. He looked across the fence. At Vern’s corn. At the end rows where Vern had stood with his rifle. At the house beyond, the old Lindgren place, with smoke coming out of the chimney.
He looked back at me.
“You want me to call anybody, Jill?”
“No,” I said.
He nodded slowly. Like he understood.
Then he went to get his hoist.
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.
