“I was wondering,” he said. “If maybe. For Thanksgiving.” He swallowed. “If we could all eat him together. Here. At Dad’s table. The whole family.”
Kinley looked at the box. Then at her uncle.
“So you can say goodbye?” she asked.
“So we all can,” Vern said. “I took yours. I thought maybe we could do it together.”
So on Thanksgiving Day, we ate Domino.
The chuck roast from Vern’s box. I cooked it all day in my grandmother’s cast iron Dutch oven, with carrots and potatoes and onions, the way my mother taught me.
There were eleven of us around Harold Nyquist’s old oak table. Dale and me and Kinley. Vern. Pete Larson. Marge Hansen, who drove her Buick down the road at ten miles an hour. Mr. Thorson, who Kinley walked across the yard on her arm. The Brennans and their baby. Rosa and Tomas Molina.
Arnold Fogle came for pie.
Before we ate, Dale asked Kinley to say grace.
She bowed her head. Everybody bowed their heads.
“Thank you, God, for this food,” Kinley said. “And for our family. And our neighbors.” She paused. “And thank you for Domino. He was a good steer. He came when you called him. He liked his ears scratched.”
Her voice wobbled. She kept going.
“He was scared of thunder,” she said. “But he wasn’t scared of anything else. Amen.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Vern said, “Amen.” Very quietly.
And everybody else said it. All eleven of us. And we passed the roast.
That was a year ago.
It’s October again now. Burning-leaves season. The corn’s coming off on Hollow Creek Road.
In April, Vern drove down to the Petersen place three miles south. Old Ray Petersen had a heifer that died calving in a snowstorm. Just like two years before. Left a bottle calf.
Vern bought him. Sixty dollars. He brought him home in the back seat of his pickup, wrapped in a horse blanket. He drove him straight to our place.
He didn’t keep him. He gave him to Kinley.
He’s red and white this time. A Hereford cross. Kinley named him Checkers.
“Because Domino was the game you lose,” she said. “And Checkers is the one where you get kinged.”
She feeds him at five every morning before the school bus. A big plastic bottle with a red rubber nipple. Mixed in the kitchen sink in her pajamas and her boots.
But not alone.
Every morning, at five, the yard light comes on at the old Lindgren house across the road.
And Vern walks down his lane in the dark, with a flashlight. Across the gravel road. Through our pasture gate.
He meets Kinley at the barn. He holds the flashlight while she mixes the milk. He stands at the stall door while Checkers drinks.
Neither of them says much. It’s five in the morning. They’re not big talkers, either one.
But I watch them from the kitchen window. Every morning. Two figures in the barn light, one tall and gray and stooped, one small and fierce in rubber boots.
Last Saturday, I was in the kitchen making pancakes at 7:40. The radio on. The farm report.
I looked out the window at the fence corner.
The northwest corner. Where our fence meets Vern’s. Four strands of barbed wire, tight. Every staple where my husband put it.
Checkers was standing there, at the corner, against the wire. On our side. Red and white and fat in the morning sun, swishing his tail.
And Vern was standing on the other side. Leaning on a fence post. Reaching over the top strand.
Scratching Checkers behind the ears.
I watched them for a long time.
Then Vern looked up. He saw me in the kitchen window. He didn’t wave. He just nodded once.
And then he reached up and plucked the top wire with his thumb.
I couldn’t hear it from the house. But I knew what it sounded like. I could see the wire vibrate in the light.
A high, clear note, singing all the way down the line.
Tight. The way his father built it. The way his brother keeps it.
The way it’s going to stay.
