**Part 3**
Chapter Ten: The Sale
The 4-H livestock sale is Saturday afternoon. In the same arena. The kids lead their animals in one at a time, and local businesses and families bid on them.
It’s not really a market sale. It’s a premium sale. The buyers pay way over market price, as a way of supporting the kids. The money goes to the kid. Most of them use it for college. Or to buy next year’s calf.
The Grand Champion steer sells last. It’s the big one. Everybody waits for it.
The arena was packed. Every seat in the bleachers. People standing along the rail.
The auctioneer was Bud Kaminski, who’s auctioneered the county fair sale for thirty years. He stood on a hay wagon at one end of the ring with a microphone.
The buyers sat in a section of folding chairs right by the ring. The co-op. The bank. The implement dealer. The insurance agency. The feed store. Local farm families.
I sat in the bleachers with Elmer Pruss. In Brent’s boots.
Cooper led Moose in at four-fifteen. The last animal of the sale.
He was wearing his white show shirt again. Clean. With a purple Grand Champion rosette pinned to the pocket. He held Brent’s show stick.
Bud Kaminski started the bidding.
“Grand Champion Market Steer,” he said. “Shown by Cooper Olson. Thirteen hundred and forty-two pounds. Who’ll give me five dollars a pound?”
Five dollars a pound. That’s what a Grand Champion goes for at the Platte Valley County Fair, usually. Five, six, maybe seven dollars a pound. Six thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand dollars.
The co-op raised their card. Five dollars.
The bank raised theirs. Five-fifty.
The implement dealer. Six.
The co-op. Six-fifty. The bank. Seven.
It went fast. Bud’s chant rolled across the arena. Seven. Seven-fifty. Eight.
At eight dollars a pound, the co-op dropped out. At eight-fifty, the implement dealer dropped out.
The bank at nine dollars a pound. Twelve thousand, seventy-eight dollars.
“Nine dollars,” Bud said. “Do I hear nine-fifty? Nine-fifty for this Grand Champion? Going once.”
Then a card went up in the back of the buyers’ section.
A white card with a number on it. Held high.
Bud squinted. “Nine-fifty! From the back. Thank you, sir.”
I looked. I couldn’t see who it was. There were too many people standing in front of me.
The bank went to ten.
The card in the back went to ten-fifty.
The bank went to eleven.
The card in the back went to twelve.
The bank’s loan officer, a woman named Carol Hughes, turned around in her folding chair to see who was bidding against her.
She looked for a long time. Then she put her card down in her lap.
“Twelve dollars a pound,” Bud Kaminski said. “Twelve dollars. Going once. Going twice.”
He banged his gavel on the hay wagon.
“Sold! Twelve dollars a pound! Sixteen thousand, one hundred and four dollars! A new county fair record!”
The arena exploded. People standing up. Cheering. Whistling.
Then Bud leaned into his microphone.
“And who’s the buyer, sir?” he asked. “Let’s hear it for our buyer!”
The man in the back stood up.
He was wearing a seed cap and a tan work shirt.
My brother-in-law.
Chapter Eleven: Mike
The arena went quiet.
Not right away. It took a few seconds. People turning around. Craning their necks. Seeing who it was.
Then everybody knew. Everybody in Cedar Bend knew Mike Olson. Everybody knew he was Brent’s brother. Everybody had heard about the nine hundred dollars across the top board of the pen.
Small towns. Everybody knows everything.
Mike stood there in the back of the buyers’ section. He didn’t sit back down. He looked at the ring. At Cooper, standing in the middle of it with Moose.
Then he walked down the aisle between the folding chairs. To the gate. Dean opened it for him.
He walked into the ring.
He stopped in front of Cooper.
The whole arena watched. Not a sound.
Mike looked at his nephew. Thirteen years old. In a white show shirt, with a purple rosette pinned to the pocket and his dead father’s show stick in his hand.
Mike reached into the chest pocket of his work shirt. He took out something folded.
Nine hundred-dollar bills.
The same ones. I’d know them anywhere. Folded once down the middle.
“These were yours,” Mike said. Not into a microphone. Just to Cooper. But the arena was so quiet that everybody heard. “I tried to give them to you for the wrong reason.”
He held them out.
Cooper didn’t take them.
“In June,” Mike said, “I told your mom no man was left to feed this steer right.” His voice cracked. “I was wrong, Coop. There was. You.”
He looked over at the bleachers. At me. In Brent’s boots.
“And a woman,” he said, “who was stronger than any man I ever knew. Including your dad. Including me.”
Cooper looked at the money. Then at his uncle.
“Why’d you want to buy him?” he asked. “In June? Why’d you want Logan to have him?”
Mike didn’t answer for a long time.
When he finally did, it came out very quietly. So quietly I almost didn’t hear it from the bleachers.
“Because I wasn’t there,” he said.
Cooper stared at him.
“May ninth,” Mike said. “I was supposed to be running the tender truck. On the south quarter. With your dad. I promised him.” He swallowed hard. “And I went to Kearney instead. To look at calves. Because I wanted to see a pen of black baldies a guy had. I told your dad I’d be back by noon.”
He looked down at the shavings.
“I got back at two,” he said. “And your dad had been planting by himself for six hours. Filling the planter by himself. Lifting fifty-pound bags of seed by himself. In the heat.” His voice broke. “If I’d been there. If I’d been doing the lifting. Maybe his heart…”
He couldn’t finish.
“So I tried to take everything,” Mike said. “Your dad’s half of the ground. I called a lawyer in Kearney in June about buying your mom out of the partnership. At book value. I told myself I was helping her. That she couldn’t run it alone.” He shook his head. “And the steer. I told myself Logan could finish him out. That you’d be better off. That I’d be taking the load off you.”
He looked up at Cooper.
“I wasn’t taking the load off you,” he said. “I was trying to put my brother back together with my own two hands. Because I couldn’t stand that I wasn’t there to hold him up.”
Cooper stood there in the middle of the ring.
Then he reached out. Not for the money.
He held out his dad’s show stick.
“Dad always let you scratch Moose’s belly,” Cooper said. “When you came over. He said you were the only other one who knew where Moose liked it.”
Mike stared at the show stick.
“Go ahead,” Cooper said.
Mike took it. His hands were shaking.
He stepped up beside Moose. He reached the curved end of the show stick under the big steer’s belly. Right in the middle. Right where Brent always did.
He scratched.
Moose’s eyes closed. His head came down. He leaned into it.
The whole arena watched a grown man scratch a steer’s belly with his dead brother’s show stick, crying, in the middle of a show ring.
Nobody said a word.
Chapter Twelve: Three Pairs
The check came three weeks later. From Mike. Made out to Cooper Olson. Sixteen thousand, one hundred and four dollars.
Cooper wanted to give it back. Mike wouldn’t take it. Cooper wanted to put it in the bank. I made him put it in a 529 college savings plan, with the State of Nebraska. NEST, they call it. The money grows tax-free.
All except nine hundred dollars.
Mike made him keep the nine hundred in cash. Separate.
“For next year’s calf,” Mike said. “Pick him out yourself. At weaning. In October.”
Mike called the lawyer in Kearney back. He tore up the buyout papers. Then he called a different lawyer. A woman in Holdrege who does farm estate law.
She drew up a new partnership agreement. Olson Brothers Farm became Olson Family Farm. Mike and Deb on one side. Me on the other. With Brent’s half of the ground held in trust for Cooper, until he’s twenty-five. Me as trustee.
Mike runs most of the machinery work. I run the cows, with Cooper. We split everything. In writing. On paper. Signed by everybody. The way Brent always said we should, and never got around to.
In October, Mike and Cooper walked the weaning pen together.
I watched them from the house. Through the kitchen window. Two of them, leaning on the pen. Same lean. Same boots on the bottom board.
Mike pointed at a calf. Cooper shook his head. Cooper pointed at another one. Mike tilted his head, like he was thinking. Then nodded.
A red-and-white Hereford. A heifer this time. With a white face and a white star on her forehead.
Cooper named her Elmer. After old Elmer Pruss. Elmer laughed so hard when he heard it that he had to sit down on his porch.
“She’s a girl,” he said, wheezing.
“So?” Cooper said. “Feeding cattle isn’t a boy’s job or a girl’s job. It’s an every-single-day job.”
Mike comes by every Saturday morning now. To help weigh Elmer on the co-op scale. He brings Logan and Tyler. They write the weights in a new notebook. A green spiral one from the Dollar General.
Cooper’s handwriting first. Then Mike’s.
In November, I bought myself a pair of boots.
Red Wing. Brown leather. Size nine. From the Cedar Bend Co-op, where Brent bought his. The man behind the counter, Arnie, has sold boots to Olsons for forty years. He fitted them himself.
“About time you got your own,” he said.
I wore them home. I put them on the back step.
Next to Brent’s.
I thought I’d put Brent’s away then. In the closet. Or give them to the church clothing drive, like Deb kept offering.
I couldn’t.
They sat on the back step next to mine all winter. Two pairs. His, size twelve, scuffed white on the right toe. Mine, size nine, new and stiff.
Then in March, one morning, I came out at five-thirty to feed and there were three pairs.
Brent’s. Mine. And a pair of muddy rubber boots, size eleven. Cooper’s.
He’d grown. Three sizes since last summer. I hadn’t even noticed until I saw them sitting there in a row.
Size nine. Size eleven. Size twelve.
I stood on the back step in the dark for a long time looking at them.
Then Cooper came out behind me. In his pajama pants and a hoodie. Yawning. With his dad’s cap on.
He looked down at the boots. All three pairs.
“Mom,” he said. “Can I try them? Dad’s?”
I looked at him.
“They’re still too big,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Just to see.”
He sat down on the step. He pulled off his rubber boots. He pulled on Brent’s brown Red Wings.
They were still big on him. But not by much. A size, maybe. He could keep them on without stuffing the toes.
He stood up. He walked across the yard in them. Toward the barn, where Elmer was bawling for breakfast.
He walked just like his father. The same long stride. The same slight hitch in the left step, from a knee Brent hurt playing football in 1998.
I don’t know how he learned that. He was ten when Brent hurt it the second time. He must have watched.
He stopped at the barn door. He turned around and looked back at me, standing on the step in my own boots.
“Mom,” he said. “I’ll grow into them. By next fair. You’ll see.”
“I know you will,” I said.
He went into the barn. The shop light came on. I heard him start mixing feed. Weighing every scoop on the hanging scale.
I stood there on the back step for a long time.
The sun was just starting to come up over Elmer Pruss’s cornfield across the road. Red and gold. The air smelled like frost and cattle and coffee.
On the inside of the barn door, I could see the piece of masking tape I stuck there last June. Faded now. The ink running a little from a winter of damp.
Feeding cattle isn’t a man’s job or a woman’s job. It’s an every-single-day job.
Then I heard a pickup on the county road.
Coming from the north. Slowing down at the end of our lane. Turning in.
Mike’s truck. Six o’clock on a Thursday. He wasn’t supposed to come till Saturday.
He pulled up by the barn and got out. He was carrying a coffee thermos and two cups.
He saw me on the step. He held up the thermos.
“Figured you could use some help,” he said. “It’s an every-single-day job.”
I came down off the step in my own boots. And I walked across the yard to the barn, where my son and my brother-in-law were already arguing about how much corn a heifer should get in March.
Brent would have thought it was funny. All of it.
He’d have taken a picture.
