My stepbrother snapped a red dog collar around my lamb’s neck outside the sheep pens and yelled, “Hey, everybody, Kayla brought her poodle to the fair,” and half the families in the aisle laughed. My mother laughed with them. I was twelve, my class went in eleven minutes later, and I left it on.
She was the runt of a set of triplets on Andres Singleton’s place.
He let me have her for thirty-five dollars because he figured she wouldn’t make it to June.
I paid him in quarters and fives from babysitting.
She made it to June. She made it to August.
At weigh-in at the Pembina County Fair she went seventy-one pounds. The lamb in the next pen went one-thirty.
My stepdad, Orville, had looked at her the first week and said, “That’s feed money down a hole.”
Tyler was his son.
Nineteen, home after one semester at the community college, showing a steer he’d raised on his dad’s checkbook.
Our parents had been married two years. He’d spent both of them calling me “the stray.”
So when he came down the aisle with something red swinging from his fist, I knew it was meant for me before he got there.
It was the collar off his dad’s old blue heeler. Red nylon, with a brass tag shaped like a fire hydrant.
He had it around her neck before I could get up off my bucket.
“There we go,” he said. “Now she matches.”
Then the poodle line, loud enough for the wash rack to hear.
People turned.
A man in a seed cap took out his phone. Two girls from the Clover Kids table were bent over, laughing so hard one of them had to sit down on a hay bale.
My mother, Stefanie, was by the lemonade cooler with her hand over her mouth.
Laughing.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “It’s funny. Get it off her before Mrs. Choi comes through.”
“Leave it,” Orville said from the rail. “Let her walk it in like that. Maybe she’ll learn what’s worth showing.”
Tyler clipped a leash to the ring on the collar. A pink one.
He’d bought it at the dollar store on the way in, I found out later.
He’d PLANNED it.
I put my hand on the buckle.
My fingers were shaking so bad I couldn’t find the tongue of it.
And my lamb just stood there. She didn’t throw her head or back into the gate. She leaned her shoulder against my knee the way she always did, and waited.
Tyler saw that and laughed harder. “Look at that, she’s already house-trained.”
The speaker over the pens crackled. “Junior market lamb showmanship, to the ring.”
I took my hand off the buckle.
“Kayla,” my mom said. “Don’t you dare walk out there like that and embarrass this family.”
“She’s MY lamb,” I said.
It was the first time I’d said anything like that to her in front of other people.
The ring steward had her reading glasses on a beaded chain, the beads shaped like little ears of corn. She looked at the collar, then at me, then at the line backing up behind me.
“That’s not a halter,” she said.
“It’s what she’s got,” I said.
She waved me through.
Tyler went to the rail with his phone up. Orville stood next to him with his arms folded. My mother came up behind them.
There were nine of us in the class.
Most of the other lambs came in on halters they’d worn for the first time that morning, or on nothing at all, a hand under the jaw and the other on the dock.
The first one bolted at the gate.
The second locked its legs and sat down in the shavings.
A big ewe in the middle of the line reared up and hauled a boy in a white shirt halfway to the bleachers.
From the rail Tyler cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “WALK, POODLE, WALK.”
Some people laughed again. Fewer this time.
I walked.
The pink leash hung in a loose loop between my hand and the collar. I never pulled on it once.
She stayed at my knee. Stopped when I stopped. Set her feet square when I touched her chest, and turned when I turned, tight, like she was on a rail.
The judge was Eunice Choi. A sheep woman from two counties over, sixty-something, known for sending kids out of the ring for less than a crooked foot.
She walked the line once without a word.
Then she came back.
She stopped in front of my lamb and looked down at the red collar for a long time. Then at the pink leash. Then at my hand, and how slack I was holding it.
Behind me somebody’s lamb was still bawling for the gate.
“Who put this on her?” she said.
Her voice carried to the top of the bleachers.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
She turned her head and found Tyler at the rail, his phone still up.
He lowered it.
“Young man,” she said. “Come down here. RIGHT NOW.”
The tongue of the buckle
He came.
The steward had already latched the gate behind the last lamb, so Tyler had to climb it. He put his phone in his back pocket to do it. Nobody in the bleachers laughed at that.
Mrs. Choi didn’t look at him while he crossed the ring. She kept looking at my lamb.
“Take it off her,” she said.
He got down on one knee in the shavings. My lamb leaned harder into my leg, away from him. He worked the buckle with both hands, and the tongue wouldn’t come, because he’d pulled the collar to the last hole.
It took him long enough that the boy with the big ewe got her back in line.
When it came loose he stood up with the collar and the pink leash wadded in one fist, the brass hydrant swinging off his knuckles.
“Go stand by the gate,” Mrs. Choi said. “Hold those up where people can see them. You don’t move until I’ve placed this class.”
He went. He held them down by his leg.
She waited, and didn’t say anything, until he lifted them to his chest.
Then she said to me, “Can you set her up with nothing on her?”
I put one hand under my lamb’s jaw and the other on her dock. She squared her feet before I touched her chest.
Mrs. Choi looked at that for a long time.
“Who taught her to walk like that?”
Baling twine
The honest answer was an old dog and a piece of baling twine.
Andres brought her over in March in the cab of his pickup, wrapped in a feed sack, still too weak to stand on the floor mat. I asked him for a bill of sale because that’s what the 4-H book said you needed. He wrote it on the back of a co-op receipt with the carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear.
ONE EWE LAMB, TRIPLET. SOLD TO KAYLA EGAN. $35. PAID.
I taped it inside the front cover of my record book. Every feed receipt after it went in behind it, in order, with the date.
We’d been on Orville’s place two years by then. The house was his. The truck, the steer barn, the hay in the steer barn. My mother had showed sheep at this same fair when she was my age, which is how she knew Mrs. Choi’s name, and how she knew what Mrs. Choi did to kids who came in sloppy.
Every night after supper I tied a length of orange twine to a loop around my lamb’s neck and walked her down the gravel to the mailbox and back. A mile and a half, round trip.
Orville’s blue heeler came along, because he went with anybody who was going anywhere. He was old and stiff in the hips and he stopped at every fence post.
So she stopped at every fence post. Then she stopped when I stopped.
The heeler died in May. Orville buried him behind the windbreak and hung the red collar on a nail by the steer pen door, and nobody touched it all summer.
That spring was also the spring Tyler went to the community college.
His steer was already on the place, a black baldy Orville had bought him at a sale in October. The morning Tyler drove off, Orville handed me a coffee can for a scoop and Tyler’s green record book.
“You’re up anyway,” he said. “Morning and night. Write it in his book. Pencil. Keep it small so it looks like his.”
He said he’d pay me five dollars a week. He paid me twice.
My mother stood at the kitchen window at twenty to six every morning with her coffee while I crossed the yard with the flashlight. Every morning. I could see the yellow square of the window from the pen.
Tyler came home in May, walked out to the steer, slapped him on the hip and said, “He’s looking good, huh, Dad?”
None of that was what Mrs. Choi had asked me.
“Baling twine,” I said.
She wrote one word on her card and walked back up the line.
The rail
She placed the class from the bottom up, into the microphone, the way she always did.
The boy with the big ewe got ninth. The girl whose lamb sat down got eighth and cried anyway.
When she got to second and it wasn’t me, the man in the seed cap put his phone back up.
“First place and junior showmanship champion,” Mrs. Choi said, “Kayla Egan. She came in with nothing that fit and never once had to pull on it.”
She shook my hand. Hers was dry and hard as Orville’s.
Then she looked at the gate. “You can go, young man.”
Tyler dropped the collar and the leash on the steward’s table on his way out. The steward picked them up between two fingers like they were wet.
I led my lamb out with my hand under her jaw.
On her way out of the ring, Mrs. Choi stopped at the rail where Orville was standing. She said something to him, not loud. I couldn’t hear it. I only saw his face go the color of the collar.
My mother said, “Well.”
That was all she said about the purple rosette.
Back at the pens a man from the extension office named Ryan came down the aisle with a clipboard, calling it out at every pen with a steer kid in it.
“Steer record books in the beef office by seven tomorrow. Sale’s at one. No book, no sale.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Tyler said from his lawn chair. He didn’t look up from his phone.
Orville came to my pen and stood with his hands on the top rail. He didn’t look at the rosette.
“You got your ribbon,” he said. “She’s done what she came here for.”
“She’s mine,” I said. “I’ve got the paper.”
“Your paper says you own a sheep. It doesn’t say you own my feed or my barn.”
He took his hands off the rail.
“She goes on the trailer to the sale barn Monday. I already called them.”
The wash rack
Andres Singleton was at the wash rack, hosing down his granddaughter Briana’s market hog, which had rolled in something it shouldn’t have.
I took the receipt out of my record book and held it out to him.
He shut off the hose and dried his hand on his jeans before he took it. He read his own handwriting like he’d never seen it.
“That says she’s yours,” he said.
“Orville says it doesn’t say where she sleeps.”
“Well.” He gave it back. “He’s not wrong about that part.”
The hog shook off and got both of us.
“I’ve got an empty pen,” Andres said. “Feed’s six dollars a week. I’m not giving it to you, either. You’d only think less of me.”
Six dollars a week was three nights of babysitting Hoa’s twins down the road, if their mother went out at all.
It was more than I had. But it was a number, and nobody else had given me one.
I went to find my mom.
She was in the camper with the door propped open, folding the show shirts into a grocery sack. Mine was in there with the corn dog grease still on the cuff.
“Mom. Tell him no.”
“Honey, it’s his place.”
“She’s MY lamb. I paid for her.”
“And he’s paid for her hay since March.” She folded my shirt again, smaller. “It’s his feed, Kayla. It’s his place.”
“So tell him she can go to Andres’s. I’ll pay for it.”
She stopped folding.
“Kayla, I already told him yes.”
“When?”
“Thursday. Before we loaded.” She looked at the shirt, not at me. “I wanted you to have the fair.”
I went back to the pens and sat on my bucket. My lamb lay down in the straw with her chin on my sneaker.
At nine that night Tyler dropped his green record book in my lap.
Page eleven
“Dad says you do August,” he said. “Same as before. Pencil, small.”
He tossed a pencil on top of it. It bounced off and I caught it.
“Some of us brought real animals to show, stray.”
Then he went off toward the grandstand, where the demolition derby was warming up. You could hear the engines from the sheep barn.
I opened the book.
It was my handwriting from the first page to the last.
January 6. 6:00 AM. 16 lb ration. 2 flakes. Water OK.
January 9. Minus 19. Broke ice on tank with hammer. 16 lb ration.
I remembered that morning. The hammer froze to my glove. That night Tyler called from his dorm and asked Orville if his steer was still eating.
February, March, April, May. Every line in the same small pencil. Every rate of gain worked out longhand in the margin, because Tyler didn’t have the book to do it and somebody had to.
The entries stopped in the middle of May and started again in a different hand, big and slanting, fed and fed and fed. Then nothing for most of July.
Page eleven was the certification.
I certify that I personally fed, watered and cared for this animal for the duration of the project.
Under it was Tyler’s signature. Under that, on the line for parent or guardian, Orville’s.
Both dated July 30.
There was a sticky note on the facing page in Orville’s printing. Bank’s bidding. $4/lb or better. Don’t screw it up.
The steer weighed in at thirteen hundred and forty pounds.
My lamb got up and leaned her shoulder against my knee.
I wrote August. Every line of it, I wrote true.
Then I turned to page eleven and wrote under Orville’s name.
Every entry from January 6 to May 15 is in my handwriting. I fed him. I am 12. Kayla Egan.
I closed the book and put it back on Tyler’s tack box, square, the way he’d left it.
Seven o’clock
The beef office was a plywood room at the end of the steer barn with a folding table, a coffee maker and a box fan.
Ryan had a stack of green books at his elbow. He opened every one to page eleven before he put it on the pile. That was his whole job that morning.
Tyler handed his over without looking at it. I was behind him in the doorway, holding a coffee for my mother that she hadn’t asked me to get.
Ryan turned to page eleven. He stopped.
“Tyler,” he said. “Who’s Kayla Egan?”
“My dad’s wife’s kid. Why?”
Ryan turned the book around on the table. Tyler read it. He read it twice. He didn’t look back at me.
“DAD.”
Orville was already coming, because the whole barn had heard it.
He took the book off the table without asking and read the page, and then he started talking, and he didn’t stop.
“She’s twelve years old, Ryan. She helped out some mornings. Every kid in this barn has a little sister who helped out some mornings. You going to pull every steer in here for that?”
“Orville—”
“That steer ate eleven hundred dollars of my feed. Mine. My barn, my water, my checkbook. Tyler picked him out. Tyler halter-broke him. You were at that sale in October, you saw him do it.”
“Who fed him January to May?”
“She’s mad about a dog collar. That’s what this is. A joke about a dog collar, and that Choi woman stands at my rail and tells me in front of half the county that a man who’d let that happen to a kid’s animal ought not to be let in a show barn. And then the kid comes in here with this.”
He threw the book down. It slid to the edge of the table and stopped on the coffee maker cord.
Ryan looked at me.
“Kayla. Who fed this steer from January to May?”
“I did.”
“You going to take her word over mine?” Orville said. “I’ve been bringing steers to this barn since before you had that clipboard.”
“You signed it, Orville.”
“I signed that it’s my son’s steer. Which it is.”
“You signed that he fed it.”
There were six or seven steer families in the doorway by then. Nobody went back to their pens.
Ryan picked the book up off the coffee maker cord and set it down on its own, away from the pile.
“He’s out of the sale,” he said. “You can haul him to the sale barn Monday with the culls. Market price.”
“That’s three thousand dollars,” Tyler said. “That’s my truck. Dad.”
Orville didn’t answer him. He turned around and looked at me in the doorway, me and the coffee.
“I took in a stray and her kid,” he said. “Fed them both two years. And this is what I get for it.”
Nobody in the doorway said anything.
My mother had come in behind the steer families without anybody seeing her. She was still in her sleep shirt with a jacket over it.
She came past me and took her coffee out of my hand.
“Every morning,” she said. “Twenty to six. I watched her go out there from the kitchen window.”
Orville looked at her for a long time.
“Then you can watch her get that sheep off my place,” he said. “Today.”
My mother drank some of the coffee.
“Kayla,” she said. “Go get your twine.”
The mailbox
We walked her to Andres’s that Sunday night, my mother and me, three miles down the gravel with the orange twine.
My lamb stopped at every fence post. My mother stopped with her and didn’t say anything about it.
I paid Andres six dollars a week for two years. My mother drove me over every Saturday with it in an envelope and waited in the car, and she never came in, and she never once forgot.
The ewe lived eleven years in Andres’s back pen and had nineteen lambs. Orville kept the collar. I never asked what he did with it.
This August I was the ring steward at the Pembina County Fair.
Outside the sheep pens a girl about ten was trying to get a rope halter on a lamb half the size of the one next to it, and a boy behind her said something, and his friends laughed.
The girl’s fingers were shaking too bad to find the knot.
I knelt down in the aisle and held the lamb’s jaw for her while she tied it.
“Walk her in,” I said.
If somebody once walked you into a ring while your own people laughed at the rail, think of them tonight.
For more stories about being judged before anyone knows the whole story, read the lanyard braided behind a locked bus terminal door, the son who walked straight to Ellis, and the sister who put a house in her prenup. Each has its own unexpected turn when people think they’ve got the story figured out.
