The steer's name was Gus, and on the scale at the fairgrounds Monday morning he weighed eleven hundred and forty pounds, forty more than Steve's father had said he would. His father said the number twice, once to Steve and once to the man running the scale, and that was how Steve knew he was pleased.

Steve had bought Gus at the sale barn the October before, with a hundred and eighty dollars from two summers of walking beans. He'd been a black baldy calf then, all legs and white face and wild eyes, and he had dragged Steve the length of the feedlot on his stomach the first time Steve put a halter on him. By Christmas he would lead. By March he would stand square when Steve touched his feet with the show stick, one, two, three, four, and hold his head up like he knew someone was looking. Every night after chores Steve walked him up the lane to the mailbox and back, in the snow, in the mud, in the dark. Saturdays he washed him. Twelve years old, and he could do all of it, and do it well, and his father had told him so, in the way his father told you things, which was by not having to tell you twice.

What Steve didn't say to anyone was that he liked the evenings in the kitchen better.

All that winter, after the supper dishes, his mother and his sister Lori had the kitchen table for sewing. Lori was sixteen and in her fifth year of 4-H clothing, and that year she was making a dress for the county fair, a yellow cotton sundress with a square neck and twelve covered buttons down the back. They laid out the pattern on the table on Monday nights, the thin brown tissue that whispered when you touched it, and pinned it to the fabric, and cut. The old Singer went on the table Tuesdays and Thursdays. Steve did his math at the far end, and then, most nights, he stopped doing it and watched.

He learned the words first: selvage, bias, ease, interfacing, notions. He liked notions best. A notion was a button or a zipper or a spool of thread, any small thing you needed to finish. He learned to pin along the grain, and to read the back of a pattern envelope, and to press a seam open with the iron instead of just pressing it flat, which was the difference, his mother said, between homemade and handmade. In March, Lori let him cover the buttons. They came in a kit from the dime store in town, little metal domes and backs, and you cut circles of the yellow cotton and stretched them over the domes and snapped the backs on with a spool. Lori's kept puckering. Steve did all twelve in one evening, and they were all the same, and when he lined them up on the table his mother picked one up and turned it over and said, "He's got the hands for this." Then she looked at the back door, where his father would come in from the hog barn any minute, and she didn't say it again.

The 4-H boys slept at the fair, on cots in the cattle barn beside their animals. Steve had looked forward to it all year. The barn smelled like sawdust and fly spray and cattle, and somebody always had a radio, and after the lights went down the older boys talked across the aisles about the Tilt-A-Whirl, and the movie with the spaceships that had come to the theater in town, and girls. Steve listened and laughed when they laughed. He had a cot between Gus and a Hereford heifer, and on Monday night he lay awake for a long time with his hand through the gate on Gus's neck, feeling him breathe.

On Tuesday night Lori found him there at a quarter past nine.

"Steve." She was still in her good slacks, and her face was blotchy. "I need you."

She had tried the dress on in the 4-H building that evening so Mrs. Pitt, the clothing leader, could see it one last time before judging, and Mrs. Pitt had walked around her twice and then knelt down with a ruler. The hem was off. Half an inch low on the left side, all the way around the back. It hadn't shown on the hanger. It showed on Lori. Judging was at eight in the morning, and their mother was working the church lunch stand until ten.

"I can't get it even," Lori said. "I keep measuring and it comes out different. You're better at that."

Steve looked at Gus. Gus was lying down in the straw, chewing, the most peaceful animal in Iowa. Steve went.

The exhibit building was empty except for Mrs. Pitt, who had a key and a thermos of coffee. The fluorescent lights buzzed over the long tables of canned peaches and pickles with their ribbons, the quilts on their racks, the model rockets and the scrapbooks and the sewing. Lori put the dress back on and stood on a chair, and Steve took out the old hem with the seam ripper, very carefully, one stitch at a time. Then he knelt on the floor with the hem gauge and measured, every two inches, all the way around, and marked each place with tailor's chalk, and pinned. Lori got down and took the dress off behind the quilt rack and pressed the new fold with the travel iron. Then they sat side by side at a folding table, Lori on the right side of the hem and Steve on the left, and blind-stitched it by hand, the tiny stitch that picks up only one thread of the outside fabric so you can't see it from the front.

Mrs. Pitt watched them over her glasses for a while. Then she came and stood behind Steve.

"Who taught you that?"

"Mom. Sort of. I watched."

"You've got a lighter hand than your sister," she said. "Don't tell her I said so."

"I heard that," Lori said, but she was smiling for the first time all night.

At half past ten Steve looked up, and his father was standing in the doorway.

He was still in his seed cap and his work boots. He'd come into town to check on the cattle before bed, the way he did every night of fair week, and he had found Gus's water bucket kicked over and nobody on Steve's cot. He looked at Lori. He looked at the yellow dress on the table. He looked at the needle in Steve's hand.

"Dean," Mrs. Pitt said, "this boy has been a godsend."

His father nodded at her. Then he said, to Steve, "Steer's got no water."

Steve put the needle in the pincushion and went. His father walked behind him the whole way across the dark fairgrounds, past the shut-down rides and the lit-up Pork Producers' stand, and didn't say a word. In the barn he filled the bucket himself. Then he said, "Get some sleep. You show Thursday at nine," and went home.

Steve lay on his cot and looked at the barn roof for a long time.

Lori's dress got a purple ribbon on Wednesday morning, which meant it was going to the State Fair in Des Moines in August. On Wednesday night she walked the plywood runway at the style show in it, under the lights, while a lady from the extension office read her card into the microphone: Lori made her sundress from a yellow cotton broadcloth, with a square neckline and a fitted bodice, and she would like to thank her brother Steve for covering the buttons. People in the bleachers turned around to look at him. His ears went hot. Beside him, his father kept his eyes on the runway. But when Lori turned at the end of it, and the twelve yellow buttons caught the light all at once, Steve saw his father look, really look, at the back of that dress for a long moment, the way he looked at a field of beans to see if the rows were straight.

Gus placed third in his class on Thursday, out of eleven steers, and got a blue ribbon. The judge was a tall man from Nebraska who said Gus was a little short of finish but as good-moving a calf as he'd seen all morning, and that the young man had shown him well. His father shook the judge's hand afterward. Steve had never seen him do that.

On Friday afternoon was the sale. Steve led Gus into the ring one last time, and the auctioneer talked faster than anybody could understand, and the grain elevator in town bought him for more than he was worth, the way they did for all the 4-H kids. Then Steve led him out the other side, to the trucks. That was what a market steer was. He'd known it in October. He had known it every night on the lane. He held it together until the truck pulled out, and then he went back into the barn and sat down on his cot and cried, and his father came and sat next to him, and put his hand on the back of Steve's neck, and left it there, and said, "First one's the worst."

They drove home Friday night with the empty trailer rattling behind the truck. Lori was asleep against the passenger window with her purple ribbon in her lap. Steve sat in the middle. The radio was on low, the farm report and then some music, and the headlights went on ahead of them down the gravel.

About halfway home his father said, "Your grandmother sewed."

Steve didn't say anything. He hadn't known that.

"My mother. After the war she sewed for half the township. Wedding dresses. Christening gowns. Shirts for the bachelors. It's what kept us in shoes, some of those years." His father drove for a while. "She could make a buttonhole you couldn't see."

A mile went by.

"Juanita Pitt says there's no rule a boy can't take clothing," his father said. "Says nobody has, but there's no rule."

Steve looked straight ahead at the road. He couldn't have spoken if the truck had been on fire.

"Up to you," his father said, and turned the radio up a little.

The 4-H enrollment cards came home from school in October. Steve filled his out at the kitchen table after supper. Under PROJECTS he wrote Beef, the way he had the year before. Then he sat and looked at the card for a long time. Then, under it, in smaller letters, he wrote Clothing, and he slid the card down the table to his father to sign.

His father read it under the kitchen light. He read it for long enough that Steve's mother stopped drying the dish in her hands, and Lori looked up from her homework.

Then his father took the pen out of his shirt pocket and signed it, and slid it back.

"Write bigger," he said. "They won't be able to read it."

 
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