Stockyard Boy

Hoffman, Minnesota has one stoplight. It has two stoplights, although one of them has been stuck in a perpetually blinking-yellow state for the last 5 years. So, Hoffman, Minnesota has one stoplight which guards the intersection of Dakota Avenue and Highway 55. The Dakota, also known as the Sioux, are one of two Native American tribes that inhabited this region before the arrival of Europeans, along with the Ojibwe. The present-day Mdewakanton Sioux, owners of several large casinos, are the wealthiest Native American tribe in the United States. Each member receives a payout of roughly five hundred thousand dollars each year. The first white residents of Hoffman arrived with the railroad in 1886. They might have had a heart attack if they saw a Sioux in a Corvette. Maybe just from the Corvette. State Highway 55 was built in the 1930s and runs with the railroad, starting just above the border with South Dakota and running southeast across the state, through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, until it reaches the border of Wisconsin at the confluence of the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers. They’re building a roundabout there now. Good luck explaining that to a carp. As a rural, agricultural community, most of Hoffman’s 627 residents are farmers or work in farming-related jobs. Or they tend bar. The average annual income in Hoffman is twenty-three thousand dollars. My father, Harold, was a farmer and a military man. He has a metal plate in his head where a piece of his skull, and then briefly, pieces of shrapnel, used to be. He was a farmer after the military and right up until his left leg was crushed in a hay baler. Now he drives truck. The Hoffman-Kensington high school football team plays on Friday nights. I play running back, and I’m 7 touchdowns away from the state record. We’ve won back-to-back state championships, and there are two stickers on the back of Dad’s rig to prove it. Sometimes, when it’s not football season, Dad brings me along in the cab. We used to mostly haul cows down State Highway 55 to the Stockyards in Saint Paul. The Stockyards were founded in 1886, the same year the railroad came to Hoffman, and at one point, they were the biggest in the country. Dad would bring me and my brother along and it smelled like shit, but we got to sleep in this massive bunk room with all the other haulers and farmhands, lying there dreaming of being cowboys when we grew up. Now I think I’d rather be an Indian and run a casino. Dad says the only way I could do that is marriage, and I’ve had two broken noses too many for that. We don’t haul cows too much anymore. Dad says all the cows come from Brazil now, and the farmers in Hoffman realized they could make more money farming the government than they could farming the land. The CCC writes them a check every month to not raise cows or grow wheat. Seems like a pretty sweet deal. So nowadays we mostly haul things to Hoffman instead of from it. Grain that we don’t grow in town anymore, hog feed, booze, farm equipment, tools, whatever people will pay Dad to bring back from the cities. Which is exactly what we’re doing right now, idling beneath the one stoplight in Hoffman, waiting for it to turn green so we can deadhead down to St. Paul.