Neil the Veal

A boy. A calf nobody expected to keep. And eighty-three days of walking.
The night the heifer in the second stall goes down, Jude’s father pulls her calf into the world by lantern light — and when she doesn’t get up, he puts the bottle in his son’s hands. He’ll be yours to feed. Twice a day. Don’t come asking me about it.
Jude gives him a person’s name. His father hears the rhyme in it and laughs until he has to wipe his eyes, and after that the whole farm calls him Neil the Veal.
On a dairy farm that is losing money every month, a bull calf is a cost, not an asset. Jude knows what that means. He has seen the milk check under the salt shaker. And when the truck finally comes in August, his father takes the alarm clock off the chair beside his bed so the boy won’t wake.
Sixty miles away, on a dark road at a fuel stop, a gate comes open.
What follows is the story of an animal who has never in his life been off one farm turning around and starting home — and of a twelve-year-old boy cutting tobacco until his hands turn black, saving to buy back something that is already gone.
Told in alternating chapters, one voice human and one not, Neil the Veal is a spare, unsentimental story about hard choices, hard country, and what it costs to keep a thing you love.
For readers of Pax and Where the Red Fern Grows. Ages 9–12, with twelve original pen-and-ink illustrations. A read-aloud for families who don’t mind a book that tells the truth.