I was about to drive into three yards and tell three households that they had my hay and I wanted it back. Every one of them had paid for it. Every one of them thought they had done a kindness. You do not walk up to people like that empty-handed and start in. Not where I come from. You bring something, you sit down, and you tell it straight.

Continue Reading »

I made three rhubarb pies with lard crust, the way Tom’s mother taught me the first year we were married, standing at her stove in a kitchen that smelled like coffee and cut hay, correcting my hands without ever once raising her voice. I had the pies out of the oven by one in the morning. Ben came down at five and found me asleep in the chair with my apron still on, flour dried white along one forearm where I’d leaned on the counter without noticing.

“You want me to come?” he said.

“I want you to grease the loader on the 4020 and make sure the bale spear’s on it,” I said. “And then I want you to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

That was the truth too. I did not know if anybody was coming.

To understand why I was sitting in that chair at five in the morning with three pies cooling on the counter, you have to go back a week, to a Tuesday morning that started like any other, with my boots still wet from the dew on the north eighty and no notion at all of what was waiting for me at my own kitchen table.

Dwayne said it at my kitchen table on a Tuesday morning, three days after we buried his brother. He said it the way a man tells you the price of diesel. He had his cap on his knee and a cup of my coffee in front of him, and behind him on the counter sat eleven casserole dishes with masking tape on the bottoms so I would know whose was whose, because that is what a Nebraska community does when a man dies in the middle of his own hayfield at fifty-three years old. They bring food. They do not know what else to bring.

I had just come in from the north eighty. My boots were still wet from the dew.

“Say that again,” I said. I did not say it loud.

“I said you don’t need it.” He turned the cup a quarter turn on the oilcloth, the way he does when he’s working himself up to something, a habit he’s had since we were all young together and he’d sit at this same table waiting to ask Tom for the loan of the grain truck. “I baled it Thursday night and Friday night, like I told you I would. Two hundred and twelve bales. Good hay, too. Tom laid it down pretty.”

“I know how many. I walked up there this morning to look at them.”

“Then you saw they’re gone.”

“I saw the twine ends and the tire tracks, Dwayne. That’s all I saw.”

He nodded as if I had agreed with him about something.

“I sold them,” he said. “All of it. Seventeen hundred dollars. And by the time I took out twine and fuel and two nights of my time, it about came out even. So there’s nothing to hand you, and I didn’t figure you’d want me making up a number.”

I am going to tell you what seventeen hundred dollars means, in case you have never bought hay. It means eight dollars a bale. That summer a big round bale of alfalfa and brome, twelve hundred pounds of it, was bringing seventy dollars anywhere in Custer County, and more if you could wait until January. Two hundred and twelve bales was close to fifteen thousand dollars standing in my field. I did that arithmetic sitting right there at the table, automatically, the way you do sums you’ve done your whole life, and I watched the number arrive and understood, in the same instant, that my brother-in-law had not made a mistake. A mistake is when you misjudge a price. This was something else.

He had not sold my hay. He had gotten rid of it.

“Eight dollars a bale,” I said.

“I wanted it gone quick.” He finally looked at me. Dwayne has Tom’s eyes, the same pale gray, and that week I could hardly stand to see them in another face, because every time he looked at me straight I felt my husband looking back out of a stranger. “Karen, be sensible. You’ve got forty pairs on summer grass and a boy who’s still in high school. You are not going to feed cows through a Nebraska winter by yourself. You’ll have them at the sale barn by October, and you know it. And a woman with no cows does not need hay.”

“And when the cows are gone?”

“Then you’ll want to talk about the place.” He set his cap on his head. “When you do, you talk to me first. That’s Dad’s ground. It ought to stay with the name.”

So there it was, all of it, laid out on my table next to the sugar bowl, plain as a grain elevator receipt. No hay meant no cows. No cows meant no reason to keep a quarter section eleven miles out of Broken Bow. And a widow with no reason to stay will take the first offer from family, especially if family is the one who has been so much help, who brought the tractor around to mow the yard without being asked, who showed up at the funeral home with the right suit already pressed.

I looked at the casserole dishes. I looked at Tom’s chore coat, still on its nail by the door, because I had not been able to make my hand take it down.

I did not scream. I have never been a screamer, and I was too tired that week to start.

“Well,” I said. “Thank you for the trouble, Dwayne.”

He blinked. I do not think it was what he had come braced for.

“It was two nights of work,” he said.

“I know it was. I brought you out a sandwich Thursday, remember? And a thermos.” I had. I had walked it up over the hill at ten o’clock at night, with the baler lights going back and forth in the dark, and I had stood at the fence and cried because my husband’s brother was putting up my husband’s hay, and I had told myself that the crying was only grief finding a new place to land, that it was good of Dwayne to do it, that I should be grateful. “I just have one question.”

“All right.”

“Who bought them?”

He could have refused to tell me. But Dwayne was proud of how fast he had moved it, and I believe some part of him thought that if I heard the names, good names, neighbors, I would understand it was settled and could not be undone.

“Arlen took eighty,” he said. “Gene Pokorny took a hundred for his backgrounding lot. And that young couple on the oil road, Steve and Kim, they took the last thirty-two for her horses.”

“Arlen,” I said.

“He came Sunday afternoon with his flatbed. Gene sent the semi Monday while you were gone to Kearney.”

Arlen had stood at the grave on Saturday with his hat against his chest. He was seventy-eight years old and he had held my elbow going back to the car.

“What did you tell them?”

Dwayne’s ears went red. It was the only sign he gave, the whole morning, that he knew what he had done.

“I told them you were selling out,” he said. “That you wanted the field cleaned off, and the neighbors might as well have it for the cost of the baling.”

“So they think I gave it to them.”

“They think they did you a favor.”

I got up and poured his coffee down the sink, because it had gone cold and because I needed to do something with my hands.

“Dwayne,” I said, with my back to him. “It is Tuesday. Every one of those bales could be back along that road fence by Sunday, and nobody would ever have to hear one word about it from me. Not one. I mean that.”

It was quiet long enough that I heard the clock.

“It’s done, Karen,” he said.

The screen door slapped behind him. His pickup started. Pete, our old black-and-white dog, did not get up off the porch to see him go, and Pete got up for everybody.

Ben came in from the shop a minute later. He was seventeen that summer, six foot one, and he had Tom’s way of standing in a doorway and filling it, like the frame had been built around him special. He had heard enough through the screen.

“Where’s the truck keys,” he said.

“On the hook. And they’re staying there.”

“Mom.”

“Sit down, Ben.”

“He stole from us. He stole from Dad. Dad cut that hay on Monday and he was dead on Tuesday and that,” and he stopped, because he was raised not to use the word he wanted, “that man didn’t even wait a week.”

“I know what he did.”

“Then call the sheriff. If you won’t let me go over there, call the sheriff.”

I sat down across from him in the chair Dwayne had just left, and I told my son the truth, because he was old enough for it, old enough to have carried one corner of his father’s casket not five days before.

“I could call,” I said. “It’s theft. Any deputy in this county would say so, and half of them went to school with your dad. But I put your father in the ground on Saturday. I am not going to put his only brother in the county jail on Tuesday. And I am not going to have you stand in this yard and watch your uncle put in the back of a patrol car the same week you carried your dad’s casket. I won’t do it. Not this week.”

Ben’s jaw was working, that same muscle Tom used to get along the side of his face when a storm was coming in and the hay was still down.

“And here is the other thing,” I said. “A case does not feed a cow. A case takes months. It takes statements and a county attorney and maybe a year, and at the end of it somebody hands me a piece of paper. A deputy can arrest a man, but he cannot haul two hundred and twelve bales home. Those bales are sitting in three stackyards today. By fall they’ll be fed or sold on, and no judge can order back hay a steer has already eaten. Forty cows eat every single day from November to April. I need that hay in the stack before the first snow a whole lot more than I need a case.”

“So he just gets away with it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

He looked at me then. Really looked, the way he hadn’t managed to since the morning we got the call about the hayfield, since his face had gone white and stayed that way clear through the funeral.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to bake,” I said.

He thought I had lost my mind. I could see it, the way his eyebrows went up and then he glanced toward the window like he was checking whether the world outside still made sense. But he sat there, and after a while he put his head down on his arms on the table, the way he used to when he was little and had a fever, and I put my hand on the back of his neck and left it there a long while, feeling the warmth of him, the solid fact of my living child in a week that had taken so much else.

When he went out to do chores I took Tom’s chore coat down off the nail. I do not know why that was the moment. I think I wanted something of his in my arms, something with weight to it, something that had touched him and not just an idea of him.

It still smelled like him. Diesel, and hay dust, and the wintergreen he chewed after he quit tobacco three years back, right after Ben was born, because he said he wanted to still be breathing hard enough to run after the boy.

In the chest pocket was his notebook. Tom carried one all his life, the little spiral kind the seed dealers give away free with a calendar stapled to the back, and he wrote down everything: rain to the hundredth, calving dates, which cow had a bad quarter, what he’d paid for diesel in March compared to what he was paying by June and how it made him swear under his breath every single time. I have a shoebox of them going back to before we were married, stacked in the closet like proof of a whole life measured out in small careful handwriting.

I turned to the last page with writing on it.

It was dated the second of June, the Monday. The day before.

N80 down. Heavy. Looks like 200 plus. Enough for Karen’s cows and then some.

Karen’s cows.

They were our cows. They had always been our cows. But he teased me that they were mine, because I was the one who named them and I was the one who would not let him sell old Number 12 when she came up open two years running, because she’d been the first heifer we ever bought together with money we didn’t quite have, and I said she’d earned her retirement same as anybody. He had written it the way he said it out loud, in that dry half-laughing voice he used when he was teasing me about something he actually agreed with. He had no idea anyone would ever read it but him. He had written it on a Monday afternoon with the sun still high and twenty more years of Mondays, by every reasonable expectation, still ahead of him.

I sat on the kitchen floor with that coat in my lap and I cried harder than I had at the church, harder than I’d let myself cry in front of anybody, because a crowd of people watching you weep for your husband is one kind of grief and a notebook entry nobody was ever meant to see is a different kind entirely, a private one, a door swinging open onto a room you didn’t know was there.

Then I got up, washed my face, and went out to the rhubarb patch by the windmill with a paring knife.

The rhubarb had come up thick that spring, the way it always did, red stalks fat as a man’s wrist, and I cut what I needed and carried it back to the house in my apron, the way Tom’s mother had carried it, the way her mother had before her, I imagine, the two of us women forty years apart in the same patch of ground doing the same patient work with our hands while the men’s world fell apart or held together around us as it would. I made the crusts with lard the way she’d taught me, working it cold and quick with my fingertips so it wouldn’t turn to paste, rolling it thin, crimping the edges with my thumb the way she’d shown me standing behind me at her own counter, her hands over mine.

I worked past midnight. The kitchen window went dark and then, far off, I could hear a coyote somewhere up along the draw, and Pete lifted his head once from the porch and then settled again, deciding it wasn’t his business.

I had three pies out of the oven by one in the morning, and I sat down in the chair by the stove to let them cool, just for a minute, I told myself, and that was where Ben found me at five, with my apron still on and flour dried along my forearm, and the whole house smelling like cinnamon and browned butter and, underneath it, faintly, like diesel from the coat still folded over the back of the other chair.