I want to say plainly why I baked, because my sister thought it was foolishness and told me so on the telephone, the way she tells me most things, fast and certain, like she\u2019s reading off a label. I told her I did not have time to argue it with her, not that morning, and she said, Karen, you are going to drive into three yards and give people pie before you tell them they\u2019ve been robbing a widow, and I said that was about the size of it, yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I made three rhubarb pies with lard crust, the way Tom\u2019s 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\u2019d leaned on the counter without noticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou want me to come?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI want you to grease the loader on the 4020 and make sure the bale spear\u2019s on it,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd then I want you to wait.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWait for what?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know yet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was the truth too. I did not know if anybody was coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had just come in from the north eighty. My boots were still wet from the dew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSay that again,\u201d I said. I did not say it loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI said you don\u2019t need it.\u201d He turned the cup a quarter turn on the oilcloth, the way he does when he\u2019s working himself up to something, a habit he\u2019s had since we were all young together and he\u2019d sit at this same table waiting to ask Tom for the loan of the grain truck. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know how many. I walked up there this morning to look at them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThen you saw they\u2019re gone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI saw the twine ends and the tire tracks, Dwayne. That\u2019s all I saw.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He nodded as if I had agreed with him about something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI sold them,\u201d he said. \u201cAll 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\u2019s nothing to hand you, and I didn\u2019t figure you\u2019d want me making up a number.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He had not sold my hay. He had gotten rid of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEight dollars a bale,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI wanted it gone quick.\u201d He finally looked at me. Dwayne has Tom\u2019s 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. \u201cKaren, be sensible. You\u2019ve got forty pairs on summer grass and a boy who\u2019s still in high school. You are not going to feed cows through a Nebraska winter by yourself. You\u2019ll have them at the sale barn by October, and you know it. And a woman with no cows does not need hay.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd when the cows are gone?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThen you\u2019ll want to talk about the place.\u201d He set his cap on his head. \u201cWhen you do, you talk to me first. That\u2019s Dad\u2019s ground. It ought to stay with the name.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I looked at the casserole dishes. I looked at Tom\u2019s chore coat, still on its nail by the door, because I had not been able to make my hand take it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did not scream. I have never been a screamer, and I was too tired that week to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWell,\u201d I said. \u201cThank you for the trouble, Dwayne.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He blinked. I do not think it was what he had come braced for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was two nights of work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know it was. I brought you out a sandwich Thursday, remember? And a thermos.\u201d I had. I had walked it up over the hill at ten o\u2019clock 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\u2019s brother was putting up my husband\u2019s 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. \u201cI just have one question.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAll right.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWho bought them?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cArlen took eighty,\u201d he said. \u201cGene 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cArlen,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe came Sunday afternoon with his flatbed. Gene sent the semi Monday while you were gone to Kearney.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat did you tell them?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dwayne\u2019s ears went red. It was the only sign he gave, the whole morning, that he knew what he had done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI told them you were selling out,\u201d he said. \u201cThat you wanted the field cleaned off, and the neighbors might as well have it for the cost of the baling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo they think I gave it to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey think they did you a favor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDwayne,\u201d I said, with my back to him. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was quiet long enough that I heard the clock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s done, Karen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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