The Hay That Came Home Again

The notebook in the chore coat

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. 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.

“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.

“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.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to bake,” I said.

He thought I had lost my mind. I could see it. 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.

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.

It still smelled like him. Diesel, and hay dust, and the wintergreen he chewed after he quit tobacco.

In the chest pocket was his notebook. Tom carried one all his life, the little spiral kind the seed dealers give away, and he wrote down everything: rain to the hundredth, calving dates, which cow had a bad quarter. He went through two a year. I have a shoebox of them.

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. He had written it the way he said it out loud. He had no idea anyone would ever read it but him.

I sat on the kitchen floor with that coat in my lap and I cried harder than I had at the church.

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