The Hay That Came Home Again

Gene Pokorny

Gene was the one I dreaded.

He is not a hard man, but he is a businessman. He backgrounds four or five hundred calves a year on a lot nine miles toward Anselmo, and a hundred bales at eight dollars is a buy a man like that does not see twice in his life.

He was at the scale house when I pulled in. He saw the pie on the seat and his face changed before I had the door open.

“That’s not a thank-you pie,” he said. “Is it.”

“No, Gene. It isn’t.”

He heard me out standing up, with his arms crossed and his eyes on the ground. When I finished he was quiet so long I started to add something, and he lifted one hand to stop me.

“I was forty feet from you Saturday,” he said. “At the cemetery. I had Tom’s hay on my truck by Monday noon.”

“He told you I wanted it gone.”

“He told me, and I wanted to believe it, because it was the best deal on hay I ever made.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Tom pulled a calf for me in a blizzard in ninety-seven. Two in the morning. My dad was in the hospital in Kearney and I was twenty-three and didn’t know what I was doing. Tom drove eleven miles on roads that weren’t open. He never mentioned it again. Not once in his life.”

I had not known that. Twenty-seven years married, and I had not known it.

“I’ve fed four of them,” Gene said. “Four bales, to the pen by the road. I can’t give you those back.”

“Then it’s ninety-six, and I’m grateful for ninety-six.”

“It’ll be a hundred.” He said it flat, like a scale ticket. “I’ve got hay of my own.”

“Gene, I didn’t come to ask you for it. You’re out eight hundred dollars.”

“I know what I’m out. That’s between me and Dwayne, and I’ll see to it. It is not between me and you.” He was already walking toward the shop, hollering for his hired man. Over his shoulder he said, “Thirty-four to a load. Three loads. We’ll start tonight.”

Steve and Kim

The last stop was the hardest in a different way.

Steve and Kim rent a little acreage six miles east on the oil road. He drives a propane truck. She has two horses and a few head of cows and a baby on her hip most of the time. They are not people with money to lose. Two hundred and sixty dollars is a week of groceries and a tank of gas in that house.

Kim came out with the baby and a dish towel over her shoulder.

“Oh, Karen,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to get over there. I made you a hot dish and then I didn’t know if you’d want company.”

I very nearly said, I just came to bring you a pie, honey, and drove home thirty-two bales short.

But thirty-two bales is three weeks of feed in January. And if I let her keep them out of pity, I would be doing to her what Dwayne’s story had done to all of them: deciding for somebody else what she was able to hear.

So I told her at the tailgate, with the baby pulling on the dish towel.

She cried. I knew she would. Steve came out of the machine shed wiping his hands, and she told him, and he got very still.

“We figured it was a gift from you,” he said. “We said a prayer over supper about it. We thanked God for you by name.”

“Then nothing you did was wrong,” I said. “Not one thing.”

“We can’t afford to just lose the two sixty, Mrs.,” and he stopped and started over. “Karen. I’ll be honest. We can’t. But we’re not keeping a dead man’s hay. I’ve only got the pickup and a two-bale trailer, so it’ll take me a while.”

“I didn’t come to take anything off you,” I said. “You keep those bales if you need them. I only wanted you to know.”

“No ma’am.”

“Steve.”

“No ma’am,” he said again, and Kim nodded with her chin shaking, and I understood I was not going to win that one in their yard.

I left the pie on their step and drove home with my chest so tight I had to pull over at the section corner and sit.