The Hay That Came Home Again

The pickup on the road

Dwayne lives two miles north. To get to town he drives the county road right past my north gate. There is no other way unless he wants to go six miles around on a minimum maintenance road, and in June he might, but not in January.

He came along about sundown that Thursday.

Everybody saw the pickup slow. There were fourteen or fifteen people in that field, and it went quiet one voice at a time, like a room does. Nobody said a word to him. Nobody shook a fist or hollered. They just stood there in the stubble with their sandwiches and looked at him: his neighbors, the men he drank coffee with at the elevator, the people who had sat three pews behind him on Saturday.

He stopped. I do not know if he meant to or if his foot simply came off the pedal.

Ben started toward the fence. I caught his sleeve.

“No,” I said. “This one’s mine.”

I walked out through the gate and up to his window. He had it rolled down. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield, both hands on the wheel, and the muscle in his cheek was jumping the way Tom’s used to when he was trying not to say something.

“They brought it back,” I said. “All of it, and some to spare. I didn’t call the sheriff, and I’m not going to. I told the three who bought it and I told Mrs. Hruska because she asked me to my face. I haven’t told another soul, and I won’t. What the rest of them know, they worked out.”

He did not answer.

“You are Tom’s brother,” I said. “That doesn’t quit being so. There’s a chair at my table that’s been yours for twenty-seven years. It’s still yours the day you’re ready to sit in it honest.”

“Dad should have split it even,” he said. His voice cracked on it. He was fifty-five years old. “Tom got the home quarter and I got eighty acres of river bottom that flooded two years out of three. I’ve rented ground my whole life, Karen. My whole life I’ve driven past this place.”

So that was the reason. It was a real one. It had been sitting in him for thirty years, and I had fed that man Thanksgiving dinner for most of them and never once seen it.

“I’m sorry for that,” I said, and I was. “I can’t fix it. It wasn’t Tom’s doing and it isn’t mine. And it doesn’t make this hay yours.”

He nodded, once, at the windshield.

Then he put the pickup in gear and drove on to town, slow, past two hundred and twenty bales lined up north and south on his brother’s fence.