The Hay That Came Home Again

What Mrs. Hruska did

I found out the rest on Saturday, when Kim came by to return my pie plate with a loaf of zucchini bread in it.

Mrs. Hruska had driven out to their place Friday in her Buick. She had handed Steve an envelope with two hundred and sixty dollars in it. She had done the same at Arlen’s with six hundred and forty, and at Gene’s scale house with eight hundred.

“She said the money came out of a widow’s field and she wasn’t going to have it on her books,” Kim said. “She said she’d put Dwayne’s bill back right where it was Monday morning.”

Arlen told me the other half, because he happened to be in the store buying fly tags when it occurred.

Dwayne came in for a pallet of creep feed. Mrs. Hruska waited until the only other customer had gone out. Then she told him, in an ordinary voice, that his seventeen hundred dollars had gone back where it belonged, that he owed what he had owed before, and that his charge account was closed. She said she would sell him anything in the store he wanted, the same as anyone, for cash on the counter.

“She didn’t raise her voice,” Arlen said. “She wasn’t ugly about it. She told him he could have it open again the day he squared up, and she’d take it a little at a time if that’s what it took. Then she asked did he still want the creep feed.”

“Did he?”

“He paid cash for four bags and carried them out himself.”

For a man who has run on feed store credit his whole life, that is no small thing. It meant selling his calves early that fall, light, to settle up. It meant every operator who leaned on that counter knew his account had been closed and could guess why. Nobody ran him down in my hearing. They did not need to.

And he drove past that stack every single day.

That winter

I did not sell the cows.

I will not tell you it was easy, because it was not. Ben and I weaned in October and sold the calves at the sale barn in Broken Bow, and the check was enough to pay the pasture lease and the taxes with some left over. Arlen came over in November and helped me sort off the opens.

We started feeding the Monday after Thanksgiving.

It was eleven degrees with a north wind. Ben had the 4020 warming up. I walked out to the end of the first row with Tom’s pocketknife, the bone-handled one, and cut the twine on the first bale myself.

When it opened up, it was green inside. Seven months old and green as the day it was cut. The smell came up out of it into that cold air, alfalfa and clover and sun, and for one second it was the second of June and my husband was a half mile away on a swather with his cap pulled down, laying it over heavy and thinking about my cows.

Ben shut the tractor off. He climbed down and stood beside me, and neither of us said anything. The cows were bawling at the gate.

“He was right,” Ben said finally. “It was enough. And then some.”

We fed two hundred and three bales that winter. I sent the last seventeen to Steve and Kim in March, when her horses were down to nothing, and I would not hear a word about money. Steve tried. I told him no ma’am.