The Camper on the Eighty That Was Mine

Why I did it

I want to be honest with you, because I promised myself I would tell this right, including the parts that do not make me look so good.

I did not sell that hay to punish Darrin. I have asked myself that question a hundred times since, lying awake in that camper, and I believe that answer is true.

But I will not pretend there was not a small hard knot in me that felt something when I handed Lowell back his pen.

What I told myself was this. For sixteen years I gave that hay for nothing, because it went to my husband’s cows and my husband’s son.

Now I had no husband, and his son had set my suitcases on the porch. The hay was what was mine, and I needed the money.

That last part was true too. My IPERS check is not large.

A propane tank and heat tape and a winter in a camper are not free. And I was seventy years old, and I needed to know I could still take care of myself.

The Sunday he came down

Lowell mowed on Friday, the morning after the freeze. It lay in the windrows two days in the cold sunshine, and he baled it Sunday morning, big round bales, and hauled them across the blacktop to his own yard before noon.

Darrin came down the lane that afternoon. He walked. I saw him coming from a long way off, his hands in his jacket pockets, kicking at the gravel in the middle of the lane the way Harlan said he used to as a boy.

He stopped at the bottom of my steps. He stood there the way I had stood on his porch.

“Dad’s cows need that hay,” he said. It was not angry.

It was flat and tired, like a man reading something off a list.

“Then you’ll have to buy some,” I said. “Lowell might sell you a few bales. He’s got more than he needs this year.”

He looked at me a long time. I looked back. I had told myself I would not say anything sharp, and I did not, but I did not look away either.

I had looked away for twenty-two years, out of good manners, and I was through with it.

Then something went out of his shoulders. He sat down on my bottom step, right there, a forty-six-year-old man in a brown canvas work jacket, and put his face in his hands.